I had this discussion with a friend who opened his own gym and set up a webiste for it recently.
We discussed how to make his website popular which would help to boost his new business.
We haven’t had any mature plans yet.
(I can’t fell into sleep becasue I am still thinking of it now.)
How do people promote their websites? any suggestion, please?
Kind of difficult to do if one is using the web to promote a brick and mortor operation. Since the services is not available to everyone on the web.
Basically web promotion is not all that different than traditional print. You have to do your research to find out where people interested in your services are on the web. Then advertise at that location.
But as I mention before, because 1 gym can only offer their services to a certain geographic area, one has to be even more selective about the sites one advertise on.
A simple way is just to have to address clearly located on the site in text, and have the search engines record it. Of course make sure the related services are next to the address on the same page, so a relationship to service and geographic location is made. Or just submit the gym’s address to various yellow-pages directories on the web, and hope a larger search engine records it as a reciprocial link to increase its importance.
Yes, because my friend’s gym is near Shi-da, he focus on developing OLs and college students near Shi-da. We think of cooperating with students clubs to promote his business and website.
One positive side to team up with student groups is they will pass on information to their junior ones. Students have great potentials.
So where’s your friend’s gym? I might be interested in checking it out. Any contact info?
Sorry, off topic.
[quote=“ac_dropout”][…]
Basically web promotion is not all that different than traditional print. You have to do your research to find out where people interested in your services are on the web. Then advertise at that location.
[…][/quote]
Yes, I’ve tried something like this. “Where on the web could my target audience be? Oh, this forum looks interesting. Let’s write the admin. Hey, here’s another website which might appeal to potential buyers, let’s ask them about running our ads” and so on. Result: Complete waste of time. I still cringe when I think of it.
The simple truth is, people really interested in your services are typing something like “gym near shi-da” in their favourite search engine right now. They won’t be able to find you if you’re wasting your time trying to find them instead of simply signing up for Google AdWords (and whatever other search engine might be popular in Taiwan).
It gets even better: Most of the admins and webmasters interested in running ads will have already signed up with services like Google AdSense, making it easy for you to run campaigns on their sites without the need to contact them individually.
[quote=“kate.lin”]Yes, because my friend’s gym is near Shi-Da, he focus on developing OLs and college students near Shi-Da. We think of cooperating with students clubs to promote his business and website.
One positive side to team up with student groups is they will pass on information to their junior ones. Students have great potentials.[/quote]
Students are notoriously poor as well. 
If it is around shi-da and if you are targeting students, I would focus on getting opportunity to post advertising around the eateries and any retail location dealing with fashion in the area. You want to get the individual when they are most susceptible to messages of being image conscious and losing weight.
Hypermegaglobal is right about Adwords / Adsense. But I suspect you’re not going to get a lot of traffic from search engines (or anything else on the Internet) anyway. Treat the site as a showpiece - something to convince people, not to attract them.
Put up paper ads around Shi-Da. Market to the student unions (do they have those here?) and fitness / martial arts clubs at the university. Leave flyers in student bars. Advertise in student magazines. All the usual stuff. Curious people will probably take a look at the website, and then its job should be to make them come try it.
[quote=“hypermegaglobal”][quote=“ac_dropout”][…]
Basically web promotion is not all that different than traditional print. You have to do your research to find out where people interested in your services are on the web. Then advertise at that location.
[…][/quote]
Yes, I’ve tried something like this. “Where on the web could my target audience be? Oh, this forum looks interesting. Let’s write the admin. Hey, here’s another website which might appeal to potential buyers, let’s ask them about running our ads” and so on. Result: Complete waste of time. I still cringe when I think of it.
[/quote]
Depends on what it is you’re advertising about. Basically, you want to contact portal sites or content sites that are very active in your particular niche. This is the part that takes hours and hours of research and sifting through the whole web until your find that site you want to advertise at.
The problem I foresee with a gym at Shi-da and webmarketing is that the market is too small. Applying the 3% rule of advertising. Assuming you want 100 people to sign up, that mean you have to motivated 3000 to think about signing up. That’s about 100,000 impression that have to have been seen by people who are interested, That’s about 3,000,000 impression that needs to go out. That’s like more people than there are in Taipei City.
