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Rachel Massey (rachmass) wrote:
Hi Kev,
Word of mouth seems to be the absolute best way to get anyone into the dojo. I have been trying, but without much sucess. I've tried flyers, ads in the paper, the website, small phone book ad...so far it isn't working. On the other hand, the dojo has only been open for one month, so it is hard to expect much at this point. I will most certainly share anything I do that works!!!! Everyone in this web community has been so helpful with suggestions and comments, and I most assuredly will give back what I can, especially with what I learn in starting a dojo, completely from scratch (the build it, they will come attitude).
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A month is just way too short. This is a long term effort. We found that the average person who came in to our dojo , if he had seen Aikido before, had done so two yaers or so earlier. That meant that the demos we were doing gad no immediate effect. In fact, given how people move around these days, it was ususally someone else's demo that they had seen. So doing demos are a long trem solution.
The web should be strong for most dojos but you have to make sure that people see the site. Do a search on the internet under Search Engines. There are whole sites about how saech engines rank their sites. A few tips are:
get your keywords into your meta tags; make sure you use those keywords in the first paragraph of the text on your main pages; if you have hyperlinks that are graphics make sure that you also put a text link because the web spiders will not follow a graphic link; if your website uses frames, make sure that all of your links appear on each main page because the web spiders don't deal with frames and won't go through your site. It is best to avoid frames if possible;many search engines give you preference if you have lots of links to other related sites; many search engines give you prefernce if there are many sites that link to you, so submit your site to as many of the meta sites like Aikiweb, Aikido Journal, Aikido Today magazine, and as many of the general martial arts meta sites as you have patience for. Manually submit your site to the major search engines.
These are just a few of the tricks to get your site recognized by the engines and given a decent position. Once again, the results of these efforts are not immediate. It takes esveral months for these things to start having an effect. You can check it out by doing your own searches usuing what you think would be the keywords that a propsective student who knew nothing might use to find you. See if you show up in the fisrt page or two of search results. If you are in a small city where there isn't too much competition you should be on the first page of the search resuults or something is wrong somehwhere.