This morning we’ve had a real lesson in using technology for teaching adults. At a conference in Florida, our internet connection has been spotty (at best) while trying to show examples of YouTube, wikis, etc.
Another great example of how technology impairs our ability to use technology.
Yesterday, I finally finished the last of three dashboards for the continuing education department’s program managers at Emory university. After following a good business analysis process of requirements gathering through to solution creation, we created tools that our managers can open each morning to get up-to-the-minute data that shows overall program health and progress towards goals. Below is the dashboard for the open-enrollment programs. We also build them for corporate learning/contract training and certificate programs. Read the rest of this entry »
I spent part of this Halloween weekend working on the Emory University continuing education website and learned several things about designing an effective checkout process for registration systems.
A month ago, Emory replaced their online registration system with a new version. For a variety of reasons, the conversion rate (the proportion of website visitors that register for a class) dropped by more than 50%. With over 10,000 weekly visitors, this meant a net decrease of over 200 registrations per week.
So what changes did we make? Here are a few. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently read Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles’s book Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service. The authors took the approach of writing the book as a short story that makes it a light, easy, and casual read. Amid the story, which Read the rest of this entry »
Here is a good article about the value/necessity of having good content on your website to perform well on search engines. It does a good job of explaining why search engine rankings aren’t magical and are actually the result of a lot of hard work and lots of good keyword-rich content. With all the hype around like link building, keyword stuffing, and paid online marketing, the quality and quantity of content for a website is often overlooked from a search optimization perspective:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3630658
Last night, we launched redesigned websites for two certificate programs at Emory University. Each of these sites contain approximately 50-75% more keyword rich content than the sites they replaced. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be tracking the search engine performance of each site. I anticipate that the additional content will have a dramatic positive effect on ranking, visitors, and ultimately registrations and revenue.
I thought I would explore Google Analytics a little today and post my thoughts.
Our firm helps manage and market several professional education programs at Emory University. The website for this department had just under 200,000 visitors during the six month period from January to June of 2008 (around 1,100 people each day). We also know that around 94,000 people (or 47.1% of the total) visited the website because of performing an online search. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not often anymore that I learn about a new, simple tool to use in search engine optimization. After 10 years of SEO experience, I tend to think that I know most of the tricks, but I’m always excited when some article or conversation brings to light a completely new technique or tool that I can use. Read the rest of this entry »
Great news!
Yesterday, we completed a project that has been “in the works” for a bit too long. This tool will make a great addition to our toolkit for analyzing data and trends in the continuing education industry. The tool plots data related to zip codes to a map of the Atlanta area. Our client, Emory University, can now get visual, geographic interpretations of all sorts of data! Read the rest of this entry »
Our president suggested studying a statistic related to a proposed marketing plan to improve the rate of return of your customers. The idea is to offer students who frequent your continuing education classes certain specials: early registration for popular classes, special events, or special discounts. Read the rest of this entry »
JMH Consulting helps Emory University manage and market its professional education programs, and our president has often share this statistic about the Emory programs: “70% of registrations come from the website.” Today, he approached me and admitted that his statistic was a few years old. So we reviewed our registration data to see what’s going on today. After a quick analysis, we found the results pretty interesting. Read the rest of this entry »