New project ControlF.io - A tech. course aggregator
I built this within 2 weeks and had a couple reasons for developing it.
- I wanted to gain experience developing with the MEAN stack. Check!
- I am & have been a course author for several networks including Tutsplus, Pluralsight and Lynda. I've always found it a pain to search through multiple networks to see what they have to offer, when learning something. So I decided to pull in all of their courses and offer a unified search system.
It's been live for less than 2 weeks, and while the feedback has been positive, it looks like monetizing these through affiliate links (3 of the 4 offer affiliate programs), the conversion ratio is horrendous. Right now it's near 800 clicks to aff. links with 1 $10 join.
Traffic sources is probably an issue, because most of this traffic has been just people who are curious about the service, and not necessarily in an active learning mode.
I plan to add Udemy and Udacity to the list of networks shortly. I think it has potential, but it definitely needs exposure from some of the big tech sites like producthunt/techcrunch to gain any real traction I believe. SEO-wise, because this is all scraped content, I'd imagine ranking for terms as it stands is not a great possibility.
what is the MEAN stack?
I really like the concept. I use this
MEAN is an acronym for Mongodb, Expressjs, Angular 2, and Node js.
nice clean design. And yes since it is scraped content, SEO will be tough unless you add some own content for each keyword
Cool project! I second kennyallen that the design is really clean and attractive. Good work! One comment I have on that front is that it's slightly hard to scan the lists of courses. Not sure why though. Might be font choice or size, line height, column width, etc.
Some random ideas:
This is awesome! I love the clean design of the site. It would be really cool if in the future you are able to add a function where a user can filter or sort by "most popular" or "trending" or something. Also, are all of the courses paid? It would be neat to be able to search for free courses only, too.
Thanks.
Good question on whether or not some are free or paid. I didn't check into scraping that data.
As for popular or trending, that would probably have to be based on my own site's metrics, in terms of user ratings and such. User ratings is something I've yet to work in.