http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-wiki_rss.php?ver=2 Sat, 19 May 2012 04:38:23 +0100 Tiki CMS/Groupware via FeedCreator 1.7.2.1 http://www.wikidrills.com/img/tiki.jpg http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php en-us http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=IsoldeMaduschen .diffchar { color:red; } + hausfrauen sofort echte Huren Hobby treffen. erlebe heisse abenteuer jeden tag. melde dich jetzt gratis an zum sex treff. livesex mature sex heute noch echte HobbyHuren? treffen. erlebe heisse abenteuer rund um die uhr. melde dich jetzt gratis an zum sex dating. mature
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]]> IsoldeMaduschen Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:14:36 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=Social+Networking .diffchar { color:red; } + Social networking
+
+ Social networking is critical for school owners today. Can you build a great school without this? Probably, but it will be difficult. The fact is that your students will be talking about you, your training, and your competitors on Facebook. Do you want to steer the conversation or not?
+
+ Where do you want to be? – There are numerous social networks out there, and there are even tools like ping.fm that will let you post once and it will send it to many networks. I believe that you should be where your students are. If this changes in the future as new sites become popular, then you can change where you are. In general, you should be where large enough numbers of your students are, but also in as few places as possible. A neglected social network is worse than not having one.
+
+ At a recent martial arts conference, the speaker asked how many schools were on twitter. About 50 hands went up. Then he asked how many schools had ever gotten at least one student from twitter, and all hands dropped. The only use I saw for it was something like an out of state tournament, sending out tweets with the results of matches. But Facebook status updates do the same thing. Right now our school has a presence on Facebook and we post our videos on YouTube?.
+
+ Facebook – Few people reading this won’t know how to use Facebook, yet school owners often make key mistakes.
+
+ The first one is understanding the difference between pages and profiles. Your profile should be your real name. You might or might not want to accept friend requests from everyone, especially if you have old college drinking pictures or other things on there. You probably also want to make your profile viewable by friends only. Your page should be your business name. You should be the only admin of the page, or at least make sure it’s someone you really trust. The reason is that only the admin of the page can send something out that everyone will see. You don’t want one disgruntled student contacting everyone. They can post on the page, but most people won’t get it, and you can easily delete their post.
+
+ Pages get ‘likes.’ It’s great to have a lot of likes, but you will also want to know the ‘monthly active users’ or how many people are actually clicking on your page, reading your stories, etc. Once you get over 25 likes, you can go to www.facebook.com/username to make your page something like www.facebook.com/kattkd so that it’s easy for people to remember and type in.
+
+ You can use free capture forms and make a custom tab so that people who are new to your page (haven’t “liked it” yet) will have the option of registering for a free class. We haven’t had much success with this, although some schools have. This could also be because we post great content, so we have far more likes than students, and only a little more than half our likes even live in the US. You can also click on the people who like your page and the most recent ones will be at the top. You can then send them a custom message inviting them to try out a class.
+
+ You also need to understand about edgerank, or the algorithm Facebook uses to sort through everything and decide what to show you. It’s not public, but you can imagine several factors that influence it. The more you click on someone’s profile, the more images you’re tagged in together, the more times students visit your page, the more times you tag them, listing someone as your relative, choosing to subscribe to all their updates, the more times you like their status, etc. All of these factors should increase edgerank. So the more you can get your students to interact with your page and with each other, the more likely your posts will show up in their newsfeed.
+
+ Tagging people is important, but don’t just tag a ton of people who weren’t actually in a photo or video, unless there is a specific reason for it. Tagging shows up on their profile and in their friends’ newsfeeds. For instance, if you tag them breaking a board, maybe their friend at school says “that’s so ninja!” and then you message that person and offer him a free lesson. Or message your student and have him relay the offer. Even though the internet is global, it’s still local. Most people are Facebook friends with people they actually know and go to school or work with. It’s a hard battle to fight, but if you and your students are constantly posting stuff about your school, you can influence the general thought in the community when it’s time for martial arts lessons.
+
+ Advertising on Facebook can be highly targeted, and it can get new students. We haven’t spent that much time or energy on it and haven’t had much luck. The main reason we use Facebook is to build the community for current students, and to keep our school at the top of the mind for past students. Most students who quit don’t do so because they hate martial arts. So if they keep seeing demo videos, awesome board breaks, etc, it will gradually pull them back.
