Entrepreneur Profile – Toronto Dance Salsa

Here’s a great success story about a young Torontonian entrepreneur.  Sharon Galor, President of Toronto Dance Salsa, is the owner of Canada’s largest salsa dance school.  With over 3,000 students attending salsa classes at her school annually, this young entrepreneur is busy with her thriving business.

What is interesting to note is that Sharon gets all of her business through two main avenues:  referrals and online leads.  She has brought in 3,000 students and has spent a grand total of $0 on marketing. How does she do it?

“Really the secret is Search Engine Optimization.  Create a website that fully markets the key words you are looking to rank for and focus on obtaining quality links for the website and quality content.”

Sharon has also worked on creating an online community through an active discussion forum and two blogs.  This increases the popularity of the website as well creates additional content for the search engines to find.

In just a little over a year, her website has gone from ranking 20th-40^th for Toronto salsa lessons and Toronto salsa classes to being in the top 1-3 spots.  This increase translates to hundreds of additional leads and students and has doubled her student base in a short period.

The moral of the story?  Invest time and energy in creating a high ranking website and reap the benefits of an increased online presence. It goes to show that you do not have to have a product or sell ad space to make money online. An effective online campaign can help support and promote your existing services that are delivered offline.

Evan Carmichael

Matthew Toren

Matthew Toren is an Award Winning Author, Serial Entrepreneur, and Investor. He Co-Founded YoungEntrepreneur.com along with his brother Adam. Matthew is co-author of the newly released book:Small Business, Big Vision: “Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right” and also co-author of Kidpreneurs.