Much of the online education literature stresses the importance of teacher presence. The most common techniques used by online teachers to achieve presence are frequently posting written announcements, providing clear written instructions on assignments, offering students meaningful written feedback, and timely responding to emails. However, if students fail to carefully read, they gloss over or they completely ignore these instructor efforts, a teacher's influence is muted, and student learning outcomes may suffer. Indeed, in an empirical test of over 500 students this hypothesis is validated. Specifically, accounting for GPA, major, age, prerequisite knowledge, student satisfaction, effort, gender, and outside distractions, students who did not follow instructions on the initial course assignment, indicating a propensity to ignore instructor guidance, earned a significantly lower grade on the comprehensive final exam than students who followed instructions. In subsequent iterations of the same course, when the instructor frequently stressed to students the importance of reading announcements and instructions and when those items were provided to students in audio as well as in written format, this negative consequence on learning outcomes was mitigated. Our study and findings suggest that teachers can improve the learning outcomes of a significant number of students in an online class by using these same simple techniques.