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...

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...

I had the (extremely) unique opportunity some years ago to share in a live discussion with who I believe to be the most brilliant marketing mind of our time, Mr. Jay Abraham. Following this discussion and his detailed answers to my academic questions, I went on to read everything I could, that he put to ink. Since then, there has been no looking back.

If I were asked what the one thing I took from all of my time and money invested in Abraham’s teaching, what would it be; I would immediately answer ‘the philosophy of pre-eminance’.

Pre-eminence is a massive topic, one beyond the scope of the article, but to summarize; it is the you want to be seen by everyone you deal with as the definitive expert source and the most trusted advisor within your area of expertise. You also want to be seen as someone who has taken on the role of responsibility of governance within your area of expertise and thus are recognized as the most trusted and credible source of counsel among...

How to set goals for your website performance that make sense.

Why Bother Setting Goals? Simple. Because nobody just wakes up successful. 

You must have a clear path to the destination you wish to arrive at, you need to know where you’re going. This isn’t a new idea. Pretty simple, right?

Setting goals to achieve your desired outcome is not new either. Nor is setting smart goals, ones that are specific to your desired outcome, make sense, are actually achievable, have purpose and meet a timeline that is specific to where you are in your life and business. Nothing new, but very rarely followed through with.

In this article, I am going to detail for you the first two priorities for how to set goals that bolt your business needs to your website and how to track performance and influence your website(s) have to student acquisition.

Before anything, let’s start with a simple acronym for discovering if your efforts and goals have alignment. Considering the...

In this article I'd like to introduce you to a marketing model that has not yet been discovered by most industries coming online but will completely change the face of how studio owners pursue success if used correctly. By name, inbound marketing is relatively new coming from the online and digital marketing space, but conceptually it's a marketing method that's antique and based off the premise that if you consistently deliver quality content to an audience ready and willing to consume it, your audience reach will grow. 

Many studio owners are sold a bundle of goods that range from $100 - $2,500 per month and are worth less than the paper they’re printed on. These goods are the template posters and flyers they get in their monthly subscription kit, that includes a DVD with some business guru telling them how to use this flyer to create a stellar event that will bring in hordes of warm bodies ready to sign a contract. They will go on to teach some base-level...

Build your online reputation based on confidence, acceptance of criticism and appreciation of honesty. Bend to nobody and remember, when emotions rise, intelligence drops. Stay cool. Sounds like a few good rules in life to follow, but these are pretty much all you need to know about managing the online reviews of your business. While many small business owners lose their cool and publicly flip out, ridiculing a patron who gave an honest review of their experience, others just ignore such reviews assuming they have no effect on their business.

The truth is, most have no clue what’s being said about them online. In this article, I’ll breakdown how you can manage your online criticism for the best outcome to serve your business and your clients, customers, prospects and staff.

No matter how you cut it, your customers will talk about you one way or the other, your ability to maintain control regardless of the content they post about you can bring about an outcome that...

As a parent of four little kids, I can tell you how much the GogoSqueez product is valued in my kitchen. Actually, my wife and I usually get two cases of it every time we shop. They love the stuff.

And why not… Here’s a US based company that’s making a tasty product. As a parent, it’s easy for me to get my kids a healthy snack, that’s US manufactured and affordable. Plus, it’s a natural product not packed with crappy ingredients that is next top impossible to avoid.

As a business owner, I’m inspired by a fellow New York business doing so well. Providing jobs at a midwest plant, where I know (as an importer myself), they could be banking a much better margin offshoring their stuff. Then I admire their concept of <em>upcycling </em>their product packaging, keeping an eco-friendly product not just on the shelves, but in front of my kids. To me, this is important.

I’ll admit, I never researched anything about this...

Note to reader: This article is written for the business owner who creates multi-media content to serve their customers. It is a detail of my own personal experience with internet piracy and theft of my own intellectual property. This article in no way condones or promotes the unlawful and immoral theft of property. Rather, it’s my goal to bring some clarity to how a fellow business owner can use the existing landscape of the net and it’s trends toward open sourced and shared content to their advantage. In the end, I am certain we will win.”

In 2006 I invested sixteen grand into creating a DVD set for the customers at my martial arts school. Like everything else I do, I went the distance with professionalism and quality. Sure I could have taken short cuts, done it myself on some Apple editing software, but that’s just not my way. Audio and image quality, voice overs, angles and packaging of the product, all these items could not be fulfilled by DIY, so I...

That Most Industry Business Gurus Completely Missed 

I think it was 2006 was the when I first read the acronym, LMS (Learning Management System). It was during a time when I was searching for information and researching how to deliver content online to paying students abroad. Believe it or not, most of my research was done on Barns and Noble’s magazine section, not online. I needed to peer into the looking glass of web’s future and see what was to come.

At the time, all I could uncover online for teaching martial arts courses to students in other countries was pretty crappy technology geared heavily toward industry systems and a very, very small amount to higher learning, mostly in the medical or engineering space.

Yes, there was YouTube and a few other sites providing a resource for experts to upload content for viewership, but linking the pieces together to offer a topic centered, single solution ecosystem that offered a private learning...

Data Scorcher and Coming Trends

Today I finally took a moment to read through the 117 pages of the Kleiner Perkins Internet Trends 2013 with some good music playing and a cool drink.

I’ve been watching their reports since 2010 and they’ve been dead on, but more importantly for me is their accuracy for current trending in the social space.

Looks like Ms. Meeker lays down some current facts that the many business owners looking to better leverage their marketing dollars must to take notice of. Her report points out that (get this!) all social space has seen strong growth over the last two years except Facebook – where people are spending most of their wasted time. So what does this mean? I think that when it comes to quality of life or business improving initiatives, which is an ideal environment for martial art school owners and it means Facebook may not be the ideal place to spend your dollars.

Learn how I run my Dojo on one system....