Google My Business Checklist

Have you claimed your swing dance and/or music business on Google? If not, I’d encourage you to do so. It offers many benefits which include managing content, accurate information, improved presence for the Google search engine, and helping people find you easier..

The following checklist comes from the “Yelp My Business” talk at the 2022 InTents Conference. I’ll also add helpful tips from what I’ve found useful after recently revamping my GYB profile.

• Claim your business profile HERE or click “Own this Business?” as shown below:

• Fill out all the information in your profile: days, hours, exact location, business description, and go through Google’s suggestions in case they’re relevant to your business.

• Set a regular day of the week or month to check your profiles: update information, upload current photos, thank kind reviews, respond to neutral or negative reviews.

• Respond promptly to: questions, messages, reviews that need clarification.

• As needed, update hours: holidays, special events

From my recent experience:

• Make contacting you easy and strive to respond within 24-48 hours to emails and voicemails. If you don’t have a business phone number, get a Google Voice number with a local area code too.

• Experiment with posts. You can post events, announcements, and offers. Currently, we’re not getting that many views, but our search ranking has seemed to improve over the last 1-2 weeks. We cannot say there is a correlation, but everything helps.

• Lower the barrier to entry which includes finding you and reaching pertinent details.

March 2022 Class Playlist

I am ridiculously pleased with the amount of music we played opening night in both our Intermediate and Beginner Lindy Hop classes! 50+ minutes were played and we were maximizing students’ dance time. The same goes for Boulder Swing Dance too!

These are the classes I love to teach and participate in - where it’s movement focused and we can put into practice what we’re learning to music. Anyway, we’re building a Spotify playlist of music below that students are dancing to in class.

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Get Out Of The Way Of The Dance

Lindy Hop speaks for itself. It’s wonderfully dynamic, playful and powerful. As Jacqui Malone writes “its hallmarks are improvisation and spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response patterns, self-expression, elegance, and control.” A Lindy Hop social dance rarely repeats itself because the partner, the song, and your life experience are rarely the same at that moment in time.

So why do some lindy hop instructors get in the way by trying to share the dance verbally when it’s a physical expression? When teaching, strive to let your dance students experience Lindy Hop through dancing as much as possible, especially dancing to swing music. This is because, as I sit here and reflect on my past dance experiences, there is nothing quite like dancing it out for yourself, dancing through mistakes, and trying to connect to a different partner to a new section of music. Lindy Hop is best experienced kinesthetically.

So let’s dance more and speak less.

Learn to Lindy Hop for Free!

It’s difficult to replace the in-person learning experience, but sometimes you need to learn from home for whatever reason. One of the best sources to learn Lindy Hop is to watch any one of our Learn to Lindy Hop in a Day recap videos on our YouTube channel like this one featuring Kenny Nelson and Allison Frey at Lone Tree Brewing Company back in 2019.

And, if you ever want more of this kinds of recap videos from our Learn to Lindy Hop in a Day workshops, click HERE for a list of those on our YouTube channel. If you do live within driving distance of Denver, we suggest taking our classes which you can find out more about HERE.

Music Matters

Consider the following excerpts from Jacqui Malone’s Steppin’ on the Blues:
“The term vernacular refers to dance performed to the rhythms of African American music; dance that makes those rhythms visible.”

“Vernacular dance gave birth to several international dance crazes, including the cakewalk, the Charleston, and the lindy hop. Its hallmarks are improvisation and spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response patterns, self-expression, elegance, and control.”

Being that Lindy Hop is a vernacular dance, it is inseparable from the music that birthed it. This goes with any of the vernacular dances. As a vernacular dance teacher of Charleston and Lindy Hop, for example, you should be playing as much good swing music in your classroom as possible to elicit the hallmarks of vernacular dance from your students. Counting, scatting, silence, clapping aren’t as powerful as the music that gave rise to these dances. They’re useful tools, yes, but just tools.

And students of vernacular dance, if you’re reading this, are you dancing to enough good swing music in class? If you’re only getting 1-2 songs or less than 10 minutes of music in a 60-minute class, I recommend asking for more. Some ideas would be raising your hand and asking - “hey, can we dance to some music?” or, if you’re 20+ minutes into a class, “hey, when can we try this to music?” Sometimes teachers can get carried away and just forget. Other times teachers may not place enough importance on dancing to music.

Regardless, music matters. And playing music allows for other things such as -

• Teacher huddles

• Open dance practice for students

• The time to give individual attention where the other students are distracted by music

• Opportunities to see if your teaching is effective and where to shore up your students

Music matters so much and for so many different valuable reasons. Play the music.

Maximize Your Instagram Name

TIL that your Instagram name is searchable. Well, not today, but a few days ago at a farmers markets conference in San Diego. One of their speakers, Molly Balint, spoke about how to maximize your Instagram efforts. It was amazing material and I immediately started editing my name.

Being that it is only 30 characters long, I had to get a bit clever. You see, you also want your business name in there preferably with some choice keywords. As you can see, I ended up breaking up our name since it’s also meant to be said and read as “swing in Denver.” Then I also wanted to work in dance, so now I have four searchable keywords - “swing,” “in,” “Denver,” and “dance” with a Call to Action.

Additionally, I made sure to include What we do, Where we do it, and How to learn more. It’s worth checking out that link in our Instagram profile too and ponder why we made that choice. More on that later!

Increase Marketing. Increase Accessibility.

Back in 2017 or 2018, I attended a talk at Lindy Focus led by Breai Mason-Campbell, Artistic Director at Guardian Dance Company. One of the discussion topics was increasing accessibility for BIPOC in predominantly white swing dance spaces. One solution I remember (and there were certainly more) was to make sure your marketing efforts included print materials.

In a digital age, you want to cover all your bases in terms of outreach. If you’re the one-person street team like me or you have people that can flier neighborhoods for you, make sure to hit up the immediate surrounding neighborhoods and then branch out from there. You never know where someone will be when they spot your flier; they could be in their neighborhood, maybe near work, or getting coffee with a friend.

A sample of the front of our class flier before we decided to switch dates to help out the Mercury Cafe. Our classes will reopen Wednesdays starting March 30, 2022.