ClassesUSA.com, which is also the publisher of Succeed Magazine, might be the granddaddy of Web sites offering a sophisticated cost-per-lead marketing program that is known for producing results. Two for-profits and one non-profit institution claimed that ClassesUSA has generated surprisingly large numbers of qualified leads, over surprisingly short periods of time, for their enrollment-producing efforts .

ClassesUSA is not a portal site "per se," says Vice President of Sales Tim Foster. "We do not send visitors to distance education provider sites. We list the offerings of distance education providers, including online programs offered by [regionally and nationally] accredited colleges and universities, and we allow visitors to request information about these degree and certificate programs through the ClassesUSA site . . ."

Foster explains that ClassesUSA has realized phenomenal growth since going live with its "Features Schools Partners" cost-per-lead program in January 2002, claiming that the company currently generates more than 50,000 qualified leads per month for its clients. At press time, approximately 40 institutions were listed on ClassesUSA.com as featured schools offering online degree programs.

The cost institutions pay per unique lead is $20. The minimum number of unique leads an institution can purchase is 100 per month. "The University of Phoenix will pretty much take as many leads as we can generate for them," says Foster, which, he claims, is "considerably more than 1,000 leads per month."

Unlike some of the other portals, ClassesUSA does not provide free listings to distance education providers (unless a provider participates in its affiliate program), thereby limiting the presence of fully online degree programs on its Web site to only those that participate in the cost-per-lead program.

Distance education course providers with open-enrollment courses (available for purchase by anyone with a credit card) can list their offerings for free on ClassesUSA.com through the "Class Provider Affiliates Program," where ClassesUSA earns a percentage on courses purchased through its Web site.

This company has a unique history. In short, back in 1996, Chip White, co-founder of DegreeInfo.com, along with five other educators that had a keen interest in distance education, became known as the "Gang of Six" after exposing a diploma mill operator that was regularly posting spurious messages on the alt.education.distance unmoderated Usenet newsgroup.

Fast-forward a few years later, and another disruption appeared on alt.education.distance. This time a group of spammers successfully made the newsgroup unstable by cluttering up the service with hundreds of daily messages. "We believed they were degree mill operators," says White. "I got annoyed and registered the domain name DegreeInfo.com, bought discussion-board software, and set up DegreeInfo as an alternate place where regular users of the newsgroup could post information."

Today DegreeInfo.com has a highly moderated discussion board with approximately 4,500 registered users, plus "about three times that number of casual [unregistered] visitors," says White. "Our site is frequented and used as a resource by numerous state and federal law enforcement authorities [trying to catch the diploma mill operators], administrators and professors from numerous distance learning programs, and individuals currently enrolled in or seeking distance learning programs."

The message archive alone is a great resource about distance education that has more than 70,000 searchable messages. "Just by the nature of all the people we have contributing, this archive has information on just about every distance learning program out there," says White.

The site also has a thorough database of accredited schools, called "DegreeFinder," where visitors can search among 350 institutions by degree level, residency requirements, location and key words. "Every regionally accredited distance learning program we know of is included in our database without charge," White says.

Concerning advertising programs available with DegreeInfo.com, White said that "schools that sponsor their listing with us get preferred placement, lead tracking and qualified leads, listings elsewhere on our site, highlighting on our featured schools page, and soon a variety of other services."

I could not get a clear handle on the pricing of DegreeInfo’s cost-per-lead program, even after the company’s advertising representative Nathan Whiteside sent me information about it. It was noted, however, that they provide a "level of premium placement on a sliding payment scale. Schools that pay a higher cost-per-lead will appear closer to the top of the ‘Featured Schools’ page, as well as on the DegreeFinder search results page, relative to other sponsoring schools." Directly after that statement, an example of one school paying $9 per lead and another school paying $13 per lead, and thus the $13 lead getting higher placement, were presented. However, the starting price point for this kind of service was never clearly stated.

DegreeInfo.com also has a pay-for-insertion flat monthly fee "to get priority placement on our Web site, in addition to well-placed links to direct students to the school’s own Web site." This form of advertising also had a "sliding payment scale," with clearly stated pricing ranging from $150 to $500 per month.

Distance.GradSchools.com is a sub portal of GradSchools.com, which is part of Educational Directories Unlimited, Inc., a company that got its start in the business of online directories with StudyAbroad.com in 1995. The company also runs CollegeAbroad.com and EducationforAdults.com, and it provides other enrollment marketing services, such Student Prospector, which is a tool for graduate enrollment administrators to pro-actively search through a database of opt-in prospective student profiles that are generated by all these Web sites.

CEO Mark Shay says that most of the advertising plans offered by Distance.GradSchools.com are based on a fixed fee. When asked if his company offers cost-per-lead plans, he said "we have bent the rules a little bit to fit those big guys who have wanted to take an aggressive position with us, so we have kind of compromised over time." When asked how much his company might charge for a cost-per-lead plan, he said "we will customize something that is a win/win situation. If they are absolutely budget-driven, we can give them a fixed-cost package and offer a guarantee of performance. If they want to strictly pay on performance, we are at least open to that concept."

