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Wrestling Coaches Marketing - On a Budget During this time of year, much of your budget is already spent on new wrestling gear and new wrestling shoes for your athletes. one thing you may not have thought too much about is how are you going to connect with your fan base and get them to come out to your matches? Well I am just going to summarize a few thoughts about how you can put together your marketing plan together on a slim budget.

For a more detailed explanation of these tools, I wrote more in depth blog postings earlier in the year. For the most part, most of these tools just take time and will not cost you anything. See if you can find a parent to volunteer to put some of these tools to work for you this year. It’s all about getting in touch with your wrestling fans and just as important staying in touch with your wrestling fans.

First Tool - Create a blog A blog like this one can be done for almost no money. We upgraded the features with this blog for a small fee, but you can start out at zero cost. Other blogging software to look at are wordpress and blogger.com. You can post a quick note or blog posting if you can post a message on a message board. And if you don’t know how to post a message on a message board, find someone that does. As you progress through the year try to learn a few tricks like how to post a link to another site, add a picture, create a photo album, etc. Try to add something new to the blog each week and by the end of the season you’ll have a nice way to stay in touch with your fans. Total cost - $0.

Second Tool - Del.icio.us Del.icio.us is a program that lets you share links with others. Wouldn’t it be cool to find websites or videos that you’d like your team to look at. Well you can simply book mark them to your del.icio.us account and make them available for others to look at. Be sure to bookmark WrestlingGear.Com and this blog. You can even set certain links to private so those you do not want to share with your team you can have at your fingertips. Jeff Pape’s and WrestlingGear.Com’s Del.icio.us Total cost - $0.

Third Tool - Twitter.Com This is sort of a micro blogging tool. You can only post a few characters about 140 to be exact. How you can use this is post a note on twitter about a blog update. Post a “tweet” about something new you found or what you are doing at that particular time. This way others can follow what you are doing through out the day. As well as you can use this as free tool to promote your blog and website and other things you are doing both onine and offline.  Jeff Pape’s and WrestlingGear.Com’s Twitter Page Total cost - $0

Fourth Tool - LinkedIn This is a business tool, but you can use it. Already there are several wrestling related groups you can join. There is a USAWrestling related group you can join to network with other wrestlers. What a great way to stay in touch with sponsors, meet new sponsors and stay in touch with alumni that have moved on to college and out in the real world. You can even create your own group that alumni can join to stay in touch with each other. Total cost - $0

Fifth Tool -Podcast/Youtube We have created our own youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/wrestlinggear where you can see shows about new products, a uniform buying show, and new technique clips added each week. This is a cool way to put online for free, a high light clip, a recruiting clip for your summer program, etc. Get kids excited about coming out for your team. Kids nowadays are online and they are watching videos online, why not let them watch a recent match or a highlight film on youtube. Total cost - $0

Sixth Tool - Email This one might cost you a little bit, but you can just start out publishing your own newsletter and mailing it through outlook. Then when you have a few hundred email address start looking at spending a few bucks on an email service. A few popular ones that I have seen include icontact and constantcontact. They have templates for you and do all the work of up dating the database for you. Your users can click on the bottom of their email and change their addresses, phone numbers, basically anything you keep track of. Total cost - $0 - maybe up to $500 if your list grows

Seventh Tool - RSS Feeds Make sure your blog is generating a RSS feed. This allows others to read your blog without having to come to read it everyday. Most email software has a RSS reader that comes with it for free. You can set up your RSS reader for the blogs you’d like to follow. Or how about to follow high school kids if you are a college coach. Or if you are a high school coach, you can let others know how to set up their own RSS feed to follow blogs you’d like them to read.

Another option is you can create a free Feed digest and add it to your website. We have a feed digest on our site at http://www.illinoiswrestling.com it pulls information from sites through out the country so our readers can quickly see what is going on in the wrestling world. Total Cost - $0 What are some other tools you are using to promote your team and to connect with your fans. Try and post an approximate budget too.

So del.icio.us is a website that will allow you to create some bookmarks and share those bookmarks/favorite websites with your wrestling team or others who visit your web page with all the links you have saved.

You can also tag those book marks/favorites with key words your wrestlers would find helpful. For example, you could tag an article with new products, nutrition, wrestling technique or any other category you can think.

There really is not too much to using this Web 2.0 Technology - simply create an account, let del.icio.us put an icon on your tool bar and you can just click it to add a link to your favorites. If you have trouble adding the link to your tool bar there are step by step instructions to add it to your tool bar and what you need to modify so it will show up.

The other upside to setting up a del.icio.us account is you can have your bookmarks at the computer you are using at that moment. For example, I have a computer at home and one at work. I am able to have access to all my book marks on both computers.

A final feature that I use is to make a link private. So you don’t have to share all your links with your visitors. For example, I do not list all my links to business articles or things that we are looking at implementing at some point in the future. We do have competitors reading our blogs and visiting our website and even subscribed to our newsletter…so I choose to not share certain articles with everyone.

Here is my list of book marks - http://del.icio.us/jeffpape 

I just started using this website, if you have any insight to offer or a better explanation of how to do something - please post a comment below.

I was at another blog the other day, and I completely disagreed with the blogger about Internet Marketing. So I decided to post a comment, I don’t usually post comments on blogs…but there is a first time for everything.

I take the time to write a well thought out posting and low and behold there is an approval process that must happen before the blog comment is put on the site. Now possibly that is in place because he had problems with people posting spam comments, but three or four weeks later the comment is still not up on their site. Comments that don’t agree with your blog posts should never be deleted. It’s what makes blogs and message boards interesting. It’s like the saying if all your employees agree with everything you say, those employees really are not needed around your organization.

