Julian Pratt at West Yorkshire Sport is leading the way in the Google Calendar revolution. He’s got 5 different organisations in West Yorkshire to set up Google Calendars of events and courses taking place in West Yorkshire. All that information now appears automatically on the West Yorkshire Sport website – www.westyorkshiresport.co.uk, and on the Promoting [...] Read more »
Find out who’s using your website
Google analytics is a free web analytics package, and it’s also a fantastic one. It can show you how many people are visiting your website, where they’re from, how long they’re on your site for and much more. This can help you to understand what parts of your site to put effort into, and therefore [...] Read more »
Update all your social media networks at once
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Do you feel you should be using all these social media networks to promote activity, but can’t find the time? Well there’s a great little web service called ping.fm which I’ve started using recently. It allows you to update your status on all these and more at once. Simply go to ping.fm [...] Read more »
New and updated communication plans
I’ve said it before – and I imagine I’ll say it again – Sport England’s segmentation work is fantastically useful for understanding your audience, what they want, why they want it, when they want it, how to tell them about it. When I was working at Sport England I wrote a series of communication plans [...] Read more »
Appear top on Google for free
If you enter your club/ facility into Google Maps directory then you can appear top for certain Google searches. This is free and easy to do. This can make you appear top for location-specific searches. For instance if you put in Kung Fu NW6 2NR then the top result is a map of London showing [...] Read more »
How to build your own website
At Make Sport Fun we build our websites in house using WordPress – here I explain how you can install your own WordPress website from scratch in under 4 minutes. Go to www.bluehost.com and click on sign up now. Bluehost is one of the most popular WordPress hosting systems out there, and a very good [...] Read more »
Top 10 tips for inclusive marketing
Here I explain my top 10 tips for inclusive marketing. This is based on some workshops I ran recently for the Inclusive Fitness Initiative. I’m going to approach this from two angles. First I’m going to give 10 tips on how to make your marketing accessible (size of font, colours, etc.), secondly I’m going to [...] Read more »
Secrets of getting people swimming
I had the chance to meet Nicola Polley from the Amateur Swimming Association at a sports marketing workshop recently. She told me all about the Everyday Swim DVD. I’ve watched it online and been very impressed by how many good lessons there are in there. The Everyday Swim project has been a fantastic learning experience [...] Read more »
Running a sports event
One way to recruit new members for sport is to host an event. This type of event is an opportunity for people to come and try equipment, classes, or other aspects of your sports organisation without the financial commitment typically associated with joining a club. It is therefore great for recruiting new members. To learn [...] Read more »
Good free website systems
I’m asked sometimes about building websites, and it’s a lot simpler to do now than most people realise. There are two magic phrases to use when building websites. You might have come across them before. • Content Management System (CMS) • Cascading Style Shet (CSS) Once you know that you have instantly more leverage when [...] Read more »
