Marketing Martial Arts

Is Your Fan Page Prepared for Facebook’s Mandatory Timeline Changes?

2012-03-17T15:30:06Z

On March 30th, Facebook is changing how they display your businesses fan page on their site.

Like your personal profile that recently changed to timeline, your business page will now follow in it’s footsteps.

Are you ready for all the changes?

Facebook Timeline Overview

The good news is that before March 30, you can preview the page and see what things will look like to help wrap your head around the changes. Just login into your personal account, then click into your business page. You’ll see a call out box about Timeline at the top where you click “preview.” Don’t worry, you can change with a click of link (before March 30) so you know what things will look like. You will see how much digital real estate is being dedicated to the cover photo, profile photo and timeline.

“On March 30, 2012, all Facebook Pages will get a new design.” Love Facebook

Here’s What’s Changing

Cover Image – The new cover image replaces your default welcome tab. You no longer can choose a custom tab as a welcome screen to prompt people to “like” you page before interacting with it. And, there are rules in place on what you can and can’t do with that image (like adding a call to action on it). Dimensions are 850 x 315 pixels.
Profile Photo - The original maximum profile image size before Timeline was 200 x 600 pixels. With Timeline, dimensions are restricted to 125×125 pixels.
App Thumbnails – You can add thumbnail images to every app you have associated with your page. This is a good exercise in branding as you can make them all look consistent. Dimensions are 111 x 74 pixels.
Milestones - You can now “go back in time” and add “milestones” for activities or events including important dates (when you were founded, etc), photos, messages or video. This is a wonderful way to tell your story in an interactive way.
Post Highlights - You can make a post take up a whole row by “highlighting” it if. Just click the pencil in the upper right corner when you hover over it.
Post Pinning – You can now pin posts to the top of the page. This could be a welcome message, photo from belt test, a special message, video, or promotion for an upcoming event. Anything you want to highlight and draw attention to when someone first visits.
Photo Positioning – You can adjust the positioning of any photo in your timeline that you or someone else publishes to your page. Just click the pencil graphic in the upper right and go from there.
Photo Strip – The photo strip of that had 5 of your latest photos is now gone. However, the photo button link is still very prominent and shows your most recent photo.
Wall Conversations – Conversations on the wall are now split up into two columns making them slightly harder to follow but as adoption of the new features becomes the norm, more will get used to it.
Messaging – I love this update! Facebook Pages can now message other business pages. Not only that, but people can now message your Facebook page instead of having to just leave a post on your page for all to see.

If you didn’t know about this change, you still have a little time before your new page format goes live on March 30, 2012.

If you haven’t yet created a page, be sure to do this for your martial arts school as it’s a great way to keep in touch with your existing and past students as well as engage new ones.

As with any change to Facebook, it’s a good idea to read through their policies so you don’t inadvertently break one of their policies and get your page banned.

So, who has a Facebook fan page they have updated? Share a link to it in the comments below!

5 Simple Ideas to Take Your Website to the Next Level

2012-03-06T06:11:30Z

Having a website that is consistently sending you leads while you sleep isn’t something that only big martial arts school chains can have. You can, too. If you’re stuck with your website and not sure what to do next to generate more leads, these five tips will help you get going again so you can take your website to the next level.

Add a Blog

A Blog is a way to add content to your website on a regular basis. It not only helps you to generate regular content that the search engines love and is a huge part of search engine optimization, you also give visitors a reason to keep coming back to your website. Think of a blog as a way for you to regularly and frequently share information about your school including news, events, training tips, videos, photos and more. Start with doing one post a week and build up your schedule as needed from there. My favorite blog software is made by WordPress, which is free. In fact, this entire site is powered by WordPress.

Add a Monthly Newsletter

A monthly email newsletter, when combined with a blog, is a powerful combination that can translate into new students for your martial arts school. By capturing a persons name and email, you can begin emailing people on a regular basis whenever you have information to share. Add an email capture form that uses a strong headline, copy and call to action along with your form for optimal success. Sending Martial Arts Newsletters can be delivered using a service like Aweber.com (that’s who I use).

Add Social Media Buttons

If your martial arts school is on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and you’re not mentioning it on your website, it’s time to make things more public. By adding social media buttons for each of your social profiles on each page of your website, you’re naturally going to get more traffic to those pages and get more fans and followers. Some add these to their header, sidebar or footer.

Add a Squeeze Page

We all want more leads from the same amount of traffic we’re getting. One way to make that happen is with a squeeze page. The sole purpose of a squeeze page is to capture a name, email and sometimes a phone number. They are sparse without a lot of distraction and are usually comprised of a headline, photo or video, bullet points, call to action and an optin form. It’s important to test all of these variations to see what works best for your website. Squeeze Pages are most often used when you have a special offer like a trial program, free ebook guide, an email series or exclusive videos you’re offering in trade for a person’s name and email. Having a good squeeze page can improve your site’s conversion by 30% or more.