The same thing goes for visitor reviews. We keep up on our site all the user reviews that do not swear or use foul language. Hey if a product stinks we want to know about it and will let you post that comment. Now if you swear or spam the reviews with lots of reviews on the same day, we delete those as well. But for the most part we allow the feedback to be posted. I think it makes our site unique - no other wrestling gear company has many user comments as we do on their sites.

Jeff Pape
Owner/President
WrestlingGear.Com

Just like any of these marketing techniques I am talking about - just go ahead and start using them. You will not be an expert when you start using them, but as you go along you’ll pick up a thing here or a thing there on how to better use them.

I think that is a key in your marketing efforts - there is no way you can attend a class or study marketing or read a book and implement 100% of the items discussed. Pick one or two of the more interesting ideas or one or two of the ideas you think will work and go with them. Try them out and see if they work. If they work, keep them and try a few more ideas. If they don’t work, don’t use them and move on to something else. I find the key though is to have something in place so you can track your marketing efforts.

Okay now back to readers, again I am no expert. I have been using my reader for just a few months now. So feel free to post a comment and as long as you do not swear in it or post a comment that is spam (e.g. a bunch of links to your site that is not on topic), we’ll keep your comments up here.

So I use google reader, it’s free (I like the price)…and it seems to work well. Also, how can you go wrong with google. You know the product will be around for a while which is also something I like. If you use sbc.yahoo for your internet access or probably many other large internet providers - chances are they provide a reader for you to use for free.

If you have Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher, they can manage your feeds as well. So there is a way to get your feeds through IE. For IE, you use your favorites and just flag it as a feed instead of a web page in your favorites. On the tool bar there is a star and plus sign in front of a star. If you goto a page with a feed set up like this one - http://www.thepapefoundation.org/atom.xml you just click on the plus sign in front of a star and it will add you to your list of feeds. The one thing I do not like about this is there is no way to mark the item as read and it does not appear to have as many options to organize it as other options do. Upside is you probably already are using IE 7 and it’s free so those are two good reasons in my book to at least look at this option.

Now will talk about google reader and others similar to it. For the most part this category of readers all have similar features, so what I say about google reader can most likely be applied in your reader. To add a subscription, you can go to the feed page like the one above - http://www.thepapefoundation.org/atom.xml , highlight the url, copy it and go to your reader. There is a hyperlink to add a subscription, click on that and paste your hyperlink in there. You can add a couple more refinements to your listing and there you have it you are subscribed.

Not many wrestling websites have what I am going to talk about, but they probably will in the future so I’ll mention it. The University of Illinois Wrestling team I am proud to say (being an alum) appears to be more advanced them most. I have not been to every DI wrestling site, but I have been to all the major National wrestling sites and very few have this feature. I guess with U of I being the birthplace of Mosiac (the browser that started browsing as we know it), it would make sense they are at the head of the curve as far as technology goes. They have a rss feed page set up so all you have to do is click on a button and they know your reader - follow this link and you’ll be able to add their rss feed to your reader very easily - http://fightingillini.cstv.com/rss/rss-index.html

That’s it for now, this blog posting was a lot longer then I’d thought it would be. I’ll cover more on RSS feeds next month…

For now here are some blogs I subscribe and some of my rss feeds to that you can add to your reader and play around with…

http://www.thepapefoundation.org/atom.xml 

http://wrestlinggearcom.blog.com/atom/

http://illinoiswrestling.blog.com/rss/

http://fightingillini.cstv.com/rss/rss-index.html

Jeff Pape
Owner/President
WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes 

Last week in our series of posts on blogs, we talked about RSS feeds. Just what are RSS feeds?

Here is a great video that will take only a couple minutes to explain them to you. Follow this link to see the video - http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english 

If you prefer to read about RSS feeds you can go here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

If you want to look at our RSS feed for this blog - you can go here - http://wrestlinggearcom.blog.com//rss/

Basically what a RSS feed does is generate the contet so a RSS Reader can post the information within your RSS Reader. This way you can compile your own web page with all the news you want to track. So say you were a wrestler and you published your own blog. For information on how to create a blog, see last weeks posts…

Okay back to how RSS feeds might help you, so you are a wrestler who generates his own blog and updates it regularly…say with match results, big wins, scores, pins, takedowns, etc. The key is you need to update the blog regularly.  You can set up your blog to generate the RSS feed for you automatically. You don’t need to know what you are doing other then be able to check a box and turn on the RSS feed feature on your blog.

Then say a coach at Number One University has an account with google or yahoo or any other RSS reader set up. He could keep track of say his top 10 or 15 recruits blog postings just by logging into his google reader. He can see what updates you made to your blog, who you beat, that you made honor roll, been accepted to National Honor Society, etc.

It’s great for you because you can publish this content and keep two or three coaches informed as soon as you post your blog. There are no limits to how many people can keep track of your blog, so you could have several hundred college coaches keep track of you if they subscribe to your RSS feeds.

Does not that sound cool? And it benefits the coaches because they don’t have to visit 15 websites looking to see if your high school has updated their site recently? Saves time for the coaches and wrestlers and is a great way to stay in touch.

Next blog posting, we’ll post some RSS feeds that I subscribe to so you have some ideas on what to put in your RSS feeder to start with.

I thought this was a cool video about presentation skills - develop your own presentation skills in about 6 minutes. Learn from the best…

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.