Free driving school advertising marketing website

Many ADIs or PDIs will be wondering if it is possible to use a completely free driving school website to market and advertise their instructor services online in a bid to get more learner drivers. Well the simple answer is yes, and I'll show you an example.

If you do a search on google.co.uk for 'driving lessons gloucester', you should find a website called 17+ Gloucester school of motoring

This website is a completely free driving instructors marketing blog hosted on blogspot.com with no strings attached and appears on the first page of both driving lessons and driving instructor gloucester. While this might not be a pretty looking online presence, it proudly advertises the owners number and is doing better than some other prettier driving school marketing sites that might have cost 100s of pounds to create and maintain on a monthly basis.
The main disadvantage with this particular website case is that the driving school owner does not own the domain name which means he is stuck with blogspot.com if he wants to keep the current google ranking.

Now if you don't want to use a blog to market you instructor services, but prefer to use a more traditional website, are there any free webhosting resources you could try? Again the answer is yes, and a reader suggested a couple which I looked at, and I've decided to mention Moonfruit for a couple of reasons which I will share in a few moments.

As you are probably aware by now, I'm a fan of using blogspot for my driving school advertising activities as demonstrated by this blog and my NW3 driving lessons online marketing presence, and that is because blogger is already search engine optimised (SEO) and very easy to setup and update with very little effort and finally because it is owned by google it is completely advert free as well as guaranteed to be around for a long time.
If you are worried about not being able to have a personally registered domain name used with the blogspot hosting service, have a look at an article on how to use personal domain name from 123-reg and blogger.

For those of you that prefer a more traditional website, you can also use Moonfruit mentioned above with your own domain name.

Update June 2015 The website used as an example above has slipped off the 1st page of rankings, this could be due to the simple reason that relevant content is not being added on a constant basis, so don't think that you can just setup an online presence forget about it and think it will continue to be at its best. You need to monitor, update and make sure your content is still relevant. The other thing is always check links to make sure they are still valid as broken links can affect a page or site ranking when it comes to SEO.
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Choosing a driving school domain name ro register.

Driving school marketing website one year on

It is just over a year and one month since I created my North West London driving school marketing website to illustrate how important it is to have an online presence to be successful as a driving instructor especially in these hard times of the credit crunch when many of your competition is offering ridiculously cheap lessons in a bid to attract more business.

While this advertising website was targeted at an area just outside my normal working catchment area (hampstead village NW3 London), and at the time I didn't have any clients in, a lot has happened, and I'm reaping the benefits of this online campaign.

The driving school website now ranks number 1 or 2 for the term driving lessons hampstead or instructor, is constantly getting hits and generating enquiries on a weekly basis, and this has meant that I now have more pupils to Supplement the downturn in number of people taking lessons due to the uncertainty in the current UK economic conditions.

There are some of you who might have started an online presence by registering a school domain name, maybe even bought some hosting package, but never followed through with the rest of the online driving school marketing steps, and thus have a half finished project which never produced any results for your self-employed business.

As I've always said on this marketing blog, you have to continually work on promoting both your business and website everyday if possible, both online and offline. I am now taking business from people who are based in NW3 London, some even have websites that are older than mine, and may even be charging less than I do, all because some people know that if you are on the first page of google.co.uk especially in the top 3, you must be offering a good quality service. Others will just call the first person on the list, and if they get a response within a reasonable time, don't bother to look any further, after all not everyone is looking for cheap driving lessons, but a good quality service.

So if you are one of those readers of these articles who have either been putting off doing some online business marketing via a website/blog, or you started but never completed it, then maybe this success story will motivate you to put action to your thoughts.

Update Jan 2015
My Hampstead blog has slipped down the rankings but is still on the 1st page. As I mentioned the targeted area was outside the normal area I was willing to travel to, and with the improvement in the UK economy I am now turning down most enquiries from this area so i'm not actively using this online tool presently.

Driving School Business Cards

One cheap way of effectively marketing a driving instructor is through the use of driving school business cards which can act as a complimentary way of advertising.

The average cost of printing 500 black and white business cards online for your school is around £25 (the price of a single lesson), but the effects it could have if properly used could run into hundreds of pounds return on investment and it could be a few months before you need to order more of this stationary for the office.

Your driving school business cards should have the following basic details printed on them.

