VIRTUAL COLLEGE A Guide to Marketing your new Reseller Site

VIRTUAL COLLEGE A Guide to Marketing your new Reseller Site

Getting the Word Out Getting the news out to your existing customers is the easiest way to start to market the courses and if your customers are used to electronic or paper based communications you can still reach them using a variety of methods. Website: Promoting the adoption of elearning on your home page is normally a really quick win. For regular visitors to your website, announcing on your home page (or the most visited page) your adoption of elearning courses immediately alerts them to the new addition. Coupling this up with a direct link to the Reseller Promote pages provides a quick entry into the sales pages. To enable ad hoc browsers to find your site, having a link to the elearning pages and adding text on your site including some key words will enable web search engines to associate elearning with your website. In the Promote pages we encourage you to add your company name and bespoke text into the top and bottom boxes. This not only enables web searches to pick up on the wording, it also allows you to personalise the text to suit your business and your customers. Eshots: Emailing your existing customers and letting them know that you now offer elearning is a very quick way to get the word out to them. This can be repeated to communicate the addition of any or revised courses as and when appropriate. Embedding links directly to the demos of relevant courses gets your customers viewing the course content immediately and acts as another aid to purchase. Email footers: If your staff email customers regularly, then a great way to get notifications into their inboxes is by using email footers. Email footers can be changed to reflect any appropriate message such as promotions you have running and just like eshots can link directly into demos or course detail pages. Existing collateral: Do you already regularly produce leaflets, newsletters or a catalogue? Adding a new section, news story or other kinds of notifications to any new collateral about your elearning content informs all existing customers of your new offer. More frequent publications could carry a Course of the Month feature. Business cards: In the same way as email distribution, business cards can be used to spread the word about your new elearning courses, adding the website address onto your business cards is an easy way of putting the details into your customer s hands.

Promotions & Discounts Promotions can be a useful tool to drive increased sales of a course or group of courses for a defined time period. For the purposes of this guide, we ll look at two different types of promotions, a promotion and a discount. Your Reseller platform can help you deliver both. What is the difference? For the purposes of this guide let s consider a Promotion as a fixed term offer which aligns to a purpose or event, for example, Adult Learners Week. A Discount is usually a more permanent deduction, given to groups of customers for a specific reason. For example, a staff discount on courses unrelated to their roles and responsibilities as a perk of the job. How does it work? Offering Promotions and Discounts to customers appeals to the bargain hunter in all of us and allows you as a Reseller to provide an incentive for your customers and gives you an edge on your competitors.. The Reseller platform is able to offer these discounts using a code that is entered by the customer when they checkout. We are able to set up a series of these for you to enable different groups to access different discounts at the same time. e.g. A staff discount on all non-work related courses of 15%. A discount for a targeted audience of 100 for the 17th Edition course. A discount on all courses of 10% for the month of March. The discounts can work on either a fixed sum or a percentage of the price of the course. We can offer the ability to control by either date or number or a fixed period for discounts. We can also set up the system so that discounts can align to specific dates or until a specific number of discounts have been used. E.g. Fire Safety courses discounted by 10% from October 1st to November 4th or the first 100 purchasers receive 5% discount. Your Reseller platform is smart, it works alongside the built in volume discounts and prevents customers from using more than one discount. It filters any multiple discount codes and only applies

the greatest discount, protecting your commission, so you only give away what you expect to. To add to this, a series of promotions can be set up to automatically start and stop at different times of the year enabling you to create a structure that just runs without constant administration. Our monthly commission reconciliation includes the details of any discounts given so that you can clearly see who has taken advantage of which discount and when, enabling you to track and plan any further follow-ups to your activity. Hints & Tips Advertising your discounts is best done by using your existing marketing collateral. Any publications like newsletters, brochures or flyers are great for this. Sending or an Eshot to your customers is a great way to highlight the discount; this method enables you to link directly to the course demo and to the course s information page. Featuring a discounted course on the home page of your website is also great way of alerting people to the featured course and to the rest of your offer. A quick and very direct way of alerting your customers is by using your email footers, featuring a link to the website or to the course turns every email your organisation sends into a marketing email. How do I do it? As with anything, ensure that you plan well ahead. Your first action is to decide which courses you d like to feature and when. Your next step is to plan how you re going to alert your customers to the promotions. Once your planning is completed, it's time to write your copy. It is a great idea to write all the copy for all of the campaign at the beginning of the campaign. This ensures that the style and tone of the message stays consistent and that your communication is ready to go at any time. The information in the course listings can be used as reference material but please be aware that copying the text directly from the Virtual College website or course catalogue isn t a great idea. This is because Google recognises Virtual College as the originator of the exact text and so won t count any direct copies in its rankings. Making your copy as relevant to your audience is also a great way of appealing to them. Once you have your planning completed let us know if you have any requirements you d like us to assist with so we can put them in place.

Setting your discount level Note that any discount you offer is deducted from the commission paid for each course and there is a limit to the amount of discount that is possible for you to offer. Please refer to your current course catalogue for the rates for each courses Hint: Displaying the discount as a percentage on the lower priced course gives a better impression than displaying the cash value. Courses that are more expensive benefit from displaying the discount in cash value.

