First of all, If I’m spending $75 for a ride to the airport… I’m not too concerned with saving three whole dollars. Granted, it is better than not having a promotion at all.

But how about a promotion that works…

Ride with Us and We Will Provide a FREE Juice of Your Choice, A FREE Paper of Your Choice and We GUARANTEE to be there 5 minutes early…

My point is, if you are going to spend money on direct mail. Make sure your offer is strong. These are the most important things to consider when using direct mail to promote your personal training business.

Who are you mailing to? Do they need your product?

Will they Open it, or Will it go straight into the recycling bin? 

Will they read it?

Would you take advantage of the offer and why?

What is the Call to Action?

How will you track the effectiveness?

If you take into consideration those main direct mail questions, you will have a much better chance of having a successful direct mail campaign.

Hope you enjoyed this personal trainer marketing tip!

Keith

Personal Trainer Marketing Coach

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:)

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:)

Keith

Personal Trainer Marketing Coach

Now of course im not suggesting that you need 3 or 4 websites, I mean it’s hard enough to deal with the one you have, right? But you should not put all of your eggs in one basket. Only bad things can happen when you rely on one website. What if your server goes down for days? (yes, it does happen) What if google just decides to drop you out of their rankings? It is a robot after-all, and guess what, when your website’s rankings fall, you can’t just pick up the phone and call the Google guys and expect them to say… We are so sorry for dropping your rankings and nearly putting you out of business, how can we make it up to you? In fact, you would be lucky if you ever even found out why.

You can protect yourself by having multiple sites or advertising on other people’s sites that have great rankings for your keywords. I have a few clients that have 3 (up to 6) of the top 10 spots for their keywords. Now, that’s an effective strategy.

The days of 10,000 dollar websites are over. Besides with blogs, and article/content sites, local listings, etc you should have no problem getting a few slots in the top 20 at-least.

Don’t wait, the sooner you start the sooner you will see the results.

For more personal trainer marketing tips and strategies, leave me a comment or a question and I will be glad to help…

Keith
Personal Trainer Marketing Coach

1. Ridiculously Simple Navigation - put your site to the 10 second test. Ask a friend to find something on your site like your rates, or studio location, if they can not find it within 10 seconds, you need to redo your navigation. Keep it simple and very obvious.

2. WTSA Headline - (What’s This Site About) The headline on your home page should tell the visitor exactly what your website is about. Don’t try to be cute, just tell them, and use benefits in your copy.

3. Call to Action - Bottom line, tell them what you want them to do. If you want them to call you, tell them to call you and give them a damn good reason why they should.

As I said before there are at least 40 something more elements that every kick butt personal training website should have but those 3 are probably the most important when it comes to turning visitors into clients.

Have a look at your website right now, if you would like more tips like this please leave me a comment and I will be glad to help…

Thanks!
Keith

Here’s a better approach to getting better search engine rankings. First, let’s think about Google. What does google want? Besides, dominate the whole world. Google wants to be the best search engine, and provide users with the most relevant content.

Think about it, if you provide great quality content to the world. Google will appreciate it and reward you with better rankings.

That is the one SEO that hasn’t changed over the last 5 yrs.

Take a smarter long term approach and it will pay off greatly!

If you have more questions about SEO, or how to get better search engine rankings for your personal training website, drop me a comment.

Thanks!

Keith

This is just the beginning, the sooner you jump on board the better…

If you are not using video in your marketing you are missing out big time. It’s not expensive like it used to be, all you need is a basic digital camera, a cheap tripod (not always) and a free editing software. By the way all pc’s come with windows movie maker and it is pretty easy to use once you play with it for a minute.

As always, if your not good at editing, find someone else to do it and you can produce your own video footage, or personal training commercials for a great price.

Get to it,

Keith
Personal Trainer Marketing Coach

I’m talking about picking a topic and learning it inside an out with books, courses, research, trial and error, etc. In the past 4 yrs I have attended countless marketing/business seminars, spent way more than you could imagine on marketing products and courses, and they were worth every penny. By attending these conferences I have been able to pick the brain of some of the most successful people in the world.

One of my favorite entrepreneurs is Nido Quebin, and one of his lines that I have embedded in brain is that “If you want to be successful you must hang around people that are successful. This is an absolute gem. I know it sounds obvious, but take a look around you if you are successful, odds are the people you spend time with are also successful.

Recently, I was able to listen to George Ross (Donald Trump’s right hand man) speak about the art of negotiation. First of all he is brilliant and you should definitely pick up his book “Trump Style Negotiation”.

I also met Kristi Frank from Season 1 of The Apprentice, who is also extremely bright, and very nice as well.

Kristi Frank from the hit show “The Apprentice”

Thanks alot camera guy, do you think I could have made a goofier looking face before you snapped the photo…:)

Surround yourself with great people, and I don’t mean rich people. I’m referring to people that are successful in all aspects of life and learn from them, soak everything up that you possibly can.

Keith
Personal Trainer Marketing Coach

How Much are You Getting Done?

An old friend of mine popped in to the office the other day and we spent a few hours catching up on each other’s life. I showed him the 3 different businesses I was running and most of the work that is involved.

He has a 9 - 5 and like most people he admits he only actually works for a few hrs each day, between espn news online and a few games of solitaire:)

He couldn’t believe I was getting soo much done without absolutely losing my mind. I realized that being productive is a challenge and it takes practice and a lot of trial and error.

So, I figured I would start a series of blog posts about “HOW to BE PRODUCTIVE LIKE A MADMAN”. Not just with your Personal Training Business but with your personal life as well.

Part 1 - The Problem with TO DO Lists

Honestly, for most people (including me) it is vital to use a To Do list. But there is a very specific formula for using these lists successfully. The first thing you will need is a dry erase board or a calender. First, sort your tasks based on importance. I usually sort by which tasks will directly increase my revenue and start with those first.

At the end of each night, write on the board the 2-3 Major things that need to be done the next day. Lists are overwhelming, if you only have a few things to do you will likely get them done.

If you end up finishing those few tasks move on to the next thing on your list.

In the next blog post I will cover time blocking, and email management, how to take control of your inbox again…

Until next time,

Keith

If you enjoyed this personal trainer business tip please leave a comment. Thanks!

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..

Thanks,

Keith