One of the most common questions I get is “How do I get more personal training leads?” The answer is much more complex than just buying advertising or creating partnerships with other local businesses. Let me first present you with this question, would you rather have 30 leads per month or 15 high quality leads per month?
If you are new to personal training you will need to be more comfortable with terms like “conversion rate” and “CPL” (cost per lead) In simple terms, if you spend 100 on an ad and you get 2 leads, your cost per lead is $50. If you know that you profit $250 from each new client on average, you have a winning campaign.
Now that we have that out of the way, here are a few tips for getting more leads. Use as many of these strategies as you can as long as you are tracking whether or not they are producing a positive ROI (return on investment)
Blog Ads
Referral Partners
Publicity / Free Press
Sponsorship
PPC - Pay Per Click
Local Papers
Online Directories
Search Engine Optimization
Contests
Facebook
Craigslist
Review Sites (ex Yelp.com)
If you have tested any of these methods, please leave a comment and let me know…
Ok so the first two are great rivalries, but the last one is becoming quite the rivalry. SEO (search engine optimizations) is lucrative for many reasons, mainly because the traffic is free.
PPC (pay per click) is not so free, in fact it can be very expensive. PPC has many great benefits as well. Let’s have a closer look at the pros and cons of each one.
PPC - The Good
You can sign up for a google adwords account and market your personal training business in as little as one hr. You completely control the budget and flow of traffic. I don’t know of another medium that allows you this type of control. There are no long term contracts either.
It is also the most targeted form of advertising that has ever existed. You can place your ads only in front of people that are searching exactly for your products or services.
You can also use ppc to test different webpages, marketing promotions, etc.
PPC - The BAD
PPC advertising can be costly, especially if you do not know what you are doing. You need to learn the ins and outs of google adwords in order to keep your costs down and be profitable.
This type of advertising is also very competitive. As is easy as it is for you to get started, it is equally as easy for your competitor to jump in.
SEO - The Good
You can get a ton of traffic from organic search engine rankings. The search engine results are pretty consistent although I have a feeling this is changing. In other words you may have the number 2 spot in google today and drop out of the top 10 by next week.
There is also a school of thought out there that suggests people “trust” organic results more so than ppc results.
SEO - The BAD
If you are late in the game, it is likely going to take you a long time to get good rankings. There are millions of websites online and many of them have a head start on you. Don’t be too discouraged because you can improve your rankings. Just don’t expect it to happen over night.
Although the actual traffic is free, getting rankings often involves you spending money. You may need to buy or rent links, and you may need to pay someone to create lots of great seo friendly content.
So there you have it. What do I suggest? Use both! Together, these two strategies can deliver serious traffic to your personal training website.
I hope you found this personal trainer marketing tip helpful. Please leave a comment if you would like to learn more about ppc or seo..
Keith
Personal Trainer Marketing Coach
No matter how bad it gets, you could always be this guy:)
If you haven’t noticed we are seeing a shift in search engine rankings and it is becoming google’s goal to provide up to date relevant content, much of which is generated by users not businesses. There’s a reason why google spent Gazillions of dollars buying video sites like youtube.com
User generated content is the future of the internet. So how does this effect your business? Well, there are customer review sites that rank very well in the search engines and it can be extremely beneficial to you if your customers are talking nice about you behind your back…
In fact, I encourage it. The more people talking about you online the better. Unless of course they are talking smack! There are ways for you to keep an eye on the smack talkers as well!
Here’s an example… Yelp.com is a site where people talk about their experiences with businesses, personal trainers, gyms, yoga studios, etc. Not only can you get traffic from sites like this, they are preselling your services for you.
There are dozens of sites out there that are just like this, use them to your advantage. Now, this isn’t something that should be #1 on your TODO list but when you get the chance tell your happy customers to go to yelp and leave you a great review. Warning: Do not be sneaky and leave your own reviews, what goes around comes around:)
The idiots have done it again. They send their junk, their spam and they are ruining the entire concept of emailing for business. Email marketing is an unbelievable way for you to get your message to your customers and potential customers. However, it is getting harder and harder everyday. Thanks alot Spammers!
Look, we are all sick of spam and we all have way too many emails in our inbox. So how do we get people to not only read your emails but actually look forward to them.
