Thanks to the folks at Zillow for being so inviting — a few weeks ago, they released the new Local Market Explorer Wordpress plug-in, making it really easy for real estate agents and other locally-focused bloggers to add hyperlocal information to their blogs with the click of a button (or, more precisely, with the installation and activation of this spiffy Local Market information plug-in).
To see how it can work, check out this realtor’s local class and real estate results — it includes home and market activity from Zillow, local K-12 school information from our friends at Education.com, the ‘walkability’ information from WalkScore, restaurant reviews from Yelp, and voila, now new local class information from TeachStreet!
p.s. We’re still wrestling with some PHP5 upgrade issues with our own blog, else we’d point you to a nicely formatted example here — those issues have nothing to do with Local Market Explorer, but rather with our budget-constrained Web Hosting Service!
Take a quick peek at this slide share for a simple ‘how-to’ on embedding videos to your TeachStreet articles. As we all know, videos are a fabulous way to share information and to show off your hot skills!!
Press releases are a tried and true method of getting the word out about what you’re doing, and best of all, they’re basically free. A press release is a statement prepared for distribution to the media. Basically, you want to create a mini news story that demonstrates the newsworthiness of an event or group to editors and journalists. Remember these few really important points below when creating a press release.
Before you Write:
Choose your publications wisely Brainstorm all the places – weekly newspapers, blogs, local magazines, etc. that people in your target demographic visit. Narrow the list down to the six or eight that you think get the broadest visibility for your event. Think about who you want to attract to the event and where they get their local news.
Identify Contacts Many blogs, weekly papers, magazines, or news websites have information somewhere on who to send your press release to – check “Contact Us” or “Press” links. You probably want to find the lead arts and entertainment journalist for the publication with information on crafting news. Sending your press release to the right person at an organization will save you lots of headaches. Never spam a contact – no one likes an inbox crammed full of duplicate information.
Writing your Release:
Follow the standard formatting of a press release
Google “sample press releases” for formatting. Blog editors and journalists receive dozens of press releases each day, so they have set standards and expectations that you must conform to have your release read, let alone published. Make it easy for them to print your story.
Write like a professional What makes your story different and special? People in this field are looking for a story that will satisfy editors and readers, not just give your event press. Write in the third person! Start thinking about the event like a reporter.
The lead paragraph must include the who, what, when, where and why When promoting a specific event, include dates, locations and other relevant details on your materials, including whether or not there’s an entry fee, and other important information, such as whether or not people should RSVP.
Include one amazing image The press release itself should adhere to standard formatting guidelines. Including an outstanding photo or image will really help the piece stand out. Determine what the newspaper/magazine/blog’s requirements are for image size and resolution, and send an appropriate image.
Include a quote or statistic if possible to ground your piece, and relevant links Remember to write about your event as a real happening: Give informaiton on why is this newsworthy, as opposed to simply being an advertisement. Place your event in context – if it’s happening in late April, is it Earth day related? If it’s a late summer event, can it be tied to “Back to School”?
Be sure to carefully proofread Give your press release to people you know who are harsh critics and good writers. Don’t send out something with obvious typos or spelling errors.
Follow Up:
At your event, try to ask attendees how they heard about it. If you think you might want to do another event in the future, be sure to capture strong, clear photographs with a wrap-up report to blogs, papers or other places the press release was published, summarizing the success of the project, and giving dates of future similar events you may be planning.
While a press release may seem like a bit of work, they really are a powerful marketing tool. Only word of mouth compares to how successfully a press release can make your event well attended and noticed. Once you get the knack of writing a professional, interesting press release, you’ll love seeing the results it can yield.
We’re huge fans, and really encourage you checking out the site any day of the week. We especially encourage you to take a peek in the next day or so though. They’re currently offering an online Masters Class called “Bridging the Gap Between Technique and Technology.” The series includes a number of podcasts for dance instructors, with tips focused on helping dance studios grow their businesses. Susan Blake Gerety (Founder of DanceStudioOwner) has organized a great line up of folks to interview, and this week, they interviewed your’s truly on the topic of “Technology For Teachers.”
We made a few enhancements to TeachStreet tonight that I wanted to share with you. Our goal with this release was to “Go Social” – by building new ways for our community to connect. We hope you enjoy the new features.If you find a bug, have feedback or need help, send us a shout at help@teachstreet.com
Announcements - where anyone can share upcoming news and events.
Widgets– Add a TeachStreet widget to your website or blog and help your readers learn something new. We developed five widget types – so that at least one will be perfect for you:
Mini-Widget: Use this widget to promote your profile and class listings, show off your star rating and link directly to your profile page on TeachStreet.
My Classes: This displays all of your classes — it’s ideal for teachers and school.
My Reviews: Proudly highlight all of your TeachStreet customer reviews, and solicit new ones!
Topic Widget: Add interesting, topical content to your personal website. You can create a collection of local classes or articles in a subject area (i.e. yoga, guitar, ballroom dance) of your choosing.
