TeachStreet™

Due to the fact that there are so many great writing teachers, cooking instructors, golf coaches, personal trainers, and other experts on TeachStreet, I am excited to announce a new feature we’re launching next week on the TeachStreet Blog: featured teacher segments.

Photo: Newspaper Stands | Wili Hybrid

Since we’ve gotten a number of requests from teachers wanting to post on the blog, we’ve decided to do just that: turn 5 posts a month over to you. It will be kind of like having your own newsletter only without having to host or syndicate it yourself.

The way it will works is as follows. At the end of this week Friday June 27th, we’ll be selecting 5 standout teachers to have featured monthly segments. These teachers will be able to share tips, videos (up to 2 minutes long), stories, upcoming events, editorials, or whatever else they’d like with folks on TeachStreet. The posts will be on the TeachStreet Blog, but the content (up to 800 words), will be all yours, including:

• Tips
• Videos
• Events
• Editorials

Though 2 of the 5 teachers have already been selected, we still have 3 spots remaining spots. So if you’re a registered member of TeachStreet and would like to reach out to more students by sharing some tips and tricks of your own. Submit a request by emailing me at sam@teachstreet.com. In your email be sure to include your name, what you teach, and what you’d like to include in your monthly segment (and, of course, your TeachStreet URL / screenname).

We’re looking forward to hearing from you, but as mentioned, all requests must be submitted by Friday June 27th.

While part of the team has been out talking to folks looking to find classes, be they students seeking to find yoga instructors, or belly dancing instructors trying to find belly dancing students, the dev team has been hard at work making TeachStreet a better place to do all those things. What’s new? Funny you should ask. A veritable laundry list, really, but here are a few worth noting.

For Students…

• Recommendations on home page that queue off of Tags and Favorites.

• Classes in nearby cities atop search results: The jewelry making class you were looking for might not be in Bellevue, but perhaps it’s in Seattle. So we expanded a search results here to help folks find these nearby classes.

• Tabs on Profile Pages: Stylish tabs that show the number of items (classes, reviews ,etc) behind them, too.

• Other Classes from this Teacher Widget: To help students find similar, relevant classes taught by a specific teacher.

• Take This Class Button: Makes it easier to sign up for classes.

For Teachers…

• Class cloning tools: It’s now easier for teachers to create more classes, more easily.

• Ads for Teachers: HTML friendly ads to help teachers with their Craigslist posts.

For Everyone…

• Add/Edit Photo buttons: Added at top of pages for easier uploading.

• Add/Edit Photo Tool: Image Uploads now show % completion and have better messaging.

• Newsletter: We now have a bi-weekly newsletter for teachers & students alike.

And of course, last but not least, there are some faces to go along with the site. Pics of the team have been added. And yes, Jim Cooley, of TechCrunch fame, is featured prominently. (I’m confused though, Jim, no switch in the team pic?)

Craigslist isn’t pretty, but people are used to it. And it works. Really, it’s the gold standard. I mean think about it, when you need an apartment, a bike, a job, a strange encounter, or anything else, where’s the first place you look?

Many folks have been using Craigslist for years, but I’ve had a number of teachers ask me recently about about ways they can improve their postings. In fact, last week one the first teachers to register on TeachStreet, Chris Lewis, over in Ballard, asked me if we could design him an HTML templated ad to help his tennis class listings stand out amidst the river of other posts.

So we did. And after hearing back from Chris about how effective the ad was at helping him find more students, we thought we’d make the Craigslist template available for all our registered TeachStreeters. So now you can reach into teacher toolbag, too. Just send us an email letting us know that you want one and we’ll send you a customized template of your own

Get More Students on Craigslist

• Update your Profile: Make sure the information on your TeachStreet profile is up do date.

• Email Us: Send an email to Sam@TeachSreet.com. Or, you can call here at the office 206. 381. 0652.

• Copy / Paste: We’ll send you a customized HTML formatted template that will help drive students to your website or profile. All you have to do is copy / paste, and put the ad into your post.

Other Good Classified Sites for Teachers

• Backpage
• Oodle
• Kijij
• Seattle.net

Though there are a million out there, some listings are geared more at e-commerce, or employment, than they are at classes or lessons. A couple of these sites include Google Base, Facebook Marketplace, MySpace’s Classifieds, and Yelp. Don’t waste your time here. Pick sites that with categories that are consistent with what you teach.

Congats on the new students, Chris. Glad the ads helped. Best of luck with your lessons this summer.

Craigslist isn’t pretty, but people are used to it. And it works. Though we at TeachStreet hope to one day become a one stop shop for pottery teachers and poker coaches alike, there’s no avoiding the fact that Craigslist is the gold standard for online listings. Think about it, you need an apartment, a bike, a job, a strange encounter, or anything else, where do you look?

Though many folks have been using Craigslist for years, I’ve had a number of teachers ask me over the last couple weeks what classified sites they should post to. In light of this, I thought I’d mention a couple teacher friendly classified sites.

Though there are a million out there, some listings are geared more at e-commerce, or employment, than they are at classes or lessons. A couple of these sites include Google Base, Facebook Marketplace, MySpace’s Classifieds, and Yelp. Don’t waste your time here. Pick sites that with categories that are consistent with what you teach.

5 Best Classifieds for Teachers

• Backpage
• Oodle
• Kijiji
• Craigslist
• Seattle.net

Also, avoid Mistakes that will cause you to lose your audience.

• Title - It’s a river of ads on these sites. Differentiate yourself by coming up with an interesting title. Don’t assume being vague is enticing. It’s not.

• Typos and Misspellings - This goes without saying, but different from a text message, you’ll likely not get a response if you have a sloppily written ad. So take an extra pass and proofread what you post before you post it.

• Contact Info - Obvious as this one is, it’s amazing to me how frequently you see people not list their contact info.

And for those who are neither copywriter, nor web developer, we’ve added a new resource to our teacher toolbag: customized classified templates. This was a request from one of our registered instructors who wanted a more professional ad she could copy and paste into her posts. More features to come, but hopefully this helps for the classified postings. Thanks, Mary.

If you want a customized template for yourself, let us know. We’d be happy to send you one.

E-mail: Customer-Service@TeachStreet.com

Phone: 206.381.0652

With over 1.4 million blog posts being written each day and over 57 million Americans reading them, it’s safe to say that blogging is no longer just for the ultra-techie. In addition to being an efficient way to get the news, it’s also a great tool to help you grow your business.

However, the more teachers I talk to, the more I realize that blogging is not something that many teachers are familiar with. So in light of several conversations I’ve had in the last week or so, I thought I’d share a couple resources on the subject.

What’s the best feed reader?

• You don’t need a feed reader to have your own blog, but reading good blogs will only help you write better blogs yourself.
• Before creating your own blog, get familiar with what other teachers are blogging about, as well as what your students, or prospective students, are reading.
• Once you start writing your own blog, don’t be afraid to provide links to industry related blogs if they’re relevant. If you give your reader what they’re looking for, they’ll keep coming back.
• Though I like my Google Reader, I also don’t have a strong opinion on the matter. There are a number of good readers out there, including FeedReader, Bloglines, NewGator, just to name a few.

How do you set up your blog?

• You’ll need two things: weblog software and a host. The weblog software is where you’ll write and manage your blog posts; the host will provide you with the server space and your other technical needs.
• If you choose a developer hosted route, your weblog software and host will be the same provider. Another option is to get an open source weblog software and pay for your host separately. Either one works.
• If you want to go the all-in-one route, WordPress, Blogger, b2Evolution, Serendipity, and MySpace all have hosted solutions you can look into.
• Wherever you decide to host your blog, when it comes to weblog software, WordPress is great. It’s what we use for the blog here at TeachStreet. In addition to being easy to use, it has a number of good plugins that’ll really make your life easier.

What to blog about?

