Who is Doing Your Talking online?

When doing your social media, make sure you know or your online marketer knows what he or she is doing. This is a crucial time in the Social Media marketing game right now. Everyone is still learning and gathering evidence and statistics as we go in this new marketing frenzy.

More than likely if you are a busy school owner, you may assign the bulk of the social marketing to someone else in the school, or you may have hired someone or even another company! You must remember, this person is representing you as a person and your business. They will be in charge of your online voice and personality. Effictively managing a social media marketing strategy takes many hours of work and dedication and organization. Social media allows you to directly interact with your consumers. You want to make sure your conversations are going smoothly and portray you as you would like.
While your teenage computer guru in your martial arts class may seem like the prime candidate to do your social networking for you after school for a few hours a day, it is not that good of an idea.
Unless you know for sure the student can handle the latest news form the business aspects of what is happening on the internet, or what is the best way to make your posts attract attemtion if you decide to do a Facebook ad, then let the kid do it.
A social media marketing professional will know what is cool and what is crap with marketing online, especially with the new Google Panda algorithm formula that is used now to compute the ranking of the Google's search engine page results.

The new cool things to do is to have:
1. Multiple account management tools
2. More than one account may be managed and linked together
3. Or, assign different administrators to one account, i.e. at work, so many people may post on the same account
4. Use Url shorteners and even custom Url shorteners
5. Always monitor, but be cool about it.. don't push it
What is Crap online?
1. Auto creation of users to have a higher following
2. Extensive retweet scheduling : automated tweets of the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over....(Bulk tweeting; if a person sends 10 tweets in less than a minute, it's automated)
3. don't follow someone since they followed you, check them out first.
4. Don't feed tweets from other sources if you have over 140 characters. Facebook has up to 450 characters and the rest is lost on your Twitter Stream.
What is Cute online?
1. It's a fine line here. It's cute to link your websites together and your blog to these social networking sites. It is cool if you don't pay that much attention on the networking sites, but Crap if you do not pay attention to them at all!
2. Tweet scheduling can be cute if you have different time zones, but do not spam your messages.

The outook for social media marketing is expanding daily. The consumers are using mobile devices even more and this is changing and expanding the way we are marketing with social media more everyday.
Your social marketing is to create a more dominant social presence on the web. You can create a higher Google Search results by having more websites and profiles.

"Positive or negative energy is exchanged like a fair trade, the more you give, the more you receive."

Energy is something we all want plenty of. Positive energy is always possible when we have a positive disposition or outlook. There are many things we can say about energy. It is constant. It can power a city and comes in many, many forms.
According to the law of conservation of energy, the total energy of a system remains constant, though energy may transform into another form. The technical laws of physics dictate that. Energy cannot be made, but changed or exchanged, but don't think that positive energy is only for the select few. Everyone can build their own foundation of positiveness with self discipline. Above all, don't waste your energy by being negative. It will just come back to you in a negative way. Be productive with your energy. Here are some ways you may show your positive energy:
1. Creating Positive Energy:  There are several ways to do this. YOu may choose to simply do yoga meditation or positive thinking will create positive energy.
2. Be aware of your energy: Try to not be negative and stay more on a positive level with your mind set.
3. Surround yourself with positive people:  The number one thing to remember is to embody what you want to attract. Focus on your strengths and meditate on a regular basis to really stay focused on these strengths to bring up mood levels.
4. Stay away from negative people: These people have no energy or it is all negative. They zap your positive energy leaving you drained. These people are the "sob sisters", "the blamer", "the drama queen", or "the constant talker", etc.
5. Design an Energy-Aware Approach to Diet, Fitness, and Health: Add  physical exercise and eat foods that will energize your body. 

Necessary

“Dreams are necessary to life.” Anais Nin -

What are the true necessities to life? There are many different opinions many people have. Some believe there are only are only four necessities to sustain life.

