1. Answer Your Visitors “SEARCH” in less then 10 Seconds.

Hopefully, if you have read any of our material on search engine optimization, you are getting some traffic to your site from the search engines. The key phrase here is SEARCH, meaning someone came to your site because they were SEARCHING for something, possibly “personal trainer your city”. Statistics say you have less then 10 seconds to get you message across to a site visitor. If you don’t they will leave!So right now, read your headline and first paragraph. Do you clearly state what it is that you do, and how you can help the visitor (potential client)? If not, fix this as soon as possible.

2. Call to Action

A beautiful site with great sales copy is nothing without a Call to Action. It needs to be obvious that you want them to contact you, so you can help them get into shape. Don’t be foolish and think you can just ask them to call you or fill out a form without telling them with words why they should.

3. Easy Navigation

Ask someone you know who is not familiar with your site to find a specific page of your site (program options or rates page), and time them. Also keep track of the number of clicks it takes for them to get there. Remember, people are lazy and easily frustrated, if they don’t find what they are looking for in a few clicks they will jump ship and find your competitor.

4. White Space

The human eye sees things in small groups, and it is important that you display your information with appropriate amounts of white space in and around your content. Otherwise, the important things like your “Free Personal Training Session” offer will go less noticed.

5. Collect Info Properly

If you meet a nice looking person in a bar, it is quite common to ask for a phone number. But, what if you asked for his or her address, home phone, fax, secondary email address and job title. You probably would get a smack and a restraining order.Your website is no different, only ask for the info you are going to use. Your contact form should not ask for the address unless you plan on sending direct mail in the future. When creating your contact forms, remember the more you ask for the less likely you are to recieve. Typically, name, address, phone (*don’t require), will work well.

Now, I do recommend adding one or two things to your “name and email” form like “what is the best way to reach you”. This way, if they prefer to be called they will let you know and you don’t have to waste time calling people who don’t want to be bothered.

6. Credibility

There needs to be some form of credibility on your website. People would much rather hear how great you are from your clients. Use testimonials and expert reviews to establish trust and credibility on your website. Do not make up testimonials, if you can not get your clients to say a few nice words about your services… you have bigger issues to deal with then your website. If you are new and have no clients, ask associates to say a few words about how knowledgeable you are on the subject. You can also use your own story as credibility if it applies.

Make sure your site is using these 6 factors, and you will be well on your way to having a KICK BUTT PERSONAL TRAINER WEBSITE!

More website optimizing lessons to come….Keith

I am dumbfounded by the number of businesses, both big and small, that choose poor business names or domain names.  Of course there are plenty of examples of highly successful businesses with un-descriptive names. Godaddy, Google, and IKEA to name a few. But these are exceptions to the rule.

The other day I was driving around Chicago and I spotted a store called ALDI. This was the third or fourth time I drove by one of these stores or saw a sign for one, and I still had no idea what kind of store it was. It was laid out out like a grocery store but I was not sure.

During game 4 of the ALDS (baseball playoffs) The rotating advertisement behind home plate displayed and ad for a company called Callahan’s. No logo, no slogan, just a phone number. I’m sorry, but somebody at Callahan’s needs to realize they wasted a ton of money, and missed out on a lot of branding opportunity.

Granted, you may not be running billboard ads, or using on-field sponsorships anytime soon, but this is an equally important lesson for you. Choose your names wisely. Domain names can be a little tricky now that everybody and their mother has a website. No seriously, my mother has a website.

You can be a little creative, but not too creative. Just cause you think something is clever or funny doesn’t mean the rest of the world will. Here’s an example of correctly using creative domain names. Southwest has recently launched a marketing campaign driving traffic to a new domain called be www.bemoreproductive.com. On this site they will give you tips on how to get more things accomplished and of course offer opportunities for you to visit southwest.com and purchase airfare. 

Why does it matter so much? If you plan on doing any internet marketing, you will have lots of opportunities to place small ads, text links, that drive traffic to your website.  Many of these opportunities will cost money. Poor business names or domain names will cost you many times over. That I promise you.

If you are looking for a great carpet cleaning company, and you see two ads: 

Fast, Reliable Carpet Cleaningwww.rickscarpetcleaning.com

or

Fast, Reliable Carpet Cleaning www.CleanerCarpetsGuaranteed.com

Which one would you choose?

Although it is nice for your domain name and business name to be the same, it is not likely. What I would suggest is try to get your business name’s domain name. If you can’t get something close. If www.RicksCarpetCleaning.com is not available try to get www.ricks-carpet-cleaning.com and one other like www.cleanestcarpetguaranteed.com and use it for your marketing. 

