Have been doing some looking around other industries and seeing how other businesses attract website visitors using YouTube….

One of the examples that I came across is nigh on perfect an example, of how to do it…

Besides the fact playing blues guitar is inherently more cool than swinging a kettlebell, we can take a lot of lessons from how this guy does his videos… and you can’t look over the numbers of views he gets… (we are talking millions of views!!!! per video)

Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwdcbpPgz1M

Things to look out for:

1. The title of the video: Learn to play lead blues guitar licks and phrasing lesson.

This contains the major keywords “Learn to play lead blues guitar”, it also has a 2nd and 3rd keyword phrase in there too “guitar licks” and “phrasing lesson” perfect on every count

2. Description tag: STARTS with the url and immediately says “Click the link above to receive free exclusive videos, newletters, and
lots of free guitar and music goodies from Next Level Guitar.”

Immediate call to action… perfect, offer more stuff for free and more stuff for free… this guy gets cooler by the minute.. What is on the back end of the URL… an FORCED OPT IN, only thing you can do is put your name and email address in… I bet this guy has a MASSIVE email list!

3. Still on the description: “In this lesson we teach some easy beginner blues licks as well as ways
to connect your ideas and musical thoughts together using phrasing.”

Contains a few more keywords but mostly actual info as to what the video contains

4. Still on the description: Many more lessons at:http://www.nextlevelguitar.com

Final stab at getting people to visit his site…

5. Tags:

• Learn
• to
• play
• Lead
• Blues
• Guitar
• licks
• and
• phrasing
• lesson
• rock
• next
• level
• acoustic

Notice all major keywords again plus more, most people forget about the tags!

6: The actual video… Very cool, understated, this is someone who is speak his truth… he is not being overly exaggerated, being someone he is not… This is just him enjoying teaching people to play cool blues.

7. Content focuses on a very small subject matter and teaches it very well, going through the basic teaching points, and then adding more complexity later in the video, catering for absolute beginners as well as intermediate level guitar players.

8. Video starts with the URL screen… and then details of what you will get on that site. Plus the URL flashes up during the video too…(visual) (*Side Note* check out his main website… this is a continuity program when I looked it said 329 premium users online at that moment!!! at 29 bucks a month… do the math!)

9. Marty starts by saying who he is and SAYING the URL (auditory)

10. Finishes again by mentioning the URL, then the screens again with whats on the site and then the URL screen again.

Marty has obviously got very good at creating these videos, the production quality is very high… but you should be able to get half decent results with a flip cam or a low end video camera and an external mic…

Major take home point to this post… DON’T just look at what others in our industry are doing to get website traffic… in fact it probably pays NOT to look at what our industry is doing!

Later

Tim
http://personaltrainerinternetmarketing.com

I scrubbed all the other stuff off my board earlier this evening and placed the following…

Just click on the image to make it bigger.

So what is on the board, besides the reminder of why I work my butt off every day, my favorite quote and a 101 dollar bill, the diagram is simple but outlines my overall system for getting new people to my websites EVERY DAY.

1. Pay For Them… This includes Pay Per Click advertising through Facebook, Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing etc etc. Or even paid for online advertising on local websites to capture local leads.

2. SEO… Improving the on site optimisation of my sites so that they rank well for my main keywords and to ensure I am getting more links back to my site.

3. Offline… Offline adverts in local media, flyers, doing public speaking as well as getting involved in local events and becoming more visible in my local community.

4. CSS… This is my content syndication system. A step by step process of creating high quality content such as articles and videos for my BLOGs, distributing throughout the internet using various resources such as ezinearticles, submityourarticle, youtube, blip.tv and then finally a system of social bookmarking to spread the word about my content.

Each element drives people back to a page on my site to opt in to my autoresponder list using aweber.

I work on this daily… it is not by accident that my web site, my videos and my content DOMINATE google for my primary keywords.

SEO is NOT a one shot deal, it is a daily process.

Content Syndication is also not a one shot deal, it is a daily process.

Paid ads is an on going process of updating, testing, updating testing… it is a daily process

Offline promotion is not just one speaking engagement, flyering campaign, or mail shot… it is a daily process

Have a system for lead generation, and get new leads EVERY DAY.

