I still haven't had any other crisis-related problems. I did ask a couple of well-placed more-cooperative teachers to pay close attention and report back and they said they're still receiving 4 emails a day. I've even had a couple of emails for company classes passed on to me. (One teacher has lower, more competitive rates. Peter above says he hasn't received any in two weeks, but he does have higher rates.) I do have to point out that last year in September and October of 2007 academies and agencies were heating the site up with their job ads looking for teachers and there were few teachers to be found anywhere. There were also more visits from people looking for "Profesores de Inglés". This year there weren't very many posts from academies and plenty more from teachers posting their current availability. My general feeling now is that supply has grown with regard to demand for whatever reason (I can't be sure whether it's because there are more teachers - I have been very effective in finding academies a lot of teachers this year - or fewer clients, or both, or there might be something else going on altogether.) It may very well be that we've gone from a teachers' market to a client/academys' market, in which case there may be a corresponding drop in teacher-salaries to match this coming down the pipe.
If there is a drop in demand, it's not because the site is less popular than before. The site got more visits last month in October than ever. (The site's gotten over 1,000,000 visits up to Oct. 31, 2008 as compared to just under a total of 1,000,000 for 2007.) Below are the statistics for the total number of visitors to the site. The column in the middle refers to the total number of unique visitors per month, the one on the right refers to the total number including repeat visits.
Below are the site's stats for individual pages in October.
Below are September's stats for comparison.
Notice that there does seem to be a 14% drop in visits to the "Profesores de Inglés" page from September to October. There's also a slight drop in visits to the index page. This apparent drop in interest for "profesores de inglés" from September to October has been evident every year in the past.
It would seem that the rise in the number of visits to the site from Sept. to Oct. came mostly from the the rise in visits to the English learning section of the site. Also, the RSS streams (See RSS for video-explanation.) I'll point out here that each of the activity pages listed above has an advertisement leading to a page with a listing of the latest teachers available (click here) meaning that teachers with availability are getting an enormous amount of highly relevant exposure on the site beyond simply being advertised on the "Profesores de Inglés" page. Notice from the RSS stream stats that there does seem to be some interest in keeping track of teachers' availability.
The statistics in 2007 for September to the "Profesores de Inglés" page were 4,285 visits and for October there were 3,763 visits. Compare 3,637 for September of 2008 and 3,190 for October of 2008.
What does this mean? How can the site nearly double its total visits from one year to the next and seemingly be a bit less effective in getting visits? The truth is that I'm not sure that it is less effective as those visits may well be more relevant. I can't be sure, but I do have my hypotheses about this. Google does seem to have improved its ability to supply quality results to searchers in a lot of different ways, for example, by mining their search-history or by better identifying their location. For all I know last year we received more irrelevant visits from students looking for teachers in a Madrid in the U.S.A. or South America. (Google has improved local search quite a bit.) Also, Google seems to be nailing sites and pages down better (i.e. what they're all about) in order to better present this information in the search results. By the way, as far as I can see, MadridTeacher.com continues to be well-placed in the search results all across a range of search-strings such as: "Clases de Inglés en Madrid," "Profesores de Inglés" and "English teachers in Madrid." Also, as I stated before, I am also paying 270 euros a month now (9 euros a day, 3,200 euros per year if continued - this is about equal to what teachers pay to advertise on the site before taxes) to attract new new clients by advertising on other sites via Google Adwords.
Besides this, I'm afraid that there continues to be competition from plenty of other free sites advertising "English teachers" for 10 euros an hour, etc. You may want to advertise on those sites as well, by the way, as something might get through, though I imagine you'd get more bargain-hunting callers as well. One of my goals continues to be not only to attract clients, but to get them to pay more. When they look at you and your colleagues advertising on MadridTeacher.com, I want them to see highly professional teachers who are also asking for respectable salaries, as opposed to the 10-euros-an-hour type. As a teacher I know likes to say, "my cleaning lady gets X euros an hour and she doesn't even need to know how to read."
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