Redsox vs. Yankees

Redskins vs. Cowboys

SEO Vs. PPC?

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:)

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.

Best of Luck

Keith

Personal Trainer Marketing

I have been getting a few questions about landing pages, or “squeeze pages” lately, so I figured I had better address it here in the blog. A landing page is a page on a website that has limited content and only one goal in mind, to get the visitor to submit their name, email and or personal info to you. The benefit to a landing page is that it is simple, there aren’t many other links for people to click on or banners they could be distracted by.

How do I use a landing page?

It is pretty simple really, come up with the general content for the page and have your webmaster create a page on your site that doesn’t have the other navigation tables. The page should only include your header image, the landing page content and opt in form, and then the footer (you may want o include links in the footer to your privacy policy and disclaimers) Once the page is created you can split your ppc traffic, 50% goes to your home page and 50% goes to your landing page and see what happens. Our experience has shown that landing pages almost always pull better conversions than sending traffic straight to the home page.

What types of content should I put on the landing page?

I will use a made up personal trainer to demonstrate an example of what I landing page may include: I wrote this in less than 5 minutes so please don’t grill me on my copy writing skills.

Local Personal Trainer and Fitness Expert Reveals 10 Exercises You can do in 20 Minutes
That Will Shed Unwanted Body Fat and Speed Up Your Metabolism!

My name is Mickey Mouse, and wanted to take a minute to show you a short video of how our personal trainers at Mickey’s Training Studio transform Orlando are transforming the bodies of local Orlando residents.

In this video you will learn how our trainers create custom workouts for our clients that target their trouble spots, like that annoying fat under the arm, or that pesky fat around your waist. You will also see that personal training is not about clanging around a bunch of heavy weights, it’s about being guided by someone that knows what to do and which exercise and techniques will deliver the best results in the shortest amount of time.

Press Play to watch the video below.

INSERT SAMPLE VIDEO HERE

INSERT SAMPLE TESTIMONIAL HERE

For the month of February we are offering Free Personal Training Sessions to help change more bodies and improve more lives in 2008

If you would like to try a free session or would like to learn more about our personal training programs fill in the form below.

INSERT FORM HERE

You can also put bullet points, testimonials, audio, etc on your landing pages. The key is to keep it clean and simple, and make the reader feel like they have to fill out the form. Tip. You cant just say fill out this form to learn more about our personal training, you have to give them a reason why, tell them what they will learn and how it will benefit them.

There some really savvy ways to test different landing page concepts that we will cover soon. Keep an eye out, and please comment to this post if you have something of value to say. Good luck,

Keith

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