+
+ Your Facebook page is also key for branding your school. People will look at it and get a sense of what kind of school you are. We’ve had black belts from other schools join ours partly because on Facebook they are constantly bombarded with press stories about how we won this or that tournament, videos from the demo team performing in NFL Stadiums, pictures of the students having great technique, etc.
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+ Facebook is also great for Missing in Action (MIA) ‘calls.’ When a student hasn’t been showing up to class for a while, you have a much higher chance to talk with him if you send a Facebook message or post on his wall than if you just call or send a letter to his house.
+
+ Writing compliments on people’s walls is a great way to publically recognize them. You should do it personally and also encourage your instructors to do it as well. It will make people feel great because you did it where all their friends can see. Just don’t use this as a forum for harsh criticism that should be done in private.
+
+ Of course, it’s important that you friend people on Facebook as soon as they join, and recommend them to ‘like’ your page. Otherwise, you won’t have this information to start off with.
+
+ Email/autoresponders
+
+ Many schools set up marketing campaigns that will automatically email someone a series of emails after they have become a lead. The benefit is that the process can be completely automated, freeing up your time considerably. If you try to do this manually, things will get missed.
+
+ These can definitely be successful, however if it’s too many you may end up annoying someone. Also, you want a way to automatically stop the autocampaigns once that person joins. You could also use the campaigns to automatically email someone once they reach a certain stage in the school. For instance, email a coupon for sparring gear once they become a green belt. Just be careful they didn’t pay full price the day before. You could email someone a reminder to change their credit card on file one month before it expires. We email people about having a birthday party at our school 45 days before their birthday. These can help you provide better service if they are done properly.
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]]> admin Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:52:21 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=Martial+Arts+Business .diffchar { color:red; } + Social Networking
]]> admin Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:51:19 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=School+Website .diffchar { color:red; } + Chapter 14: Internet Marketing
+
+ Basics of websites
+
+ Having a webpage is a critical step for martial arts schools. Obviously, schools have thrived for generations without them, but in this day and age many people won’t consider you a ‘real’ business without one. Creating a simple webpage can literally be done within minutes. A webpage will market your school while you sleep and can help show off your students. There are two generally accepted reasons for martial arts schools to have a website.
+
+ To Get New Students – People don’t go to the yellow pages anymore. When they want something they Google it, and they will often look through several pages at once. In our school, the majority of new students come through our webpage. It is critical that you have some sort of lead capture form on the site.
+
+ To Keep Your Current Students – Use the site to keep your current students interested and engaged, keep them up to speed on the latest news and announcements, help them to learn the curriculum and network with each other, etc.
+
+ Keeping that in mind, a lot of consultants have recommended a certain type of website. These are the school websites where you go there and on the first page there are basically three buttons labeled something like Children, Adults, and Student Section (Login Required). If you click on either the children or adults buttons there is basically a long sales letter filled with glowing testimonials and an “unbeatable free trial offer” or something like that.
+
+ I will offer a third purpose of a website that is disputed by many in the industry.
+
+ School Branding - I’m sure sites like the above work well, but to me it lacks something in the branding department. If you go to a website like www.harvard.edu or www.cornell.edu, you will have a much different experience. You will see things like highlights of current research, awards won by students and faculty, high quality images and videos, etc. They do have a section for prospective students, but that’s not the only focus. I’m often asked my opinion on various martial arts schools, for instance if one of my students moves to a new state. I want to see a website that shows off the skills and accomplishments of the students of the school. If I go to BMW’s website, I don’t want to read a sales letter with testimonials from owners. I want to see some cars. It’s true that it is a mistake to design your marketing through your own eyes rather than a prospect’s eyes, but I can’t believe I’m the only one who thinks like this. Do you want to attract people like yourself to your school? Of the top martial artists who have moved to Colorado and looked for a school, a very high percentage of them have ended up with us. Many of them have gone on to become key instructors in our organization. I’m sure it’s not just because of our website, but that’s something to consider when designing it.
+
+ SEO and SEM for websites
+
+ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means making your page easy for search engines to find. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to things that will make your site appear higher in search results pages. Before promoting your website, make sure you understand the onsite and offsite factors that will bring traffic to your site and the major tools to analyze them.
