 Hey, what's up guys? It's Coach Ben from Soccer Entrepreneur. I'm back with another video. Like I said, I'm gonna be creating one video and one podcast every single week. And if you want to subscribe to my podcast, it's basically what you're seeing right now. It's just the audio version. There's gonna be a link in the description. That'll go to iTunes. You can check out my podcast there. And if you like the videos, make sure and comment below. Let me know what you want to learn coming up about how to build your private soccer training company. And that's what I'm going to be talking about today is marketing. I want to talk about what a lot of people run into with problems when they try to market themselves to get in front of parents and players who they want to start training. And I want to talk about a couple tips that you can implement. So the first problem I see a lot of trainers face is at the very beginning when they're not training anyone yet, they like to spend a lot of money on a website or a logo or t-shirts, business cards. I mean, I could go down the list of things that people spend money on before they even start training players. And I recommend that you start training players first and you do that by putting yourself out there and what I teach in my book called the Startup Soccer Academy is I talk a lot about finding who you want to train first and understanding and realizing who you want to train and why you want to train them. This way when you are marketing, you're specific to a certain segment of people out there. I know one of the biggest problems I had at the beginning was I was trying to train too many players. I was trying to train kids from all sorts of age groups and that led to a lot of confusion in my own marketing. And once I realized that I wanted to segment who I wanted to train, everything became a lot easier. So you need to think about that when you're trying to think about your marketing and how you want to spread your message in front of a lot of people in your town. But I want you to avoid trying to get a website, trying to get a cool logo, t-shirts, water bottles, whatever, soccer goals. I mean there's so many distractions out there that people go spend money on and you don't need to have that at the very beginning. I recommend get people first, get them in your training program, and then you might be able to spend some money to go get those types of things. And as far as equipment goes, I would recommend that you partner with a local soccer store in your area. This way they can supply all of the equipment for free. That's something that a lot of people never do because they don't reach out to local soccer stores and they would love to hook you up with free equipment based on your communication skills that you have with them. So that'd be a great way you can save money on the startup cost when you're thinking about training players. So now I want to talk about a couple ideas that work really well for us with our academy when we're looking to market to certain players and I'm going to try to keep this as simple as possible. So a great free way to get your message out in front of a lot of people is by simply using Facebook or YouTube. And Facebook is free. You can have a free Facebook fan page. You can invite all of your friends to like it. You can create short videos that are specific for players or parents. That are very shareable within your community. You could do that two or three times a week and this way you can be be known as the soccer authority in your town. And this is one of those things that a lot of people just simply don't do. They won't put themselves out there. They won't make a short video. But when you do this it really gives you a lot more respect. It gives you more credibility because you're putting yourself out there. People are watching you. They're they love what you're going to talk about. And I think that's a great way to spread your message in front of a lot of people especially online at one time. And I would recommend coming up with a plan of maybe having one to two videos per week that go out on a regular basis. And if you do that over the course of the year I promise you you will start to see so many new players come into your academy because their parents are going to be watching it. Another great tip is go watch the players who are currently training. Go watch them in their games. You're going to have a lot of advantages doing that because you're going to see them playing them in their games. You're going to be able to meet a lot of new people who are out there. And it's just a great marketing tool just going out to the games and put yourself in front of a ton of new prospects. And that is to me the smartest thing that you could probably do. And all of these things don't require you spending any money. They just require you taking a little bit of time. And I would recommend going to the games anyways because now you can actually see how the players you're training how they're performing in the games. And that's one of the things that I know most trainers don't do. They're just going to go to the session and then they'll see the kid the next week. And if you want to go over beyond that and you want to be the elite trainer in your town you need to do everything you can for the players in your academy. This way they're getting the most out of it. You know where what they're struggling with. You know what they're doing well at. And going to their games is great to be able to see that. And it's also a great way to meet a lot of new parents. And there you can meet coaches. I mean really the sky's the limit depending on how much you try to put yourself out there. Going to games is really really solid. And lastly another great free marketing tool is you can go to MailChimp.com. And I use personally use something called Aweber. And I'm going to link Aweber below in the description. But Aweber is a email marketing service. And I kind of want you to think about how can you get a message in front of a lot of people at once without having to use Gmail and send individual messages. And I really do feel like one of the biggest advantages we have is we have an email list that we've built over a long period of time. But what we do is we send out emails pretty much on a daily basis to parents in our community. And what we do is we try to provide a lot of great free content on the emails to where they're going to know, like and trust us more because we're in their heads all of the time. Every week they're getting multiple emails. And we do that because we want to continue to show our community that we care a lot. We are there for the kids. We're going to games. We're showing pictures, videos, whatever we're doing, we want that to be showcased on our emails. And having an email list, you can have that set up for free until you get a certain number of contacts. I know on MailChimp you can do that. Aweber, there's going to be a fee. I recommend Aweber because it's a much better system. That's what we personally use. And I think that can be a great way to scale what you're doing to get your message from a lot more people. And I could give you a bunch of different other ways that we look to market ourselves. But everything really starts with you and using the resources that you have. And the greatest resource you have is your time. And if you're catching yourself spending a bunch of money right now, you don't need to do that. Like you will need a website in the future. So if you're just starting, you know, having a website, if you understand how to create a website, I mean, there's so many free or great resources out there that will show you how to do that. If you need a website, and you're getting a lot of players, great, go do that. But you don't need to spend a bunch of money on stuff. And that's why I want to create this video, because I see so many people out there that they're spending way too much money upfront before they're even training players before they even prove themselves that they can train, they're spending a bunch of money. And I feel like that's not a smart way to start a business. So if you want to start off smart, I would definitely recommend, you know, look at the time you have and see how you can use that effectively with the people who you want to train and get your message out to them. You don't have to try to help everyone in your town. That's not, that's really not the best, you know, most effective way of running your academy. You want to be specific on who you want to train. And that's really what's helped us the most is once we identified that, everything kind of skyrocketed because we knew that we could just go focus on a certain age group. And that's really, really beneficial for us. And I know it will be for you. So if you like this video, make sure to click the thumbs up button. Let me know in the comment section what questions you have. And if you want to get in touch with me, there's a couple ways to do that. You can go to my website. It's www.soccerentrepreneur.com. It's going to be listed in the description below this video. Or you can just reach out to me at startyoursocceracademy at gmail.com. And if you are interested in my book called The Startup Soccer Academy, I would highly recommend it. It's going to walk you through the process from A to Z. It will probably take you 30, 45 minutes to read it. But I'm going to post that in the description as well. That has helped a ton of trainers over the past couple months go from the idea of having an academy to actually doing this full time. So I would highly recommend that resource. If you have time, go check that out. And I'll see you next time.