• The answer to this question is likely the same answer to the question “why do you teach?”
• If you were selling a product, you’d want to keep your messaging consistent with your brand. Think of what you teach as your product and yourself as the brand and keep the blog consistent with your core teaching values.
• Blogs as conversations, not as commercials. If you say something interesting students will want comment, tell their friends, and most importantly, come back. If you make your blog into a commercial, people will simply change the channel.
• Address things you teach, sure, but also be creative. For example, if you’re a golf coach you don’t always need to give swing tips. Perhaps write a post about a favorite local course, upcoming tournaments to play in, or anything else that your golf students might be interested in.

How do you measure subscriptions?

• One of the best tools to measure how many people subscribe to your blog is by using a site called FeedBurner. FeedBurner, now owned by Google, is a free, easy to setup blog analytics tool that will tell you, among other things, how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed, either via email or feed reader.

• Though FeedBurner is probably the best tool out there for this, it’s important to note that subscriptions alone will not tell you the total number of people reading your blog. Subscriptions only take into consideration the number of people who consume your blog via RSS. In other words, if someone types in the URL of your blog and reads your blog this way, it will not be a reflected in the subscription metric.

• Another great tool to use for measuring the success of your blog is Technorati. Technorati tells you two useful things about your blog: rank and authority. Rank tells you where you stack up in relation to the millions of other blogs out there, while authority tells you how many other sites are linking to your blog.

• There are a number of other tools out there, too. If you want to read more, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, has a great blog post on blog metrics where he goes into greater depth on the issue.

Photo - Finsec - Creative Commons

OK, your startup is getting ready to launch its new product/service. (Really, TeachStreet’s getting close too — we mean it! Heck, if we don’t launch in April, I may buy all of our loyal reader’s a burger at Dick’s — that’s almost a promise!)

So, what does every startup founder do when this happens?

First, they frantically start prioritizing bugs and last-minute fixes — and they pray that their friends will help them with site reviews, feedback, usability testing and moral support. Check — we’ve done all those things, and continue to do so. Thank you, to our friends!

Then, they start getting really worried that they don’t have a marketing plan (acck — how are we going to attract customers?!?) Check — my ulcer is growing.

Then, they start contacting people who seem to be really good at this sort of thing (I quickly reached out to Glenn at Redfin, Jonathan at Picnik, and a host of others) to get their feedback and introductions to the ‘experts who make it happen for them’. Check — I’ve annoyed both of them with emails, coffee meetings and favor-begging.

Next, they probably ask friends for introductions to scrappy PR consultants who will work for peanuts and deliver New York Times front-page exclusives. Check — I’m now waiting for the results of that effort.

Then, they revert to praying.

Here’s a better process, and I’ve known it all along — I just needed reminding:

1) Be real — make your ‘pitches‘ personally to target press — reporters/bloggers/media want to talk to founders/owners, not paid mouthpieces. Glenn reminded me of this (his great post here). And, be willing to make mistakes/say the wrong thing. It reminds me of how annoying I find post-game interviews with athletes, and why I always found Charles Barkley to be so refreshing (and maddening).

2) Be frequently helpful — Don’t be the friend who always calls, only when the need something! You need to foster the relationship. Comment regularly on things unrelated to your mission. Introduce others to reporters who have stories that you think are compelling. Disagree with them!

3) Get help, where needed, but make sure that person/agency understands your business to the core. But, have them complement steps #1 and #2 — they can help you identify leads, focus your message, draft outreach mails (which you can edit/personalize), highlight blogs you should read/comment on, etc. This isn’t fake — it helps focus your time-constrained efforts!

OK — I’m off to repeat steps 1-3 as rapidly as possible.

And, if any of you know of a great contractor who can get us a New York Times front page cover in a few weeks, I’d really appreciate it.

Since starting TeachStreet, we’ve met some incredible people — none moreso than Jon Bischke, the Founder of EduFire, a new live video language learning website.

While EduFire’s entirely different from what we’re trying to build at TeachStreet, Jon shares many of our shared passions — that the education system is broken in many ways, and that there are incredible teachers everywhere — they just need to be found, and empowered with tools to help them find passionate students (and vice versa)!

