Advice on Publicity for Iaido Club

[Joe Armstrong]

Attendance at the Calgary Iaido Club has been a little spotty as of late and so we are working on publicity to attract new members. Since most members discovered our club via the website, we think that there needs to be a serious revamp in order to make it more pleasing to the eye, easier to navigate, and more likely to appear in searches. This will likely be the first step in a small "publicity campaign" to make our club more present.

http://www.calgaryiaidoclub.net/

So, come take a look at the site and please give me some honest, hard feedback. I need some independent opinions so I can get a different perspective on what's good or bad with the site.

Also, if you have done any kind of successful publicity work for your MA club, please give me some ideas.

Thanks a lot for help.

[Kim Taylor]

Let me know how it's going Joe, attendance is down all over, and I'm looking at ways to increase it all over Canada.

One suggestion, how about a "bring a friend for free" week or month, get everyone to bring at least one more person along to try it out. Club members will be the most effective recruiters in any club.

Press releases in local papers, if you don't have an event handy, make one up and write up a release, including a photo for all the local media.

Recreation handbooks, make sure you're listed in all the community calendars.

Summer Samurai Camp... if one of the club members needs a job for the summer, why not do a day camp? Can you imagine being a kid and being able to do a Niten Ichiryu based camp for a week or two?

Let me know what else you come up with.

Kim.

[Endboss]

Hi Joe

For search engine optimisation (which is a whole art in itself) I suggest that you get these phrases into *all* your pages (even if you set their font colour to the same colour as the background so that they are not seen):

learn to use a sword
learn to use a longsword
learn to use a katana
learn to be a samurai
learn samurai arts
learn budo
learn bujutsu
... et cetera

If these appear on all your pages and all your pages you should get a lot better rating on most search engines.

Content-wise, the very first thing your home page should do is tell the reader what it is you do. What is iaido? You are aiming for new practitioners who are keen to do "that thing where you kneel down and draw the sword" but have no idea what it is called or what an iai (or batto) is. Reassure them that they are at the right place. At the moment, your site looks like it is clearing aimed at existing students only.

Asthetically, perhaps drop times new roman as a default font... perhaps replace it with verdana or arial or some other "clean" font in your style sheet. Times New Roman is easy to read in print but on screen, sans serifs fonts are easier on the eye.

The general layout is a little lopsided. Might I suggest moving your menu bar down to the same level as the rest of the text and having your banner image stretch across both tables?

You are using a purple colour for visited links which jars with the whole site. Perhaps change that to a light yellow / gold?

Kind regards
Ben Macarthur

[Kim Taylor]

Don't use hidden text and other such search engine spam, they will spot it quickly and penalize you.

Good design is excellent advice. Make sure you know what good design means for your audience.

Kim.

[tsunamiflood]

keywords would be an excellent place for all those words and phrases

anything you can think of that a prospective student might punch into a search engine

i have always found that the best advertisement is word of mouth - your students know your class and like it and have the greatest chance of bringing more people who will stay longer.

i would create a very simple flyer with a big picture of yourself using a sword, with a catchy title, your phone number and website. give it to your students each class to give out.

keep at it! it takes time.

[gendzwil]

Make sure all of your important information is clear. For example, I have no idea what I would pay for fees. It says "$400 for all arts", then lists $100 for each art except iaido and then says there is no iaido only fee. So does that mean if I want iaido I have to pay $400 and then I can study anything, but if I only want HNIR I can pay $100? Or does that mean the base fee is $400 and then I pay $100 extra for HNIR? Confused.

How do I register? Are there terms, ie do I need to start at a particular time of year? What equipment do I need?

Likewise the instructor information is this long, rambling blurb from Chris about how he really didn't want to post his information but then people told him he had to blah blah blah. Prospective students want to know if this guy is legit or not, so make his rank, years of experience and federation affiliations clearly visible.

[Joe Armstrong]

Thanks for the excellant comments! I'll run them by Chris and see what can be done and if there are any other questions we might have.

[Joe Armstrong]

Chris has started with a new website template that he will show me next week.

We are also thinking of potentially making the website have only the bare information that a prospective student may want (location, styles, fees etc) and put our supplementary information related to equipment, upcoming events, and anything else on a blog linked to the website.

[Joe Armstrong]

So, here's the rough version of the new site. For some reason it came out a little weird when it was opened, so there will be significant revisions and cleanup.

http://www.calgaryiaidoclub.net/

We recieved a Japanese name from Yamamoto sensei that better represents our club: Ka Muso Kai. However, we still intend to properly tag the site so we will show up first in related searches.

Consensus in the club is that we are still going to keep the prices posted on the website.

As you can see, we also revised the price structure and went with the minimalist approach regarding information as recommended.

If you have any thoughts, please don't mind sharing them with me.

Thanks.

[gendzwil]

Formatting aside, that's a big improvement in terms of the clarity of information presented to prospective new students. Maybe I missed where someone suggested not presenting prices - I think it's a good idea to be upfront about all that stuff. Even so, you'll still get e-mails asking for all the details that are in plain view on your site...

[Joe Armstrong]

Maybe I missed where someone suggested not presenting prices - I think it's a good idea to be upfront about all that stuff. Even so, you'll still get e-mails asking for all the details that are in plain view on your site...

Some people not on this forum suggested that we not display the prices until the prospective student attends a class, but we decided against that.

Thanks for the input.

[tweety]

Nice, clean site! I like it.

On this page:

http://www.calgaryiaidoclub.net/thearts.html

With Windows / Firefox the 'Jodo' heading with the green box appears on top of the text.

[Budoist]

The current site is clean and to the point. The one thing that I would advise against is having the viewer download the media file to watch the video. I would convert it to flash or upload to dailymotion/youtube and embed it into the page. Perhaps a separate navigation page or section of the current page can be included that describes what the viewer is seeing.

[carnops]

Hello,
This site is simple and clean.
I just have to point out some details that might make it even clearer :
- In order to maintain a logical hierarchy in the menu, why not separating the home page and the different locations/timetable with two separated tabs?
- Concerning the inclusion of the directorate members in the "history" tab, I think it would be better to put it apart for same reasons as above.

I've also an advice concerning the Meta tags ; as someone else said, you should add meta-keywords and meta-description for search engine optimization.

I copy a sample of the actual source code to show what seems weak :



<title>Zenlike by Free CSS Templates</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="" />
<meta name="description" content="" />


You could try this (for example) :



<title>Ka Muso Kai</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="ka muso kai, japanese weapons, iaido, jodo, kenjutsu, hyoho niten ichi ryu, Canadian kendo federation, Calgary, Saskatoon, Saint John" />
<meta name="description" content="We are a martial arts group dedicated to the teaching of traditional Japanese weaponry. We teach iaido, jodo and Hyoho Niten Ichi Ryu Kenjutsu." />


Hope this helps...