Providers Update Fall 2015 – News from Abroad101

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Where does the time go? As spring program deadlines pass and focus starts to shift on returning Fall students, we hope you’ll take a few minutes to take a deeper look at getting more from Abroad101, the first and largest study abroad review website.

New Scholarship Directory

Abroad101 recently announced a makeover to our scholarship directory. As an expansion of the “Financial Aid” tab in each program listing, the new and improved Abroad101 Scholarship Directory now lists opportunities for students with direct links to the application forms and websites. These listings come from entries made through the “Scholarships Available” link, under the providers tab on the left side of your account dashboard. You can enter them for individual programs or for your organization as a whole. In addition to appearing in your listings, you’ll see them listed here: http://www.studyabroad101.com/scholarships  Please login and update your scholarship listings.

Reporting Graphs

While you’re in your account, don’t forget to take a look at the Reporting tab to see how students are rating you. The provider and program graphs will compare your star ratings against others for each of the nine rated categories: Overall, Academics, Program Administration, Housing, Food, Social Integration, Healthcare, Safety and Cost of Living.

If you like what you see, please consider adding links from your website to your program listings on Abroad101 or sharing the good news with our Abroad101 Program Widget

Boosting your SEO with Abroad101

Help us help you. Content is very important when search engines determine a website’s relevance. A strong position on web search engines comes when your site is designated as an authoritative site. Search engines prefer sites with outbound links to content matching topics. By linking to other quality, on-topic resources like Abroad101, you can improve your search engine results as well as ours. Utilizing the Abroad101 program widget with its links to your program page is one way to boost your outbound links, adding links to your program listings on Abroad101 is another.  Better yet, please consider adding the new Abroad101 Providers Widget to your testimonials page, which allows you to always keep the top rated programs visible to your users.  The providers widget will also screen reviews and only display the most favorable ones!

Use Abroad101 as Your Program Evaluation Software

A number of universities use Abroad101 as their official program evaluation software and we welcome the opportunity to do the same for providers. Abroad101’s system is driven by a core set of 37 questions that you can see/download here.

We can add additional questions for you at no charge, or offer you some modest enhancements and systems integration with your CRM or enrollment system for a modest charge. Contact Mark@Abroad101.com for more details.

Using Abroad101 will align your program evaluation with your partner schools and help us increase our reach and impact on students, parents and advisors alike.  If you operate programs for universities in a private label format, we can list those programs as well.

Reviews Drive Rankings

Speaking of search engines, what drives a lot of traffic to Abroad101 are keywords tied to our annual rankings. This year the rankings will recognize review volume much more than ever before. Abroad101 has already changed its listings display formula to give greater recognition to review volume and we will do the same for this year’s rankings.

To improve your odds in the rankings, we hope that you will drive all your students to submit program reviews through Abroad101, not just your alumni ambassadors. The 2015 study abroad rankings cover students who have studied abroad in 2015 and will be determined by compiling reviews collected by February 1, 2016. If you’ve not yet asked your spring and summer 2015 students to submit reviews, we encourage you to do so now.

Updates to the Inquiry Form

The inquiry form on your Program Listing is the primary call to action through Abroad101. Those inquiries come to you by email and are stored in your account dashboard. We hope you respond promptly to those inquiries and to help better qualify leads, students are now asked to identify when they would like to study abroad, which you will see reflected in the field called “Study Period.”

For our advertisers, you will also see a new lead type “mp” that comes from our new LeadMatch utility that points students to programs similar to ones they have just inquired about. LeadMatch has resulted in a 15% increase in overall inquiries and is yet another reason to consider advertising on Abroad101.

New Staff, Need Training?

Abroad101 has added a staff member whose primary duties are helping advisors get more out of the software. If you have new staff that would benefit from an online training session, or if you’d like a refresher course on your account dashboard, please don’t hesitate to contact support@abroad101.com to schedule a 30 or 60-minute session of your own.

We appreciate you taking the time to catch-up on the latest developments at Abroad101 and your comments, questions and feedback so please don’t hesitate to contact us whenever we can be of service – mark@abroad101.com

 

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