+
+ Google Pagerank – Perhaps the most important thing to know and manage is Google pagerank. Why Google? It accounts for almost 70% of all searches in the US, and building Google pagerank in good ways will also help in all other search engines as well. Pagerank is basically how much each site is 'worth.' Every site that links to your site counts as a 'vote' that your site is a good site. The more votes you have, the more Google is going to choose your site on top of another site with the same keyword.
+
+ Pagerank has become less important lately with the inclusion of more user data, or custom search results. The good news is that it may help your site to get more of a reach, the bad news is that it’s harder for webmasters to manipulate. For instance, if someone searches only for “martial arts”, it will use their Internet Protocol (IP Address) to find their location, and bring up results from their local community. Other factors include sites you have visited in the past, what your friends have recommended, etc.
+
+ Conversion – Right off the bat you have to know what your goal is. Usually, that involves people buying something, or converting from leads to customers. It is important to know this to see how much time/money you should invest, or if you should buy advertising and at what cost. For instance, if it costs $2 to send someone to your site, and your conversion is 10%, then it will be worth it if you profit more than $20 on each sale.
+
+ Onsite Factors:
+
+ • Keywords- Make sure pages on the site all have a high density of keywords used in natural language. For an example of not using keywords naturally, read the letter at the bottom of: http://www.omegawhitetiger.com/. Remember, keywords used in images or flash don't count. I once saw a site (for a SEO company no less!) that put text in images. This site didn’t even come up on the company name search!
+
+ o You will come up higher for more specific keywords. For example for the KAT website, under “aurora, Colorado taekwondo” we are #1, (of 40,000) under “Colorado taekwondo” number 12 (of 450,000) and under “taekwondo” number 48 (of 11.7 million)
+
+ • Internal links – Make sure you can get from each page to the other one in no more than two steps. If menu is in flash/javascript, have a sitemap linked from each page with plain text links.
+
+ • External links – Too many links out could dilute pagerank, but a few links to other relevant sites is certainly helpful. When linking to other sites to help them, include keywords in the link anchor text.
+
+ • Title and Headings – Keywords in the title and headings count more than in the page text.
+
+ • Clean site – Have good design with a variety of media and no 404 errors. Overall goal- if a person would find the site interesting, chances are a search engine will too.
+
+ Offsite Factors:
+
+ • Directories – It's very important to submit your site to directories. The most important is DMOZ.org, the Open Directory Project. It can take a while to get in there, but it is well worth it. You might have to volunteer to become a category editor. Since it's human edited, other sites trust it, like Alexa, and its members are thought to carry greater weight in Google rankings. Other directories are also important, especially sport-specific directories (like the school links page at www.cotkd.com.) Other directories including yellowbook.com or dexknows.com may or may not be worth it. In the past we have chosen not to advertise with them. There are numerous 'lists of martial arts schools' out there. Search them out and then add your listing.
+
+ • Link Building – The more sites that link to yours, the better. This encourages referring traffic, but more importantly, drives up your site’s pagerank. It's also better to have links from .edu, .gov, or .mil networks. Google considers each link to your site as a 'vote' that your site is worth viewing. The more links, the higher it will display your site when someone searches for any of your keywords. Also, note that links from sites with higher pagerank gives you higher pagerank. Thus, a link to your site from cnn.com would be much more beneficial than a link from some student’s MySpace? page. (Because many more people have 'voted' for cnn.com by linking to it) Also, if you can, have the person linking include your keywords in the link to your site.
+
+ • Articles/Aps/Widgets, etc. – The basic idea behind all these is the same. Say you write an article about a related topic. For instance, if you Google “Distance: The Donut of Danger” you will find that several other sites have picked up this article I wrote. Of course, at the bottom of the article it always includes a link back to our main site. The same idea goes into writing an ap or a widget. Other sites find it useful, and post it on their site. But it should always carry a link back to your site. This works with press releases as well. For instance, Google “Korean Academy of Taekwondo Hosts Grand Opening of South Branch” (with the quotes.) You will see that several sites have picked up the news feed. http://www.prlog.org/ and www.free-press-release.com are free distribution sites. Remember, the key thing is to get pagerank back.
