| Friend,
Yesterday I told you about the initial actions I took to get my dojo in the black during the Great Recession. And as you'll recall, the first steps I took had to do with marketing.
First, I increased all the marketing activity that had traditionally worked for me. This mostly consisted of print marketing - newspaper ads and the like.
None of it worked, because at the time the world of advertising was shifting from a print world to a Google world.
So when that had no effect, I stopped dropping cash on what didn't work, and decided to use the same methods that had worked so well in marketing Small Dojo Big Profits to marketing my studio (you can go back and review yesterday's email to see what that entailed).
Step #2: Traffic
What I soon discovered was that having a marketing funnel was great, but it simply wasn't getting enough traffic (site visitors) to make a difference for me.
I set a target to get 30+ leads a month so I could enroll enough students to get my numbers where they needed to be. My marketing funnel was only producing about ten leads a month, so I knew I'd need to triple that to hit my goals.
Here's the good news... the wonderful thing about having truly automated marketing systems in place is that automated systems are scalable.
Meaning, if a system works properly and is properly automated, all you need to do to get the system to increase outputs is to increase production activity.
In this case, my marketing funnel was converting well - all I really needed was more traffic. So, I set about doing exactly that.
Free Traffic Rocks
And the first thing I did was to implement everything I learned in the fancy-pants search engine marketing certification I'd taken about a year previous.
Within a few weeks, my site and marketing pages were showing up at the top of the local searches for top keywords. That meant that whenever someone was searching for local martial arts classes, my site and pages popped up in Google.
That alone nearly doubled my lead flow, which was great - but it still wasn't enough.*
Adding Paid Traffic Sources
So, once I started seeing more immediate income from my initial marketing efforts, I went out and bought a new car and took a vacation on Grand Cayman!
Just kidding. In reality, I did what every struggling school owner should do when they start seeing more money coming in their school...
...and that is, I reinvested that extra money into more marketing.
Specifically, paid traffic. I spent money on various traffic sources in order to get as much of that badly needed traffic to my martial art school website as possible.
That took my lead flow up to about 30 leads a month in short order, which was great. But I wasn't done yet...
Even though my school was getting plenty of leads, and I was seeing a lot of students through the door, I wasn't converting as many students as I would have liked.
So, the next step was increasing the number of leads that I was converting to long-term students. And I'll tell you about how I did that in tomorrow's email...
Until next time,
Mike Massie MartialArtsBusinessDaily.com
P.S. - *It is MUCH harder to get placed high in Google these days. Back then the search algorithms were much less sophisticated. There are better and easier ways to get traffic to your site today - check out The Martial Arts Marketing Success System to find out what's working now.
P.S.S. - If you want your martial art school website to crank out leads, and you want it to rank well in the local search results (which will happen over time if you do things right), you need to have a site that's set up properly from the get-go. So if your website sucks and you want a better online marketing solution for your martial art school, click here. | 