These four things are physical and are:

1. food
2. water
3. shelter
4. oxygen

These may keep a body alive, but they may not keep your mind healthy. One must have other things in life to maintain life as a human being. All life is not created equal. Amoebas, a single celled animal, don't think or love, therefore can't believe in much of anything. All they require is food, water which is also their shelter and oxygen. But we are not amoebas, we are much more complicated than that. We, as human beings must have something more in which to survive. We must have:

1. love
2. happiness
3. faith
4. confidence

Enrolling in Martial Arts can have a great deal with inspiring confidence in ourselves. Giving us the faith we need to keep working hard to get to our goals. Then we will be happy with ourselves with the achievements we accomplish. Often we share these accomplishments with our family and friends whom we love.

Is Martial Arts a necessity of life? It depends on who you may ask. If you look at it in this way, it could be the most essential part of your life! It gives you the motivation to do your best each and everyday. Martial arts gives you the confidence to go for your dreams, no matter what those dreams may be, whether it is to be an engineer or a ballerina or a black belt, you know you can do it if you really work hard enough to do it!

Martial arts feeds our mentality to keep us striving for more in our everyday lives, motivating to become more than what we were yesterday. Martial arts also teaches us respect for our elders and our family. Which in return, we receive the love we need as humans. If we didn't receive love and affection, we would turn into destructive and hateful people. Martial Arts is not about being destructive, it is about self-defense.

To keep your life down to the necessities, just remember the basics you need to stay happy and healthy. Eat the right foods, drink lots of water, practice your martial arts daily, respect your family and friends, and this will keep your faith and confidence within yourself, as well as keeping your physical self strong and healthy too!

by Marty Penate

Marketing on Twitter

Marketing on the Internet can be ‘Tweet’

Over the past few months we have been covering innovative ways to market your martial arts school on the Internet and increase your SEO without spending money to do it, just maybe a little bit of your time. This month, we will be sharing some insights on how to utilize a popular Internet site called Twitter. On Twitter you post tweets. What is a ‘tweet’? A ‘tweet’ is a micro-blog that you can post on a social Internet application called Twitter. Twitter allows you to connect and interact with fellow users easily and in real time, but with no more than 140 characters. That is why it is called micro-blogging.

There are corporations that have Twitter accounts that use it in addition to advertising their specials or contests. Bigger companies even have people devoted to simply maintaining the company’s Twitter and/or other online applications. Depending on the size of your martial arts school, you may not have to hire someone to do all of that for you. You may want to have one of your staff team designated to oversee the applications for you when you are too busy. Have someone you trust be able to use the system and enter with the password. That is why it may be a better idea to assign the account to your school’s name and make it a business account (so to speak) and your school will have the recognition on the web.

The Twitter application has lists you may organize your followers with. You create new lists and customize these lists to whatever suits your needs. Categorize your students, potential students, night classes, day classes, etc. and put your followers where you see fit. This way you may access them easier and faster!

There are so many other applications you may use with Twitter, such as uploading your pictures to your Twitter account. Even though Twitter is really a streamline of information consisting of micro-blogs of 140 characters or less, how does one post pictures? The application called TwitPic is used in conjunction with Twitter. You upload a picture and if you choose, it will show a URL address in your timeline and automatically post the words, “a new picture has just been added,” with the URL address to click on the link. People can click on the URL and it will take them to your picture. The advantage of this is when you come back from a tournament or demonstration and the pictures will be seen by many people and can be retweeted by your followers to their friends or followers. This can create a viral effect and may get you more followers of people you don’t know yet! That is the idea behind Twitter.

If you would like to start up, here’s how:

1. Go to Twitter.com and click, “Get Started—Join!”

2. Choose a user name, such as your school’s name or yours

3. Next, click ‘skip’ (don’t worry about signing up your friends yet

4. click on ‘Settings’

5. Update your name, Time zone, Location

6. Go to the ‘Devices’ tab check the box under your phone # and ‘save’

7. you will get a 6 letter code

8. On your cell phone, create a new address book entry called ‘Twitter’ and use 40404 as the phone number (for US)

9. Send the 6 letter code as a text message to Twitter. You should get a confirmation text back from Twitter.

10. Now your account is set on both your phone and the computer!

Now all you need to do is find your friends on Twitter. You may be surprised to find out how many of them are using Twitter. Or find many businesses and entertainment or news and media companies to follow to keep up with the latest news on Twitter at home or right from the palm of your hand.