+
+ • Social Networking – Facebook/Myspace/youtube/etc. can be good if you have your customers in a group. They can post videos, blogs, etc. Make sure you always request a link to your main page. These things are more valuable in other ways though then just increasing your Google pagerank.
+
+ Paid Search - Sound complicated? You can skip all of this and just pay for people who click on your ads for your specific keywords. How much does it cost? It depends on the keyword. The more specific your keywords are, the less it will cost. It's all based on a real time auction. Basically, you'll have to pay more than what someone else would pay. Then you will show up on the 'sponsored results' section, instead of the regular (organic) search. Of course, you will still have to have a good site to get people to stay.
+
+ How do people get there? - People will get to your website one of three ways. How do you make each road there wide and easy to travel?
+
+ • Direct Traffic – These are the people who go to the address bar and type in your address directly. These probably include current students, and people who know that they want to go to your exact website. How to increase this number? Put the URL on everything- flyers, pencils, shirts, ads, cars, etc. Also, encourage contests (i.e., to find the KAT Tiger mascot to win prizes) to make sure current students go there. Put things online that will draw them to visit it repeatedly.
+
+ • Referring Sites – This is when someone was at a page that linked to you, and then clicked on it. It could also be if someone clicked a link in an email. These people might not know that they wanted to go to your site, but something about it seemed interesting when they saw the link. Obviously, the more links you have, the more people will surf over. The main advantage of having a lot of referring sites is that it will cause pagerank to increase, driving traffic from people coming in from search engines.
+
+ • Search Engines- This is the most important one. These people know that they want something (i.e., martial arts lessons) but they've never heard about you and don't know your business. You want to make sure that they see you instead of someone else and then don't feel any need to keep looking. Or, make sure that if they check out a few, you will be the one they choose. Very few people will go down beyond the first page of results, which is generally the top ten.
+
+ Tools - There are several important tools out there to help you.
+
+ • Google Toolbar – This is an add on that you can put in your browser that will tell you, most importantly, the pagerank of all the sites you visit. You can use this to see your Pagerank as well as that of other sites you're competing with. The score will be /10. However, it's a logarithmic scale. Thus, 5/10 is 10 times better than 4/10. (The exact factor is a subject of debate, it’s probably less than 10) Thus, 100% of sites have PR>0, 10% have PR>1, 1% have PR>2, etc. However, remember that this is for pages, not sites. Each website might have hundreds or thousands of pages, where most would have low Pagerank.
+
+ • Alexa – www.alexa.com. Alexa users install another toolbar which tells Alexa which sites that they visit, and thus ranks all websites based on who visits them and for how long. The ranking of course is approximate, because it only takes data from a small subset of internet users. However, by using it yourself, you can also influence the results somewhat. For instance, on Alexa, KAT is ranked as the most visited TKD school website in the world, and even higher than WTF.org. Is this true? There's no way to know. Alexa will also give you some idea if what you are doing is working, and also social proof for your site.
+
+ • Google Local Business – This is a different set of results than the main listing. It's absolutely critical that you put yourself in here (yahoo local as well) and update your page with pictures, videos, etc.
+
+ • Google Webmaster Tools – This tool is free and you can sign up with your Google account. The first thing to do is upload a sitemap.xml file. This is critical to make sure that all your pages are in Google's index. Sitemap files have to be written in a special way. You can go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to have that site do it for you for free. Webmaster tools will also tell you what the top searches are that are listing your site on the results page, as well as what people who actually searched for your site clicked on. You can also see if there are any errors in crawling your site, which will definitely help you to fix them. These tools will also tell you which sites are linking to yours.
+
+ • Google Analytics – This is another free program that competitors used to charge thousands of dollars a month for. It can tell you everything you want to know about people visiting your site, and more. Key statistics include the number of visits, the percentage of traffic (For KAT, 57% came from search engines, 23% from referring sites, and 20% from direct traffic.) It will tell you how many people left after a certain time on your site, and it will even let you see the pages visited, links clicked on, etc. for each visitor. For instance, after clicking on the tournament page, 7.3% of users clicked through to one of the sponsor pages. You can also tell a lot about keywords. For instance, only two people came after typing in karate classes for three year olds. I should probably add the word karate to the preschooler Taekwondo class page to increase this number. Also, two people came in looking for “fix osb to studs” which would have sent them to the south school floor page. Another thing you could do is have it randomly display one of two pages (i.e., with a different trial offer) and see which one resulted in more leads being converted.
