People can (and have) written entire books on this subject. So I’m not going to.

Instead I shall write about some of the major methods you can use to attract students and will discuss their strong and weak points.

The first thing to say is that there is no magic bullet, no one special secret that works all the time in all places to get people to attend classes. There are lots of ways to promote a dojo and doing so successfully means using a mix of them. This mix will be different for a new group starting off from scratch, for an existing small group, for an existing large group and so on.

Some cost money, some are free and there can be cultural considerations in how this mix is put together. What works well in one place may not work quite so well somewhere else. Regardless of these issues, there will always be a mix and building up a dojo is usually a matter of tweaking the mix until you find out what is the best fit for your art and you, in your area measured against your goals.

For example, in the US it’s apparently common to find professional martial arts teachers who earn their living from teaching but that’s relatively rare in Europe and certainly in Ireland. I certainly don’t earn a living out of my dojo – it pays for itself and pays for me to go to Japan to further my own training a couple of times a year.

Someone trying to run a dojo as a business will probably approach this mix in a different way to someone trying to grow a small group of two or three people into a group of eight or ten people.

However the tools available to both groups are largely the same. The good news is that they also don’t really cost much money if you’re resourceful. Leaving that aside, let’s look at the most important promotional tool out there:

Word of mouth.

This comes first, because it is the single most important and powerful way to attract students to any dojo, doing any martial art. I once shared a two hour car journey with a famous American author who told me that in publishing, reviews of books count for a tiny percentage of sales.

Word of mouth and front-of-store placement were many orders of magnitude more important. The same thing is true in martial arts, and in any other form of human endeavour.

We’re social animals, and if a friend or co-worker recommends something to us, that carries far, far more weight than any newspaper article, youtube video, flyer or whatever. So how do you get people to go forth and tell their friends and family about your dojo?

The best way is to be an inspiring and accomplished teacher, as well as a good martial artist. I’ll write more about this later, as it’s a big subject, but the best kind of ‘marketing’ is spontaneous and sincere, in the form of a recommendation from one person to another.

Once a dojo grows in size, this kind of thing happens on its own but that isn’t really helpful if you’re just starting out.

So how can you help word of mouth happen? Firstly, don’t be afraid to ask existing students to spread the word. It can be a good idea to put together a pamphlet or flyer specifically for them to give to people they think might be interested in training.

At the same time, it’s important not to put them in a position where they may feel conflicted – getting people into a dojo is your job, not theirs – but most people will be happy to help if you ask them and most people will also be happy to spread the word about a dojo if they enjoy going there and get a lot out of the training.

The problem for teachers of newly established dojo is you can’t really have word of mouth without students so how do you get them in the first place. Well, that’s why you need a mix of methods.

The next entries in this series will break down the pros and cons of online promotion, print promotion, media promotion and public demonstrations and other ways of promoting a dojo.