More than likely you have visited one today, they are everywhere.

The site probably looked alright, reasonable graphics, easy enough to navigate, but you just sat there wondering what you were looking at, and you just didn’t get a warm fuzzy feeling from it, so you simply clicked the back button.

ahhh so cute

When someone visits your site you have about 5 -10 seconds to get your message across to the visitor. It is either what THEY were looking for or NOT what they were looking for. It is really important that in that 5 – 10 seconds that you tell them exactly what they are going to get from your site!

That last sentence is actually really important so re-read it!

This means you cannot be sending mixed signals, or mixed messages.

1. One site that springs to mind is for a local Gym here in Luxembourg. Believe it or not this gym is called “PainWorld”. First of not a great name, unless you where selling hardcore training programs for guys and girls looking to start sweating testosterone at every session. When I last checked they were trying to run a Pilates class… Big mixed message.
   

   Maybe not the image for pilates?

2. Many sites for PTs I have visited over the last few months have been of the generic/boring brochure variety… see my free report for info on this… The problem is whilst your stunning picture of your gratuitous six pack may be the envy of your friends, and bragging rights in the pub, it sends a mixed message to the clients attracted by your post pregnancy service.
   

   The face of post-pregnancy personal training?

3. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter, whilst fantastic tools for making great connections, posting pictures of your drunken weekend antics next to “Read my fat reducing facts report”
   

   Tis a good job Steven Gerrard is not on Facebook as a Personal Trainer

4. The psychology of web design has probably been done better elsewhere, but one of my biggest pet hates is the issue of colours. The dark blues and blacks for the main colour of the background may look “cool”, they not only make the site difficult to read but also do not inspire the same level of trust. Look at pretty much every large corporation who is online; Yahoo, Google, Amazon, etc etc they all have a white background.
5. Clutter is another pet hate! All these sites with so many flashing knobs, bells and whistles, feeds from here, BLOGS, Adverts, Articles, galleries, Links to this and that. And that is just on the front page. Every part of the page is vying for your attention that none of it actually does, it is just noise. The message is indecision and disorganised.
   

   The Million Dollar Webpage - aka Clutter

6. Being all things to all men (and women): We do personal training, bootcamp, pilates, muscle building, tone butt, belly and thighs, over 50s workouts, marathon training, nutritional advice, life coaching blah blah blah. Urm I don’t want a generalist, I want the specialist. Stop hedging your bets and market to the one group you want to work with.

Mixed messages will put off potential clients, make it a black and white choice for your website visitor!

They either want what you are offering or they don’t.

What is necessary to have friends on Facebook? Let me know.

What I do have on Facebook, is something quite powerful, that I use regularly to help promote my Bootcamp locally. I have created a group and a page, both devoted to ForestFit. Whilst it doesn’t have so many members or fans, the act of having a facebook group or page adds to your reach, making more people aware of the groups you run.

Over the last few months, when I ask new people who join ForestFit where they first heard about us, about 75% of them say Facebook.

I do run adverts on Facebook too, but the chatter I get from my current members is significant to widen our reach.

Setting up a group or page on Facebook is really easy, and requires little attention afterwards. It is a good idea to update it each month, but this will take a matter of minutes.

Dan Kennedy talks regularly about using multiple media to promo your product/service, never rely on just one approach. Whilst your newspaper ad may work this week, it may not next week. If you can spread your reach through multiple media, you’ll continue to get a steady flow of new leads to your website.

Your task this week is to set up a Facebook group for your bootcamp or personal training service. Once you’ve done that add me as your friend )

http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn#/profile.php?id=587693973&ref=name

Tim

Un-geeking the internet for Fitness Professionals

PS. Facebook can get addictive, so I would suggest getting the group set up, invite your current clients to join and post stuff to it and drop in from time to time to add contact, but leave it at that.

Like many I got burnt, big time by making mistakes with Google Adwords, and I never seemed to get the return on investment I would of liked from it. Yes I picked up a handful of new clients and maybe one or two sales of my information products, but it seemed so haphazard that I eventually switched off all but one one campaign.

Now when facebook came along with there own PPC system I was very skeptical, but after some digging around and playing I found it to be really powerful, so much so I use it heavily now for advertising my local bootcamp and personal training services. The only real downside to it was the ability to get decent reports off the system to analyse exactly what was happening… that is until now.

Facebook have obviously realised they have an incredibly powerful marketing tool available to them and so they have done a fair bit of work improving their reporting system. This was released just a few days ago, and today I had a bit of a play around and now I am like an excited kid!!

Let me give you an example of the information I have received:

Example: ForestFit Bootcamp Hardcore advert showed me the following split for gender and age, the percentage of impressions and percentage of clicks.

Now the power of this hopefully obvious. What I can read from this is the EXACT demograph of the client who is viewing and more importantly, clicking on my adverts… this means I can now go back in to my adverts and more tightly target them in terms of the people I let see them. I can also alter the text of my advert to suit a very tight demograph, I can set up the landing page so it is more targeted for each advert, I can even change the type of programs I run based on the age groups and gender.

And this is just a tiny snapshot of the data that I can pull off facebook.

So what is your next step… First of all get on to Facebook and start setting up some ads.

If you want to know how this is done, I have a full tutorial on facebook ads as part of the Group Training Success System, the complete program for setting up and running an outrageously successful bootcamp or group training program.