Twitter for my cell phone, really? Tweeting on your cell phone is similar to using the SMS system but you are texting to all of the people that are following you, not just one person! It is something like texting on a CB radio to the people only that band and channel at that time, only this has a worldwide outreach capability. Twitter is a great tool for personal use and for business, especially if you have your friends and students and your staff on board with it. If you have many students following you, and you go to a tournament or an outing, you may send a tweet on your cell phone and your students that have it on theirs will all receive that same notice, at home or on their cell.

You may customize it so you may choose whose tweets are sent to your cell phone, so your phone won’t go crazy all of the time with posts from your Twitter account.

There are several ways to get followers to your Twitter page. Twitter widgets can be placed in strategic places like your school’s main website. You may need to contact an AMS consultant to have this done properly for you. But the widget enables you to see what is happening on Twitter without you having to leave your school’s website at all! Other people when visiting your site may also see the Twitter widget and click on it. When they do, the link takes them to your Twitter page. If that person is logged on to Twitter, they may choose to follow you.

The Tweet button, which is not to be confused with the Twitter widget, may be placed on your website or other websites too! It is just a simple blue button and when pushed, takes the person to your Twitter homepage. There the person may choose to follow you if they are already signed up on Twitter.

There are some tips for tweeting which are:

1. Tweet often and tweet something interesting. Do not tweet that you just got up and have to brush your teeth. Really? Tweet about your school’s activities and accomplishments or news about martial arts.

2. Check your ‘@’ replies to see if anyone is directing messages towards you.

So, if you have been registering and opening several of these social networking applications for your martial arts school and/or your professional self, you should link these up and have your blogs updates at the same time to save you time. You have the option to choose which ones to be connected. You may link up your (ex:)Youtube and Twitter and MySpace but not your LinkedIn, or you may have them all linked up. You can decide. By linking them together, you lose the chance one becomes dormant or inactive. If you have several online social applications, make sure you have them under one name. This will increase your SEO on the Internet. If someone is looking for a great martial arts school to go to, yours will be several of the top ones that pop up!

If your school needs a good website, you can call 1-800-275-1600 and an AMS consultant can help you get started to set up your website now! You can get started to market by utilizing the web in addition to your regular marketing right away!

Marketing on FACEBOOK

Innovative FACEBOOK Marketing

by Martha Nelson

If you are one of the very few people in the world that doesn't have a Facebook account, now is the time to sign up! If you do have a Facebook account, please read on. I am an avid social marketer and I have learned much from doing research and would like to share with you about using this wonderful social networking application to help market your martial arts school and help bring it to the next level!

First, you must create a Facebook page especially for your martial arts school. You may do so by adding an additional page from your personal profile, or you may create a separate account with another email address and make sure you identify with Facebook that this page is a business selling services. This way you may promote your school with a 'LIKE' instead of adding friends. If you have a Pro-Shop, make a separate page for it as well. You can promote these products online via Facebook, and show the pictures online using your students wearing them in combat and sparring practices. There are many ways to use Facebook to advertise sales on particular items that your students may use with upcoming events such as tournaments, exhibitions, and fundraisers.

The 'Create an Event' that you can do on Facebook like you do with your AMSweb page is a great way to also promote any event you have. You can post new Events on your school's Facebook page and invite all of your students and potential students to all of your events and have the RSVP responder so you know approximately how many will be coming. You may put your school's home website inside the body of the text of the Event notice to everyone may link to the details of the actual event. One simple idea to make an event of one night have an exhibition and have potential students come to watch your students perform. If they sign up for lessons that night, their first two weeks of lessons will be free with a free uniform! The posibilities are endless.

This social networking tool is so powerful, fortune 500 companies, such as Anheuser-Busch is using Facebook to advertise to consumers in a different way using it as an interactive tool. The company is inviting its million fan base from its Fan page to view the 3 superbowl images from the commercials and guess the storyline. Then the company is going to display a 4^th commercial only on the Internet to its fans on Facebook. It is contest related and game interactive.