Course of the Month This section looks at the practical use of promotions. Did you know that Adult Learners Week in 2015 will be 13-19 June? Each year a whole calendar of events drawing awareness to a cause or concern are held, as well as the high days and holidays we all look forward to. Promoting courses that align to these events is a great way of promoting both the course itself and your catalogue of them. Using a Course of the Month promotion enables you to draw attention to a particular course, by linking in with these events and holidays to keep your site looking relevant and having a new offer every week, or month, depending on how often you want to use it. To make the Course of the Month more attractive you can discount this course using the promotions options as previously described. How to use a Course of the Month promotion Advertising your Course of the Month is best done by using your existing marketing collateral, any monthly publications like newsletters, brochures or flyers are great for this. Sending an Eshot to your customers is a great way to highlight courses with the added advantage of being able to link directly to the course demo and to the course s information page. Featuring the Course of the Month on the home page of your website is also great way of alerting people to the featured course and through this the rest of your offer. If you don t use eshots another option is to use your email footers, having these feature a link to the website or to the course turns every email your organisation send into a marketing email. Virtual College can assist by creating you a new category called Course of the Month and having this as the first category section and we can list the featured course at the top of your listing. If you wish to do this, please get in touch.

How do I do it? As with anything, plan it first! If you are in need of inspiration or need assistance in understanding how to create a calendar of events, please do get in touch and we will do our best to work with you on this. Adding this information into your marketing plan and utilising the suggestions from this section will help you run your Course of the Month promotion.

Search Engine Optimisation and Pay per Click advertising Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process of ensuring your website can be easily discovered by search engines and attracts traffic which you will then convert via your website. Below we ve put together a few tips to help you get started in ensuring your website is getting the basics right. SEO can be a very complicated matter and the tips below are only scratching the surface, but they should help to get you started. As with many things in the digital age, SEO is constantly evolving as changes are made to search engines, and indeed the way we, as people, search and use the internet. The following is a list of SEO websites that regularly create good practice guides and up to date information. We recommend subscribing to them and visiting regularly to stay up to date with information: www.seomoz.org www.seobook.com www.searchengineland.com http://insidesearch.blogspot.com The official Google Blog Search Engine Optimisation The easiest way to do SEO work is to get someone else to do it for you as specialist knowledge can be a major plus in an area like this. However, be wary of any SEO company that guarantees page 1 results. If you decide to use an external company to manage your SEO be aware of them using black hat techniques. A reputable company will be open with their processes. Search Engines love new content! Something you can do very easily is add new content to your site. Whether it is text, videos or infographics, search engines and people will keep coming back to your site the more you add. Every time you add a new page to your website, you re adding another potential search result for people to find you.

It s all about the words Adding tags into the code of your page is a great way for search engines to discover your site. Adding the words you want to be found for into your html title tags, and using appropriate synonyms and related text on that page will help you to show up for those terms when people search. We can enter html title tags into your sales pages, you just need to let us know what you would like entering. Build Connections online and offline If you and your competitor have exactly the same website, but more people are linking to you, it will be seen as the more popular site and rank higher for certain terms. If you create content people like, they will link to it. If you attend regular business meetups, ask people to write about your site and link to it. In reality, link building is a little more complicated than this, but finding websites that cover similar topics and emailing them to ask for a link is a good place to start. A reciprocal link (i.e. linking to somebody in exchange for them linking to you) should be avoided where possible, as search engines may ignore these links. Make use of Long Tail Although it is a good idea to have some targeted broad terms to help guide your content, the vast majority of searches made on home computers are known as Long Tail searches. Put simply, if a person is looking for a particular course, just typing online courses is unlikely to bring back exactly what they are looking for. Instead, for example, they may search Online 17th Edition training with Bradford Test Centre. Don t be afraid to create new pages based around questions that people ask. Again we can amend the text onto your home page, just let us have the text and we'll upload it for you. Short on time? Be a curator, not a creator To be effective for SEO, and to offer site visitors something worth visiting for, your content needs to

avoid being simply a duplicate of other people s, but many successful blogs and websites create content by simply keeping an eye on what is happening within a particular industry. By taking snippets from a range of sources (and linking back to them) and adding your own opinions and comments, it can be faster than you think to create an effective weekly piece of content. Are you in good shape Technically? Putting the effort into content and link building is all well and good, assuming that your website is technically able. In order for search engines to effectively crawl and index your pages you should try and keep your code clean, run regular maintenance (removing broken pages etc.) and ensure relevant meta tags are in place. There are a number of free tools available from Google to help with this and your developer should be able to help you find them. Paid Marketing The term Pay Per Click or PPC refers to any kind of affiliate marketing across the internet, such as Google Adwords, Bing Advertising or Facebook Advertising. Adwords The most common form of PPC currently available is Google Adwords. This system works by placing a budget on a number of keywords so that when somebody searches for that term, your website will show up as an advert in their search results. You only pay when somebody clicks on your advert, but this doesn t guarantee a sale. Conversion rates vary greatly depending on your ad, the landing page you use and the person s desire to buy your product. Resellers may use Pay per Click advertising, however the use of our brand Virtual College and it s derivatives or adwords that are close to ours must be avoided. But don't worry, if you re going to use any paid advertising such as Pay per Click, please contact us so we can ensure that our marketing campaigns don t overlap each other s or contravene our agreements with 3rd parties such as City & Guilds. We ll be happy to work with you to ensure you maximise your return for your money.

