The joy to behold at having done a brilliant poster advertising your martial art class. It really is something to experience and be proud of, if of course you have something of an artistic eye and love making things of that nature. And of course the thrill of publishing it on your website, or on one of those social networking forum platforms for all to see.
Not only have you inserted a really good eye catching photo, or something of an artistic picture that portrays what you teach, such as a person doing a kick for example if teaching one of the striking arts, but also the colour is brilliant and all the details have also been inserted in a professional laid out way. And all done in the comfort of your own home on your PC or laptop. Nothing else to do now, you think to yourself, but to sit back and hope someone will see it and join your classes. Of course that is how making a promotional poster is done these days, but back in the day long before anyone had even heard of the internet there was a lot more work involved including walking around in the snow and rain and hoping that some kindhearted shopkeeper would put your poster up in their shop window. Back in those days with no internet to help you to advertise your classes you only had three methods of recruiting new students to your classes, the first one being via ‘word of mouth’ as it is commonly termed. If you had a good reputation as a martial arts teacher and the venue was local for many to easily get to, and they were keen to join such classes, then new students would walk in the door most weeks without any real effort on the instructor's part. It is worth mentioning at this point that most new beginners will not go looking for a suitable martial arts class to join that is miles away but a local class that they can get to every week easily rather than spending hours travelling back and forth. The second method, that did not always work, is paying for an advert in the local newspaper. Many will see the advert, of course, but there is always a high risk that no one will turn up. And last, but not least, the good old poster in the shop window. An almost next to nothing cheap way of advertising in the local area but also a risk, like an advert in the local newspaper, when it comes to no one turning up. And of course a time consuming way to advertise with all that walking around from shop to shop. Sadly however the job does not end there. Before you can even ask for your poster to be put up in a shop window you still have the problem of making one. As mentioned already, these days anyone can produce a poster of a reasonable standard on a PC or laptop but back in those days it often involved using a typewriter and pasting a photo on the paper by hand. Of course you could always get the job done at a printing firm, but that would also cost money like an advert in a newspaper. The one thing that was better back then however, when it came to new students seeing your advert, is that posters and newspaper adverts were seen outside of martial art circles which tends not to be the case anymore with instructors sharing what they do with each other on networking sites rather than via open public media methods such as regional newspapers or even a poster in the local chip shop window. For a related article from the archives click >HERE< Comments are closed.
|