How become less dependant from Web Portals?

First of all I would like to apologice for my english, is not my mother tongue but I wasn´t abble to find a forum like this in my own language

Now to the topic.

My company (wich belongs to educational sector) expends quite a lot of money on Web Portals in order to get customers, we want to get rid of them and become independent. Because we are, literally, on their hands. When their marketing campaigns are a failure our ROI is ridiculous.

Currently we are working on three lines:

- SEO (VERY slow and very strong competition): We are deeply considering create alternative e-commerce platforms and websites and start a SEO bombing strategy in order to get quick results.
- Increasing SEM budget: There is no room for more investment without throwing the money away.
- E-mail Marketing: Well... it´s e-mail marketing, conversion rate is quite small unless special offers are thrown.

We can´t focus any attention into custommer loyalty because of the nature of our business. I´m looking for new ideas, suggestions... anything will be appreciated.

Thank´s for your attention

 

Can you tell more about what your company sells exactly or about your website? It would help us help you. =)

 

Our company sells e-learning and distance-learning courses.
Problem is that most of our customers come from education web-portals that group nearly all the offer. Sometimes potential clients provided by these portals are ok, and we pay 1/10 for every sale. But many other times these potential customers come from disastrous campaigns and we end up paying 1/3 of our income from that specific portal. We want to diversify, we don´t want to get rid of web-portals, but we don´t want to deppend on them.

Hope this make thing clearer... I would prefer keeping our website anonimous, as I told you there is a very strong SEO campaign and we´re sure we are tracked down by our competence and by those web-portals i´m talking about.

 

What about social media, why don't you use it to drive traffic to your website?