Educational Market

How to reach students online

[WinWayne]

Anyone here has educational products that target students specifically? Any online marketing experience to share?

Most of the educational software go the en route to educators, meaning you have to "sleep" with the publishers (work with them and let them eat the big chuck of profit).

Another approach is to go directly to the users (students), lots of them are online now and looking for products. We have great success in Google/Overture PPCs. I found that ask.com is very popular among students and draw target traffic from the site. Anyone has any success in other online channel in reaching students?

--Wayne

[ProHealth]

As a recent grad, I used on-line text book stores quite a bit. Places like bigwords.com or textbooks.com (aka bn.com) were some of my favorites because their prices are much cheaper than campus bookstores. I don't though have any experience with marketing directly to them. I guess the one thing I'd keep in mind is that today's students are VERY web savvy so you'll need to keep the BS to a minimum and offer solid products -- if you don't they'll go elsewhere.

[WinWayne]

Thanks for the textbook idea. Since text book sites do not offer any advertising options, not sure what I can do to attract target traffic from the subject-oriented visitors to my site. They do have a lot of student traffic for sure.

--Wayne

[rfung]

Oh no, another textbook site! :)

I own one, and let me tell you the competition is brutal. I would not be able to survive from my textbook site alone. OTOH, Bigwords as exemplified gets a big chunk of the action, and I once read in an article of 3 years ago that they were pulling in over $200k/year from affiliate marketing. These days however, if you have some sort of price comparison for books, you better be really working hard at promoting it. They're a dime a dozen...

[chrisgarrett]

Students need all sorts of supplies, not just books. Think about the different courses people do that need equipment, specialist clothing, materials. I used to work at a college and it was criminal the amount of kit students needed to pay for .. someone has to supply it ;O)

[WinWayne]

True, it is amazing how much students have to pay to buy required and optional course materials. If you are the master author for a classic textbook, you are set year after year milking the poor students (although your publisher takes 85% of the profit). Being students forever, I now teach in univeristy, being more merciful on students'pockets, by trying to limit the required courseware to the minimum and use the online resource to the maximum.

I guess back to the debate:
(1) Is there money to be made from students online?
(2) What types of niche products they would be willing to pay (to meet their needs and passion)?
(3) How to reach them (HS and College Students) online?

Your insighful comments?

--Wayne