How to publicize your nursery school online

Lots of people browse for your nursery school on the Internet daily. Are they finding you? If not, then this introductory article is a great place to start the Web Marketing plan for your nursery school.

You don’t need to have the most advanced corporate website for your nursery school – in fact a straightforward but interesting site normally works better. You can easily hire a local website design company to produce a website (ask around for referrals). Many companies prefer to develop their own website, to make it simple to change the content in future. It may be time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be complicated – there are plenty of excellent services like Yola and Google Sites that will help you to build a beautiful site quickly and easily.

Do not forget to install a tracking/analytics system on your website. There are plenty available, some free, and some paid (the free ones would be more than adequate for almost everyone).

The starting point for lots of people is to send their web site to the relevant category on the Yahoo Directory. Alas this now costs $299 each year, and as it sends very few visitors these days (have you tried locating the Yahoo directory on their web site) it may not be great value for most businesses. Luckily there are also free standard directories out there, and it’s generally worth submitting your site to those. DMOZ is one of the most widely known, but because it’s run by volunteers it normally takes a very long time to get in. Make sure that you submit your website to the right category for the best probability of getting accepted.

Along with general directories, it’s normally good practice to post your site to any vertical market directories (ie those that deal specifically with your market) that you can locate. They usually get much better results than general directories. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them require payment for entries, but it’s occasionally possible to find free ones. For example http://www.ClickNurserySchools.co.uk/ is a brilliant site to submit information about your nursery school to, and it’s absolutely free as well. They do demand in depth details and images, but that all helps drive more visitors to your site, so it’s worth doing. Try to find any other free sites like that, and submit to those also – it all adds up!

Assuming you really want to get website visitors to your nursery school website quickly, then you’ll want to check out PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. As its name implies this is a way of advertising on the web but only paying when somebody clicks through to your web site. The largest PPC system right now is Google Adwords. Adwords allows you to advertise on Google itself – right next to the search results. You can ensure that your adverts are only shown in a particular country (eg the UK) if you would prefer – and needless to say select how much money you’re willing to pay out for each click.

If you would like to have the ability to remind folks to come back to your website – or to tell them when you have deals on offer, then you will need to get their email address when they are visiting your site. Services such as GetResponse make this easy. You can use the service to send a single newsletter occasionally – or set up a sequence to be emailed on auto-pilot at intervals. This is a great way of keeping in contact with prospective customers – and once it’s set up – it all occurs automatically – you don’t have to do anything.

In a post this length, I’ve only been able to offer a short summary of the key topics involved in marketing your nursery school on the net – there’s a good deal that I’ve been forced to leave out. Luckily, all the info you require is out there on the web, and freely available – so you’ll easily be able to obtain more in-depth information on any of the themes covered above.