Two popular fixed-fee advertising plans offered by Distance.GradSchools.com include one $600 annual plan for a "Hot Button" graphic link that takes a visitor to the home page of an institution’s distance education Web site, and a $300 annual plan for a "Standard Listing" text-based link. Other types of enhanced listings and sponsorship plans are also available.

David Butler is the guide of the About.com distance learning Web site, which is one of many Web sites under the banner of the About network. Butler is a reference librarian at Chabot College in Hayward, California. Previous to the librarian position, he was Dean of Learning Resources and Technology at Chabot for 15 years. Basically, the About.com site is Butler’s labor of love. He has been researching and working inside distance education in many capacities since his days as a photojournalist during the Vietnam War.

"The site is unique in that it is one of the very few Web sites whose aim is to help online students succeed," Butler says, emphasizing that "finding and selecting courses is a very small part of the information services offered."

Indeed, throughout the numerous sections of this Web site, there is a great deal of helpful information geared toward assisting students on many different fronts. There are also a wide variety of ads and sponsored links from all kinds of businesses posted on these pages.

Check out the "articles" link in the top navigation bar. Many of Butler’s timely, information-rich articles reside in this section.

A few years back I wrote several articles for Ed-X.com, one of which is currently linked off the home page, titled "Distance Learning 101 - Tips for Learning Online." During that time, I had many lively conversations with Ed-X President and CEO Mark Hall via e-mail and by phone, so it was a pleasure to get back in touch with him. Hall is a hard-working, dedicated professional who has done a great deal of traveling around the world establishing relationships with people who are very interested in what U.S. colleges and universities have to offer by distance. This has given his company - which is one of the oldest pure distance education portals out there, started in 1998 - what could be a leading edge for helping institutions capture prospective students from the international marketplace.

"Roughly 25 percent of our traffic right now is coming from outside of North America," Hall says. " I have spent a great deal of my time in the European Union and the former Soviet states, and I just returned from Brazil where I met with some folks within the government of Pernambuco (in northeastern Brazil) that are very interested in online education to educate a wide number of individuals within their jurisdiction so that they can improve their economy. They see education as economic development, and they would like to source high quality programs from the United States, if possible."

Hall adds that he has cultivated a user-base outside of the U.S., with registered users from 95 different nations currently visiting Ed-X.com. "People are interested in education, and they are interested specifically in quality distance learning they can do within the environs of their community and not have to go through the Visa struggle these day to come to the United States, England or Australia."

Distance education providers have several options to get listed on Ed-X.com. They can opt for one of three paid marketing programs, or, they can take advantage of Ed-X’s free "Post Info" area on the site (www.ed-x.com/postinfo.asp) to add a maximum of five course listings. The marketing programs have annual costs of $950 (Level I), $1,975 (Level II) and $3,160 (Level III). All three levels offer data entry and maintenance of a limited number of courses and degree programs: 60 for Level I, 120 for Level II and 200 for Level III. Levels II and III also include Run of Site (ROS) banner advertising, as well as a unique service whereby Ed-X.com provides advertisers with an unlimited number of student leads instead of the typical cost-per-lead model that many of the other portals provide.

"When we pioneered the performance-based advertising model for higher education, almost three years ago," claims C.J. DeSantis, founder and president of eLearners.com, "it was clear to us that the quality of our inquiries would be paramount. We take every possible step to find users who are actively researching online degrees, not just folks who might be inclined to fill out a request form to get free information from colleges."

In addition to providing a solid lead-generation marketing service, there’s a lot of good information on eLearners.com, including a student services area with a good amount of important resources and information for potential students, as well as an opt-in service to receive two free, e-mailed weekly, newsletters on eLearning.

At press time, eLearners.com was doing business with 83 partner institutions, 33 of which are regionally or nationally accredited colleges or universities offering online degrees. The remaining partners comprise a wide variety of providers of professional training and continuing education courses and programs.

Basically, potential advertisers can choose from a Gold Partner or Silver Partner program. The Silver Partner Program is a fixed-cost branding model that advertisers can buy into for a minimum of $2,950 per year, and it includes a fixed number of student inquiries per contract. Cost to participate in the Gold Partner Program "varies based on a large number of factors," says DeSantis. "In some cases we will start out with a price and adapt it over time to make sure the price is appropriate. We are not a one-price fits all model . . ."

DeSantis added that "taking an inquiry is really about half the battle." The other half is converting that inquiry into an enrollment. To help institutions with this part of the equation, eLearners.com recently formed a partnership with edGenuiti, a company based in the United Kingdom that provides tools to higher education institutions that "greatly increase the yield on their inquires," said DeSantis. Part of edGenuiti’s many enrollment-management services includes, for instance, a tool that verifies the correctness of an inquiry’s postal address, thus saving institutions on mailing costs, which, in some cases, can be as much as $10 or more per mailing. For more information about edGenuiti, visit www.edGenuiti.com.