Here are a couple tips for successful email marketing for personal trainers.
1. Be Honest - If you plan on emailing someone every day or every other day, tell them up front before they fill out the form. Of course you don’t want to say, “hey you don’t know me but im going to email you every day for the rest of your life for no good reason”.. What you can say is, “I would like to send you action packed fitness tips, workout routines, and other great resources, in our daily E-newsletter..
Also, if you say “fill out this form for a Great Free Report”, give them the free report. Don’t leave them hanging wondering what you are going to do with their email address.
2. Provide Real Value - I’m on everyone and their mother’s email list these days cause I like to see what people are up to. Some of them I open and read, the ones that get deleted right away are the ones that never have any real value. Trust me, if people benefit from the content of your email they will keep opening it and keep reading it.
3. Differentiate Yourself - What makes your newsletter so special? It’s probably just like all the other fitness / personal training newsletters out there. Stand out from the crowd.
4. Choose Words Wisely - Not only do you have to be careful which words you choose for the spam filters, but you also need to write subject lines that will make people have to open the email. This can be a challenge, watch out for words that trigger spam filters like free, weight loss, fat, etc.
5. Always offer a chance to unsubscribe - It will really tick people off if they want to unsubscribe and they can’t. You don’t have to make the unsubscribe link big bold and bright red, but it needs to be there.
There is much more to having a very successful email marketing campaign but this should be enough to get you started. If you have any questions, let me know..
I have to admit I’m a bit fired up about this. About 1 yr ago it used to be easy to get high quality traffic to your website, now things have changed…
The Rules Have Changed, and He (or She:) Who Knows The Rules, WILL PREVAIL!
Many of my personal trainer coaching clients ask me “How Can I Get More Traffic to My Personal Training Website“? I tell them to get a pen and a pad ready and then I share my top 5 traffic generation strategies with them.
Each strategy is very in depth and would require that this blog post be about 20 pages long. But to keep it simple I will give you the “meat and potatoes” now and write a follow up post later with more of the details.
So here are 4 rock solid website traffic strategies to bring consistent, qualified visitors to your websites (personal trainer websites or any other for that matter)
Traffic Strategy #1 - Content
You may have heard this saying before “Content is King”. This still holds very true for getting traffic online. The more relevant content you have the more organic search traffic you will get. You can also leverage your content by offering it to other sites in exchange for reference back to you.
Warning: Do not create garbage content, you may get traffic but the visitor will see your site as a spam site and leave anyway. Yes, you can sneak spammy content by google and trick them into ranking your website. But I assure you, it is not the risk. If you get black listed by google, you will regret the day you tried to fool them:)
Traffic Strategy #2
Blogging - You don’t have to be a techno geek or a 16 yr old gamer to be a blogger. First of all a Blog (short for web log, aka web journal) is quick and easy way for you to add content to the web without understanding how to create websites, or edit html code. You would be surprised, if you write about interesting topics people will read it, and often return. You can either install a blog on your existing personal training website or keep it separate. The benefits for keeping it separate is that you are creating a back up in case your main training site drops in rankings, the down side is that it may take a while for the personal trainer blog to rank.
Traffic Strategy # 3
Pay for your traffic - I can see it now, you’re already nervous since I said the word pay. Google adwords is the most targeted form of advertising EVER. As long as your website converts prospects into clients you can make pay per click traffic work for you. You can set your exact daily and monthly budgets as well as monitor the effectiveness of each ad. The best part is that it is immediate. You could start a brand new personal training website and drive traffic to it in an hr or less
Traffic Strategy #4
Other Peoples Traffic - Since you are mainly selling personal training ( a regional service) it wouldn’t make sense for you to buy banner ad space on ediets . com or major other health and fitness sites. But what about another local site that is moderately relevant to personal training. Ex. If Sally has a health food website in your area and she gets local traffic from people that are interested in health, why not ask her to let you put a banner on her site. You can do a swap or even pay her for it. Odds are that her website doesn’t actually bring in much money so she may be thrilled if you offer her 100-200 per month.
Of course, before you pay for any banner ads you will need to know their traffic stats. I will try to write an entire post on this subject soon.
There are many other strategies for getting traffic to your personal training sites. First focus on the 4 strategies mentioned above. Then, you can try some of the advanced marketing strategies.
