WrestlingGear.Com

Just Blog It

Just go ahead and write your blog posts, do what I am doing now. Sit down and write something and post it on your blog. It does not need to be a master piece with correct grammar and spelling (although you should just not ignore it completely).

My first blog post was written offline and violated that rule, but I wanted to try and put together something a little more special for my first post on marketing your wrestling team online.

As I mentioned in past blog postings, we'll be discussing many of the Web 2.0 marketing techniques that you can take advantage of for little or no cost. Web 2.0 is basically just a reference to the next generation of the internet so I am applying Web 2.0 marketing ideas to the next generation of website and internet marketing.

I will talk about the blogs that I subscribe and will be posting my favorite bookmarks for those to see and share with others. It really is cool what is out there for free.

If you have any comments or questions about blogs, post a comment under one of the blogs. If I don't respond in a day or so, give me a call at WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and I will look for the comment and write back to you in the comments section.

Next up we will talk about RSS Feeds and google read and other RSS readers that are available for free. What is cool about a RSS feed is if your recruits have their own blogs - they can publish their results to the blog and you can track them everytime their is an update to their blog. This way you could keep track of your key recruits with only a few mouse clicks.

High school wrestlers - these techniques should help you push out information to college coaches that they can subscribe to your RSS feeds that you can generate for your blog - usually by just enabling the RSS feeds on your blog. My goal is for next week for you to understand a RSS feed and illustrate how important a blog can be in your marketing efforts.

Basic html codes and icons to edit your blog postings

If you wind up creating a blog and start writing, chances are you will need to know a little bit of html programming. Or at least I should say if you know a little bit of html programming you can tweak your site a little more and control how the page looks.

Some basic codes I use are the new paragraph code, the bold code, the hyperlink code and the image code. When I first started out (and when I want to use a code I don't use too frequently). I look at this web page that has a bunch of commonly used html codes. None of these are too difficult to use if you have the time to play around with them.

Webmonkey Cheat Sheet

The options are to use the icons that are above your text box. A few icons you can use instead of the html code are icons like this bold tag  and the add an image icon here

One thing you do not want to use as a formating option is the underline icon - I did it now and hopefully you will not be too annoyed clicking on it thinking there is a hyperlink active with that text. In other words use Bold and CAPS to stand out. Don't use CAPS too often as people think you are screaming at them.

Rather then using all caps, you can increase the font size of headers and titles and sections to your blog postings. Normally blog postings are not too long that they need multiple headers and section titles. I try to not write too much on each blog posting.

Blogs are a great way to post quick notes about how your team is doing, updates on key recruits, what athletes are being recruited, how they are doing in off season tournaments, and just about any other news.

Blogs are easy to share information and organize it as well. Add tags to your post and blog.com will create a section for you. For example, look under marketing for the posts that relate to marketing. There will be more and more posts there for coaches and wrestlers to learn more about marketing themselves. The blog creates a blog roll for you based on the key words you type in.

Do you have albums to post online? Blog.com has a feature where you can add your own albums to your blog. We have several posted here about past shoe lines. We'll also talk about other photo hosting sites in the future. There are free places to create web albums and host your images for free.

Create a blog roll of top wrestling links. Hopefully wrestlinggear.com will make the cut. We were just added to intermatwrestle 's blog as a link in their blog roll. You can link to other blogs or other web sites you think your visitors will be interested in.

Archives - each month is organized so uses can go back and find an article you typed in a previous month. If you visit our other blog - http://www.illinoiswrestling.com and know we took photos at a tournament in December - the photos will be linked in that December section of the blog.

Syndication - for this you just need to check a box you want an rss feed or other feeds created so someone can put them in your reader. Don't know what a rss reader is? Don't worry we will explain what a RSS reader is later and why you want to make sure you are generating an RSS feed. Several wrestling sites have rss feeds you can subscribe to - they include themat.com and revwrestling.com  are two wrestling related sites that have rss feeds - wrestlinggearcom.blog.com and illinoiswrestling.com have rss feeds that you can subscribe to.