Add Videos

If you have videos you’ve made and posted to your YouTube channel but haven’t yet add them to your site, it’s time to embed them onto your site and get them working harder for you. These can be placed on the home page, a video page or sidebar. If you’re going to build a squeeze page, you can create a new custom video for it. If you don’t have any videos yet, just about every computer comes with video editing software these days. Your videos don’t have to be Hollywood productions, just convey the message. Having videos that are shot on a shoestring budget that contain great information and personality can make you seem more genuine and authentic than those that cost a lot to produce.

8 Essential Qualities of Growing Your Martial Arts School Quickly in a Crowded Town

2012-02-08T19:07:01Z

Every martial arts school owner I know wants their martial arts business to succeed—myself included.

As more and more martial arts schools spring up, it becomes increasingly difficult to grow quickly and get ahead. Every day there seems to be a new martial arts option in town. Krav Maga, BJJ or MMA gyms seem to be popping up in strip malls all over the valley everywhere I look. Successful martial arts schools are expanding or opening new locations.

Competition is getting incredibly fierce.

What prompted me to write this post was that a martial arts training facility is expanding into my area from the next valley over. And, they are paying through the nose to enter into the market and get noticed in paid search ads on Google. They’re #1 right now on a lot of terms and have bumped my ads down because they are willing to spend the money. It caught my attention and made me think about next steps.

So, here are some tips to help you persevere and grow you martial arts school in a crowded town. I’ve used many of these ideas for years and has helped me grow each and every year since I started. And, I’ll be using these same ideas to help me grow when I have more competition than ever. Maybe they’ll help you, too.

1. Find Your Hustle

If you’re sitting back and waiting for business coming to you, you’re already doomed. Deep down you know you need to get up off your chair, stop watching reruns of Steven Seagal: Lawman and take action. Every single day you should doing at least one thing to move your martial arts school forward. Just do something. Plan events. Brainstorm promotions. Make your classes better. Raise your energy. Be relentless. I have some competitors that seem to be every where. They clearly have hustle. However, so do I. And then some.

2. Never Give Up

It’s easy to push marketing your business when you just got a crop of new students. Just as when you spar, don’t drop your guard. In fact, that’s one of the best times to double your efforts and leverage your momentum. You have to keep pushing to be successful and can’t stop just because times are good today. Tomorrow, you may have 5 people quit or move out of town. I know of so many martial arts school owners who have just stopped trying because it can be draining and difficult. They gave up and are on autopilot as their martial arts dream dies a slow and horrible death. Being a small business is hard. We all know this. There are no easy ways to make it. However, you didn’t give up on getting your black belt. You can’t give up on making your business grow. We all know it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s just easy to forget when the phones aren’t ringing. You must persevere.

3. Stretch Yourself

Stretching is something every martial artists is familiar with and an important part of our training. The same thing applies in business. Stretching what you know, who you know, and how to do things are three great ways to stretch yourself. Obviously, you want to avoid stretching yourself too thin (that’s where tip #4 comes in). I try and learn one new thing a day. Sometimes two. I try and meet a new business owner every week. I visit martial arts website’s all over the world. Same with Facebook fan pages. I get so many ideas from doing this. I visit related (and none related) businesses and pick up ideas all of the time. I am constantly learning. More importantly, I’m always trying to grow and actively seek it out. For example, I never thought of myself much of a salesmen. So, I started reading books. I started applying what I learned. I got better. So can you.

“You must do the things you think you cannot do.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

4. Get Some Help

Are you a control freak? You can get more done faster and easier with other people helping you. You know this. But how many of us really leverage OPT? Some use this to mean “other people’s talents” while other’s see this as leveraging “other people’s time.” Either way, it works. All you have to do is ask and you’d be amazed at how many people want to help you. Let them. I am so much farther ahead now than ever because I just asked for help. You can quickly get ahead, too. Just ask.

5. Be Bold

You can’t be boring in business and expect to stand out. I once saw a martial arts school in town teach outside near the sidewalk during rush hour. Believe me, they got noticed. What are you doing to stand out and get noticed?

6. Say Yes More

Saying no can be good for business. However, it can also hurt it. Once I started saying yes to things more often, I quickly realized I could help more people if I just loosened up a bit. And you know what, it worked. Years ago I had a student ask me if I could start doing automated payments. I was reluctant because it meant I had to research things, invest time in calling around, weighing options, learning a new system, etc. But you know what? I’m glad I did and it changed my business. Had I said no, I’d still be chasing down someone’s monthly payment and hating every second of it. What a drain! Are you saying no when you should be saying yes? If so, rent Jim Carey’s “Yes Man” this weekend. It will not only make you laugh but also put this into better perspective. Who knows, it might even inspire you?

