I initially joined the search and social media course at Salford University to update my knowledge on how best to attract and engage with the potential new customers in Manchester, and therefore grow my business. My business is Blush Dance, a pole dance, aerial fitness and burlesque dance studio, we have a website and all the usual social media platforms, where we post pictures from classes, videos of our dance performances and parties. Most of our class participants find us online, however I was keen to use all of these formats together with more effect so I signed up to the course to help me understand how I could do the online thing with much more sass.

In four weeks I have acquired new knowledge and implemented strategies to help improve my online marketing. For example I learnt my website ranked in the first 4 listings on google for keywords such as Pole Dance Classes in Manchester, however search pole dancing lessons and we were only just making the first page. Using tools such as the keyword master and searching incognito in Google chrome proved a healthy way to monitor how we were being viewed by potential clients, and how they were searching for us.

I have learnt the importance of good content and am putting into practice how to work my keywords into interesting articles to engage and attract customers to my website. I am improving my ability to getting all the key words in the right order, and finding high authority websites which are interested in publishing content about increasing dance skills, strength, co-ordination or flexibility. I have started with our current clients, a list of dance studios offering a range of lessons. I checked their page authority through opensiteexplorer and I will be writing interesting articles for their clients, which integrates keywords to create reciprocal links and help increase traffic between both businesses.

I was already sold on the importance of social media for business marketing, we daily engage with our dance students via facebook and twitter. In the past I have received direct sales from both facebook and twitter, so I particularly enjoyed learning about socialmention and twitter chat. I plan on using these to check the strength of my brands’ social media presence. I will be putting together a strategy and setting targets to monitor my websites progress. I will also be using Twitter chat to enable me to discover the pole and aerial fanatics who are engaging in discussions surrounding my expertise on twitter and also plan on hosting my own pole and aerial dance twitter chats.

So thanks to all the help from the industry experts, peers and tutors at Salford University I now have more knowledge and confidence to put together an online marketing strategy for my dance business and lots of new knowledge and goals to improve our online presence.

---