Website as a marketing tool

Posted by: RazorFoot

Website as a marketing tool - 02/06/07 12:58 PM

How much does having a website contribute to gaining new students and for genrally spreading information about your club/school/dojo? I have looked at pricing for these for my instructor and a lot of the good WS developers want close to a grand for what we want. As an investment, is it worth it over time for those of you who have done it?

Scottie
Posted by: clmibb

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 02/06/07 05:53 PM

We just got one up and running. In fact it's still under construction. We had one of our parents who maintains the local police department's site ask if it would be ok if he made a site for our school. We said sure and a business deal was made between him and my instructor. We haven't had any new students because of the site yet but we're willing to give it some time. I'll let you know if we get any new students because of it.

Casey
Posted by: olga

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 02/06/07 09:48 PM

I think a website is a must for any business nowadays, including MA schools. Most of the new students in our school, we've gained through our site. Plus, a website makes your business appear more legitimate.

However, you should check with your friends and especially classmates to see if any of them could develop a site for free for the school or at least for a minimal charge. I have several friends who can make websites at different levels of complexity. I built my school's site and I maintain it for free. It is the least I can do.

Do you know what everyone does for a living in your school—I bet there are some people who know HTML or some web building software.

Good luck
Posted by: Ed_Morris

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 02/07/07 12:01 AM

You can do it for free and with no operating cost or maintenance. just throw it up like a business card with name, logo, telephone number and location. Then add the web address to directories like yahoo, local chamber of commerce sites, etc, etc ...eventually in a couple weeks, it will surface on google searches.

cheapest and easiest way to make/design a website: use the free blog sites...it will step you thru it's design so you can just focus on content and not silly html layout problems.


doing that free way first will help you asess a few things:
1. you can ask whoever calls or shows up how they heard of your place...then make note of it. This will tell you how many prospective students the website has generated.
2. after a while, you'll have numbers that will allow you to determine if a fancier site is worth the money. ie, will the additional students that the web site ad generates offset your cost of a professional site? I'd guess, yes. since the costs of having a site are offset by less than 1 student a year...you'd basically make back what you put in even if you only attract one extra person to join.
3. think in terms of what type of audience you want to attract. if you want kids signing up that will quit in 6 months, then put a ninja turtle graphic up on the site. lol The more serious prospective students only need the name,place,number,hours and Art. the rest they can see for themselves.

try it free first...if you attract some prospective students, that tells you it's probably worth it.

one thing of caution...a mistake alot of commercial dojos make is showing too much on the site, so people don't feel the need to come in and watch or try a class. Just like forum limitations, communication of what you are all about is best in person. A website should not try to 'let it all hang out' by giving tons of pictures and writeup of your Art...or even worse, exagurating/justifying what you do. Instead, think in terms of getting people to call and come in.

hope that advice helps.
Posted by: Tezza

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 02/09/07 01:07 PM

A website is successful depending on how it is designed. For example if it looks very cheap and basic it will make people feel like no one has put care into it so its not worth the hastle and will look else where.
However if you spend time making it user friendly then you are sure to recieve some success.
I remember when I joined my first martial art school i recieved a flyer and the first thing i did was look at their site for pictures and information just to see the layout of the centre and also information of the clubs background. The site also had a timetable to help me gauge how the classes were laid out and whether they suited me. Good luck with it and if you want advice on it please post a link so we can help give feedback.
Posted by: kurttasche

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 02/10/07 08:33 AM

Quote:

How much does having a website contribute to gaining new students and for genrally spreading information about your club/school/dojo? I have looked at pricing for these for my instructor and a lot of the good WS developers want close to a grand for what we want. As an investment, is it worth it over time for those of you who have done it?