+
+ • Google Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You can type a phrase (or use the text from your site) and it will suggest keywords for you, tell you how many other people are advertising for that word, and tell you how many people are searching for that keyword.
+
+ • Other Tools – There are many other tools out there... link analyzers, directory finders, keyword density tools (how many times your keyword is on the page), search engine watchers, keyword typo checkers (i.e., what if someone searched for taikwondoe?) etc. Check http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/ for a more comprehensive list than you will ever need.
+
+ What Doesn't Work - These are so called 'black hat' practices, ways to 'cheat' the systems. Don't do them. They don't work, and can get your site banned and set to pagerank =0.
+
+ • Different text for users and spiders- People have tried all ways to hide text from human users and then load it up with keywords, such as “Brittney spears naked”. They make it the same color as the background, etc. It is easy to find these.
+
+ • Link Farms and Paid Links – People set up sites to be huge repositories of random links, and charge you for links. Doesn't work.
+
+ Checklist – Here is a flowchart for deciding what to do.
+
+ • Step 1: Define keywords. Make a list of all keywords you would think of if you were searching for your business. For martial arts include words like: classes, lessons, training, school, dojo, dojang, children, adults, teens, the name of your city and surrounding cities, zip code, etc. Type all these into the keyword suggestor tool above and get more ideas. Pick the five most important keywords to work on your density.
+
+ • Step 2: Build a Great Site. Make sure the keywords are all over every page, and make sure the links are all clean. Add images and put more keywords in the alt text tags.
+
+ • Step 3: Get Links. – Add your site to directories, and try to get your site linked from other sites all over the web. Use articles/widgets/etc. If sites want to trade links, see if their Pagerank is more than yours, or if they are well related to yours. Finding sites and directories is easy. Just search for your keywords and some directories will come up!
+
+ • Step 4: Analyze Results and Repeat – See if your traffic is increasing, and then keep going back and refining your keywords, and building more links!
+
]]> admin Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:43:01 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=ThatDoodz .diffchar { color:red; } + gratis sofort echte Huren Hobby treffen. erlebe heisse abenteuer 24/7. melde dich jetzt umsonnst an zum sex dating. livesex
]]> ThatDoodz Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:21:37 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage .diffchar { color:red; } - This is the home page for wikidrills.com, where you can post and view different martial arts drills!
+ This is the home page for wikidrills.com, where you can post and view different martial arts drills and see how they fit together! We are nearing 1000 pages of drills, techniques, and other information of use to martial arts students and teachers.
]]> admin Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:06:47 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=Help+Wanted .diffchar { color:red; } - In order for the page to be of maximum use to the community, we need to introduce more links in the various categories ((Drills by Age Level )) or title="Drills by Attribute Enhanced" href='tiki-index.php?page=Drills+by+Attribute+Enhanced' class='wiki'>Drills by Attribute Enhanced for example.
+ In order for the page to be of maximum use to the community, we need to introduce more links from pages to other pages.
]]> admin Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:53:56 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=Kung+Fu+Butterfly .diffchar { color:red; } -
+ The key here is the setup. You want to take a reverse step, turn and make your body horizontal (we tell the students to make themselves into a T shape) and then jump off your standing let. Hang in the air as long as possible and then land on the other foot. Having a good hangtime is important if you want to be able to progress into a Butterfly Twist
]]> admin Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:47:35 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=Drills .diffchar { color:red; } - [http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-browse_categories.php?parentId=16&deep=off&type=|Sport Specific Drills)) - See drills specific for sports like forms, demo and xma, Olympic Style Sparring, MMA Drills, etc.
+ " rel="">Sport Specific Drills - See drills specific for sports like forms, demo and xma, Olympic Style Sparring, MMA Drills, etc.
]]> admin Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:42:14 +0100 http://www.wikidrills.com/tiki-index.php?page=Scissor+Kick .diffchar { color:red; } + In a scissor kick, you hit targets with both legs simultaneously. It's usually done with a Front Kick and Side Kick
+
+
]]> admin Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:43:24 +0100