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How to promote a yoga studio online

Photo Taken of Ganges River in Varanasi, India (2005)

We love taking on clients that do business in niches that we are associated with and/or love their practices. Yoga is a great business with lots of potential to connect on a personal basis online. We would like to share with you our latest research, tips and conclusions on how to promote your local yoga studio:

A. WEBSITE CONTENT

1. Detailed content and focus on local

Make sure that you include a full list of all nearby cities and zip codes to ensure that you will target not just those searching for your “exact city” but locations nearby. You may even want to consider creation of city specific landing pages.

* make sure you have correct city based h1 tags, relevant meta descriptions and title tags describing your area and focus. For example – “Los Angeles Ashtanga Yoga Studio”

2. Gather email lists

Make sure that you ask your students to be listed on your email newsletter and send out regular news and updates about yoga to:

a. ensure that your students are kept in the loop
b. provide benefit to your students and not only ask them to signup or join a class (for example – asana of the week newsletter)
c. leverage word of mouth and sharing of newsletters by creating amazing content

3. Ask for reviews / testimonials

Why not show off your great reviews to new potential students or visitors to your studio or site? Ask you students to review you and share their thoughts with others. Great for enhancing your yelp and google places listing as well as on your website plus helps with organic and yelp rankings for more exposure.

4. Create a regular local giveaway (one month of classes)

Great for keeping your students on their toes. Try to have the giveaway related to writing, images, text, video or content creation. (For example – submit a picture of your favorite asana to pinterest)

5. Provide free content

We especially love video creation for promoting your own yoga business. All you need to do is get a tripod and use your digital camera to create class videos and short how to’s. Think about it this way – you are running “x” amount of classes a day so why not share them with others. Your students can use it on rainy days, you will be able to gather additional students and most importantly you are contributing to the vast online sharing ecosystem plus your business will benefit.

yogascenery

B. OFFLINE RELATED

6. Get listed on yoga sites

For example –

– http://www.yogadirectory.com/addURL.shtml
– http://www.yogafinder.com/entry.cfm
– https://www.findyoga.com/advertise
– http://www.yogatrail.com/
– http://www.yoga-centers-directory.net/Submissions.html
– http://www.yogaeverywhere.com/get-listed.html
– http://www.yogablisshub.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=%2Fsubmit%2F
– http://www.gratefulyoga.com/

PLUS – Local Yellow pages and get reviews to these listings:

– biz.yelp.com
– places.google.com
– local.yahoo.com
– citysearch.com
– foursquare.com
– hotfrog.com
– yellowpages.com
– superpages.com
– localeze.com
– facebook.com busienss page
– acxiom.com

7. Be social

Go on social networks and interact with yoga students, answer yoga questions and be in your local communities online.
(For example – use the “near:[city]” search operating in twitter search to find local people talking about yoga)

8. Join local meetups and business organizations

Search meetup.com and find local groups. They don’t need to be all about yoga. (or even sponsor a meetup)

9. Connect and partner with relevant side businesses (reiki, massage, etc)

Use linkedin and Google search to find businesses such as massage therapists and reiki practitioner’s to partner with. Don’t send them an email and hope for the best, Give them a call!

10. Leverage your existing base (friends, email list, family, etc)

Call you friends and family and you’ll be surprised by referalls and opportunities that may arise.

11. Guest Blogging for yoga magazines, sites and local city magazines

Show off your writing abilities will help you gain additional exposure:

For example –

– http://www.mindbodygreen.com/contribute
– http://www.elephantjournal.com/submit/
– http://www.flowyogamagazine.com/submit-articles/
– http://www.originmagazine.com/ (story ideas)
– http://spiritualityhealth.com/submission-guidelines
– http://www.yogamagazine.com/editorial-guidlines/
– http://www.yogajournal.com/general_customer_service/about/editorial_subs_guidelines/
– http://www.journalonweb.com/ijoy/
– http://www.yogatrail.com/yoga-poses/contest/
– http://theyogadiaries.net/submit-a-story/
– http://yogameditationhome.com/content-submission/
– http://fuckyeahyoga.tumblr.com/submit
– http://www.doyouyoga.com/contribute/submit/
– http://thepoetryofyoga.com/submit/
– http://www.ommagazine.com/contact-us/

12. Advertising

Advertise on sites such as facebook which have extremely specific targeting (by age, location, sex and interests – for example – 18-24 year old women, living in los angeles which like meditation)

13. Ask your customers what you can improve + Leverage user Q&A to create short videos

14. Create an Event

Create a free event and get locals to find out about you. Also submit to local newspapers and “event sites” such as eventbrite.

15. Create Promotions

Create a Livingsocial or Groupon promotion to get new students to know about your business.

Don’t forget, growing your business takes work. Compare it to the 1,000’s of hours it took you to learn and get great at yoga!

NAMASTE

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What Do Top SEO’s Say on Twitter? (Tag Cloud)

We wanted to see what the top SEO’s say on twitter (and here’s what we found)

Rand Fishkin


randfish

Barry Schwartz


barryswartz

Max Minzer


maxmizner

Wil Reynolds


wilreynolds

Danny Sullivan


dannysullivan

David Mihm


davidmihm

Jon Cooper


joncooper

Matt Cutts


mattcutts

Tools used to create:
– allmytweets – downloaded latest 3200 tweets while hiding replies and retweets
– tagxedo – added terms to tagxedo, profile pic of SEO’s and removed terms such as “mon-fri”, “jan-dec”, “http”

topseotagcloud

Hope you enjoyed this post.