When placing an event on your page, try to make a contest out of it. Make a contest for the potential students and your present students to name the upcoming winners of a particular event. Such as, 'Who will be the winner of the most funds raised?” or “Who will break the most boards at this year's Break-A-Thon?” or “Who will be the Champion at the Tournament?” Put online, “Who will be the winner?” On your fan page, post videos and pictures of ten of your students in action to make your page exciting. These pictures and videos will get posted on the streamline and your friends or fans will see them as soon as your upload them. If they comment, the pictures may be seen on their friends' streamline as well. Many people will see the action, they may or may not get curious about it and click the picture to see. But always try to keep your site interactive and exciting.

Here are some interesting facts and research statistics about Facebook. There are over a half a billion Facebook users worldwide and 60% of them sign on daily. That means over 250,000,000 people sign on to Facebook everyday. It has minimal public access, so your data is protected from outside sources. The quizes you take as fun time quizes are actually marketing tools to help the people that do advertise on Facebook, are better able to target market the consumers by knowing more about who to target by having more information about each person that is enrolled in Facebook. These quizes find out people's likes and dislikes, your career, your personality, your gender, income level, etc. Facebook has a potential of an 8 X ROI advertising potential if done right. It is not easy however, if it was you would have more advertising competitors on Facebook. So, being not so easy is more to your advantage to advertise on Facebook once you know the tricks to doing it.

Spending your money on Facebook ads can be very tricky and maybe expensive, but you can set your limits to your spending per day. You can spend as little as $10.00 a day or an unlimited amount, it is up to you. The estimated reach to people on Facebook is at least 134,052,720. (I pulled this number from my own advertising campaign page.) The ads on Facebook are very simple. They have a title, which is only 10% of importance according to research. It has an image, which is very important. So important, it has 70% relevance to your ad according to reseach done by Facebook. The description or the body text of your ad is the remaining part of your ad. It is under your image and has 20% of importance. The study Facebook took 1000 men and 1000 women and displayed a series of ads advertising basically the same thing. Over 70% of the study clicked on the image with girls having clevage, 10% clicked recognizable brands, 10% on blended images, and the other 10% on everything else. So, this study tells us that pretty girls showing their chest is actually the best image to use to get the best results when advertising. (Sorry, facts are facts.)

For the content of your title you should have the name of your school, a Facebook feel, and be very simple. The body text of your ad must give results for the consumer. Such as, Become a black belt; Lose Weight; Get in Shape; etc. Remember your 'call to action' and also mention you have a limited number of spots left or have an urgency posted in your ad, such as 'Offer expires this week.'

Things to remember about advertising on Facebook:

.01% return ratio is excellent

Numbers is the advertising game

CPM=cost per 1000 impresseions

CPC=cost per click

23. is the house rate

The 'Ninja techniques to lower your costs of advertising on Facebook are to choose the right image for your ad. Images online is worth 70%! Remember this when you are thinking of spending your hard earned doallars! How many times are you seeing pretty girls in tank tops online? A picture is worth a thousand words and maybe thousands of dollars! Critique what time of day your ad is being displayed and where. If your school is in Texas, you don't want people in China viewing it at midnight. Check out the 'responder profiles report.' It can tell you things about the people that have responded to your ads, like what books they read, tv shows they like, and what interests they have.

Also, Facebook does not cap how many times someone views your paid ad. So, tighten your group with separate campaigns of your ad. Stop running your ad if it is not getting clicked and tweak it and try it again. People often change what and how they do things on Facebook.

If your ad does well, later flip it to CPM. This way you will get more impressions and Facebook will be guaranteed money and will cut you a deal. You may spend less, but watch it or you could lose money. Be patient and keep it simple. Follow these steps and you just may become a marketing guru on FACEBOOK!

Analyze your Internet Marketing

Analyze your Internet marketing!

Now that you are placing your web address in key places on the Internet and have opened up more doors in social networking sites, what would be the best way for you to analyze all of this crucial data?

AMSonline has several ways to analyze your marketing data. AMSonline gives you reports from your email marketing and your telephone incoming calls and what made them call you. But, what about when you place ads on the Internet, or your website address link on your blog or your link on your LinkedIN profile page? How can you manage to maintain the data that brought a potential student to your site from another site? How long did that person stay on your site? Maybe it was the ad you placed on a page they clicked to bring them to your school’s website with the pay per click option you purchased. Then you may ask, “If I purchased an ad, which sites should I consider putting my ad on to get the most visual exposure?”

