Week Five: Blogs, Blogs, Blogs!

I bet you’re sick of blogging by now.

Content is King. You’ll be sick of hearing it, but its true. If you want to keep boosting your site, getting likes on Facebook, getting those sweet, sweet links – Content is KING. You’ll need to write about what you do and why you do it. You want your site to be a useful resource. A one-stop shop for all things related to your Martial Art. The more you can create, the better. Always try and include the key words and phrases you would expect people to search for if they ended up on your article. If you would expect people to find your article by asking ‘What is a roundhouse kick?’ you should answer that question in the first paragraph.

1 – Blog Suggestion – Student Story

I’m going to label these as ‘suggestions’ because if you have an idea for a blog post you think would be interesting, you’ll have a better time writing something if you came up with it yourself. If you’re looking for some inspiration, you should consider doing a ‘Student Profile’ on someone who has either a) just taken up the Martial Art, and can offer some insight into why they started or b) a High Ranking student who can talk about how Martial Arts has changed their life for the better. Make sure you get permission from them to use their story and photo, and don’t use their full name.

Well formatted blogs tend to get better shares, comments and work better for SEO. People don’t like to be confronted with a ‘wall of text’, so try and split your blog into easy digestible chunks. Student Stories work well for this as you can divide the post into Questions and Answers. Format the Question as bold text, and have your students answer below:

Why did you take up Kick Boxing?

“Well, interesting story, my great grandfather, Kit Booksing, actually invented the sport….’

This will help the text flow and help readability. Try and reach 700 – 1500 words.

Add a link at the end of the post to your Timetable or Contact Us form so that if people like what they read, they have an obvious next step to take to book a lesson with you.

2 – Turn this Blog into a Video

A tip to reduce the time you spend making content, is you can re-use topics in different mediums. If you’re interviewing a student, you should record some of the interview and post the video to your Social Media accounts. Don’t record and post a full 20 minute interview, people are unlikely to watch. But if you have one particularly interesting answer to a question, record that one answer and post a video to your Social Media. Make sure you include a link to the full interview if people want to know more.

3 – Follow up asking a Martial Arts/Fitness or other relevant website to publish your blog

Last week we suggested you contact a website relevant to your Martial Arts to see if they would be interested in publishing one of your blog posts. If you’ve not already done this, you should this week. If you can offer to write a relevant article, many sites will be willing to publish it in exchange for linking back to your site. Find a relevant site and try and get in touch with them. Have your topic idea ready to go for the discussion, and show them the posts you’ve written in previous weeks.

Week Five Wrap Up

I know this week has been content heavy. The first 4 weeks were key for boosting your site, but from this point on you should consider these tasks as optional. Do as much as you can, and if you can take what you’ve learned in the first few weeks and run with it you should see some success.

If you’re seeing increased traffic and bookings and want to continue to boost your sites profile then please keep going, doing as much as you can. Next week we have another blog post idea, as well as some tips on how to optimise your About Us page.