Scottie




There's no need to pay someone to build your site for you. Really, all you should be paying for is your domain registration and web hosting

You can design your site yourself. I use Front Page for mine, which works very well.
Posted by: harlan

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 03/01/07 01:54 PM

Came across this website, and thought it did a good job of communicating. AFter looking at the little video spot on women training in their dojo...heck...I wanted to join.

http://www.dallaskenpo.com/
Posted by: ironsifu

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/20/07 02:26 PM

website is a great way to get new students, if you get more links to it, or search engine to it. my first website was made by my baby brother, who was 13 when he did it, and i build TWO schools out of that (and penny savers, and yellow pages). my website now, i get WI (web inquiry) almost every day. but of course, you almost have to be a showman when the come. i am not much of a friendly, smooth talker, i use to pay a guy to sign people up for me. now, when they come, i tell them my story, pound the punchin post, and they sign up. as a teacher you have to have a good skill when they come down to visit, theres always a cheaper school around, and you have to make your school look like its worth the money. i charge $175 a month, the two schools near me are less than $100 a month, but its how you make it worth the monty.
Posted by: Ed_Morris

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/20/07 03:59 PM

Quote:

i charge $175 a month, the two schools near me are less than $100 a month, but its how you make it worth the monty.



you are charging for the full monty, then?
Posted by: AndrewGreen

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/20/07 05:26 PM

Quote:


There's no need to pay someone to build your site for you. Really, all you should be paying for is your domain registration and web hosting

You can design your site yourself. I use Front Page for mine, which works very well.




I would suggest against that. Website is a great source of recruitment, well not so much for kids, but for adults it is. A good webdesigner is the way to go, homemade sites always look homemade and rarely get any exposure.

You should have someone that understands web programming, can make you more then a static page and knows how to get search engines to pick it up.

Pages should be interactive, at a minimum you should have a registration form online.

What it really comes down to is that if you want a professional image of your school given by your website, you need a professional to develop it.
Posted by: NewJitsu

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/21/07 03:46 AM

Yeah, I agree. Most sites (but not all) that have been put together by one's self just can't cut it compared to competition's professionally designed ones. And, for me and my business, the important thing about using a professional web designer is that you can get the site properly search optimized. The 1st thing most people would do is go on to google and type something like 'martial arts + town' and if your website isn't there it is losing so much of its effectiveness. No matter how pretty a girl is, if you don't know which bar she's drinking in it's not much good....
Posted by: ironsifu

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/21/07 04:58 PM

i was too cheap to get a real web guy, but when i finally spend the money, it was worth it. i think when it shows you have a little class, they are more interested. my old website (www.angelfire.com/wizard/typhoon) is still there, and still gets people. but the new one has a way people send me there phone number and email. fancy fancy!
Posted by: ironsifu

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/21/07 05:11 PM

Quote:

you are charging for the full monty, then?




yeah, you know my school, the biggest we ever got is 175 students, and that was when i am still in my 20s. now i am less than 100 students, but now i got kids, and a wife. i'm never going to have the huge, 300 peoples schools, but thats okay. but my old consultant told me, charge what your worth. theres nobody in town have the style i teach and the teaching methods i use. most teachers not even stronger than me, so i think i deserved. its like some people want to pay saturn price, they get a saturn (well come saturns real nice now), but my school is a hummer, and i aint charging no saturn price!

i found out, that students will pay if they really want the training. sometimes i'll give a "scholarship". but its like this. one of my teachers in the philippines lived 80 miles from my home. but i wanted to train there. i caught the "rabbit" bus, like a grayhound every week for two years. i slept on his floor, sometimes when i had money, i slept in a hotel (in the philippines a hotel is like $8 in those days). but my master always got his money, and i got to learn from a teacher i been wanting to study with since i was a kid. and guess what. he teach me himself, not his son, not one of this students, he did. and i was poor, but i wanted to learn. i sure learned a whole lot more than the visiting GIs and tourists who came with the "visit asia tour". i did this 2, 3 days a week for two years. here in the US, i was boxing with ham johnson in a junior high school. well, this is when riddick bowe was the champion. i catch an amtrack train to work out with rock, his trainer, and i was poor then, but i paid the price.

students today, most of them are too spoil they dont know how to learn an art. but theres lots who do. so $75 extra bucks, that's like 3 dates to the movies, 3 music CDs, or 2 dinner dates in a restaurant. if they want to learn, they gonna find a way. harvard is expensive, but some guys make a way if they want harvard's education, right?
Posted by: ironsifu

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/21/07 05:12 PM

boy i sure talk a lot huh?
Posted by: tkd_high_green

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/22/07 11:33 AM

For someone with little web experience, I recommend using the various tools offered by google, either blogger or google apps. I'm in the process of setting up a website for my instructor. It cost 10 bucks to get the domain setup and running, and its simple enough to use that my instructor will be able to post new content by himself. Plus the templates that are provided help to keep the site consistent and professional looking. But, if you want to pay someone $150 bucks an hour, go right ahead.