1. Driving school name. This is your identity and brand representation.
2. Business logo and motto if you have one.
3. Instructor name and contact number (usually mobile, but could be a landline if using an answering service or spouse at home acting as secretary)
4. Driving lessons website, you can't compete in the current day and age or be able to promote your ADI and learner driver services without one.

Let me illustrate with an example of how handing out a business card to one person if you are in the right place at the right moment can bring more learner drivers to you.

I met a woman who joined me for driving lessons, she in turn introduced me to her son (complete beginner), brother in law (foreign licence holder), sister in law (partly trained driver) and sister (beginner). If I didn't have a card that pointed her to my website where she was able to get a lot of information about learning to drive, the DSA test which prompted her to use me despite not being the cheapest in the area, I could have lost out on the hundreds of pounds of business.



Don't under estimate the marketing power of driving school business cards, I have mentioned in the past how I missed a promoting chance while out in the car because I had run out of cards, so make sure you have supplies in your vehicle, wallet, purse because you can have a networking moment anywhere, supermarket, childrens school playground, etc.

Driving School top 3 on Google

My driving lessons in NW3 school website is now in the top 3 spots on google.co.uk for the search terms "driving school hampstead" as well as lessons and instructor.

As I mentioned in my getting driving school indexed in google article there are not many websites competing for driving lessons in hamsptead (only 35,000), so I haven't really done any work on promoting this website because I'm not really targeting clients in this area of London.

I have however made sure that the on page optimisation (8 pages in total) is done with the written content covering the subject of driving lessons in Hampstead NW3, sprinkling in words like school and instructor where appropriate, couple that with the domain name containing my keywords and a few links from this blog and blogcatalogue.com, the age of the website has now allowed it to climb up the rankings of google since the domain was registered in september 2009.

Now as you can see driving school marketing using a website does take time and effort, but it DOES work, and ANYONE can do it, which is why I created this blog to give you tips on what to do.

I will obviously continue to monitor my website performance, to see if any of the competition is getting ahead of me, but in the meantime I'm now in a position to get a few more enquiries which I can either take or turn away. Would you like to be in the same position, you can do it yourself, or pay someone hundreds of pounds.

Driving instructor advertising leaflet

If you are considering printing some advertising leaflets for your driving school marketing efforts, my honest advice to you would be don't bother, as the return on your investment is going to be very low.

Let me explain why door to door leaflet drops will not do much to attract more learner drivers to you.

Driving school advert leaflets are not targeted when posted through letter boxes. You have no idea if the house has any provisional licence holders who might benefit from lessons. Even if there is a potential learner driver, they might not be ready or have the money to start at the time of your marketing campaign. Assuming they decide to keep the leaflet, what are the chances they will find or remember your leaflet 9 months later.

How many people take a second look at leaflets that are posted through the door? Most people don't trust companies that advertise this way, consider them cheap or untrustworthy.

How much information can you put on a leaflet that will convince people to use your services, will that include price and will it satisfy the cheap driving lessons crew?

The people that will benefit most from your leaftlet advertising campaign will be the printer and distribution company (if you decide to use one).

A driving school website exposes your instructor services to people who are ready and actively looking for lessons, car for a test or refresher tuition, if you don't have one or have a poorly designed, non optimised standard website, you are losing out and also wasting money on the wrong marketing tools.

This week alone, I've already had 2 new pupils signed up for lessons after visiting my online blog, and it is just wednesday.

Driving School getting more learners

Getting more learner drivers for your driving school is a 2 stage process, and as an instructor, you need to work on both stages in order to generate the work that will give you an income to live on.

Your driving school marketing efforts needs to:

1. Get people to know you offer the services that they require.
This can be done via various forms of advertising, my most effective method is via my online driving school website which brings in enquiries on a weekly basis to keep me busy with enough learner drivers.

Other ways of getting the word out there will be adverts in local shop windows, newspaper classifieds, word of mouth (friends, family, church, gym, etc), yellow pages, google adwords. What ever method you use, only continue if you find it effective, as sales executives will give you many reasons for renewing ads, but at the end of the day you can not afford throwing money down the drain if these marketing efforts are not being rewarded with genuine enquiries from new clients. Don't forget to get business cards made as well, I've lost count of the number of times I've handed these out during driving lessons to people looking at the car.

