If you do NO other marketing on the Internet, you should at least do this ...

Make it easy for potential students to find your martial arts school on the Internet

Dear Martial Arts School Owner,

As I hope you realize, almost everyone is going to the Internet to find local businesses -- including martial arts schools. In fact, it won't be long before the Yellow Pages are dead (if it hasn't already happened in your community), having been completely displaced by the use of online search.

Therefore, it is extremely important for your businesses to be easily found online.

But, unlike what most business owners think, putting up a website should not be your number one priority. In other words, developing an online presence for a local business should NOT start with a website.

Instead, you should initially focus your Internet strategy on making sure your business is accurately listed in all of the local search engines, local search directories, and local online phone directories.

See, the way people search online for a local business within a few miles of their home is completely different than how they search for a national business.

To search for a national business, people are looking for company websites. But, when searching for a local business, they might be just looking for a phone number, an address, or a listing of businesses in a particular category.

To meet this need, an entire new industry has emerged called Local Search, which includes such players as Google Maps®, Yahoo Local®, MSN Live Local®, Superpages.com®, YellowPages.com® and DexOnline®.

These companies exist solely to assist people in finding local businesses in their community. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that your business is accurately listed in all of them.

Here are the problems

To have your martial arts school accurately listed with the local sites is fraught with problems.

First, it is a lot of confusing and time-eating work. You have to:

• Identify all the companies which submit your business data
• Find the web page on the Internet at which you can make your submission
• Type your business data into the form at each web page you find
• If any information changes, re-submit your data to make sure it is up-to-date

Second, through manual submission you can only submit a small subset of the data you want listed about your business.

Why? Because these companies are really interested in your paid advertising. So, they offer a limited free submission as a lead generator for their "enhanced" paid service (you might want to submit your business data to one of them and see how quickly you get a call).

Therefore, via these free submissions, the local search sites end up with incomplete data about your business.

The Solution to these problems

The solution we have developed is an eLocalBiz Profile that serves as a central master repository for your business data . . . . . . that we submit to the largest network of local search engine partners in the industry

Here is how our eLocalBiz Profile works:

1. You complete our online form that includes 26 fields of data about your business (products sold, services offered, hour of operation, languages spoken, payment methods and much more) and submit a digital version of your logo
2. We review your submission, correct obvious mistakes, reformat your logo for optimal viewing on the Internet, and add keywords specific to your business category
3. We use the data and logo from your submission to create an online business profile page which resides on our online directory. In many cases, this profile - because it is so optimized for the search engines - can actually show up higher in organic search results (e.g., Google, Yahoo) than your website.
4. We submit your data via a national online data aggregator to over 85 local search sites (representing over 90% of local searches).
5. You can modify your business data at any time using our online form and we will update your online business profile and resubmit your data to the local search sites.

The benefits of an eLocalBiz Profile

Here are the two reasons why having an eLocalBiz Profile for your local business is so important:

Ensures that all of the most important local search sites have complete and accurate information about your business - so that:

• No matter where a potential customer is looking for information on the Internet, they will find your business and the information will be correct.
• The local search sites will rank your business higher in their listings (when a local search site has incomplete and inaccurate information about a business, they are less inclined to position that business prominently in their listings).

Provides a web page about your business that delivers the following:

• An online business presence with complete an accurate information about your business that is optimized for the organic search engines -- which also includes your logo and a map showing the location of your business
• Another way for people to find your business beyond the local search site
• An external link to your website (if you have one) which does two things:
  • Provides another way for people to click through to your website
  • Increases the ranking of your website with the search engines (Google, especially, uses external links to determine rankings)

Make an eLocalBiz Profile the starting point for your local Internet presence

No matter what other marketing you do on the Internet, an eLocalBiz Profile should be the foundation of your Internet strategy.

To get started, just click on the link below to access our secure online order form.

Once you've submitted this form, you'll be taken to another page where you can submit your business data via an online form and upload a digital version of your logo, if you have one.

We look forward to providing the foundation of your efforts to be easily found by your potential customers on the Internet.

Committed to your school's growth,

Al Oelschlaeger