7. Become Remarkable

This one is easier than it sounds. One of the best way to grow is be remarkable enough to get people excited to talk about what they learned in your classes. Getting started with this idea isn’t hard. Just look at a few key areas. For example, how are you teaching your classes? Are you energetic or dull? Are they fun or predictable? Do they push people or can everyone slide? Are you constantly introducing new ideas or are you having everyone do the same old? You’d be surprised at how much people love you challenging them, giving them new ideas and making them think.

Push your paying clients in new ways and they’ll in turn help push your business to new levels.

So, I’d really like to know how are you standing out in crowded market. How do you do it?

Negative Reviews in Local Search Results May Be Killing Your Online Reputation

2012-01-16T22:35:40Z

At one time or another, we’ve all had a bad experiences with a service or business that makes us never want to go back. Ever.

It’s happened.

It’s going to happen again.

Now, if it happens to you, it happens to your customers.

And, they may have just had one of those dreaded experiences at your martial arts school.

Nowadays, people turn to online local directories like Google Places or Yelp to share their experience as a warning to others.

You can choose to ignore negative reviews or respond to them head on.

The choice is yours.

How often do you monitor your reviews online?

Having positive reviews has always been important but having positive online review is absolutely critical in today’s online obsessed world.

But what do you do when you have even one negative review in a sea of positive reviews? What do you do when you have more negative reviews than positive?

You can’t just ignore the problem and hope it goes away.

It won’t.

And it can (and will) only get worse.

You have to respond and try and make things right.

By saying nothing, you’re basically telling everyone who reads this you don’t care enough to respond and that person (more importantly) is right.

Either way, it’s bad for business.

It’s Time to Audit Your Reviews

If you haven’t done this in a while for your martial arts school, I highly recommend you take a look at what’s being said and what kind of rankings you are receiving. I hope you’re pleasantly surprised to find all positive reviews.

However, you might be surprised to find out that you have unhappy former students leaving one star reviews with a laundry list of all that’s wrong and evil with your business for your potential future students to read.

While there is no real way to calculate the true impact to your business, I think we can agree that it definitely hurts you. And bad.

What if the following example was your martial arts school?

Imagine what it would be like to load up your page and find that you have multiple negative reviews for your martial arts school.

That’s probably going to happen this martial arts school’s owner someday.

Check this out…

If you look at the red circles above, you’ll see that potential customers indicated that those reviews helped them. I don’t know about you, but I read those to mean “Hell no! I’ll never ever, never ever train here. Ever!” and can’t picture the person saying “Oh hell yes! I cant wait to send my kids here and pay all those hidden fees!”

Sadly, from the looks of things, this owner hasn’t ever looked at these reviews.

You can tell because they haven’t responded to them. Either they don’t care (which would be shocking), they don’t want to respond, or they don’t know they can respond (which they can as a verified owner of the page).

I’m hoping for the later but you never know.

What do you think?

I really want to know what you think about this and how you would handle it.

If this was your business, how would you respond? Would you take the same approach as this martial arts school owner and say nothing? Has this ever happened to you? How did you respond? Share with our community in a comment below!

How to Add a Facebook Like Box to Your Website

2012-01-17T20:35:00Z

If you’re looking to get more people to “like” your Facebook Fan Page for your martial arts school, this post will give you an idea on how to do that for yourself simply and easily.

Why create a Facebook Like Box?

If you’ve visited Marketing Martial Arts lately, you’ve probably seen an example of this in the right hand column. I added this to the site a while back and have enjoyed seeing an increase in the amount of followers on Facebook each and every month. It’s become one of the best ways to get people to like my page that I’ve found and wanted to share the idea with you so you knew how to add it to your site, too.

I think this works so well because it provides “social proof” that other people like your page. Social proof is an important marketing concept and is one you should definitely add to your marketing arsenal. Think of these almost like positive testimonials of your business.

Not only that, but by adding the Facebook Like Box, you’ll be able to make it a “one click” process for someone to like your page from your website without having to go to Facebook to do it.

How to Get a Like Box

Getting a Facebook Like Box is simple – visit the Developers Page for the Like Box on Facebook then complete the Like Box generator form. Once done, you can cut and paste it into the code of your website.

You have a lot of choices on how the like box is presented, including:

Facebook Page URL – Add your Facebook URL here
Width – Enter in the desired pixel width of your like box.
Height – You can either leave this blank or your can enter in the pixel height if your website’s design only allows a certain amount of vertical space.
Color Scheme – Choose from “light” or “dark” options.
Choose Faces – This is an on/off switch that lets you display a sample of the people who already like your page along with their profile photo.
Border Color – Add the hexadecimal color of your choice for your border, if you want one.
Show Stream – This is an on/off switch that lets you display your posts from from your Facebook page.
Show Header – This on/off switch either automatically adds “Find us on Facebook” text at the top or removes it.

If you’re looking for a smaller solution, you can also add the Facebook Like Button instead. Either way, it’s a very similar process.

Does anyone else use this on their website? What results have you seen? Share with our community in a comment below!