And it's killing their ability to grow

In the past 6 days, I've spent 38 hours on the phone talking to traditional martial art school owners all over the States, the UK and one Australian leading up to our kick-off workshop this Thursday. 

I did not expect this, but one thing stood out very clear - and I want to share it with you.

Their ability to grow their schools was centered collectively around one thing.

 It was NOT the MMA school down the road 

It was NOT Covid

It was NOT the economy

 In every conversation, there was a theme centered on one thing ...

Overwhelm. 

Overwhelm in all areas of running a successful school. I heard them talk about burn out, loss of passion, chasing squirrels, spinning plates and shining objects. There was a lot of fear too. 

In this video, I break down exactly what I learned, and what you can do about it as a traditional martial arts school owner. Do not let overwhelm get you, own your clarity. 

Join us for...

Have you ever struggled with marketing your studio without any money? If you’re reading this, then I’m sure you’ve at some point tried to get your head around how you’ll market appropriately and stay in budget. Or do you even maintain a ‘budget’?

The old way of looking at this question is pretty stoic,

“Why did you start business without enough marketing capital to begin with?”

Justifiable question, but shit happens. The speed of smart business today is as fast as a click making brick and mortar rapidly becoming more ethereal as each day passes. Every small business is now global and crowd influenced. Fork tongued sales tactics inside brick and mortar are losing their bite.

We’re in a place now where your ability to market your product or service has very little to do with how much you pay an artist to mock up some shiny full page ad to make people think you’re the best. While coupon books and local periodicals...

I read a wonderful quote from an old Japanese sensei, I believe he was an aikido instructor.

'In the Japanese martial arts, anyone who calls himself a master, isn't.'

I love this quote. It says everything about what separates us from so much of the martial arts garbage out there.

Anybody who is creating stories, lying to their students just to fill some self serving need; it's garbage, it needs to stop. We (as teachers) need to be protectors of something that's honorable, that involves integrity and something that in many ways a treasure.

There's no more important belt in your dojo than the White Belt. There's no more important student than the Mukyu level.

To me, someone who earns their white belt has fulfilled a much larger goal in their life than any shodan or black belt.

Here's why; I want you to take a step back to when you first stepped into your martial arts classes. Can you remember when you first started, when you had never experienced martial...

There is no script here, I'm not reading from any type of teleprompter. I am doing this entire project in my dojo, from my dojo and it is about my job. My dojo has been reasonably successful over the last 12 years. My measuring tool for success is based on the development of my students.

My school we has about 200 family members and many of my students travel to Japan yearly, spending time training. But this course is about you and how the functions of my Dojo, and the different systems that I've developed work.

Many people tell me that martial arts shouldn't be commercialized. People would tell me about their teacher, teaching out of their garage in exchange for breakfast on Sunday mornings. That's all they would accept for training, on and on and on.

I've seen so many people martyr themselves to the martial arts here in the United States. We have this enormous sort of stigma of 'if you don't bow when you walk in the door, then you to drop into, push-ups, on your knuckles, on...

And what it means for your Dojo

So this is what Google does ... 

Search engines like Google have a pretty simple, main task and that’s to follow links. Like a chain, they follow these links from website to website. The way this is done is through three parts.

• Crawler
• Index
• Algorithm

If you get to this point, you’re ahead of most with how Google creates it’s majick.

The crawler does exactly what it says, it crawls the web around the clock recording the code of every website within it’s database called the index.

Each time Google passes your site and sees a new change, the index is updated. Simple, right?

This is where it gets important. The more engagement and traffic that is visiting your site, the more time people spend consuming your content - the more often Google’s bots drop by for an index visit.

But first, before all of this is possible - Google must know your site exists. So a link must exist somewhere so that the crawler can...

I have compiled a list of best google tools to help you speed up your search experience. The goal is to for you to find what you need, with the most amount of search precision and time savings. Most people use simple search terms and don't even know that Google search has a deep suite of tools and tricks. 

Yes, that's right, Google search is a skill that is learned. And this article will help you get closer to finding exactly what you want and becoming a search 'expert'.

While there are hundreds (probably thousands!) of hacks and tricks to Google search, below are a list of the most used. While you are reading this article, take time to try each one out as you go through them. 

Let's get started.

Explicit Phrase

By simply wrapping your search query in quotes, your results will be filtered to specifically what you want.

Exercise: Create an explicit phrase now by entering "Chinese martial arts", wrapped in quotes - instead of ... Chinese martial...

I could never get this.

You’ve probably been in a martial arts school that has this in giant black letters on their wall. You may even have it on your wall. If you do, I am in no way trying to offend you or anyone else.

And if you have no clue what I’m talking about then let me explain.

Some years back, a major industry trade group conjured up the wonderful idea that every Karate academy should have “WE ARE A BLACK BELT SCHOOL” written in giant letters, front and center in the training area and in a place for everyone to see.

When you walked through the door of the academy, you immediately knew you were in a Black Belt School. Parents entering the school see this and immediately have visions of their child one day wearing a black belt, breaking bricks with their knuckles and doing three-sixty spin kicks to the freckle faced bully. The big letters were to keep the goal of black belt in front of everyone during training.

Actually, this was meant to...

In 2007 a few things happened in the tech world that would shake the way nearly everyone would spend their time online.

First, the iPhone launched. Enough said.

Second, Facebook just opened their doors to the world of 13 years olds and beyond.

BluRay DVDs were all the rage

The first #HashTag was conceived.

Oh yeah, Incubus punched the massive music industry in the gut with their self released album for download and at a price their fans chose to pay.

You might be reflecting on how much things have changed in ten years.

Well, you can’t even go online with that first iPhone, it won’t work.

DVDs are filling the dusty corners of Good Will stores around the country.

I now listen to whatever band I want, whenever I want on Spotify for free, yet I spend way more money today on going to live gigs of bands I never would have heard of if left to the marketing devices of the major record labels. Thank you Incubus.

But what about those #hashtags?

Obviously they’re still...

But most don't.

Marketing systems start with personas and chances are you have neither. I hope you do, but statistics say you don't have either.

When it comes to the online marketing of your martial arts school and promotion of your services, there are a battery of formulas you can put out there; blog posts, info-graphics, white papers, etc. While the combinations of content stuff is limitless, I think the number is somewhere around 221 fundamental ways to run an online campaign, but I don't remember.

Example, you have a bolt you want to sell. You create an engagement sequence of articles that all feed to a lead magnet optin where people can get a DIY bolt blueprint, support that by syndicating a compelling bolt video, promote your blog post on Facebook with an Ad to a lookalike audience generated by a conversion pixel on your bolt and direct your collective audience to your lead magnet on a Youtube card, that's supported by a curated content piece from an...

Want to know what the folks who try to sell you expensive local SEO programs are doing?

Kudos to them for seeing an opportunity and taking it, but really… screw them. In this article, I’m going to show you how a fellow martial arts business owner over-invests quite a bit in their web use, was missing over 50% of their potential traffic. Then, I’m going to share with you how to correct this mistake for yourself and completely dominate your local searches with about an hour’s worth of work.

First, let me be very clear that nothing is more valuable for your studio’s website than a cleanly structured framework.

There are a few simple solutions to getting this done, but one thing is for sure; if you don’t know what you’re doing, then leave it to a professional. Don’t think you can have some high school kid or karate mom run your site in exchange for free classes. That’s nonsense. Period.

For solid online visibility and indexing, you...