2. Convincing or converting enquiries to a sale. This is the most difficult of the 2 stage process, especially in the driver training industry, as most learner drivers are just looking for cheap driving lessons and if your prices are above what they expect to pay, then they will probably move on to the next instructor on their shortlist. So what can you do to increase the lighlyhood of someone learning to drive with you?

Again your driving school website has an important role to play since it would be the first point of call that you would have directed them to via stage one above. The good thing about your online presence is that the potential client can visit without feeling that they would be pressurised into a sale by a smart executive on the other end of the phone, so use your website to sell all your unique points.

Don't just tell the visitor the areas you cover, the driving school car you use and the prices you charge, market yourself, tell them what you have achieved with other learner drivers. If you have a degree or special diploma that helps you deal with nervous students let them know.
Female drivers might what to learn with a woman instructor, as a man re-assure them why you can do a good job with them, use statistics to quantify the ratio of male to female learners and how YOU always treat them as individuals in a professional manner.

Give them as many reasons why though you might not be the cheapest in the local area, but you are the best. Not everyone can afford or appreciate the quality of a Mercedes benz car, but those that do, will not prefer a Skoda instead.
There is nothing you can do to convince someone looking for lessons at £10 an a hour to go with you that charges £20, but you can easily make someone with a £18 budget go with you if they think you will be honest, have a track record of high quality tuition and find your website very informative and helpful, especially if they where searching for driving school Hampstead and you are on the first page of the results returned by the search engine.

Once you get a call, always get some details from the caller even if the first question they ask is 'how much do you charge for driving lessons'.

Found out if it is the caller that wants to drive.
How did they get your number (very important and you always must ask this so you can know which marketing methods to focus on).
What area they are based in.
Do they have a test coming up soon.

The more information, the better you might be in getting them to join you if they are within your price range as mentioned above. If they got your number from the website, they already know how much you charge, and even though they might want to bargain, you are half way through.

After the call if they did not go with you, make a note of their number, and try and make contact a month later to see if they passed their test or started, things might have changed.

Getting more learner drivers is not easy work, so continue to put in all the effort to market and sell yourself effectively.

Effective marketing & advertising articles

Let us now look at how to write very effective driving school posts or articles for our newly published driving instructor marketing website.

As I mentioned when we created our school advertising website, one of the advantages of using a blog instead of a static page solution is that blogs are optimised for search engines (SEO) and we will make use of this feature when writing all the pages that we will be marketing our tuition services with.

I have listed below the title of the 4 main pages that I want to publish on my lessons blog, in the order in which they will be posted on the site.

Lessons Price List NW3
Driving lessons Terms and Conditions
Your first driving lesson in Hampstead
MI Driving School London NW3

It is up to you how many pages you initially post, but as we will be constantly updating our school marketing website, there is always room to add anything that you think might attract more page views, and the more people that see your advertising articles no matter how long or short they are, the better your exposure, and the more likey you will get an enquiry which could be turned into a sale.

Now that I've given you the list, lets talk about what effective driving school marketing articles are, and how to write them.
The purpose of your article is two fold, it must attract the potential learner driver's attention, secondly it must contain enough information to sell your services to the reader and make them want to pick up the phone and give you a call. While doing this, we must not forget that search engines will also be 'reading' our website, so we must give them relevant information at the same time.

I'm not a perfect online internet marketer, so I don't know everything, but if you read the 4 pages I've posted above, you will see how I try to maintain a good balance between writing for humans, while at the same time making sure that search engines like google and yahoo can properly index and know what the keywords are that i'm targeting.

Your article title

This is your first step to capturing your audience's attention, but for our online marketing efffort, it is important that we know that it has a bearing (not the complete determining factor) on whether we beat our competition in the search engine results (SERPs) when someone looks for information online. So taking the example of my first article 'Lessons Price List NW3', I could simply have called it 'price list' and any human on my website would know it pertains to learning to drive, but a search engine might not, but more importantly by adding the post code I have strengthened the weight of the page for anyone looking for driving lessons price list in hampstead nw3. Our blogging software also uses the title to form the url page filename, and if the filename contains our target keywords, then google gives it a little more relevance than a page name not contain the words searched for.

