Help with marketing

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Does any one have any ideas how to attract more members to our club.
We our getting a lot of hits but no increase in membership.

Any help would be appreciated.

http://www.club-amigos.co.uk[/url%5D

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Well

This is a case of the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray……..

You can sometimes have the greatest website and marketing material for a product and it never gets read. Now Cub Amigo is a very common name and even if you do a UK Google search it doesn’t even register. Remember websites are just another method of marketing, you have to all kinds of things, leaflets, posters, newspaper ads. How are people supposed to know where the website is, if you haven’t marketed the URL.

Lots of clubs are found by word of mouth, flash marketing and lots of money to do it. I also think you need to put much more information on your site, especially the home page and make up some people for your Guestbook…or better still get rid of it for the moment….no way would i want to go to a club that has four members unless it was a Bridge club.

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Great tips , thanks for that Jezza.

What sort of additional info could l put on the site? l am working on more photos anything else l could do?
We have little money for other sorts of marketing.
Altough we go in the local free paper every week and are going in the local magazine very soon.
If l were to have a blank forum and guestbook l assume this would be better than a forum and gbook with very few entries?
As people cannot judge how many members there are.

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Justin

I’ll you some questions, no need to answer them here but something you could think about.

1) WHY should I go to this club…what is in it for me.
2) WHY is your club better that the club up the road
3) When are you open
4) When do you close
5) Do you have themes
6) It seems to be all 20 somethings….is it for all age groups
7) Are there any benefits if I become a member

You guys have got to get together ask some really simple questions, get a tag line and pump them into some classy ads. Give out free membership, get the students on boards…I imagine there are quite a few around that neck of the woods…

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How do you suggest l get more people to sign the guestbook?

As l don’t want to have it left blank, do you know of a way l could get people to sign it?
As more entries = more possible members.

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That red X button that runs a delete script, could I actually delete one of those entries? (Not that I would want to, but you can understand my concern.)

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> Does any one have any ideas how to attract more members to our club.
> We our getting a lot of hits but no increase in membership.

Maybe you’re being too honest? More hype is needed! Just kidding.

I’m not sure it makes sense to expect complete strangers to join up just based on a web site. Members of your club should try word of mouth promotion to their friends and acquaintances. Or they could offer something for free to lure people in… assuming they actually want more members.

Two additional suggestions:

Correct this typo on the home page: “you social life”

Change the photo album to show activities that most people would enjoy. Once I saw that your idea of fun events are underwater paddle ball and fencing, well, I’m pretty sure that this club is too strange for me.

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Jezza has said most of what needs to be said – the website is simply another marketing tool, and should not by any means be your sole source of driving membership.

That said, target your META keywords towards the kinds of terms that real users would search with. Web surfers don’t search the way you probably think they do. In the past, I have asked members of a fitness club what they would look for on the Internet if they were trying to find a… fitness club. You’d be surprised at the answers you get. Real terms from real users are an immense help. Make sure every page has a full complement of metadata for web bots to spider and index.

Paid inclusion into the major search providers can grease the axles too. It sucks, but that’s the trend and has been for some time. Remember, there are a lot of search engines but the data is provided to them by relatively few sources – Google, MSN, Yahoo, for example. You’re going to get your site spidered more quickly this way.

Reciprocal linking can also help – if you have any partner sites that link back to you, for example. Search algorithms are constantly changing but this provides additional entry points for web bots.

Lastly, as a design point, all or as many of your images as possible should be clickable links (to reduce user frustration). In particular, your header graphic should be an active link that takes a user back to the main index page. Once visitors discover the site, they will quickly leave if it’s hard to use. You should be able to get anywhere in about two clicks.

Hope that helps,

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