Well, there are over 188 social networking website applications on the Internet right now and the numbers keep growing. So, you may want to know which website is the most popular and would most likely create the most impact. To date, the top site for networking socially is Facebook. The second one is MySpace and third is Twitter, and LinkedIn is forth and the list goes on.

There are several new applications you may download and several are actually free for you to use. I will start with Google Analytics and its additional products you may find useful. What is Google Analytics? Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, and how they explored it, and even how you may want to enhance your visitors’ experience. This is great for improving your website’s return on investment and it is absolutely free! Just log on and sign up for it.

There are some things you must do so the data may be collected from all of your websites and blogs you may have. You must place the automatically created HTML code on your websites when opening up the profiles for each website you have on your Google Analytics account. Google Analytics works with great AdWords, which is an advertisement application by Google. You may log on to this site and purchase ads for your business to be placed on various websites or on the Google search engine pages. It has an option of local, national, international ad spots. You just put your zip code in and select a mileage radius, and the computer will keep your ads localized if you choose. You may decide to pay per click or per number of impressions. The site has the details of payment options of course if you decide. There is a sign up fee for this site. The AdSense website also works with the AdWords and Google Analytics as well, but this site is made to make you money with your site. All three of these sites are run on a website server, so there is no installing discs, or data to lose once you have it. It is a web-based software system, just like our AMSonline system.

If you have an intranet or internal network or a security firewall that prevents you from using the Google Analytics system, you may want to check out Urchin 7.0. Urchin 7 is just like Google Analytics, only you install it on your computer system. You may use both of the software applications together to give you the best data reports possible. There are some things Urchin cannot do that Analytics can.

There are other website analytic software programs out there you may want to check out. You may find one that may best suit your needs or one you may find easier to understand. There are DoshDosh.com, Onestat.com, LyrisHQ.com, Mineful.com, Smartfocus.com, data marketing applications.

Another useful tool that is up and coming is the Alexa Toolbar that helps in the

e-marketing and advertising business to bring up your websites Alexa rating. Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon. The Alexa rating is the level of traffic a website accumulates from other computers that has the Alexa Toolbar installed. The rank is based from three months of traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users.

So, what does this all mean? If your website or blog has a high Alexa rank, someone that wants to place an ad on the web may see your website or blog as a high traffic place, or as highly viewed. Therefore, your site would be a good value for advertisers to place an ad there, and you could actually make some money and increase your sites popularity even more! On the flip side, to place an ad for your school, you would desire a site with a high Alexa rating to get the maximum exposure.

The only downside to Alexa is that it is not totally accurate. The Alexa Toolbar must be installed on every computer in the world to make it so. So far, not everyone knows about it. Even if everyone did, would everyone install it? So, how can you increase your Alexa Rating?

1. Install the Alexa Toolbar.

2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. (According to some, a click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.)

3. Encourage others to use the AlexaToolbar.

4. Write only quality content

5. Use the Pay per click campaigns for advertising

6. If you have a popular post that does get traffic, put the Alexa widget on it!

7. Ask your local Cyber Café owner to install the Alexa Toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers.

These are just a few tips to getting more out of your Internet marketing, now that you have opened up many social networking applications and/or blogs and your main websites for your school. Now let’s make sure people surfing the web know your pages are out there! Now you can know exactly how many people know you are there and what your return on investment may be! You may then enter the final result of this important information into your AMSonline system and it will compute all of your marketing data for you to give you a complete financial return on investment report! To sign up for AMSonline with NO sign up fees, simply log on to www.ourams.com and register or call 1-800-275-1600 today!

Internet Marketing in a Nutshell

Internet Marketing in a Nutshell

By Martha Nelson

The Internet is everywhere! We walk around with our cell phones to try and find a WiFi connection in shops or restaurants. How crazy is that? Companies rent billboard signs just to put their web addresses on it. The Goodyear blimp flashes a website across its bottom after the ad sometimes! WE all use the Internet most everyday. If you would rather be teaching than computing, AMSonilne can help you even though it is a computer web-based software you use on your computer. AMSonline can help you with everything.