I banner exchange with porno sites—that really increases the traffic on my site. And since the cyber surfers usually already have their credit card number handy, makes them more likely to buy whatever I am selling.
yours in cyberbusiness,
Larry Flint Brian
I found my local gym by looking up creatine suppliers in Taichung… in a roundabout way I came across the gym because they put up lots of useful information about fitness etc. rather than just a ‘here we are’ site.
We manufacture CDs/vinyl and put together a large amount of information on how vinyl/CDs are made, how to get them sold, who to contact for distribution and licensing etc. This was all original copy that nobody else really had so we got a lot of hits from people interested in the processes and get quite a few orders into the bargain.
A gym is a pretty hard thing to promote using the Internet but I guess it’s possible. I think with all the fuss about search engine rankings and all the other nonsense everyone forgot that content is the biggest draw. I’m sure if the owner of the gym is willing to put time in there are lots of events that he can set up to get people talking about his place on discussion boards etc. This is what the aforementioned gym owner did and he seems to have done okay by it.
I see. There is usually a discussoin board giving positive feedback, right?
Perhaps if you show us an example of the site, there can be more suggestions made. Because right now we can only talk about the site and the promotion in the abstract.
Does your friend have a discussion board on this website? Where people can talk about fitness, health, food, drink, and other topics that would interest the people who would go to the gym? You can have a members only section, a section for photos of any events your gym runs etc. Then you can join other discussion groups like the bbs board at unis or look for say individual blogs talking about similar topics and post links to the discussion group. It is not as bad as posting “go to my website”, rather sharing info about another discussion group. Keep the board updated with new info so people will visit and share with friends.
And not about websites but have you considered the flier handout option, where people hand out fliers in the area near your gym? If the offer is good it may get faster results.
A private discussion board might be good once your friend has a bunch of regular members. A public discussion board is a terrible idea.
Seriously.
Forums are really hard to get going. If someone visits an empty forum, they won’t post. They will just leave, with a bad impression. For most business-website forums, what this means is that you and your friends spend weeks and weeks posting stuff on there under false identities, and then visitors figure it out in about thirty seconds anyway and leave with an even worse impression.
Don’t do it.
The general theme of this thread has been: don’t promote the website. It isn’t appropriate or worthwhile for this. Promote the business, in old-fashioned ways, and let the site just be a glossy flyer.
I can only give suggestions for things that worked for me, so they may not apply to a location-specific business. We posted on a lot of discussion boards related to our business. Many boards in Taiwan don’t let you have a direct link to your site which shows products or services for sale. So having another page means you can link that one. Maybe that page could be an info one rather than a discussion board, although for us the board works because people have a lot of questions about our products and it saves me writing a 10-page FAQ section.
In Taiwan, many people also use blogs as a kind of door for their product or service. You would need to search for sites that are related to your business, then post in their blog area. Whether this is worth the time for you or not is something you have to consider. I am very lucky, people write about us without me having to do it.
A lot of small businesses also advertise on yahoo auction, your friend could also try selling tickets to his gym there with a link to his site. People sell California fitness, swimming pool tickets etc there all the time, that is where we buy ours. There are tricks to selling there without being busted as a commercial venture.
I also found some frustrating problems with google adwords for posting in Chinese. The rules for posting in Chinese seem to be direct translation from English, which meant my product listings kept getting rejected cos they had the “offensive word” pee in them - which happens to be the main word in the Chinese for our product.
Again, whether these ideas will apply to your friend’s gym I really don’t know, but at least they may get you thinking.
[quote=“asiababy”][…]
I also found some frustrating problems with google adwords for posting in Chinese. The rules for posting in Chinese seem to be direct translation from English, which meant my product listings kept getting rejected cos they had the “offensive word” pee in them - which happens to be the main word in the Chinese for our product.
[…][/quote]
If you explain that the product name just happens to contain “pee”, they’ll put your ad back online. I had the same problem with something called “BS-Series”. 
To get back on topic, I’d also add the business to SkypeFind, it only takes a minute.