We don’t make a lot of these ‘industry news’ type posts, but the amount of excitement in the online education space is starting to surge, and we’re not surprised. Like our friends over at EduRev / EduFire, we’re big believers in this being an industry that needs a good carpet shaking!

Not sure if you saw these… but some huge moves online today…

1) Global Scholar (formerly known as InfiLearn) raised a $27mm Series B — yes $27mm!!
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/130764.asp

2) Education.com won a ‘demo god’ award at Demo 08 conference
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/130702.asp

3) Local startup ‘CultureMob‘ raised a small round, going after local events (Upcoming, Eventful, etc.):
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/130724.asp

4) Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo… not education related, but huge for tech industry
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/story-1
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/story-2

5) Google missing earnings because of some weaknesses (they claim) in social networking

Never a dull moment folks… onward!

Like most other businesses in America, January is tax time for TeachStreeet. Though “tax time for TeachStreet” is an adorable (albeit annoying) alliteration, it also had the distinct possibility of being the bane of my existence for the past month.

Creative Commons Photo: chpoor

Thankfully however, we have an amazing accountant who’s helped us along. And Dave, man of many talents that he is, was a CPA in a previous life. Thus, working through our taxes and end of year accounting was much less tenuous than I’d originally imagined.

That said, I would like to spend just a quick moment singing the praises of my newfound love for Quickbooks. (I swear we’re not getting a kickback for the following overview. QB is just a helpful product, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the fact that I’ve enjoyed learning accounting — words I never thought I’d utter.)

Learning bookkeeping and accounting (especially small business accounting) is not an easy thing for most people. Even for folks who like math or who can keep their personal banking in tip-top shape, keeping tabs on all the financial comings and goings of an entire business has the potential to be a little overwhelming.

Accounting is a daunting task that can lead to businesses just stuffing receipts into random manila folders and hoping for the best. Not that we do that at TeachStreet, but I have to imagine that this receipt-stuffing is especially prevalent at small businesses where owners and employees are doubtlessly wearing a dozen hats and are always pressed for time. Doing the books often falls to the bottom of people’s To Do lists because it can be arduous, confusing and time consuming.

If you have receipt-stuffing tenancies, then I’d say you’re in luck. I’m a great example of how after just a few Quickbook lessons, this handy-dandy program can make the mind-boggling arts of double entry bookkeeping relatively straightforward. For all you small business owners out there, if you’re hurting for an easy-breezy accounting system… go get yourselves some Quickbooks!

An example of how the Quickbooks interface makes life a little bit simpler for those of us who aren’t CPA’s or CFO’s.

QB handles everything from banking accounts reconciliation, to payroll, to tracking inventory, to credit card processing, to check writing. The interface is awesome (very user friendly), and anyone who’s seen some of the other choices for banking software out there know this in itself is a true feat. However, my favorite part about Quickbooks (seeing that I’d still consider myself to be in the “steep learning curve” phase of my accounting understanding) is that if you make a mistake… no real harm done. There are easy double-checking features built in and you can fix entries from a multitude of places throughout the system. It’s intuitive in a way that most things in accounting aren’t. Oh… there are also pretty good discussion boards out there, a Quickbooks sponsored Community site as well as an amusing blog.

So, even if you’re still confused about the difference between debits and credits, fear not. Quickbooks is here to help.

Happy accounting folks. May your end-of-year tax time be quick and painless.

As we prepare to launch TeachStreet, we’ve started to discuss the question about how to spice the place up a bit… you know, photos for class and teacher pages, richer content about subjects and locations, etc. We’re hoping that over time 99% of this content will come from our teacher and student users, but we can’t have it looking like a ghost town at launch!

Photo: Creative Commons - laszlo-photo

So, we’ve discussed our options, and done a lot of reading about stock photography, creative commons licenses, and other options around digital photography. To save others some of this time, I thought I’d share what I learned, and offer some links to online resources.

Premium Stock Photography

First, there’s always the ‘pay for the rights’ option, which makes total sense — great photos come from great photographers, who need to pay their bills like the rest of us! After doing a little research, you’ll quickly find that the stock photographers range from pricey to more affordable.

