End of an era (again)

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Buondì.

Our first website was put together by an expensive web developer and his equally-expensive graphic designer girlfriend, who I was teaching English to at the time.

That was back in 2005, when I was laid off from a job at the British Council, so foolishly decided to open an English language school here in Bologna. “People will always need to learn English”, I thought. Hah!

I didn’t have much to do with the site itself, though I remember writing the texts and choosing the photos during the start-up phase. It seemed likely that the new business would be a success so I planned to get on with being the boss and leave the technical bits and pieces to contractors.

How wrong that turned out to be. The school’s first year was a disaster, with many fewer students than hoped for, and expenses far out-weighing income. Needless to say we didn’t pay ourselves. My parents sent money each month so their grandchildren wouldn’t starve.

Scratching around for ideas on how to survive the second year, we decided to duplicate the website (by changing the colours, text and logo) and so present ourselves to the world as also an Italian language school. I bought a paperback book on HTML (useful for understanding how webpages were then constructed) and taught myself the basics.

Not long after, in 2006 it would have been – more or less exactly twenty years ago – our embryonic Italian language school attracted its first two clients, a young woman from Switzerland and a chap from Greece, who didn’t get on at all. On the first day they each asked where the other students were…

While selling English courses to Italians had been and remained bloody hard work (we finally gave up after the Covid lockdowns), everyone seemed to want to come to Italy and learn Italian!

The website got ‘traffic’, the ‘traffic’ ‘converted’ into sales, we hired teachers, and away we went! Fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy takes the T-Bird away. And all down to the website.

But her daddy did take the T-Bird away. ‘Social media’ was already picking up momentum, and the faster it went, the more time and energy it demanded from us. At one point we had Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Youtube accounts.

At first ‘Social media’ seemed to be a great opportunity to spread the word, and for free! But soon the algorithms changed, and the only way to get seen, even by our own students, was to start paying for advertising.

At least with a website, once you’d put in the time and energy to create it and promote it, it was yours. As were any resulting profits. But creating ‘content’ for the platforms seemed fruitless, just a way to make the ‘tech bros’ wealthy.

Worse, anyone could compete on social media platforms, and anyone did. Given that youth employment in Italy was always so dreadful, just about every young Italian with a laptop or smartphone fancied themselves as an Italian teacher cum social media star. Ho hum.

In the end I decided to quit social media and focus only on websites. There wasn’t the time to do everything, and it was clear that for a micro business we’d never have the resources to pay professionals to do it for us.

But where to get that vital ‘traffic’ from? By now it seemed that everyone had a website, and that Google, which was the only search engine that counted, prioritised older, more-established businesses, the ones that lots of other older, more-established businesses already linked to.

Social media had become hard and expensive. And we were no longer ahead of the pack in getting our Italian language school onto the first page of Google’s ‘organic’ search results.

It was the end of an era, and one which had barely lasted ten years.

So what to try next?

The solution turned out to be ‘content marketing’, so initially publishing articles about learning Italian on the school website (find them here, all dated 2013-15), then subsequently building OnlineItalianClub.com, with its free exercises and entertaining articles.

Finally, from 2018 onwards, there’s been EasyItalianNews.com, which many club members appear not to have discovered yet. Hint hint.

Once again, and for a decade or so, we had a strategy which worked. I had fun, creating material and writing about language-learning, Google sent us ‘traffic’, and the result was a steady trickle of new students, who mostly loved the school and its teachers, so returned year after year.

This morning I received an email from WPengine, which hosts some of our websites, delivering bad news.

50% of traffic to websites these days isn’t even human, apparently.

Referals from Google are DECLINING BY A THIRD YEAR ON YEAR.

If I wanted our businesses to survive, I’d better make sure its websites were optimised both for the increasingly occasional visits from actual humans and for the much more important and soon be dominant A.I. users.

The article concluded:

“The web is evolving fast. Success is no longer about websites that get the most page views or highest SERP rankings, but to those that provide the most machine-readable data to the agents facilitating today’s AI-driven buyer journey.”

Oh dear. That sounds like a bore, don’t you think?

End of an era (again).

All that said Tuesday’s bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news featured a story about how an organisation representing British authors has created a logo to certify that a given book is ‘Human Authored’, that is so say NOT written by A.I.

They don’t mention website articles, but I can assured you that I typed every single word of this, which you can verify by looking for typos.

I was never great at spelling in any case, and spell checkers weren’t an option when writing in one language about another. Browse the “Best of OnlineItalianClub.com” page and you’ll find missing apostrophes, erroneous double letters, and misremembered applications of the “i before e, except after c” rule going all the way back to 2012!

See? It’s really I. Or really me, whichever.

“How did this article help me learn Italian?” you may be wondering.

Una domanda valida, an Italian might concede.

It probably won’t help wean you off social media.

And it likely won’t sell any ebooks, online lessons or Italian courses at our school in Bologna (though you can’t blame me for trying…)

But it might, at least, drive some ‘traffic’ to the club’s website (there are links to the club’s free materials at the very bginning of each article) and/or encourage people to read and listen to the ‘easy news’ articles (details are in the P.S. below).

Alla prossima settimana!

(This artikel was human-ortherd.)

P.S.

And here’s the usual reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week -on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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