Eran Galperin - May 20, 2016

The Underbelly of Gym And Martial Arts Sales

When building your gym’s marketing, there’s a basic conflict for every gym owner. On one hand, they opened a gym or martial arts school because they love the sport and art they train in, and would like to make it as accessible as possible to people in their community. On the other hand, they are now running a business with their livelihood on the line.

From a business perspective, gym owners are worried about their bottom line. From the sports-fan and instructor perspective (which not every gym owner is), the goal is to provide the best experience and value to gym members.

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Recent Articles

Eran Galperin - March 24, 2016

Most Gym Websites Suck, But They Don’t Have To

As someone who moved a lot and likes to travel, I find myself searching for gyms in new places quite often. My first contact with a gym is typically through their website, and thus I’ve already seen a lot of variety in gym website design. Granted, it’s mostly BJJ schools websites, as that is the sport I train (with a few MMA gyms thrown in the mix).

Your school website being the first point of contact with many potential visitors is something we already covered before, when we polled 250+ people on how they found their current gym. And yet, too many gym websites do not do a good job representing their owners.

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Eran Galperin - March 4, 2016

Why We Use Stripe For Payments

A story recently broke out about National Fitness Financial non-payment to gym owners. National Fitness is a gym management software, not unlike our own, but one big difference is that they handle billing and collections directly, as it would appear from the article.

I cannot comment on the exact situation at National Fitness as they haven’t released a formal response yet, however it brings up a point that we often discuss with our customers – how we handle billing on behalf of gyms using our system.

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Eran Galperin - February 26, 2016

5 Reasons you should be using social media for your gym

Social media has pervaded our daily lives to the degree that you’ll be hard pressed to find a member of your gym who doesn’t use it at all. Over 90% of young adults (18-29) and 2/3 of all Americans, use social media in some way.

Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram provide you with a great opportunity to reach and interact with your gym members and potential visitors, for a relatively small investment of time and effort.

Most gym managers are aware that they can benefit from using social media, though it might not be clear to them what exactly they should be getting out of it. Let’s go over the main reasons you should be using social media for your gym:
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Eran Galperin - February 18, 2016

How to Make a Referral Program Your Gym’s Most Powerful Marketing Tool

Member referrals are an extremely valuable source for finding new members for your gym. When we analyzed how people find martial arts schools, 21% of people found their current gym through a referral. However, 41% of people decided to visit their gym for the first time based on a referral – This means that an additional 20% of people looked for an opinion about a potential gym from someone they know, before trying it out.

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Eran Galperin - January 31, 2016

How to Build a Curriculum for Your Martial Arts School

If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated or burnt-out on coming up with lesson plans week after week, you’re in the right place. 

Here’s the sad truth:

A structured curriculum for classes is missing from too many martial arts schools…

Instead, the most common approach is the “technique of the day” — where an instructor shows a few random techniques during class, often without any unifying theme or relation to previously taught material.

If they’re more diligent, instructors sometimes might prepare a week or two worth of material in advance…

But is that enough?

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Eran Galperin - January 23, 2016

SEO For Martial Arts Gyms (2019)

In my previous article, I covered the main acquisition channels for new members at martial arts gyms. It may or may not surprise you that search engines accounted for a whopping 46% of new gym members. If you add map services such as Google Maps to it, which is another form of search, that comes to a staggering 63%. That means that on average, almost 2 / 3 of your member acquisition will arrive via online search.

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Eran Galperin - January 8, 2016

How People Find Your Martial Arts Gym

The survival and growth of a martial arts gym is tied closely to the influx of new members. Members pay the bills, and without a steady flow of new ones, a school cannot grow or even maintain its current status, as there is a constant churn of existing members.

To understand how prospective members might find your place, we ran a survey on Reddit’s BJJ community. Being that the results are from an online community, you would expect the data to somewhat prefer online acquisition channels. However, I believe it is still representative of how most people conduct their martial arts school search.

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