Advertising - you can generate web ads and display them. You just need to know the html to post in the message - below is an example that we have generated that will rotate a banner ad. The script does get blocked by some browsers, but you should see an add at the bottom this post.

That's it for now, we'll post  more information about blogging later

Web 2.0 Marketing for Wrestling Coaches

I was sitting at a seminar a few weeks ago about marketing techniques for the next generation of the web, e.g. Web 2.0. I thought to myself this might be a good topic to start writing about and since one of the techniques is blogging, I figured why not talk about some of these techniques on my blog.

There are several techniques that will help wrestling coaches improve their image to outsiders, generate news, speak with other wrestling fans and keep them interested in their program. I will talk about what college coaches or college programs and build, but it also applies to high school kids, high school coaches and youth clubs as well.

To give a little background about myself, I have used many of the web marketing ideas of the previous generation to help build one of the largest Internet/Catalog wrestling companies in the country. Granted it took me ten years to do this, but I did not have hundreds of thousands of dollars to build the company and market it.

One thing I read somewhere, now that I am writing about it I wish I remembered where I read it...but when you are runnin your business you have two constraints, time and money. In the beginning I had time but not money. So I taught myself how to design a web page and build it so search engines would rank it highly and developed my email list.

I think coaching wrestling you are in the same boat, you have time and money as a constraint. All programs and businesses have budget constraints and no one in the world has more then 24 hours in a day. After you decide you want to do something, you should ask yourself two questions: 1) Do I have the time to learn this myself? 2) Do I have the money to pay someone else to help me?

Our first Web 2.0 marketing technique will be about blogging. I have been blogging since August 2005. I believe WrestlingGear.Com is the only major wrestling Internet/Catalog company with a blog even today. It is really easy to set up and if you can post a message on a message board, you can post a message on your blog.

My blog is not perfect, not even close, but we do get a lot of activity on the blog and I think it creates something for my customers to look at to find information about new shoes, new gear, specials, promotions, links of interest etc. For a wrestling coach, you can have your schedule, links to preferred dealers, links to other wrestling sites, a history of the club, photos, links to youtube videos and more. Most of this you can do for little or no money, just time.

For us, we use blog.com and started out with a free blog. There are limitations on the free blog so we did wind up upgrading and spending I think $25 to $50 a year for the blog. Most wrestling teams can get a donation to cover that expense.

Another idea if you don't have time to maintain the blog, is to work with high school students or college students to run the blog for you. At my old high school, I just met with the Business department chair and she talked about how the students built a website for a local hot dog stand at a significant discount. If you ask around, I am sure there is a college student, a high school student or a parent that can help you get started or even maintain the site for you.

This weeks challenge - go to blog.com or blogger.com or another blogging website set up a free blog and post back your blog on my comments. Let's see how many blogs we can generate in the next couple of weeks.

THE FUTURE

We will talk about a Web 2.0 marketing technique each week on our blog - http://www.wrestlinggearcom.blog.com - we will discuss tools like linkedin (someone already created a wrestling group are you in it), flickr, youtube, del.icio.us, RSS, Google Reader and other web marketing ideas that you as a wrestling coach can use to inform your team, inform sponsors, keep in touch with alumni and more.

Post a comment under this blog posting, if you have any questions, I'll try to respond within 24 hours...

UP COMING EVENTS

We will be hosting a series of lunch and dinners in Las Vegas and the Chicagoland area. WrestlingGear.Com and sponsors will pay for the dinners, space will be limited and details are still be finalized. Tenative dates and locations are: Las Vegas June 2008, Elmhurst, IL July 28 and Chicago/Evanston December 2008. Call WrestlingGear.Com to add your name to the mailing list for these events.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff Pape was a member of the University of Illinois varsity wrestling team for 3 semesters - earning All Big Ten Academic awards each semester. Jeff graduated from Illinois with a BS in Accountancy and is a licensed CPA in the state of Illinois. In 2005, he graduated from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management with a MBA in Marketing and Operations. Jeff is the founder and sole shareholder of WrestlingGear.Com, Ltd, one of the largest Internet wrestling stores in the United States.