Martial Arts Business Magazine Resources for Running Your Martial Arts Business
Nowadays, social media has been dominating the internet. That is the reason why you should allocate effort into maintaining your social media presence. There are a lot of social media websites that can improve your marketing and ultimately increase your sales and school memberships. Although this might be the latest craze, it doesn’t mean that you should altogether forget about your website. It’s still important to have a website, they are not obsolete. Your school’s website is still the face of your company, your cyber calling card. Leaving it to rot will be a poor marketing decision because there are still people who check school websites. If a potential customer stumbles upon your unkempt website, then that customer may be dismayed and may look for other martial arts schools.
If you don’t know how to improve your website then I’ll show you some guidelines on how to do so.
Make it Fast
People want everything to be quick, that goes for websites as well. Due to the increasing number of things that keep us occupied, our attention spans have keep on decreasing. So make sure your website loads your pages quickly. It only takes a couple of seconds before a potential student gets bored and clicks the close button. Monitor your website for speed by trying it on different browsers, operating systems, and locations. If you have fancy animation and sound bites or videos that play automatically, remove it. It only slows down your website and annoys visitors. Your website’s serves should be topnotch as well. If the servers are inefficient, then switch to a better one.
Remove Excess Information
Don’t put too much information on your website’s home page. What people should see is what your school can offer to consumers. From that point on, make your website as a guideline on how to lead them to your school. So keep your website simple and the directories organized. Put only the important information like your school’s physical address, contact details, your classes, and some pictures of your facilities.
Keep it Fresh
A popular addition that you can put on your website is a blog where you can post photos of school gatherings, ceremonies, or day to day activities that can attract students. This way, you can put new content to your website every week or whenever you may please. Write an article, share a video, or make a podcast. You paying for your website so might as well take full advantage of it.
Just remember that a slow and inefficient website will drive away customers. And don’t delete your website. Improve it. We are still in the internet age, your website is still one of your best marketing tools.
I have worked hard on developing and customizing my WordPress site in such a cool way, it doesn’t look anything like a blog. So I’m proud of it, but I also realize that it is important to integrate it with social media. I think it is a good strategy to integrate a little bit of everything and not stick to just one or two sources of traffic. These are good tips. Thank you and I hope you keep posting pointers.
Yup, social media and your company’s (or personal) website should really work hand in hand. Having a website is important, but social media is the trend today. Thanks for reading!
One of the more frustrating things for those just getting into creating and promoting their own website is the realization that web marketing and SEO is a methodical game. It’s not a sprint as much as it is a marathon. To the steady go the traffic. That is exactly what happened to me once I started designing websites; I became frustrated how time consuming seo can be. You just have to accept it and dig in.
I learned about several of the factors that can affect your website’s ranking on search engines. Among these factors are: loading time. Google will apparently penalize your site. Another thing I try to avoid doing is over stuffing pages with any one keyword. Apparently, the Panda updates took care of that problem and evened the playing field. This gives the little guy a chance to compete.
Kenneth you are so right, the more you can do with social media that leads the people back to your web site the better off and more successful you are going to be. Thank you for posting your comment because I was thinking the same thing. I also see that the writer believes that as well. You did a great job on this blog post keep up the good work.
I somewhat disagree a little bit with the author’s recommendation not to put too much information on the home page. To clarify, I do agree that if you try to stuff too much information by squeezing static text onto a static page, that will only confuse and discourage visitors from reading, however, there are the newest WordPress widgets such as RokSprocket that enable you to rotates/animates lots of information in a dynamic way so the data does not appear crowded and overwhelming.
It really boils down to your preference, really. But the RokSprocket widget does make information more dynamic, and less boring. 🙂
I think it is more efficient to start sketching a top level framework before you get into the actual development. The exception to this rule would be if you use a Word Press them that comes with the layout already setup along with sample content. Once you figure out how the theme works, it’s just a matter of plugging in the content. Easy enough, right? Maybe not.
Sketching a top level framework is a good tip! Word Press is easier, and has a lot of cool add-ons called widgets. It all depends on your personal preferences. 🙂
I have read so many posts and how to improve your website that I almost didn’t read yours when I saw the title but I am glad that I did because I actually picked a few things that I didn’t know and I hadn’t read in a blog before now. Keep up the good work because this was very interesting and I hope that you will post some more.
Wow, thanks Albert!
If the loading speed of a website plays any factor (as I have been told it does) in how the Google spiders rank it, then plugins like RokBooster should be given some strong consideration. This plugin is a Word Press extension that compresses content such as graphics / images until the web browser needs it. It loads the content in a smart efficient manner.
I think the main thing these days that people want out of a website is for it to be fast, they care more about this than they do fresh content because they get used to using the website a certain way and aren’t going to wait for the new stuff to load anyway. Keep it fast and take away the unneeded stuff and you will have a successful web site.
Their exact formula is a secret, but there are a few things you can do to improve your positioning. The term for this is Search Engine Optimization. Forgive me, but I am just making sure that newbies are not trying to digest this technical jargon. If they are, I’d be glad to take one under my wing so they don’t fly blind any longer.