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Reduce Spam on Web Forms

1. Restrict by IP – Know your customers and discard form completion from specific IP addresses.

2. Set minimum timer – If a form is completed within less than “x” seconds after load of original form, then flag for spammy bot.

3. Hidden form fields – Use CSS and Javascript to show bots additional fields and if they are filled out assume, bot had filled out form.

<input style="display:none;" type="text" name="email" value="" />

4. Irregular naming of form fields + Validate – Always validate user submissions and name your fields irregular but easy to recognize names.

5. Irregular text recognition – Filter out messages which contain spammy or irregular terms or multiple links.

If all else fails, use CAPTCHA

reducespamwebforms

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Tracking Completed + Problematic Contact Forms in Analytics

In this article we’ll show you a basic method to track your form submission with emphasis into fields filled out, fields not filled and problematic fields all input into Google Analytics using event tracking. With this data you’ll be able to gather conclusions, fix errors and remove unneeded fields.

event tracking fields

Setup Scripts

In our form pages, we will need to add the following 2 scripts in order to input information into Analytics

Script 1: Load Jquery

<script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.2.js"></script>

* please note that jquery MUST load before 2nd script PLUS make sure that your page does not have other jquery or conflicting loads of scripts.

Script 2: Javascript Event Tracking for Form

<script type="text/javascript">
(function($) {
$(document).ready(function() {
$(':input').blur(function () {
if($(this).val().length > 0) {
ga('send', 'event', 'contactf', 'completed', $(this).attr('name'));
}
else {
ga('send', 'event', 'contactf', 'skipped', $(this).attr('name'));
}
});
});
})(jQuery);
</script>

The above script reads your form and checks if length of each field in form is more than 0 characters. If field is empty, it sends an event tracking (using the latest universal analytics code) with the label “skipped” and the field name. If the field is not blank it will label the field in analytics event tracking as “completed”.

In addition, you will want to add the following to your form processing script

On script, if form was submitted correctly ->
<script>ga('send', 'event', 'contactf', 'completed', 'success');</script>

Else ->
<script>ga('send', 'event', 'contactf', 'completed', 'problemwithform');</script>

real-time-event-tracking

message-sent

See our Video How-To

* special thanks to Lunametrics for initial data and help with their article

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Intro to Custom Timelines in Twitter (+Tweetdeck)

In this article, we’ll explain and introduce you to Twitter’s custom timeline functionality. Custom timelines are a way for you to organize your twitter timeline into specific themes or topics that you choose instead of having a general timeline with everything. It’s a great way to focus a specific topic while sharing and growing an idea or subject.

In order to create and work with custom timelines you will need to use Twitter’s Tweetdeck:

Steps to add a new timeline

a. Login to Tweetdeck

Go to tweetdeck.com and login

tweetdeck

b. Add new timeline

Go to the left hand navigation, click on the “+” sign and click on “custom timeline” and “Create new” or edit existing.

custom-timeline

Name your custom timeline in box and add description

name-timeline

How to add tweets to timeline

option a – hover over desired tweet over arrow icon and drag to custom timeline.

option b – hover over desired tweet, click on “more” button and “add to custom timeline”, then checkbox the desired custom timeline name.

add-to-timeline

How to share custom timeline

In order to share custom timeline, click on share button. You can do the following:

a. Embed on website

Customize widget and copy and paste code into your website or blog

embed-timeline

b. See on twitter.com and copy url

view-timeline-twitter

* also can get embed code from twitter page

c. Tweet about timeline

tweet-about-timeline

That’s it. Let us know if you have any questions. We’ll be happy to help!

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How to run Analytics Experiments (A/B Testing) on WordPress

In our daily marketing scramble, we many times forget the importance of conversions and conversion rate and only focus on gaining new customerss. Due to this fact, we have setup in our own company a policy of always running tests on our clients’ websites.

a-b-testing-experiments

We have included below a simple step by step guide on how to setup A/B testing using WordPress and Google Analytics Experiments.

Step 1 – Business Goals

a. Think about what are your core conversions are (purchase of product, form filled out, newsletter joined, commented on blog, etc)

b. Define a goal in Analytics
If you have not defined a goal in analytics, see our analytics goals article

Step 2 – Define Experiment

Create variation page in wordpress by visiting the “Pages” -> Add New. Create your new variation page with the specific element you want to test and publish. Try not to test out too many changes on your pages.

add-new-page

* don’t forget to note the live url for later.

url-of-page

Step 3 – Setup Experiment in Analytics

Visit the Behavior -> Experiments page:

behavoir-experiments

a. Enter original page you want to test against (and click on start experiment)

start-experiment

b. Setup settings for Experiment

– name
– objective
– % of traffic to experiment on
– email notifications

step1-experiments

c. Enter URL of Variation Page

* you can add more than one variation if desired
* check previews to make sure you are defining the correct pages

step2-experiments

d. Add code to site pages

step3-experiments

You will need to add the correct analytics code to begin your experiment. Follow the instructions below to proceed:

1. all pages must have analytics tracking code
2. the original page has to include additional code

Use the following format:

<?php if (is_page('') ):?>

<?php endif; ?>

Find the original page. edit the page in wordpress and look at url
“post=x” -> take the number and add to our code:


<?php if (is_page('x') ):?>

<?php endif; ?>

b. go to appearance -> editor -> header.php and paste the code with analytics
extra code right after the <head> tag and click on “update file”.

wordpress appearance editor


<?php if (is_page('') ):?>
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<?php endif; ?>

Step 4 – Complete and set experiment live

Verify that you have two check marks underneath “Experiment Code Validation” and click on “start experiment”

step4-experiments

That’s it! Let us know if you have any questions with A/B testing. We’ll be happy to answer your questions.