Search Widget: Bring a fully-functional TeachStreet search box to your own website! This is great for teachers, and also ideal for local neighborhood blogs and newspaper/media-oriented websites. (And, we’d be happy to work with partners to enable larger-scale customizations of this widget).
Installing a widget is easy – just copy & paste the HTML code into your website or blog template.
Facebook Connect – you can now login to TeachStreet with your Facebook credentials. If you are a current user, first login to TeachStreet and then link your TeachStreet account with Facebook. New users can choose to login with Facebook right away.
We’ve also made some improvements to current features of the site:
Photos: Our newest engineer, Phil, has been working overtime to build a feature that many of you will love: photo cropping! You can now edit your primary profile image or class image. Just go to the photos tab and select your primary photo! We’ve also added the ability to pick from other pictures you’ve uploaded when selecting photos for classes.
Search: Our engineers went algorithmic on us and revamped our search infrastructure. This means it will be faster! They have also made improvements to our location search, related subjects and the recommendations for how to improve your search query. We also made modifications to our Featured Teacher placement so that more awesome teachers will show up!
Reviews: We expanded our review form so that reviewers can provide more detail on their experience with a teacher or class. We definitely want your feedback on these changes!
Help content: We’ve made significant changes to our help section by adding “how to” guides for popular areas of the site. Check out the guides on everything from managing photos, to writing articles to how to rank in TeachStreet search results.
We hope you enjoy the changes to the site – if you have any questions or feedback, e-mail us at help@teachstreet.com – we’d love to hear from you!
The TeachStreet community team recently visited the Bay Area to host several meetups for our members and their guests. It was exhilarating to meet and have conversations with over 60 great teachers and instructors on TeachStreet.
If you missed the events, here are the tips we shared with attendees to help them use TeachStreet to get new students.
Completing these steps will definitely get you ahead of the game for finding new students. And, if you have any friends or colleagues who might like to learn more about TeachStreet, please let them know or suggest them as a teacher on TeachStreet.
In addition to sharing our favorite “how to’s” for how to use TeachStreet, we also had the opportunity to connect instructors and teachers with one another for support and networking.
If you live in Seattle or the Bay Area, TeachStreet members are meeting up regularly. So, if you’re interested in connecting with a local group, email me (with “group member” in the subject line) and I’ll try my hardest to get you linked-up with groups forming in your area.
Here’s a great slide show of the events that my colleague Joseph put together:
As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for me — I’m more than happy to help.
We’ve written about our friends at eduFire before — really, they’re amazing. They introduced their website a few months before we did, and while we share similar passions around encouraging lifelong learning, they take a primarily online approach to it. When they first launched, they focused on enabling live, online video learning between a teacher and student, so pretty much one-to-one. That’s all changed.
Just last week, they introduced what they call ‘classes‘ — that is, eduFire teachers can now offer teaching sessions via online video to up to a hundred students at a time, no matter where they live or where they come from — we’ve tried it, and it’s really cool.
So what does this mean for you as an eduFire student?
1. Reduced Rates: Since teachers can spread their time over more students, they should be able charge a little less per student (rather than charging $25 for an hour for one person, they can charge 10 people $5 each, and still make more money.
2. Social Learning: We all know that learning with others is fun — so, learning with bunches of folks on eduFire is more fun too — the sessions we sat in on had multiple folks, and it was a blast — we were exchanging twitter addresses behind the scenes, just like passion notes in the old days of school.
3. More Choice: Besides languages and test prep, they’ve already seen all sorts of other categories as well. From a “Raw Foods” class, to a “Twitter for Business and Blogs” class, expect to see new and exciting things. Just like we say, “Everyone’s an expert in something”!
Oh, and if you’re a TeachStreet teacher, and have a profile at eduFire, they make it easy to link to your TeachStreet profile as well when you build out your eduFire profile — if you have questions about that, let us know!
If there was one thing you can do on TeachStreet, as a teacher, to help boost your profile, requesting reviews from your past students would be it. We try to provide our community with a lot of information about classes and teachers, so having testimonials from past students definitely help the cause.
Once you get a couple great reviews under your belt, you will instantly get more recognized in the TeachStreet community depending on how competitive your category is. You’ll get higher placement in search results and you have the opportunity to become a “Featured Teacher” or “Top Teacher” for your category (ie. Pottery Community), as well. Here’s a quick video of how to request reviews from past students:
Whether it be urban exercising at “Free Beginner Parkour Classes” from the Pacific Northwest Parkour Association to my “Early Stage Comic Strip” class, we feel everyone has something they can share with the community. It’s fairly easy to create a class, and if you have an idea of something to teach — we encourage you to teach it, you never know who wants to learn it. Here’s a quick video of how to add a class to your profile page:
Do you happen to have the blue man as your placeholder for your photo still? Help brand yourself on TeachStreet by easily adding a photo, and set yourself apart from the rest. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” so here’s a quick video of how to add photos to your profile page:
