Click the PLAY button to get this quick IDEA!

“Freakin’ nuts”, is what average school owners think when they hear about what most of the REALLY successful school owners are doing and (advocating other school owners do) during these wild economic times.

Let’s face it…

The ups and downs of the stock market and the constant bad news about our economy are wreaking havoc with the finances of many school owners.

Cash flow is shrinking, students are dropping off, and less prospective new students are calling.
And, for average school owners it’s SCARY. Rightly so.

Meanwhile, the members of the highest-earning bracket of school owners are loving life.
They’ve yet to see their businesses take any significant step backwards in cash flow. In fact, some have actually experienced growth in their cash flow, even with everything taking place on Wall Street.
So, what are these high-earning school owners doing within their martial arts schools that the average school owners aren’t.

Well, it’s not what they’re doing in their Martial Arts business that the average school owners aren’t. The better question is what are the school owners with the shrinking companies NOT doing that the wealthiest school owners are.

The answer…

Marketing, marketing and more martial arts marketing.

Aggressive marketing to be more specific.

You see, what the wealthiest, most successful school owners understand is that marketing for their schools is the lifeblood of their martial arts business.

It’s the engine that drives their company growth.

It’s THE thing that allows their martial arts business to survive and thrive. Nothing else.
And, because of that, your martial arts marketing should be the very last thing to ever get cut our of a budget.

“Marketing is muscle, not fat. Be careful about cutting it”, one journalist wrote.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what so many struggling school owners have done – they’ve cut their marketing budget way back, if not eliminated it altogether.

What a MONSTROUS MISTAKE!
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Register Now For Thursday’s FREE Webinar! Only 23 spots left
Title: “How to set up Your Online Strategy”
Date:  Thursday, October 29, 2008
Time:  11:00 AM – 12:15 PM CST
Register now by clicking the link below:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/158466362 <==
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In fact, a recent article in Business Week, “Five Don’ts for Marketing in Tough Times”, said it best…

“Just as the savviest investors view down markets as a time to buy when everybody else is selling, the savviest marketers know recessions are a great time to pick up market share. They understand that by maintaining their budgets (or even increasing them) they may not come out ahead during the down times, but they can pick up market share that will pay off in the long run.

Marketing dollars in a recession are like oxygen on Mt. Everest, the less there is in the surrounding environment, the more valuable the amount you possess becomes. Cutting your marketing spending is a sure way to give ground to competitors who may be more aggressive during the downturn.”

And ,if that wasn’t enough, here’s what John A. Quelch said in a recent HBS Newsletter:

“It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.”

Lastly, here’s what Business Maven, Laurie J. Storey-Manseau, had to say in the New Hampshire Business Review:

“When times are tough and business is slow, marketing is the very last thing that ought to be cut. Now, more than ever, companies must make themselves and their products known.”

But we recently came across a great quote from marketer Chris Lockhead of Mercury: “Go ahead. Cut your marketing budget when things get tough. I get it. That’s like saying ‘I’ll throw some logs on that fire when it warms up in here.”

It is critical to keep stoking the fire of your marketing campaign. And face it, keeping the fire burning now means you won’t have to rub two sticks together — starting from scratch! — when the “economy improves.”

Martial arts school owners make mistakes you see, when it comes to marketing their schools right now, the last thing school owners should be thinking about right now, is cutting back on their marketing.

No.

Instead, what you should be thinking about when it comes to your school marketing, is doing it more efficiently. effectively, and aggressively.

We believe martial arts marketing online is the best way to do that.

As we said, the key to surviving and even thriving in these tough economic times is improving your Martial arts school advertising efficiency and effectiveness.

While it is not a black box you can throw money into and expect great results, the web is a proven martial arts school marketing medium that can generate phenomenal returns for you.

Successful online school marketing campaigns can often take time, effort, and creativity; however, these efforts can certainly provide a substantial ROI (return on investment) when compared to pricey traditional offline marketing for schools.

The key, though, regardless of whether you do it online or offline, is that you continue marketing your school.
# Continue to invest money in generating new students.
# Continue to invest money in marketing to previous students.
# Continue to invest money in things that automate processes in your school.

Don’t stop. Don’t even slow down.

Let other competing school owners around you do that.

Let your competition make the potentially life-changing FATAL MISTAKE of thinking that in tough, trying-times the correct decision is to cut-off the ONE and ONLY activity that can fix a decline in cash flow and new customer flow.

And, while they do that, you continue doing your school marketing… and when all is said and done with this crazy economy… you’ll be the #1 school owner in your geographic area making some serious bank!

It happens all the time.  Just make sure you’re on the correct side.

Yours for a better school,
~Dunae and Dion

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Register Now For Thursday’s FREE Webinar! Only 23 spots left
Title: “How to set up Your Online Strategy”
Date:  Thursday, October 29, 2008
Time:  11:00 AM – 12:15 PM CST
Register now by clicking the link below:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/158466362 <==
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Captain John Rade, a legendary fisherman from Montauk, NY, is known for his amazing ability to out-fish every commercial fisherman in his area.

His secret contains a profound lesson for school owners.

Grasp this… Captain John’s secret… and there’s no doubt you’ll mutiply the number of new Students coming into your school every month.

Captain John is a commercial fisherman. He’s also known as a Pin Hooker, the rarest of all fisherman.

While other commercial fisherman are using big nets to bring in their daily catches, Captain John is out there with nothing more than a rod and reel.

He doesn’t use any of the tools the other commercial fisherman use.

No nets. No giant trollers. No crews of five or six fisherman.

He simply goes out on a little motorboat with a rod and reel… and out-catches every other fisherman by multiples.

In fact, on any given day, on the same exact body of water, Captain John will regularly catch more striped bass than 10 commercial fisherman COMBINED!

So, how does he do it you’re wondering?

Well, when asked exactly that by a local news reporter, he said something profound.

He said, “When most fisherman go out on the water they think like a fisherman. When I go out I think like a fish.”

WOW!

The implication of that answer for School Owners is HUUUUUUGE.

Let me break it down for you:

When it comes to marketing and trying to attract prospective Students, most school owners think and market from a SCHOOL OWNERS’s perspective.

Most design their marketing materials from the perspective of a school owner and NOT from the perspective of a potential martial arts student.

In other words, most school owners are thinking about themselves and their practice when they advertise. They’re NOT thinking about what prospective students are looking for, want, need, and desire.

You see, martial arts marketing  is very similar to fishing.

You have to know your target and know what they’re looking for so you can use the correct bait to attract them.

When fishing, it’s not about what you want to use as bait. It’s completely about what your target fish is looking for. And then using THAT as bait.

This is why the most effective martial arts marketing materials are totally focused on solving the prospective students’s problem or need, and NOT… NOT… about the school itself.

In essence, the most effective martial arts school marketing materials are not even marketing the school at all. They’re marketing the solution to a prospective students’s problem. Period.

Why?

Because that’s what most prospective student’s are looking for and want.

here’s what adult’s want…

*They want to know how to choose the right martial arts school.
* They want their pain eliminated.
* They want their energy boosted.
* They want to feel confident.
* They want to feel their best.
* They want to know that their child has an advantage to succeed.
*They want to feel challenged again
*They want to have fun
*They want to feel toatally engaged in something to free their mind from stress.

Here’s what Parents want…

*They want to know How to choose a martial arts school
*They want their child to have an advantage over others.
*They want to feel proud of their child
*They want feel that heir child will not be a victim.
* They want know that their child will make right choices in life
* They want their child to have a positive outlet for energy so that they sleep well and parents can have some “ME” time when they go to bed.

An overwhelming majority of prospective students are NOT looking for a school. They’re looking for a solution to their problem.

If you try to advertise and market your school, you’re trying to attract them with the wrong bait.

Instead, market the solution to their problem.

Market confidence.
Market the result of being in shape
Market stress relief
Market giving a child strong advantages in life
Market Life lessons that help children make good choices
Market How to find the martial arts school and avoid the hassle of doing the home work.

And the best way to do this is with free information… like a free online video… that educates them on why martial arts training is the best solution to their specific need.

(This is what we do for school owners with the Martial Arts Dashboard. Check it out here: http://www.schoolownersecrets.com/dashboard/

The reason why this approach to martial arts marketing works so well is threefold:

1. It allows you to use marketing materials that are totally and completely focused on the prospective student. Remember, the average prospective student is solely interested in finding and getting the best and most effective solution to their problem. They’re not interested in you or your school. At least not righ now. And, so you need to make sure your marketing focuses on them, exactly what THEY WANT, and answers the question of “What’s In It For Me”.

2. When you offer free educational videos tailored to the specific problem prospective students want solved, you’re able to identify exactly who the interested prospective students are, so you can do targeted, benefit-focused follow-up with them. Remember, when it comes to martial arts marketing; the fortune is in the follow-up. (This is automated with the Martial Arts Dashboard. Check it out here:http://www.schoolownersecrets.com/dashboard/ )

3. With free videos tailored to specific problems & Solutions, you’re able to deliver a much more targeted message that highlights the specific benefits prospective students want. In other words, if you have a video dedicated to educating people interested in Choosing The Right Martial Arts school, you can hit on the exact benefits those people want.

Here is the take away:

The more you can get into the mind of the different groups of prospective students, and better understand their needs and wants, the better you can tailor the bait to attract them into your school.

The effectiveness and power of your martial arts marketing totally comes down to YOU offering the most sought-after bait prospective students are hungry for.

As Captain John Rade would probably say… It’s all about thinking like a prospective student.

Every Martial Arts Marketing website should at least do these 3 components…
If it doesn’t, you’re website will NOT bring you the new students or increase your cash flow the way it could.
If you don’t have your own martial arts marketing website yet, use the following list as criteria to
make your decision when shopping for one.

If you do already have a martial arts marketing website, use the following list to
determine what your school’s website is lacking.

MARTIAL ARTS MARKETING WEBSITE MUST-HAVE #1:

A compelling way to capture the name and email address of visitors to your site.

Without the ability to capture the contact information of visitors to your martial arts marketing
website, you do NOT have the ability to follow-up with them.

And, without the ability to follow-up with visitors to your website, you will miss out on a huge amount
of potential new students and cash flow.

MARTIAL ARTS MARKETING WEBSITE MUST-HAVE #2:

An automated email follow-up system pre-loaded with messages to turn visitors into students.

Because the “fortune” in martial arts marketing is in the follow-up, you’re martial arts marketing
website must have an automated and targeted email follow-up system.

This is one of the many ways a martial arts marketing website can do your marketing for you even
while you sleep, relax, or enjoy whatever hobbies you like to do.

MARTIAL ARTS MARKETING WEBSITE MUST-HAVE #3:

A multi-media system to educate prospective students on the value of martial art classes, with video and audio.

Today, it’s insanely inexpensive to use video and audio on your martial arts marketing website.
Add this to the fact that most people are visual by nature, and it makes video and audio on your site a must.

As well, today, the use of video and audio in school’s marketing is a highly effective way to stand out from
competitors, convey high quality, and provide a compelling, entertaining marketing message.

Without multi-media in on your martial arts marketing website, you’re behind the curve.

MARTIAL ARTS MARKETING WEBSITE MUST-HAVE #4:

An automated system to generate and follow-up with referrals… so you don’t have to.

Because martial arts school marketing on the Internet can be automated, your website
should have a system that asks students for referrals and then follows-up with those
referrals without you having to do anything.

This way, you get referrals on a regular, steady basis, yet you never have to worry
about them or even ask for them.

Your martial arts marketing website should be doing it.

MARTIAL ARTS MARKETING WEBSITE MUST-HAVE #5:

A system to reactivate inactive students.

Former students, who have fallen off  from their commitment to training with you,
are usually very easy to reactivate and bring back into your students.

In fact, with the right reactivation system, you could easily reactivate over
50%, if not more, of your inactive students.

For most school owners, this is a huge source of cash flow just waiting to be mined.

With a good martial arts marketing website, reactivated students is automated and built right in.

MARTIAL ARTS MARKETING WEBSITE MUST-HAVE #6:

A system that delivers welcome messages and educational material to new students.
Today, in the competitive economy, it’s crucial that you exceed students expectations.

One of the easiest ways to do this is with a series of educational welcome videos or audios.
This is something every great martial arts marketing website should do.

MARTIAL ARTS MARKETING WEBSITE MUST-HAVE #7:

A system that does your networking with local businesses for you… so you don’t have to.

A great martial arts marketing website will do most, if not all, of your networking for you.

Every martial arts marketing website should have a built-in system that contacts local business
owners and operators for you… and introduces them to you and your School.

***

If your website is lacking even one of the “must-haves” listed above, you should check out the Martial Arts Dashboard.

It does all of that, and then some!

We are going to be launching our UPDATED Multi Media-Automated Follow Up Marketing Website package
called the Martial Arts Dashboard in a few weeks.

It’s AMAZING!

If you don’t have your own martial arts marketing website yet…

Click Here Right Now To Get Your Special Report on The NEW Martial Arts Business Blueprint

In this FREE Report you will learn how to implement the 7 Must Haves you learned today.

I just got this email from Google and sometimes I take for granted that I already learned something and that you might have learned it too.

This is what the email said:

Improve your local marketing with Google:
Add location extensions to your ads. Get your business listed, free.

There’s now a better way to promote your business location locally with AdWords. With the new location extensions feature, you can make any ad more local by including your business address and a link to your website. You can directly improve the performance of ads promoting your business locations, as compared to ads without location extensions. Here are the two things you should do to get started:

Learn how to connect your Local Business Center account with AdWords to start using location extensions.

Add or claim a listing, free. If you haven’t done so already, use Local Business Center to add your free business listing to Google and Google Maps, and to claim listings that already exist. You’ll also get free insights on how people are finding your business.

Go to http://www.google.com/lbc for more info.

Which One Wins?

Soon you will recognize to love one of the simplest things that
makes you a big stock pile of bucks. One of these, is how just
one little TWEAK can create a huge impact on your business.