Laura
Posted by: AndrewGreen

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/22/07 04:39 PM

Quote:

d help to keep the site consistent and professional looking. But, if you want to pay someone $150 bucks an hour, go right ahead.

Laura




To get a template developed and all your copy plugged into it, along with a online registration form shouldn' cost more then a few hundred. A good designer could add tools too allow you to edit content online in a wysiwyg editor as well. I would also recommend a way to take payment online, such as paypal integration.

Free site building tools make static pages, nowadays that's not much. Things should be somewhat interactive. A website that can't take a registration form is not doing its job.

You also need someone that knows enough about search engines to get it too show up when people are looking for it, otherwise it's no better then printing 1000's of flyers and dumping them in the garbage bin as you drive out of the print shop.

I think you would also want someone familiar with online advertising. I can put $20 into advertising my website and get better results then $100 into more traditional advertising.

But you can't have a "If I build it they will come" mentality about your website or nothing will come of it. Do it right, and it will pay for itself.
Posted by: JAMJTX

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/23/07 12:11 AM

You probably will not get many new students just because of the web site. But it can help you communicate not only with potential students, but existing students as well.

The web site will have information about your school, schedule and directions. It will answer a lot of questions that people will normally call to ask.

Also, it can be used for student information - handbooks,announcements, etc.

I think $1,000 is a lot of money to pay for a web site for a martial arts school. You can get a nice looking basic web site with photos and even some video for a few hundred dollars - and that will include a year of hosting.

You can spend a lot of money on great looking flash animation and all sorts of things but that will not get you students. What will bring students is providing the information thay are looking for.

Invest in some video and make a commercial or a short infomercial about the school - showing demonstrations and have the teacher say a few words. You can do this yourself.

Then just go for a simple web site. You can always add to it later on as you see it paying off.

We offer hosting for $99 for 2 years. You can get a basic web site, the year of hosting and monthly updates for $300.

Jim Mc Coy
jimm@jimmccoy.com
Posted by: tkd_high_green

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/23/07 10:24 AM

I might be a bit biased in that I build corporate web applications for a living, but I was pretty impressed with what google is offering these days, and based on their performance, I can only expect more to be offered in the future. When I set up the account, I indicated that it was a business, and I was given tools for registering the school on google, and I literally spent $10 to get the domain name, and 4 hours building the initial site. We are still working on content right now, so there are several "coming soon" pages for details.

For $10, I can post images, documents, videos, have discussion groups, I have tools to show how often the site is being hit, and what is being viewed. Users can comment on the site, with moderation, and I can add as much html/java script as I want, should I want to add things later. Not only that, but I get free email as well.

If you want you can check it out, but please be aware that it is in no way complete right now as we are still working on the content.

http://www.LaplantsTKD.com

I agree that there are a lot of people out there that don't have a clue how to make a site usable and shouldn't be allowed near a computer. I wouldn't expect my instructor to be able to put this together, at least not without training, but I fully expect him to be able to log in and contribute to the site. However for anyone with at least some competency with computers, doing what I did should be quite doable.

Laura
Posted by: JAMJTX

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/23/07 01:32 PM

For the LaPlantTKD site is that $10/month?
Posted by: tkd_high_green

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/23/07 04:00 PM

$10 a year for the cost of the domain. Which by the way, I didn't have to configure, just pick what I wanted, and paid for it. Google did the rest.
Posted by: BulldogTKD

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/24/07 11:47 AM

What this site has is what I would like to have. I use city max and will be finding something else if I can't get it to work for my needs.

http://www.austinmartialarts.com/adult.php

Can anyone point me to something that I can do that I can put up vidio like this site?
Posted by: AndrewGreen

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/24/07 12:22 PM

Embedding video isn't hard, but is something you might want to think about. Tends to annoy folks that got slower connections. As well as a lot of people that don't, but also don't like it when video starts playing on its own without warning.

http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/special/object.html
Posted by: BulldogTKD

Re: Website as a marketing tool - 08/25/07 08:07 AM

Quote:

Embedding video isn't hard, but is something you might want to think about. Tends to annoy folks that got slower connections. As well as a lot of people that don't, but also don't like it when video starts playing on its own without warning.




Yes I understand your point. I would probably have a play button for the video. I wife said the same thing that you did.

Thanks for the link.