The Online University Consortium (OUC) has a unique business plan, as well as a unique portal, when compared to all the other portals covered in this issue of Educational Pathways.

What makes this portal unique, which went live in May of this year, is that participating institutions must buy in as members at $3,000 for a full membership, and they must pass a number of quality standards before being accepted. At press time, there were 20 "traditional" institutions in the consortium that, combined, offered 220 online degree programs listed on the OUC Web site.

The quality standards, which OUC Executive Director Greg Eisenbarth says came from criteria used by corporate education and training and human resources professionals when making decisions about educational expenditures for their employees, include:

- If the university and their online degree programs are accredited both regionally and through a program-specific standard such as AACSB is to business.

- If the university has enrollment and admissions’ standards or outcomes-based graduation requirements.

- If campus-based professors facilitate and instruct online degree programs.

- If the university provider maintains a proper balance between program development and promotion.

- If both quality and/or quantity of student throughput in online degree programs is high.

Eisenbarth said that OUC has denied about 150 online degree programs that have not been able to withstand its qualification standards.

"We promote through channels that we call volume buyers," says Esienbarth. "These are people who can authorize or approve educational expenditures for multiple adult learners."

Peterson’s is a leading publisher of education guides that are widely distributed through public libraries and all the major book retailers. Additionally, just about every high school guidance and adult-education counselor has a Peterson’s guide on his or her bookshelf. Being a highly visible and recognizable brand helps attract visitors to its Web portal on distance learning.

Peterson’s collects data for its distance learning Web site through an annual survey it conducts with approximately 1,100 institutions. Respondents to the survey get a free basic listing on the Web site. For $2,000 to $3,000, institutions can boost that listing to the level of what’s referred to as an "in-depth description" that also goes inside the Peterson’s printed guide to distance learning. Additionally, an e-mail link is provided on the description Web page, and your program gets listed as a featured program in all search results.

Institutions can boost the in-depth description further by participating in the "Feature Forum" option, which costs an additional $850. This allows you to add a photo or logo, a 100-word announcement, and at least two articles up to 1,000 words each, all of which can be updated on a regular basis.

There is also an "Anchor Tenant" program where institutions pay from $1,500 to $1,750 for 100 x 34 pixel ads that appear on the Peterson’s Web site.

The more elaborate option is the "micro-site" program, for institutions "looking for something a little different than our core clients that purchase in-depth descriptions, says Michael Fleischner, vice president of marketing. The micro-sites - currently numbering between 12 and 15 - are built by Peterson’s in conjunction with the institutions who buy them. In addition to providing "more flexibility in terms of how they talk about their programs," the micro-sites feature a cost-per-lead or cost-per-impression model. Fleischner said the cost to participate in the micro site program is "a negotiable price. Most of the deals are based on impressions that we serve or the actual inquiries that we deliver. The proprietary schools have really started that. They really know their business and what their conversion and yield rates are, so they are able to look back at the data and say each lead is costing me X, and I can convert so many students [to enrollees] and, therefore, this is the result. We find that they [the proprietary institutions] are much more savvy when it comes to marketing experience, i.e. lead-generation costs, return-on-equity - those sorts of measures that are obviously important when you are running a for-profit business."

Last and definitely not least is WorldWideLearn.com, a real DE portal that comes up very frequently on the top pages of Google search-engine results when key stroking just about any particular subject name in conjunction with the words "online degrees."

Another interesting quality uniquely specific to WorldWideLearn.com is that all of the many key categories on this Web site are only one click away from the home page, which makes it look awfully cluttered, but, then again, the entire Web site is fairly easy to navigate through.

WorldWideLearn.com has a very extensive listing of categorized online degree programs and online training programs. In my opinion they really are "the world’s largest directory of online education," as proclaimed on their home page. Moreover, there are numerous resources and links to helpful information spread throughout the pages of this Web site.

"The development of what you see today is what Angela Lovett (WorldWideLearn’s CEO and Founder, who started this as a hobby) had always put as the number one goal, which is that the Web site visitor’s experience has to be number one, and then the clients or customers or revenue streams have to be number two. That will be the quickest path to success," said WorldWideLearn President Keith Woodard.

In relation to WorldWideLearn’s advertising programs, "our primary goal is to offer universities high quality leads from prospective students," Woodard says. "In addition to providing exposure throughout the WorldWideLearn.com Web site, we create a micro-site for our university partners that provides the user with pertinent information about the university, its online degree offerings, and its accreditation. From the micro-site users can request more information from the institution."

Simply put, "we provide a service that allows universities to post their request-for-information forms on our Web site, and then they pay us a fee for each time a student requests information from them."

So, what does it cost to participate? Woodard decided not to reveal pricing except to say that there is "a mixture of different programs."