Update: How We Ramped Up Content Production And Grew Traffic 50% In The Last 3 Months

Jed Macosko

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Published: December 16th, 2022

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Jed Macosko

Founder, AcademicInfluence.com

$5K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

AcademicInfluence...

academicinfluence.com

from Fort Worth, TX, USA

started August 2020

$5,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Jed recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Jed recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on AcademicInfluence.com? Check out these stories:

1. AcademicInfluence.com Pioneers A New Way To Compare Colleges And Scholars (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for AcademicInfluence.com. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 2 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hello again, I’m Dr. Jed Macosko, president and academic director at AcademicInfluence.com, a company founded by Dr. Winston Ewert, Dr. Erik Larson, and me as described in our original starter story.

Our company continues to provide students with high-quality ranked lists of colleges and universities that meet their needs. As of November 2022, we have grown the site’s offerings and traffic metrics considerably. Specifically, we’ve grown our core degree ranking content offerings by nearly 50% in the last 3 months alone.

With our innovative InfluenceRanking™ Engine, we have fine-tuned and optimized our school and degree program ranking methodology such that we believe it stands apart from similar sites like US News and World Report.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Since our last interview, we have expanded our team to include new writers, editors, designers, and researchers to increase our volume of high-quality content production that both current and prospective students will find helpful.

We also recently launched a new feature to attract readers from all walks of life. It is a tool that allows users to look back in time to find out who were the most influential people and universities in the past.

We began with influential physicists, which was convenient since being a physics professor at Wake Forest University is still my day job.

The beautiful tool gives the same insight many recent YouTube videos provide in areas such as GDP.

army size;

closer to our area of expertise, US News ranking

A broader goal of ours is to continue to iterate on and improve our school and degree rankings.

As we mentioned in our earlier interview, we tap Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crossref, and Semantic Scholar for information about the most influential people, then bootstrap our way from people to universities by way of alumni, professor, and administrator affiliations.

Our thinking has always been that big databases, such as Wikipedia, can tell us who the influencers are that make great colleges and universities so amazing.

This approach allows us to provide unique and unbiased rankings to help students tap into influence networks, which can be leveraged in academic and professional development. Our driving philosophy is that our company will thrive if we continue to improve the value we offer to students.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

The biggest challenge we have faced over the last year is the monumental challenge of building our content catalogs to completion. Because we aim to offer the most comprehensive collection of rankings, tools, and information available to current and prospective students on the web, we have had a lot of work to do!

Our team needed to rally behind a unified vision to execute an efficient strategy. For instance, we realized students needed a more complete catalog of affordable and accelerated degree rankings, as more and more students are looking for entry points into an increasingly competitive job market.

To accommodate this need we improved our ranking methodology to be able to explore more specific variables related to the best, fastest, and most affordable degree programs -- such as we cover in this ranking of best accelerated business programs.

While certainly a challenge, our team has risen to the task and we are working hard together to improve our value as both a website and an organization.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

We learned that sometimes it’s best to focus on the fundamentals such as:

Focus on providing value to students
Create unique and helpful content
Identify weaknesses of competitors

There are so many things that we want to do, but we need to make sure that what we do matches up to our high standard of quality and value first.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Our vision has been to disrupt the college ranking industry, an industry that people have complained about for years but still frequent the same ranking companies despite their shortcomings.

As we perfect our strategies, we aim to expand the scope and application of our methodologies in the coming years.

For instance, we want to explore new ways to present and organize school, degree, and career data.

As it currently stands, much of the data that would be most helpful and influential on student decision making is often hidden (such as average starting salary after graduation). We would like to bring this data to the forefront of students’ minds so they can make the best choice possible.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

As a professor, I have the privilege of teaching a first-year seminar course each year. This year, I get to teach it in both semesters!

I have my students, who are primarily future MBA earners, write about business founders that have inspired and influenced them.

I have encouraged many of them to publish their essays, so stay tuned for a URL with a long list of inspirational stories of business leaders you have never heard of before.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

In our previous interview, we encouraged other entrepreneurs to “Keep it light!

There’s no need to get all hot and bothered about whether things are going well.” We still think this is good advice. But, of course, it also helps to surround yourself with hard-working people.

The only way that we know how to achieve this is to be hard-working ourselves. Hard work seems to attract people who work hard.

The other piece of advice we would like to share this time around is to look around for friendly rivals and seek to partner with them.

This has been a huge boost to our productivity since the last time we shared our story. It might not work in your area of commerce, but if you have the chance to partner as we did, go for it!

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are always looking for writers and coders. If you have an interest in writing about higher education and the importance of finding the right fit in an online or brick-and-mortar institution, please let us know!

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!