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Promoting Your Local Tai Chi School
We've been working hard to find the best ways to promote ourselves Nationally and Internationally, as well as in our own back yard. Along the way we've learned some things that work really well, and we're sharing it with our Mastermind Group / Regional Organizers to help you grow your schools and fill your workshops.
Step 1: Have a Dedicated Website
There are certain elements of Local website that can make or break it's performance. Here are the key features you need.
  •  It should be very simple: The theme should be straight forward and the whole site should be very easy to navigate. The site should be very easy to navigate and there should not be an overwhelming number of pages.
  •  Home Page with Video: We have a short video of Sifu Clear entitled "What Is Real Tai Chi?" We run a $1 per day facebook ad that directs local traffic to that video. The video is about what sets real Tai Chi apart from the Health Club variety, why you want the real stuff if you are going to do Tai Chi at all, and how to find a qualified teacher. You will want to find a topic that allows you to do something similar. You want to promote the category of "Real Tai Chi," and let the content of the video convince people that you are an expert on that subject.
  •  Course Listings: There should be a page with descriptions of your different classes. We removed the Class Schedules and replaced them with a message encouraging interested people to call or email, and we saw a surge in contacts using this strategy. When people call or email, we are able to engage with them to find out exactly why that individual wants Tai Chi and speak directly to that need. Using this approach we are getting more contacts, we are getting more of those contacts to come out for a free class or private lesson, and more of those who come out for class are signing up for ongoing lessons.
  •  Contact Page: There are always some folks who want to skip all the frills and videos and go straight to a contact form. Let them! Make it easy for your low-hanging fruit to contact you. Have a Contact Page with an embedded email form that gets the message straight into your primary inbox. Put your phone number on there, too.
  •  Promo Page / Press Page: If you get on the news, get interviewed, write an article on Tai Chi, or put on a workshop, let everyone know! Show off how active you are in the community, establish your authority in the industry, and make everyone believe you are a Tai Chi celebrity (at least to some degree). The more people like and trust you up front, the easier it is to sign them up.
  •  Link to ClearsTaiChi.com: You link to our site in a few places and we'll link to your site in a few places. By building backlinks like this our various sites all rank higher. Google's algorithm has changed a lot, but it has ALWAYS loved links. Link to each other also and encourage other people to link to your site.
For a good example of this strategy that is working well for us right now, look at MaryvilleTaiChi.com. It doesn't have a press page yet for technical and time-budgeting reasons, but we are working on adding that element which should make the whole site perform even stronger.
Step 2: Build your Facebook Business / Fanpage
If you don't have a Fanpage for your Tai Chi school, make one! It won't take long to get the shell of it together. This is the promotional tool that you will leverage to build your tribe, so get one together. It's really that simple, and then you're on to:
Step 3: Blitz your FB page with cheap "Likes"
Get a campaign together that is designed to get people who are interested in Tai Chi to like your page. (See the next step for advice on running a campaign)

Do not use geographic targeting. Target based on English speakers. I know you are promoting locally, but to START you need to let FB know that you are a big deal. You want to get a bunch of cheap likes, from around the world if you have to, in order to kickstart the FB algorithm and get it to start working for you. Do this for about 30 days. Your goal should be to get as many likes as you can in as short a time as possible.

Once you have a strong following by FB standards, THEN you can narrow in your geo targeting and FB will treat you like a Boss.
Step 4: Build a local Audience and Send them to your Website
This part is easier said than done, but there is a proven method for drawing a following.
  •  Post Every Day: If people stop engaging with your posts, Facebook will stop showing them your stuff. Keep whatever audience you manage to build engaged so they keep seeing your posts.
  •  Focus on the "Pull" Content: 4 out of 5 days, you are posting "Pull" content. You want these posts to be highly shareable. Set aside different days for different types of posts (i.e. Motivational Mondays, Throwback Thursdays, Video Fridays, etc.) Any Meme's you post should be very relevant and consistent with your Tai Chi message. Ideally you actually create them yourself and brand them at the bottom with your school's logo. We are currently redesigning our logo to allow for this, but for a good example check out the Rolflex FB page. We are very close to launching this new model ourselves, and you are encouraged to share Clear Tai Chi's posts as part of your outreach effort and tribe building communications. Soon you will see us doing the same thing with MaryvilleTaiChi.com. 
  •  Promotional Wednesdays: Your Pull content should be consistent with your message, but you still want to have a voice and a message that are all yours. You also need to encourage your new fans to check out your website and ideally contact you for lessons. Typically you will be promoting the video on your homepage. If the website is well designed and encourages interested parties to call or email, this will send consistent and free traffic to your site every week. You'll need to put together several different posts so that your fans don't get bored seeing the same thing every week. You can also use this day to promote workshops or events you are having. If you intend to take out paid ads or use other advanced strategies, you can use the positive response you get from your fanpage for targeting and building lookalike audiences. You'll have to set up the Facebook pixel on your site for this one to work.
  •  Don't limit yourself: You can post more than once a day. You can post several different things every day, EXCEPT for the Promo day. On that day you ONLY promote yourself, and only in one way. You could re-post it 2-3 times that day, but you ONLY want that going in front of your audience. Every other day of the week, go nuts! Post a mix of your own unique, branded Pull content and some Clear Tai Chi shares. You should have some of each, and Clear Tai Chi will most likely share some of your content as well. We all do better when we ALL do better.
Step 5: Help Each Other Out!
For the regional organizers, this should be a no-brainer.

The goal is to create content that gets shared all over, but you can't predict engagement. You may all post the same thing, but Harry's may be getting shared all over the internet and everyone else's goes stale. This is the nature of local marketing. But if you follow each other's stuff, you can see if that is happening and weigh in on the thread to get your names out far and wide. In fact, you may want to make it a habit to comment early on your fellow Clear's Regional Organizers' discussion posts.

Remember, we best build a name for ourselves by helping and promoting each other. Done right this method of promotion can be useful for all sorts of things, not the least of which being to fill your schools.
More Next Time
As with anything worth doing, the devil is in the details. We will cover more of those details as we go, but this should give you a good idea how to get started with a few things that should do very well for you in all the various places that our Regional Organizers live. If we can make it work here in Maryville, it will work just about anywhere.
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