Free Publicity for Martial Arts Schools: How One Brown Belt Made Us Famous — and How to Get the Media Calling You

Years ago, a 14-year-old girl from one of my schools was walking home from school in Arvada, Colorado. The prototypical green LTD pulls up, a man jumps out, grabs her by the wrist, and tries to pull her into the car.

She was a brown belt. She had the presence of mind to punch him square in the nose, break the grip, and run.

Here’s what happened next — and pay attention, because this is the part most school owners get wrong. The mayor of Arvada presented her with a bravery award. The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News covered it. The ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox affiliates all covered it. Black Belt Magazine ran a full-page article. So did Taekwondo Times. We were booked on Montel Williams (they cancelled the show before we taped), and we did a couple of big national radio spots.

One student. One story. National publicity that money literally cannot buy.

The Media Didn’t Find Us. We Found Them.

Now here’s the lesson inside the lesson: the media never approached us, and the student’s family never thought about publicizing it. None of that coverage happened by magic. It happened because we were tuned in enough to what was happening with our students to recognize a story — and then we went and pursued it. Every outlet. One by one.

You don’t wait for the magic. You announce it to everybody and go get the coverage.

Every Testing Cycle Is Hiding a Story

You won’t get an attempted-abduction story every year — thank God. But if you actually knew more about everybody getting ready to test for black belt, you’d find that one out of ten, one out of twenty, one out of thirty has an interesting backstory. We had a mom with a back problem and a heart condition testing alongside her daughter — we got publicity on that one too. Sometimes it’s a former pro athlete. Sometimes it’s a local personality. It isn’t always somebody overcoming an illness; it’s simply somebody with a story worth telling.

And here’s the double payoff: digging for those stories makes your retention better. The more you know about your students — what organizations Billy’s involved with, what his dad does, whether the family’s active in a church or Scouts or a sports league — the more they know you care. I used to run my branch managers through exactly that checklist early in every student’s progress. It surfaces publicity angles, referral networks, and community connections, and it deepens the relationship all at the same time.

A Hard Truth About “Self-Defense Workshops”

Since we’re on the subject of safety stories, let me say something unpopular: my least favorite student-generation activity of everything we’ve ever done is the four-lesson women’s self-defense program. Because here’s the truth — there is no martial art I can teach anybody in four lessons that will keep them from freezing when they get jumped in an alley.

What I can do is teach them how not to be there in the first place. Give them Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear. Teach them to trust the intuition that says “don’t walk through that park.” I lived that lesson myself in Berlin during my MBA program: a group of us started cutting through a park late at night, and ten feet in, something told me we shouldn’t be there. I told the guys — who were all several beers deep — that I was terrified and we were leaving. We backtracked. At the hotel we learned that park was where the addicts congregated, in the middle of a crime wave. I had no information. I had intuition. That’s the real first lesson of self-defense.

So if you run those programs, frame them honestly — as awareness programs — and be clear that real skill comes from real training over time. The mis-sold version (“come for six hours and leave able to defend yourself”) sets people up for a dangerous illusion, and it converts poorly anyway.

How to Actually Reach Producers (Hint: Not Just Email)

A member asked me: “I look up reporters who’ve covered similar stories, I email them, I try to find a phone number — any better ideas?” Yes. Stop relying on email alone.

I was at a small private session with Dan Kennedy in Chicago once — about ten of us — where he broke down how he promoted a book. He had bobbleheads made of himself sitting on a longhorn bull. Clocks with the book cover on them. A parade of strange, memorable objects — mailed to the editors and book reviewers at Entrepreneur, Forbes, Fortune, every outlet that might cover it. They all opened it. You don’t ignore a bobblehead.

Apply that locally. Your CBS affiliate’s address is public. The producers — who book the guests, not the on-air personalities — are listed on the website. So build your list of 100 media people, put together an interesting lumpy-mail package (Oriental Trading is full of cheap, weird, memorable stuff), and send it FedEx with signature required. Nobody declines to open a FedEx. That’s $10–15 each — $1,500 for a hundred of the most valuable contacts in your market. Send the emails and press releases too. It’s not either/or; it’s all of it, layered.

Give the Media a Taste of the Product

Back in the Jhoon Rhee Institute days, we sent every newscaster in the market a “Nobody Bothers Me” t-shirt with a certificate for a free month of lessons and a uniform — for them and their family. A bunch of them came in. Some stayed a month, some signed up for programs — and every one of them was on the lookout for us in the news, forever.

I did the same thing years later with the highest-profile weather forecaster in Denver — his kid trained with us. We set up remotes: every day for a week on the noon news, he took class at our school, banner in the background, wearing our uniform, working toward his white belt on air. Two to four minutes of free coverage, every day, for a week — with a local celebrity giving an implied endorsement. Radio DJs are gold for this too: a free month of lessons, and suddenly they’re earning their white belt on air and talking about you between songs.

One Hit Buys the Next Ten

The most important mechanic in publicity: once one outlet covers you, it gets dramatically easier to get all of them. So the moment you get TV coverage, build a reel. Send producers a link, a QR code, even a thumb drive — make it effortless to see that you’re real, engaging, and good on air. That’s how radio bookings work too: you break in once, then you send the clip of that interview to the next producer.

And watch what happens whenever news breaks: behind the scenes there’s a producer scrambling to find an expert — any credible expert — to put on air. Be on their list before they need you, and you’re the martial arts, child-safety, bullying, and fitness expert in your market by default.

The Affinity Principle

One last pattern from forty years of doing this: every real celebrity connection I’ve ever made came through martial arts affinity, not through chasing fame. Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy — affinity for the martial arts. Denver Broncos great Carl Mecklenburg — his kid trained. Joe Corley cold-called a famous New Yorker because his autobiography had a photo of him doing a vertical side kick — turned out he’d followed Joe’s Battle of Atlanta for years and picked up the phone himself.

The same principle is sitting in your market right now. Mark Zuckerberg talks about training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on Joe Rogan. Ed O’Neill is a BJJ black belt. Somewhere in your town there’s an executive, an athlete, a broadcaster who already loves the martial arts — it’s on their LinkedIn, in their interviews, in their kid’s after-school schedule. Approach a celebrity to borrow their fame and you’re one of a thousand asks. Approach a fellow martial artist and you’re family.

Interesting stories. Events that look good on camera. Lumpy mail that gets opened. A taste of the product for the people with the microphone. And the discipline to pursue the story instead of waiting for it. That’s the publicity machine — and it’s been filling schools since before social media existed.

Community marketing, publicity, and celebrity affinity are systems we build with members step by step. Get the free book at FillYourSchool.com, or call/text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne to set up a free school evaluation.