Education Marketing

I feel rather good about using blogs to double response rates.

This is because this is not another bit of pontificating on my part, but is in fact because I have just spent two years getting this right.

Blogs (rather like search engine optimisation) are one of these areas where the world is full of people who tell you they know how to do it, but then seem vague on the details.  Of course there are people out there who deliver – I am not suggesting there is not.  It is just I seemed to come across a lot of people who were hot on promises and cold on delivery of results.

The blog I set up two years ago (www.blog.emiratesstadium.info) got 120,000 unique readers last month, and is used to sell a book about Arsenal FC that I wrote.  It started (obviously) from zero in a very crowded market, and I found out during that time how to get my blog to the top of the lists.  If you look at it you will see that it now has a number of guest writers, and gets a fair number of comments each day.

Having got the blogging bit sorted I then added the twist which linked it to schools.  You can of course start your blog on education any time you want.  But you will also need to find ways of getting people to read.  

To help with this, what we have done is set up www.UKEducationNews.co.uk which contains a rolling list of news stories – and is attracting a large number of readers each day.  In between the stories from the BBC, Guardian etc are pieces that either come from our customers’ own blog or news pages, and items that we put up on our own blog, on behalf of customers.

That might seem a bit complex, but in essence here’s how it works.

If you send us in a story, we put it on our schools blog, and the story gets listed on www.UKEducationNews.co.uk   That story can get anything between 100 and 400 readings in a day.

Now if you do a generic email to 5000 secondary schools you might get 100 or 200 click throughs onto your web site.    Using UK Education News as well (which will cost you just an extra £20) you are going to double the number of people who read your details.  

The only note of caution I need to add here is that because many people do send out emails to the generic list without taking any guidance on how to write the copy the click through rate from generic emails can range from 20 to over 400 – it all depends on the offer and the copy that is written.

But whatever number you are getting, using UK Education News should be doubling the number.

You can see UK Education News at www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

You can see the blog where we put news items on behalf of clients at www.blog.schools.co.uk

If you have your own news pages or blog on your site, we can pick that up automatically day by day into UK Education News – please call 01536 399 000 to talk this through.

If you would like to know more about blogs there is an article in the HOW TO series on the www.hamilton-house.com site – just click on the link – click on the HOW TO tab on the left (second one down) and you will see a list of articles.   HOW TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF BLOGS is there.

If you have questions, if you would like HHM to be involved in developing your blog, or if you would like to know what we are about to do next in the world of blogging, give me a call.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings plc reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

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