And so on. But today? The YP is just a waste of money, because Google has long since made it obsolete. The only people still using it are down at the old folks home.

I was shocked to see a copy left on my door the other day. I was even more shocked when I flipped through it and saw there were still schmucks dumb enough to pay for display ads. My advice to you is, get a listing, but don't pay for an ad in the yellow pages.

Now, let's move on to some older but still very useful marketing channels.

Direct Mail

Ah, I love me some direct mail. Funny thing though, most school owners don't.

Now, why do you think that is? I'll tell you why, because it's a difficult medium to get right, and it's expensive compared to other marketing channels.

So, mistakes are costly in direct mail. Meaning that this marketing channel is NOT for amateurs. 

If you're going to use it, make sure you've cut your teeth and have at least six months of successful ad campaigns behind you in other more easily mastered and less expensive marketing channels.*

Moving on...

Email

Email marketing is great, and anyone who tells you that email is dead is either an idiot, or they don't know what they don't know. Either way, don't listen to them

Email is a fantastic medium for direct response marketing, because it's cheap (nearly free after your cost of acquisition per lead) and almost everybody has it. But you want to know how small business owners get it wrong?

By spamming people who never requested information on their services! Not only is this illegal (it's called UCE, unsolicited commercial email), it's also stupid and a waste of money.

Yet, there are scammy companies out there ready and willing to "rent" you lists for a hefty fee. Or you can buy email lists from legitimate info brokers, but it's still illegal to contact those people via email if you haven't established a business relationship with them.

Folks, this is the most ineffective way to use email. The right way to do it is via permission-based marketing—literally getting a consumer's permission to email them with your info. That's how you got on this newsletter list, in fact.**

Even with the limitations email presents, it's still a fantastic medium for direct response marketers, and it's a marketing channel you want to have in your quiver.

Website Marketing

Ah, the venerable website. A marketing medium that should be the cornerstone upon which a solid direct response marketing campaign is built. Yet, it's more often the gravestone that marks a dead, decaying dojo.

Folks, your website should be the key component of your entire marketing system. But if that's the case, why do so many school owners try to do their websites on the cheap?

"I'll just build my site myself. No sense in paying all that money to those website companies." Famous last words of the failing school owner, let me tell you.

Look, it may seem like a simple matter to put up a few web pages with some info on your school, slap up a contact form, and hit the "publish" button... and it is.

But if you want your website to actually get site visitors (that's one oft-ignored aspect) and to turn those site visitors into leads and customers (that's the other aspect of good web design) then you need to be willing to spend some money on your site.

Good heavens, and it's not that much money we're talking about here. Before the days of the internet, I used to spend an average of $1,800 a month on advertising. In one month!

Yet, I hear school owners saying they can't afford $100 or $200 a month for their website. Are you freaking kidding me?

So if you're rolling with a lame-ass DIY website right now, and you're struggling to get leads and students, I suggest that you loosen those purse strings and spend the money to get a decent website.

But be warned... I've seen some pretty lame sites coming from companies with a rep for creating sites that sell. Sometimes you get a winner, and sometimes you don't from web design companies. 

So, make sure you get it in writing that they'll redesign your site if it doesn't produce leads. Otherwise, you might spend a bundle and still get a site that doesn't sell.

Paid Online Ads

This heading covers a variety of individual marketing channels, including Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

And what I'm going to tell you is, you need to be running paid ads in these marketing channels. 

Why? Because it's the easiest damned way to get traffic to your website!

See, traffic generation is the conundrum facing most martial art school owners. You might have an awesome website, but if it's not getting traffic, it's like a billboard standing in the middle of the Mojave.

But what are the limitations of paid online (pay-per-click) ads?

For one, you need to know how to write halfway decent ad copy. Second, on social media sites you need to have at least halfway decent graphic design in your images, so people pay attention to your ads.

Remember, the digital world is full of noise and distraction. So, you have to be able to cut through that noise with a killer ad and offer, if you want to make these marketing channels work for you.

And third, as I mentioned before you need to have a website that converts to send all that traffic to, otherwise you may as well be spitting in the wind.

But if you have all three of these things in place? Well... let's just say the results you can get with modern digital advertising methods are above and beyond anything we used to produce with more traditional marketing methods.

And for a fraction of the cost.

Other Offline Marketing Channels

There are other offline marketing channels that are worthy of your time and attention. For example, rack cards are a venerable method of distributing direct response marketing pieces that is still working for school owners everywhere.

Door hangers are another means of delivering direct response marketing to consumers, but most school owners are too lazy or too cheap to use this method. For me, it's one of my favorite methods, but it takes money or a lot of legwork to use.

Still, it's worth considering.

Snipe signs are another method that can work well, if you don't run awry of the local authorities in using it. 

But if you live in an area where code enforcement isn't an issue, a hundred snipe signs placed in strategic areas within a few miles of your school can make the difference between no business and show business, that's for damned sure.

There may be other marketing channels that I'm overlooking, or some you could point out that are subsets of those I've described. However, those I've listed are the channels a direct response marketer should chiefly be concerned with.

- - -

That's it for today's message. 

Next week on Monday I'll be back to wrap this series up. And hopefully, over the weekend I'll be able to record the first new episode of the Martial Arts Business Podcast in months. So stay tuned.