Here is a simple thing that I’m referring to that has totally
help me and others to boost email conversions and at the
same time make a lot of money.

Focus on putting out quality blog posts that provide usable content.

Then send your list of prospect, leads and current students.

In the email you send out to these lists. It is important to
write a 1 to 3 sentences email teaser driving people to your landing page for your post.

People now a days, dislike long emails, they tend to put your
emails to spam. As much as possible make it a short one.
Once in a while you can write a long one but these are often
stand alone emails that you need more words to explain something.

Hear is an example of a teaser email for blog posts…

====================================

Subject: (contact firstname), you won’t believe these 5 tips…

Hey (Firstname)

Parents often don’t know how to recognize if their child is being
Bullied.

Go to the blog now to find out what they are.

=> www.MartialArtsBlog.com

See you later,

Instructors name
www.MartialArtsblog.com

PS. Let me know if this helps by posting a comment.

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FREE Karate for 30 days
Register online to get your FREE Karate lessons
www.yoursalespage.com

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In this example, you will see a higher click rates for the blog post.
As much you don’t like to write blogs, have someone do it for you.
Since blogs are top marketing strategies. The fact is blogs are a great
relationship builders and we have seen people who enroll up to 14 months
after they start visiting our blogs.

Some of us like me get hundreds of emails. When I am scanning my emails
I will delete a lot of the emails. I am in deleting mode. If you don’t capture
their attention right away, it’s probable they will delete it.

So that is why the short email strategy works great.

Got test it for yourself and you will be happy with the results.

Grab yours still for only $1 Click Here!

I got this email from one of our school owner and he asked about the top ten things he ought to be focusing for his business.

So I’d like to share the list with you as well some of a few of these may apply to your business.

1. Make a clear and defined goal, write them down on the paper and focus on each one of them every day. You could find a book titled “Think and Grow Rich” to help you start with.

2. If some of your classes are not full, give away some 30 day trials for that class. Remember to collect their credit cards BEFORE they take the trial. Make it a condition of the trial. Say something like this…”In order to know that your fully serious about acheiving your desired outcome we require a credit card in order to activate your trial, however we will not charge it until the 30 day trial period is over, it’s risk free. Also you will be able to start getting results before you make any commitment. This WORKS like crazy!

3. Make your website a reality. Load it up with pictures of happy clients and Rave Reviews as part of your marketing and relationship building sites

4. Have your websites/ pages optimized always. Have your keywords placed  naturally within the content of the page and for the title tags insert your top one to three keywords used for your sites. Up to 63 characters or less.

5. Do link building to relevant to your websites. If you run a martial arts business, get links from health and fitness sites inside your city and outside or create your own mini net of sites. ( we will be covering mini nets in a future posts).

6. Use Craigslist in your daily marketing routine in systematic way. Meaning use good headlines, social media proof and strong call to actions. Your goal is to drive people to your sales page which is loaded withpersuasive copy, before and afters, testimonials and rave reviews of your school.

7. Read and adapt “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and use it in your business. People are the important audience.

8. Look for barter clients to outsource to work to. Referring students to your school. Make sure to be very clear that you want them to recruit and give them the tools to do their job. (We know this goes against most popularopinion but, it works like crazy and out of 5 people you do this for 1 will recruit 1 person a month and 1 will get 5 students a month). Also, be sure to do this on a trail basis, 3 months seems to be a good time to see who are your top recruiters.

9. Always be working on your systems. Get very proficient at documenting process and evaluating then tweaking them.

10. Always think on how you can improve your business by looking at your systems especially follow up.  Think of your business as flocks. then keep in touch with each flock and make steps to move them closer to you. Then for the ones that are under your care, think of ways to take better care of them. When you care for them they ALWAYS multiply!

Educate yourself daily on these tips and take massive action quickly. Don’t wait too long. Its already in your hands. Take action to gain results.

PPC- Pay per click:

Is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website. Advertisers bid on keywords they believe their target market would type in the search bar when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser’s keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser’s ad may be shown. These ads are called a “Sponsored link” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to, and sometimes, above the natural or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster chooses on a content page. Pay per click advertising is a search engine marketing technique. Pay per click ads may also appear on content network websites. In this case, ad networks such as Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network attempt to provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved. While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter are the largest network operators as of 2007. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at
US$0.01 (up to US$0.50).

CTR- Click through rate:

Is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and 1 person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1%.

Keyword(s):

Is one of the words used to find matching web pages. It was popularized during the early days of search engine development, as it was not possible to ask natural language questions and find the desired sites. Searches gave the best results if only a few keywords were chosen and searched for. These “keywords” captured the essence of the topic in question and were likely to be present on all sites listed by the search engine.

Google Adwords:

Is Google’s flagship advertising product and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.