56 - If Your Martial Arts Website Developer Can't Answer This Question... Run! - Martial Arts Marketing For Martial Arts Business

56 – If Your Martial Arts Website Developer Can’t Answer This Question… Run!

The term ‘high-converting martial arts website’ is often spouted amongst web developers without the expertise to back it up. If your gut check spells doubt, this question will reveal if they're worth their salt.



  • The one ‘traffic test’ question that every martial arts website developer should pass
  • Why a high converting martial arts website can make or break your marketing
  • Your real problem beyond marketing
  • How to get the BONUS PDF – 20 Questions To Ask Your Web Developer Before Investing In A New Martial Arts Website



Hey, this is George Fourie, I’m doing a quick Facebook live experiment. I want to talk about the one question you should ask your web developer and if they can’t answer it, I reckon you should run.

And I’ve put together 20 other questions, a bit of a report – I’ll explain how you can get a hold of that, but I just want to talk about this one thing, because one thing I noticed, especially talking to a lot of web developers, and I guess just paying attention to things happening in the martial arts industry is, there's a lot of advice that just gets thrown around.

Thrown around like it’s knowledge, like it’s something that people actually know and they know what to do, but then, when it actually comes to the crocs of doing it, it’s just being heard from somewhere, or it’s just been read in a book, so it can't actually be applied.

And it costs you money at the end of the day. And it comes down to conversions and look, if you've listened to a lot of my podcasts or videos, I'm always going on about conversions, because the truth of the matter is, most school owners that I speak to don't have as much as a marketing problem, they’ve just got a conversion problem.

They're doing a lot of things: they're putting stuff out on Facebook, they're putting stuff out on YouTube, on their websites, but they're not getting the results. So it’s not really the marketing as much – look, obviously yes, marketing can be fine tuned and strategy and all that, but it really comes down to the actual conversion.

And the reason I carry on about conversions is the numbers make such a big difference. If you think of – and I always refer to this: if you get a 100 people going to your website, and you get 2 students from that, that's a 2% conversion. And depending on what the students are worth for you, let’s say your lifetime student value is $1500, or $2000 – let’s say it’s $1500: that's $3000 from a 100 website visits.

So if you had to double those conversions to 4% – it seems like 2%, but it’s 4%, that means an actual $3000 for every 100 visits you get on your website. And that's from a 100 visits to your website, or to one page.
So think if you start optimizing all your pages and everything that you do and you just make these little conversion improvements on your website. So that's… let’s say you push it from 2% to 4% – that's an extra $3000 this month, that's times 12, that's $36,000 over the year, times 5, that's another $150,000. So you can see where I'm getting at: it’s all about the conversions, right?

So the question you should be asking your web developer is: have they spent their own hard earned cash to drive traffic to their own martial arts website?

Because if they haven't done that, then how the hell are they building you a high converting website? Right?

Because if you haven't felt that pain, that pain of putting together your website and going to a place like Google, which is probably the biggest reveal of them all, and start spending money and sending people to your website and watching your dollars, your wallet get bruised and watching zero results – so watching no results and no results and you don't know what's going on. And if you haven't done that, then there's no way in hell that you can be building somebody a high converting website.

So getting back to the conversions side: if you haven't actually spent money and driven traffic to a website, then how can you actually optimize it and things that we are seeing right now, it’s not normally the first take.

And I think this is where people get it wrong is, I mean, when we build a website, we go to the point of interviewing the client, talking to the school owner, what's their strengths, what's their values, what's the market like – and then we go and we write out the copy. We do that first, before we do any design. Because it’s about the sales message, it’s not about the design.

So the problem is that you get web developers and they focus on the technical aspect and the pictures. And they don’t understand the sales proposition and they don't understand the fact that there's got to be a conversion element.

So that's what it really comes down. If somebody is not doing that themselves, then they can't be giving you the advice, or be copying other people and other designs, which people do and giving that off as their own expertise and think that you're going to get a result. Because chances are – and we do this all the time, we build a website to the best of our ability and then as soon as we start sending traffic to it, we realize that we've got to make adjustments. So that's when the real work starts, the real work is not actually developing a website that converts off the bat; the real work is, now that it’s built, now that traffic is going to it, all right: now do the numbers talk and do we need to optimize it?

I hope that helps in any way. Like I said, this is a bit of a Facebook live experiment.

I am walking off an injury in the middle of the bush. I've got another 20 questions. If you are looking at getting a new website, or you've got questions for a web developer, I've got a PDF with 20 questions that you can ask a web developer before you go ahead. It will give you a good idea of where their mind is at, OK? Are they somebody that studied programming, that I did initially and did not actually go to the lengths of understanding the conversions afterwards, or are they coming from a marketing perspective, thinking about strategy and then doing all the tech side.

martial arts websites

VIEWER QUESTION: Greg, what if you do it yourself?

Greg, I guess that really depends on the level of skill you have with web development. If that's what you've got to do, if it’s because of cash flow, then by all means. But you will have to put in some time to learn about conversions, to learn about what makes a website convert and be prepared to spend a lot of money on the testing.

That's where you could probably save in the long run, is it’s probably the one thing where people try and take a big shortcut right off the bat, because it’s a lot easier to pay $300 a month for a website, then it is to pay 3,4 5 grand. But then, I'm not saying that the 3,4,5 grand is always the best route, because I see people charging that and then again, what we just spoke about is they're not considering the conversion; they're considering the flash. The flash stuff that makes them as web developers feel good, but sucks for the client, because the client can't get results from that.

I hope that helps. If you want the PDF, wherever you're watching this, just drop the number 20 in the comments and I’ll send the PDF to you, it’s just a bit of a write up. 20 questions that you can ask any web developer, it will give you a bit of an insight. Also, perhaps if you're doing it yourself, it will give you some feedback on what you need to be looking at for yourself in your own development.

Awesome – cool, thanks for watching, speak soon – cheers.




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George Fourie
