“Martial Arts Technology? Solutions? Web Marketing? It Doesn’t Matter To Me. Or Does It?”

Martial Arts has certainly come a long way. It wasn’t until 15 years ago that Martial Arts schools were small family-orientated businesses with carpeted floors, a punching bag, and a group of 30-40 beaming hopeful Bruce Lee wannabes. And the closest thing to a computer was the thick chunky calculators masters used to work out their monthly budget.

Today, Martial Arts has fully embraced the business aspects of the culture and with the growing popularity of Martial Arts, catered by big budget Hollywood movies starring any one of the plethora or high-flying, spin-kicking Martial Arts movie stars, the business practices of Martial Arts schools of the past is a nostalgic memory few can remember. Carpeted floors have been replaced with anti-bacterial space age rubber mats, fully-sized life-like kicking dummies silently stand side by side ready to be barraged by punches and kicks, and calculators have been tossed for high-powered computers outfitted with software solutions specifically tailored to do everything you can imagine and more.

Technology has infiltrated every imaginable market in the business world and Martial Arts has not escaped from its cold, calculating grip. Whether or not you are an advocate of utilizing technology within the confines of your unadultered and sacred dojo is not really the case in point. Of course, a small temple dojo in Japan with an eighty-five year old master teaching the art of Shotokan Karate to a group of five disciples may think twice about buying the latest billing software to help keep his school cost-effective.

However, the North American environment is a much more demanding market, and as schools expand their student base sand look to set up multiple locations spanning different provinces and states, using a software program that testifies to decreasing the headache filled hours of organizing everything other than the punching and kicking aspects of your business may not be such a bad idea.

Whatever technology is out there should really be looked at as tools to help you in whatever circumstance your Martial Arts Business is in. Whether you are a growing school pushing towards 100 students, or you are a small school looking to get a really cool website so that you can attract 10 new students each month, or you are a master wanting to get over the dread of having to spend your entire weekend crunching numbers, the technological tools out there can help in those painstaking areas that give you computer themed nightmares.

Really, the advent of technology in the Martial Arts market has meant two things: that school owners are now black belt Donald Trumps minus the atrocious coif; and that masters have had to become as “tech saavy” as the Silicon Valley computer developer. Truly, the vernacular and jargon of software is often daunting and so confusing that it would make anyone want to pull their hair out from its ends. SEO, SEM, CTR, PPC, “stickiness” are all terms that make you want to throw your copy of “Website For Dummies” out the window. To explain all the terms would definitely be out of scope for this article, but the few that are important to any Martial Arts school can be explained here.

So what is SEO and SEM?

Well it all begins with a website. A website really helps get your school exposed in a relatively cheap way to an audience so big that you might need a minute to prepare before reading the subsequent facts about to be revealed. According to recent statistics, as of today, there are almost 1,000,000,000 internet users in the world and that number is growing by 630,000 users a day. In Canada alone there are 22,000,000 people who spend some part of their lives sitting in front of their computers looking at a website.

So where does your school fit in the grand scheme of things?
Is your website getting you the millions of viewers you so desire?

It’s most likely that your website is lost within a sea of other Karate, Tae Kwon Do or Judo websites and when you analyze the amount of traffic you are getting your monthly goal of a million views may be falling quite short of that total. But that’s where SEO plays a big role in helping your website get noticed.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is your flotation device and literally does what it says. It is a technique used to make your Web pages more useful for your customers while making them more transparent and understandable to search engines. Search engine optimization helps your website get more page views by creating Web pages that rank highly in search engine results. So what does this mean in layman’s terms? It means that the content and keywords within your website (as well as valid html) will determine where your website will show up when somebody wanting to learn Karate types in “Martial Arts School” and presses search.

SEM, or Search engine marketing, is really a subset of SEO. It is everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a website and increasing its traffic, its “stickiness”(anything about a Web site that encourages a visitor to stay longer), and in the case of Martial Arts businesses, increase student registration and profits.

With these two tools you most likely won’t get millions of viewers, but, it will give you a targeted and efficient way to market to the audience you want to expose your business to.
Whether or not your school is using all the state of the art technology that is being offered today remember that technology cannot be ignored, and shouldn’t be ignored because they are tools to help your school become a better experience not only for you but for your students as well. I’m sure that there are some of you out there that could push a nail through a 2 x 4 using only your forehead but wouldn’t you rather use a hammer instead? In the end, what it all is really is tools to help your school become a better experience not only for you but for your students as well.