Bringing the Internet Revolution to Martial Arts

By Hersh Sandhoo
First appeared in Martial Arts Professional
Feature Article - December 2002
View PDF Version 2.3 MB

A website is one of the best ways to advertise your school. An interactive brochure accessible 24 hours a day allows you to include color, pictures, video clips, unlimited text, and get instant feedback from potential students. It can also boost your revenue and save money on printing and postage.

The first step in creating a web presence is to choose a good domain name. This may not be as easy as it sounds. On average, 35,000 domains are registered daily and it can take over 30 attempts to find the right one. Avoid hard-to-spell martial arts terminology. The domain should be easy to remember.

Your website should portray the image that your school provides a safe training environment and excels in teaching the martial arts. The quality of the graphics, layout, load time and content will make the difference between a website that receives 10 to 15 leads a month and one the receives 100 to 150. Your website should have the same look and feel as your school's branding (i.e. school colors and logos). It should also be separated into two sections - one for non-students and one for students.

The non-student section should describe your school, instructors and programs. All content in this section should list the benefits of training and what the potential student will gain from joining your school. One common mistake schools make it putting too much inofrmation on their style and its history in this section.

You want potential students to see your website and to take immediate action, which should be to fill out an information request form that allows you to collect their contact info and demographic data. This will permit your staff to schedule an introductory class and place them on your mailing list.

Well placed pop-up ads can also increase the response of a program or offer. For example, we included a pop-up ad for a client's summer camp on the home page of his website. The result: 50% of his summer camp students were direct leads from the website.

The student section should be the main source of information for your school, providing easy access to your school's rules, schedule, news and events, style history, student programs, training tips, downloadable documents, tournament results, and more. We recommend that you password protect this section so only student have access to confidential information like your school handbook. Give your students their own username and password so they feel a greater connection with the school. A "forgot password" system will eliminiate the need to keep track of your students' login information. Futhermore, giving students, such as black belt club members, a school e-mail address can enhance their commitment to the school.

An online proshop will increase your retail sales by allowing you to offer your students more products and a convenient method of ordering. We advise selling products only to students. This will simplify online security.

Once the website has been created, the content in the student section should be updated monthly, ensuring that your students will return frequently to check for the latest information and news. Webmation's website maintenance plan allows us to handle all your updates.

To complete your Internet presence, we explain the different online marketing strategies such as search engines, and help you construct an e-mail marketing campaign. You can use e-mail to send anything from monthly newsletters to product announcements. Webmation's E-mailer system lets you send HTML e-mails (those that appear like web pages) from easy-to-use templates, track statistics, include photographs, surveys, and much more. Our design team can construct a custom template for your e-mail campaigns and even manage them for you.

Establishing an Internet presence will strengthen your relationship with your students and introduce many new students to the school!

Hersh Sandhoo is the President and CEO of Webmation, leaders in web development and online marketing for the martial arts industry. Mr. Sandhoo, a fourth degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and Hap Ki Do, has trained for over 13 years.

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