After researching over many months about Internet marketing we discovered that the Internet is a very powerful marketing tool. Utilizing matching software systems such as AMSonline web-based management system and the AMSweb for your school’s website, it is so much easier to keep track of all of your marketing and spending while integrating everything. By having the AMSweb address of your school, you may link the address to many of the other websites you have. This way people can click the link and be spun right to your martial arts school’s website! This is the text marketing I mentioned in the past article.

If you haven’t signed up with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Yahoo Martial arts group, MSN, Reddick, Youtube, or Linked In, now is the time to do so. You are missing out on some valuable and free advertising you may not be utilizing to your full advantage. Especially if you sign up with the Youtube account, because you may upload your martial arts videos and embed them into your AMSweb Sensational website or your MySpace account. If you really know what you are doing with the editing software and the filming, you can even create your own infomercial of your own to put out on the Internet. Put your school’s web address even in the video! Place your video on your blog, or post the link on your status of your Facebook page. The video will play right on the page of whoever is your friend!

Let’s not forget about Twitter! Twitter has become a huge way to market your brand or school if it is done in a correct manner. First you must try to accumulate many followers and you may follow as many people as you would like to. There is a right way and a wrong way to market or post on Twitter. Twitter posts are micro-blogging, which means each post is 140 characters or less. As a school owner, you should post the different exciting events and happenings at your martial arts school. You may want a personal account as well as a business account exclusively for your school. There are many companies with a Twitter account.

You don’t have time to keep up with all of these different accounts and post on each one all of the time? No problem! You can link up all of the sites so you only have to post on one of them and the one post will automatically update all of them! How great is that? You can update your Twitter stream’s status with a new event and your Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Youtube accounts can be automatically updated too! So, even if you haven’t signed on to one of your accounts in a while, it will seem as though it is active with fresh updates. However, if you would like to not have your Youtube updated, but have the rest updated, you have that control. You can choose which ones will be updated automatically or not.

If you haven’t installed the Alexa toolbar for your computer, you should. It tells you which sites are the most popular sites to advertise on. So, if you do decide to spend money advertising on the web, you will be more informed to what sites to place your ads on. The Internet can be very overwhelming with over 188 social networking website applications and too many other websites to mention, how will you know where to put your ad for the best return on your investment. With the Alexa toolbar, the answer to that question becomes clearer. It will show what sites are top ranked and which ones are not.

There are several sizes and shapes of ads you may want to put on a particular site. Facebook has its own type of banner ad that is placed in the side panel of its application. Look for the option, “Create your ad” and follow the step by step instructions. Facebook alone, the estimated readers who can be reached, who live in the United States are 139,690,120 people.

You may want to choose placing an ad on the Google search engine. The best way to do this is to go the AdWords site on the Internet. This is a text ad when you Google something no the Internet and want the name of your school to come up in the ‘martial arts’ category within your zip code range. Google will usually charge a PPC fee (pay per click) and what you pay is determined what the CPC is (cost per click). You must bid on your cost per click fee and the person with the higher fee when the category is googled, will come up with the higher SERP (search engine results page). However, if you are active enough on the Internet, your SERP rating may be high enough not to have to spend any money for PPC ads. Just link up your web addresss to as many of your social networking sites and your school may come up many times on the Google search results page.

The other ways to market is to contact your local group coupon advertisers. It is usually the application called ‘Groupon’ or Living Socials’ or find out what is available in your area. Usually there is no, up-front costs and the consumer pays immediately for the goods before they even get the item or service. The company takes a commission from what is sold, and there must be a minimum sold in order to make a profit for the company offering such a discounted rate.

After utilizing all of this marketing on the Internet, you must keep track of it all the computerized way. How else? The best and easiest way is to sign up with Google Analytics. It is free and web-based. It works great with the AdWords in which you may have purchased some ads for the Google search engine or another site. Other similar softwar product are DoshDosh.com, Onestat.com, LyrisHQ.com, Mineful.com, Smartfocus.com, data marketing applications you may take advantage of.

The best part of doing all of this Internet marketing, once you get it started, it doesn’t take up that much of your time, nor that much of your money! But remember, to do this in addition to your traditional print marketing. Always put your web address on all of your traditional marketing as well as your phone number. Soon enough people will be calling or simply emailing you from the ads or your website from the Internet!