Social Media Guide Social Media has changed the way people connect, discover, and share information. But, leaving aside the inevitable jargon, here s what you need to know: Social media is the technology that connects people whether it s to share content or just to chat. Social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are the places where social interactions happen (discovering & sharing). Social media marketing is the way to use that technology to build relationships, drive repeat business. and attract new customers through friends sharing with friends. Sound familiar? That s because social media marketing is really just word-of-mouth powered by technology. Set Your Goals It's important that, at the outset, you set goals and understand what you want to achieve from your Social Media marketing efforts. Here are some of the main ways you can use Social Media to have a big impact on your business: Spread the Word. Show customers and prospects who you are and what you can do for them. It s great for brand awareness! Drive Sales. Give customers offers that are so good they ll share them with their friends. Your promotions can go viral! Provide Great Customer Service. Listen and respond to what your customers are saying about you and to you. It s a wonderful feedback loop! Keep Your Customers Coming Back. Build deeper relationships so customers will get to know, like, and trust you more. Because social media is all about discovering and sharing interesting content, every interaction you have through social media has the potential to reach many new people. This means good Social Media marketing can help to spread your message and attract new audiences.

Which Social Media Marketing platform is right for you? In order to run a successful Social Media marketing campaign you need to know which platform will work best for your business. While there are benefits to dipping your toe in the water of multiple Social Media sites, setting up multiple profiles and then not utilising them effectively may have a negative effect on your business image. It s probably worth concentrating your energy on a couple of the main Social Media platforms to ensure you get the most out of them, and only focus on other platforms if you know that they suit your business style or that you re obtaining a specific benefit. Facebook Facebook is one of the most popular sites on the web and over the years has evolved a variable and integrated tool for business marketing. By creating a page for your business you re effectively creating a website on Facebook itself, allowing your followers to keep up to date with business news, offers and updates alongside status updates from their friends. With only a limited technical know how you can also use WordPress plug-ins (or equivalent) to automatically post your blog posts to your Facebook page. Facebook is very much a community so you ll probably find that your followers don t like anything overly sales related, but on the flip side the community spirit can allow for some great interaction with customers so it s ideal for building brand loyalty. Twitter The shorter format of Twitter often means it s more difficult to really build a relationship with customers,however it s great for getting in touch and keeping up to date. Many businesses use Twitter primarily to release news, market their products, and direct attention to special offers and new content such as blog posts.

Clever use of Hashtags (a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign # ) means that followers or users looking for information on a certain topic might find the information from your business even if they have never come across you before. Twitter is a great way to get in touch with key influencers in your niche, simply follow them and start a conversation with them! As well as promoting your own blog post ideas, try retweeting good content that you find from other people; you ll find it s a great way to get in touch with a whole host of interesting people. Google+ Google+ is a relative newcomer but is quickly becoming an important tool for businesses looking to increase their presence in the world of Social Media marketing. It may not be as popular as Facebook and Twitter, but don t feel this is a reason to ignore Google+ for business. Even if all you do is to create a Google+ page for your business it ll help you in the search engine rankings. Google+ s circles allow you to customize your content by creating different groupings of followers that you can then market differently to. There is also a Measure feature to give businesses an interactive measurement of how their Google+ page is being used. The Best of the Rest. If you feel you have more to gain from social media marketing and without stretching yourself too thinly then you might want to consider some of these sites too. LinkedIn Linkedin is essentially a business networking site and many people use it as an online CV and address book of past business contacts. Use LinkedIn groups to find like-minded people in your niche and engage in their community. Every time you post you get a link back to your profile or website.

YouTube Video marketing is hugely effective. It s also popular with the Search Engines and at the moment is a relatively less competitive way to rank as there are still fewer videos than blogs. YouTube is now also under Google s wing, another reason to at least have a profile and an introductory video. Pinterest If your business doesn t revolve around good looking images then Pinterest may not be right for you, but if you can tie in images and pictures to what you do then setting up a few pinboards could be a great way to showcase it. Anyone from Estate Agents, to Cake Makers, Furniture Upholsterers or Travel Agents could possibly use Pinterest to build interest in their products. Foursquare The premise of Foursquare is around people checking in to a location so that their friends can see where they ve been. Any business that relies on foot traffic coming through the door might do well to run offers or incentives on Foursquare. Stumbleupon Stumbleupon is a social bookmarking site where users can thumb up articles they like. topics. Users can randomly stumble articles across different If your business puts out a lot of specific information you can build a following on stumbleupon, and the more likes you get, the more people will stumble your stories. Stumbleupon can sometimes drive enormous traffic to specific blogs, although it is harder to convert stumblers to regular readers.