School Marketing Content

When writing your website content, you want to make sure you emphasise your unique selling points as these are what will get learner drivers to become pupils of yours. Not everyone will choose a driving school only because of how cheap they are, many are looking for good quality tuition from honest instructors who will not be abusive or patronising.
While writing the content, don't forget you are marketing your information to search engines as well, so include your target words (notice how I use the words driving, school, instructor, lessons, Hampstead, NW3 and London regularly in all my pages), so it is clear that your specialist services or areas are. Don't overdo it, the way I normally write is I will do a first draft containing the information as required by a human reader, I will then review this making sure to add the keywords sparingly throughout the articles changing words where necessary.

It is little on page SEO techniques like these that can give your driving school website that advantage over your local competitor.

Above all, try and write unique content partaining to the area you are targeting, so information about local roadworks affecting learning to drive, test centre diversions or changes as well as difficult test route roads or manouvers are things like these will cause people to link to your website, and the bottom line is the more links you have, the better your marketing online presence will be. The other effect is that people tend to pass good articles onto friends or family which is exactly want you want to happen.

Finally don't make the mistake most driving school owners do with their advertising website, publish 4 pages, and forget all about it. Update your blog as often as possible with any information that might be of use to anyone learning to drive in your area, in addition to this keep reminding your learner driver pupils of your online presence and ask them to promote it for you, you do have your webite address on your driving school business cards?

Following these steps will put you on the way to getting those highly needed enquiries from potential clients.

Creating a driving instructor blog for advertising

As part of our driving school online marketing effort, we are going to use a blog to establish an internet website presence.
For those of you instructors asking why we are using a blog to advertise our services instead of a normal static website, the answer is not far fetched.
Blogs are much easier to create, manage and update especially for those not too technical minded (HTML knowledge is not required), but most importantly they have been optimised to perform better in search engines and this is crucial to an ADI who wants a constant supply of learner driver enquiries from his website

There are many blogging platforms and software available to use, and the one you eventually choose is really a matter of personal preference.
For our current driving instructor advertising needs, I'm going to create our school blog using Blogger.com. It is owned by google, and they also host your pages for free with no advertising, and I've used them for over 5 years with no problem or downtime. If you prefer using a website instead of blog, you can use Moonfruit to create a basic professionally looking website for free, this can be upgraded to use your own domain once you register one.

Creating driving school advertising blog using Blogger.com

To start the process go to the blogger homepage.

Click on the create a blog button, this will take you to the create a google account screen shown below.

If you already have a google account you can use the sign in link, otherwise fill in all the fields as requested. In the email field use the business address if you opted for that feature when you registered the driving school domain name, alternatively use any existing email address you have access to (you will need to activate your account later using the link sent to this address).
Once you have completed the form, tick the box to accept the terms and conditions (you read them of course) and click on continue.
You are now presented with the name your blog screen.

Blog Title: This is the name you want your driving school business website to be known by. Make sure that it contains the keywords you are targeting, so in my case I've used 'MI Driving School Hampstead NW3' replacing lessons with school and adding the post code NW3 to further strenghten the locality of the area where I want my learner driver pupils to come from.

blog address (url): You can fill this in with whatever you like, as it is only a temporary address, we will be using our driving school domain name. I have used midrivinglessons.blogspot.com

Enter the word verification in the appropriate field and click continue.

Select a template for your blog (you can always change it later if necessary), click continue. You have now successfully created your driving instructor website. Don't close the window yet or click on the start blogging button, as we are going to proceed to the next step.

Optimising your school advertising website

The key to any business website performing well in search engine results is optimising it as much as possible while still keep focus on your target market and the keywords that will attract them. So let us do a little tweaking of our driving school blog.

Click on the start blogging button from the screen above, this will take you to the create a new post section.

Click on the settings tab and you should see something similar to the one shown below.

Unless specified, we will leave the default setting alone.

First thing we will do is to fill in the description field with a summary about yourself or driving school, note I have used driving instructor and mentioned hampstead once. I have also added the word north London as this description will appear on all the website pages.

Skip to Show Email Post links? and change this to Yes. An explaination of this feature is given next to field and is very good for allowing your visitors to email interesting articles to other learner drivers thus advertising your website for you.

Go to the bottom of the page and save settings.

Now click on the formatting tab.

Change the following settings.

Show 1 posts on the main page

Time zone to GMT

Show link fields to Yes

Save Settings

This completes the creation and optimisation of our driving school blog, and are now ready to start writing our marketing posts that will go on the website. Note the url of your blog you have just created, mine is midrivinglessons.blogspot.com which is just a temporary address which will be kept just long enough for the school marketing articles to be posted and will be changed after that.

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