Martial Arts Classes in Evansville and Mount Vernon Indiana

Archive for the ‘small business’ Category

Extreme Website Makeover

Well, it is true!

We just put the final touches to the Community Martial Arts website.

This includes upgrades to class listings, more information and easy to use functionality. I also included all the original content but merged the site with my Community Martial Arts blog.

I am really excited about the changes and I think that the site reflects what I wanted to accomplish!

That said, be sure to comment on the blog which you can find at http://www.communitymartialarts.com/news and tell me what you think!

If you make a suggestion that I add to the website I will give you $5 that you can use in the pro shop!

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Easter Special at Community Martial Arts

This week we are running some really awesome specials. If you haven’t seen the paper last week, we are running our 2 Weeks for $2 special. This Easter Special allows people to come and try our program for two weeks before deciding to officially join one of our valuable martial arts, yoga, or dance programs.

Other things that are coming your way…

We are introducing a customer loyalty program. We will start rewarding students for doing things such as showing up to class on time, to doing great in class and paying attention. There will be special rewards for those students who invite friends and family to come try out class. If those friends or family join, the student will be overwhelmed with how many reward points they are going to receive.

The students can then redeem those points for such things as martial arts gear, clothing and other fun stuff in the pro shop. On top of that, we will be allow students the opportunity to redeem points for a Nintendo Wii or HDTV flat screen Television.

Be on the lookout !!!

Today’s post will be a short one. As I sip my coffee and getting ready to head to my first meeting of the day, I took a look around. One thing that struck me was the room that I am sitting in.

What would be the reason that someone would want to do business with me? How does the customer feel about my business when they walk in the door?

Is my business welcoming?

Are they enticed to buy?

Do I have an environment that is conducive to attract and enable buyers to spend money with me?

One of the major improvements I did to my business is totally renovate it over the holiday break. I spent some time and money to make the space feel more open and welcoming to my perspective clients. I specifically focused on customer satisfaction and comfort. The key to my business is satisfaction and how the customer feels as I provide my service. I added free premiums such as providing high end coffee and cappuccinos. I also provide free wireless Internet to make their visit inviting and comfortable.

While this model won’t work for every business, you can spend some time looking at your business from the customer perspective. Evaluate what small things you can do to make their visit as welcoming as possible. I believe it to be a ‘visual hug’ where I provide an environment that says “I want you as my customer.”

“You would have missed it in your hurry to get your web page out to the world…”

One of the magic bullets in your arsenal of web marketing comes from a fairly obvious but often overlooked piece of web page development. The secret is hidden behind images.

Images convey a feeling or perspective. It is something that we hope that our readers will find appealing or relate with. We use images to set our brand so our customers know who or what we are about. Images help break up the text and entice our customers to read further and gain more information. We want our customers to stay on our website for an extended amount of time to give us the opportunity to either get information from them or to sell something to them.

That information is probably not new to you. However, it is important that you do have images on your website because along with all the benefits of images I listed above, there is the magic bullets that I wanted to talk about.

When you start to add images to your website, I recommend the following:

Rename your images to help add search engine friendly keywords - Remember search engines ‘READ’ your website to grab all the text and information and stores it in a database. When you search for a particular query, your ranking on the search engine is partially reflected by the number of words on your webpage that match the search query. So, rename your images to match the target market you are trying to reach.

For example:

Target Market: Martial Arts Evansville
Image: A Girl Throwing a Side Kick

So when I edit the Image Tag on the web page I would rename the image to a search friendly name. I have highlighted my image name in red for you. Mind you that you really have to change the name of the image that you are using, not just changing the name in the HTML.

img style=”width: 200px; height: 200px;”
src=”martial_arts_evansville_indiana.jpg“

The second piece I add is information for alternative text in the image tag . For the longest time I never worried about filling anything in the “alt text” box that was presented to me in my favorite web editing tools. Most of the time I was in a hurry or on a deadline. This often resulted in poor search returns for my website. After implementing this secret to my websites, it has dramatically improved my search engine placement due to have a greater mix of the key words in my web page documents.

Continuing my example from above, lets add some key words into our image tag. I have highlighted the added change in red for you.

img style=”width: 200px; height: 200px;”
alt=”martial arts evansville indiana self defense karate judo“
src=”martial_arts_evansville_indiana.jpg“

Adding these quick and easy changes to your website will definitely improve your search engine performance. Take some time this week to look at your website and see where you can make these easy changes. While it will take some time to rename your images and have them reflected on your website, I guarantee the effort is well worth it.

First and foremost it is a New Year. With the launch of this new site, I want to wish everyone a very prosperous new year. 2009 already looks like it is going to be fun filled and very successful.

With all the television commercials we see out there about weight loss and changing habits, we sometimes become numb to the reevaluation of our habits. Keeping a eye on our processes is important to our business. I get tired and worn out. I sometimes get stuck doing the same things over and over because they seem to be driving results to my door. Why Change? It is always a good process to reevaluate your marketing to see if it really is driving the results you are looking for. Being a small business owner, we want to make sure we are getting the most bang for each dollar spent. Often marketing returns diminish with time.

With our current economic situation it is very important that when we spend money we are going to get the absolute best return on our investment. Here are a few things I am doing to clean to ensure that I am getting the best return:

• Clean up my direct mail list - Am I targeting the right customers?
• Evaluate my marketing mix - Do I get the number of new leads or business each month?
• Website clean up - Does my website reflect what business I am trying to attract or sell?
• Trends - What trends do I see with my marketing efforts as they reflect sales
• Customers - Does my target marketing efforts match who is actually buying my product?

These are just a simple list of things that I am doing to spruce up my New Year. Take time out this week to evaluate your marketing efforts and clean things up, reevaluate your marketing efforts and prepare for a prosperous New Year.