The top names in the more expensive category are probably Getty Images and Corbis, but you’ll find a plethora — prices for the rights to use their photos range from $50 to $200 and up — the benefits are:

• Awesome photos, with extremely high-resolution settings
• Fantastic selection
• Rich websites/features — seemed really easy to use

That said, as a startup, these costs immediately didn’t work for us — if we were doing an advertising campaign where we were looking for a single, great photo, it seems to make more sense — but, for a site that needs 1,000’s of photos, we’d quickly be out working 2nd jobs to foot the bill!

Microstock Photography

Microstock options are very similar to the premium options above, but they often offer pricing options as low as $0.80 - $1.00 per photo, or monthly subscriptions that generate even lower pricing options.

We looked at 3 different pay sites, including www.dreamstime.com, www.fotolia.com and www.istockphoto.com — the licenses look similar, but pricing varied a bit:

• dreamstime - $0.83/image ($830 for 1,000 images)
• fotolia - $1/image ($1,000)
• istockphoto - $1/image if purchase at least 600

We also found some ’subscription’ sites:

a) www.photos.com for $99 we’d be able to download 250 photos per day — results seemed pretty good.

b) www.shutterstock.com for $199 we’d be able to download 25 photos per day (too few)… but they have 10x selection of photos.com

Since it looked like the primary benefits were lower price, we wanted to check about potential drawbacks, primarily around selection.

To do that, we did some test searches, and here are some sample results:

“Test prep”

• istock - 1,285 matches. And, we really liked their search refinements (e.g. “Did you mean test as in: a) exam, b) medical exam, c) scientific test”)
• dream time - 71 pretty good results
• fotolia - 655, photos seemed more natural
• shutterstock - 1662 results - good… also seemed more “natural” ..
• photos.com - 2580 results - good. Less “natural”

“Finance”

• istock - 787 results. ok… more posed pics
• Dreamstime - 245 results - Ok… less good photos - lots of graphics
• fotolia - lots of photos… quality not as good.
• shutterstock - 260 results. good.
• photos.com - 5,335, ok photos… less ‘natural”

At the end of these tests, we determined that we’d be most likely to use iStockPhoto (and hence, that’s probably why they’re the 800-pound gorilla in this space), because of their selection, featureset and pricing. However, there was another option that we wanted to consider a little more deeply… (read on, gentle reader )

Creative Commons-Licensed Photography

The last several years have seen an explosion in the amount of user generated content available on the web — to help accommodate the interests of users who want to share their work with others, and at the same time clarify the terms under which they’re willing to have their creative works used, Creative Commons (a nonprofit) has emerged. Creative Commons defines a set of licenses ranging from “By:” to “No Commercial Use” — you can see a good summary of the different options on Flickr.

In the end, we felt like the Flickr “CC: By:” license fit our TeachStreet Core Philosophy best of all — it’s our intention to make our data accessible by other developers (via a TeachStreet API), and so we’d like to embrace that same karma right out of the gate. This benefits our users (with fun, engaging, high quality photo content) while at the same time garnering some extra exposure for the fantastic photographers contributing to Flickr!

We know that there are other issues, including ‘Model Rights’ — but we’ve done some research on that, and feel like we’re doing our best to comply — We’ve found some documentation that it’s the photographer’s liability in releasing the photo online under the attribution license. There is a recent case of this against Virgin Mobile using a photo of a teenager in their national add campaign:

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9109

And, of course, we’ll not only be providing linkback/attribution to the photographer’s page on Flickr, but if we receive a complaint, we would immediately take the photo down.

So, that’s our decision — and we’re sticking to it (until we change it ).

We don’t get a ton of comments on this blog, but my hunch is that we’ll get a few on this one!

We can’t wait to share some of our favorite launch photos — here’s a few to whet your appetite!

Surfing:

Photo: Creative Commons - mikebaird

Boxing:

Photo: Creative Commons - ganessas
Archery:

Photo: Creative Commons - chailey