Traffic Tip -The Secret to Getting More Students Faster

 If you have some marketing dollars to spare, go ahead and spend them on Facebook awareness ads. Tell people how you’ve prepared your gyms/schools/business to be compliant with the government standards... And most importantly, safe for staff and students.

I talked about how insanely cheap awareness ads are nowadays and you should take advantage of that.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you get your Google game on point.

Continue reading below. These tips remain helpful and relevant for business post-COVID. ↓

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I hear this story all the time - "I can't get enough leads...",

"Online marketing is hard.",

"How do I make Facebook ads like that?"

It's the most common thing you see in different Facebook groups, and chats. Everybody's always talking about it. It’s like a Hail Mary in a big game. There’s way more to it than a sexy Facebook Ad of the month. 

Don't worry, we've all been there at one point or another. 

I can remember being so broke that I could not even spend a hundred dollars on ads. It was super frustrating so I had to do TONS of guerilla marketing! 

This was years ago, before my gym grew and I didn’t have any money to do any marketing. So I had to do a lot of “sweat equity”, I’d like to call it. 

But then as things get better, you’re able to hire coaches, spend more money on marketing and then grow your academy. 

When you get the money, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars for advertising yet. You can, if you want, but you don't have to. You can always do a combination of free and paid advertising. 

What I want to talk to you about today is the SECRET TO GETTING  MORE STUDENTS FASTER. 

There’s 2 things you have to do.

• Do more and then

• Do it better.

What I mean by that is - the less budget you have, the more things you have to do and you have to do them better. 

When you have a bigger budget, you still got to do more and do it better.  As the top school in your area, everyone will wanna take you out. People are going to start moving into your area because they’re going to think: 

“Oh, he’s making money there” or “His gym does well.” 

Happens to me all the time! 

People put gyms down the street, I’ve got so many gyms around me - I don't know if I could count them anymore! 

So what I want you to focus on is this week's tip. 

Dominate on Google before you spend a single dollar on advertising. 

I'm talking about organic SEO.. 

People are chasing Facebook ads and chasing different things.  But their organic search sucks, their website sucks, and their Google Local sucks! The they don't have a YouTube channel! 

And of course, if you have a bunch of money you can speed this process up, have somebody help you with this or do it for you. 

But you can do all these things for free and then you can start putting more money into advertising. 

Get your Google game on point. 

We’re going to go through  these three things: 

1. Google Local - Set up your Google My Business account. Then set up your page, start getting reviews, get links to your site, your hours, your pictures, your videos. Everything! 

That thing has to be the pimpest Google Local page in your area. Make yours dialled in and the absolute best! 

2. Organic SEO- you have to have a good website that’s SEO-optimized. Then you start building quality links, press release, or anything that drives links back to your site. You want to keep driving as much organic traffic as you can. As you do that, you start blogging. Then cross-linking your blogs to other pages on your website back and forth. This creates what Google calls a ‘spider web’ because they have spider bots crawling your site. 

Contrary to what a lot of people are saying, SEO is not dead. 

That’s a huge myth! 

When you look for something in your area you go to Google and search for it. Here’s a great article debunking this belief. 

If you need help researching your keywords click this link.

After you’ve dialled that in then you can get into paid Google ads because you want to dominate that as well. I will talk more about Google ads on my next blog posts. 

3. YouTube - Google owns YouTube. It’s the Number 2 search engine in the world. When people search for things in their area, YouTube videos will come up. When people type in local search terms, you want your videos to come up. Make sure you get that dialled in. Get your channel set up. Start creating videos now. Link those to your Academy's website pages - that helps with your organic SEO.

All those would have a compound effect. 

Keep doing that one after another. 

You’d go from spending no money to having the best Google Local page. You'll have the best organic SEO and the best YouTube channel in your area without having to spend a bunch of money. 

As you grow, say you’re now getting 5-10 new students a month, then you get 10-20, then when you get 20-30, it's going to cost you money to go out and find more leads. Getting 0-10 leads, that’s almost by default. That’s when people are randomly finding you or somebody referred them to you. To get above that number, say 10-20, you have to start spending money, PLUS doing the things you have to get done. 

So if you are under 10, start doing all these organic things. Then if you want to go from 10-20, you can do ALL the organic things + PAID TRAFFIC  + LOCAL EVENTS. 

Keep building up. 

I challenge you to get these 3 things dialed in at your academy - Google Local, Organic SEO, and your YouTube.