I will also be covering topics like how to come up with slogans, great logos, website designs, business cards and more. 

Thanks for reading,

Keith 

As if google wasn’t dominating enough, the best free search engines, the best free email program…

They had to out do themselves, AGAIN, by creating what might be the best website data collection and analytics program. Oh, and it too is also FREE! If you are not using google analytics you need to get on board today.

What is google analytics and how will it help me?

Google analytics is a web based program that allows you to see detailed reports like: where your website traffic is coming from, which traffic is resulting in sales, orders, or sign ups, why people are leaving your site, and dozens of other reports that effect your profits, and your search engine rankings. Interested, keep reading.

Why does all that analytic stuff matter?

Google analytics is like an x-ray for your business. You can look deeply into your website and see what is working well for you and what is ailing and needs to be fixed. For example, if you have a personal training website and leads are slow, you can look at your daily, weekly, monthly traffic. Yes I know, most sites have back end stats that offer the same numbers, With GA (google analytics) you can see what keywords drove people to your site. What you may find is that much of your traffic came to your site something other than personal training. Perhaps you wrote an article about “Getting Shape for Women” and it is getting some love from the search engines. That is not exactly highly targeted traffic if you are marketing big training packages in a specific region.

You can also look at your sites “avg time on site” statistics. If you have a low ATOS, it is due to only a few things.

A. Your site is un-interesting

B. Your sales copy is weak

C. Your Navigation Sucks

Improve one or more of these things and you will improve the amount of time people will spend on your website.

How hard is it to setup analytics?

It is simple and it should take less then ten minutes. You will need access to the HTML of your site but relax, all you have to do is place one line of code at the bottom of each page that you want to track.

Here is a quick video showing you how easy it is.

Stay tuned for much more google analytic insight on this blog.

Google’s adwords program is like the New York Yankees, you either love em’ or you hate em’. If you know what you’re doing you can use google words (aka. Pay Per Click) to your advantage, if you don’t know what you’re doing it could cost you a small fortune.  It is by far the most targeted form of advertising ever invented,  and the best part is that it is all under your control. You control how much you spend, what keywords your ads appear in front of, and how often they appear.

If you work on your adwords skills you can even somewhat control how much you pay per click. The reason why I’m writing this post is because I was just searching and saw a former client (who stole from us) running google ads. I got a good chuckle when I saw his ads appearing for totally irrelevant keywords. I’m not going to get into the math of it all, but basically he’s totally wasting money and he doesn’t know it. Maybe I should tell him…. Nah!

If you are using adwords, you need to be aware of negative keywords.   These are keywords you don’t want your ads to appear for. For example, there are at-least two Hollywoods in the U.S, one in Cali and one in Fla. If you have a pet store in hollywood florida and you are running google ads for the words “pet store hollywood” your ad will appear when people do that search. However it will also appear when someone searches for “pet store hollywood california” unless you are using negative keywords for “cali”, “california” “CA” etc. This is a very basic example, so please don’t reply to this post saying duh, I knew that already. If you look carefully you will see HUGE, multi million dollar companies making this same mistake. The difference is they don’t know it and it doesn’t effect their wallet like it does yours.

This is just one of many adwords strategies that you need to know about and I will continue to share many of them with you.

If you are not using adwords, I suggest you create an account and get in there and fool around. Don’t turn the ads on untill you have an idea of what you are doing. If you would like to learn more, let us know and we will try to accommodate you.

Good Luck!

Keith

There is a buzz going around about our new Top Trainer’s Club. “What’s it all about? Who’s Going to Be In It? How Can I Get on Board?” To be honest, I just don’t have time to answer all the individual questions we have been getting about the club, so I’m going to use the blog to answer a bunch of them at one time.

 What’s the Hype?

This will be not like any other personal trainer business building tips you have seen before.  Yes, we will cover lead generation, email marketing, search engine optimization, probably better than anyone in this industry has done before. But, we will be going “where no personal training marketing guru’s have gone before”.

I will be spilling the beans on some of the freshest online marketing strategies that are out including viral marketing, social marketing, advanced traffic strategies that we use to drive thousands, even hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site.

Who’s allowed in?

Everyone, except whiners and slackers. We will give you all you need to dominate your market, whether or not you take it and run with it, is up to you.

When Will It Be Released?

We are just weeks away from the launch of the New Top Trainer’s Club. You will see a few more emails about it and there will be a Top Trainer’s Club sign up form on the new website.

 I will post more info later, after I view more of the questions we have been getting.

 Dedicated to Growing Your Biz,

Keith