Now I don’t get anything for referring you to Frank, i just thought this video would explain how powerful having a BLOG can be for your business.

Frank is a bit crazy and the intro to the video is quite long but quite amusing, but once you get on to the educational bit you’ll see why I sent you there.

Watch Frank’s Crazy video right now

Once you’ve watched the video and are ready to get started with you BLOG, follow the link to Easy Fitness BLOGs to get your BLOG today

“What about traffic to my blog?”

In other words, how do you get people to your blog?

This is a great question, and I am really pleased that so many of you are asking it – it shows that we have some really sharp readers. 

You see, not to long ago, we were in the “build it and they will come” era.

“Webmasters” were cold-calling businesses, and showing them some fancy looking site and giving them some pie-in-the-sky sales pitch about how they would build some fancy site for them (really just one of those brochure sites), and then they would tell them how many million users there were on the Internet… and if only 1% of those people visited the site, it would mean wealth beyond dreams.

OK, maybe I am exaggerating a bit… but not very much!

With all these questions I have been getting about traffic, it is obvious that we have all gotten a little more sophisticated – or at lease we have been through the wringer a few too many times.

In any case, this is the deal with traffic (but hey I am by no means the ultimate guru on traffic but I have been studying this stuff non-stop for a couple of years now):

KEY POINT #1: Traffic is important, but conversion is just as important… and maybe more so.

You see, if your blog doesn’t convert visitors into leads, and then leads who know, like and trust you, it doesn’t matter if you are getting 10,000  visitors to your site every day. It really is that simple.

The better your site converts, the more money you make. And the way our blogs are built, when your blog delivers a lead… that lead is already pre-sold to a large degree. So you are not only getting more business, you aren’t working as hard once you get that business.

Another key thing about conversion – the better your conversion, the more liberties you can take in spending money to get visitors to your site.

You see, a lot of traffic sources are free. However, you can also pay to drive traffic. Well, if your site is converting 5 visitors out of 100 versus your competitors site converting 1 visitor out of 1000, then you can spend more money to drive people to your site.

KEY POINT #2: The best traffic is local.

The traffic that you want at your blog is traffic from people that are local to you (in a geographic sense). This is the traffic that is going to turn into personal training clients or bootcamp sign ups.

It probably won’t help you much if someone who lives in Russia visits your site, and you are in  Nottingham. 

The good news about this is that it is easier to “win” free traffic from the search engines if that traffic is local.

This is a nice paradox – the local traffic is not only easier to get, but it is a lot more valuable.

But most of the “big boy” generic cookie-cutter site providers completely miss this point.

Our blog system and training is designed to help you capture that local traffic. Obviously, I can’t give away too much on this… because I guarantee that my competitors are
watching me. But this is a key area of traffic that we are going to dominate.

Which leads to another big point…

KEY POINT #3: This isn’t just a blog!

Because of the software we use, Wordpress, we have access to one of the most powerful content management systems on the internet today

This is critical for expanding your site to more than just another generic blog – there is little point in providing something to you that you can get from somewhere else for free.

Your blog can morph in to many different things:

• A video blogging system, for example a whole library of exercise videos that you produce.
• A podcast portal, with you interviewing experts in your niche for your visitors to listen to.
• The ability to add static pages that promote your services and sell your products
• The basis for affiliate marketing other peoples products and services.

And with some further development from our base build you can create “members only” areas to truly monetise your blog!

How can you do all this stuff, well we are going  start by teaching you the basics and then give you the step by step guides to doing more as your blog expands.

Ultimately all these extra features convert your traffic in to regular visitors, sign ups and then to paying clients.

BOTTOM LINE: Traffic is critically important. You need a system that CONVERTS that traffic to dollars, you need a system that captures LOCAL traffic, and you need the ability to add the CONTENT that boosts the “know, like and trust” then have in you to become a client.

Regards

Tim

P.S. We have two very cool traffic techniques that are working right now to get search engines to list new blogs VERY quickly. We will cover that in one of our first follow-up sessions after we launch the system.

P.P.S. I know people are wondering about what this will cost. There has been a lot of speculation in the emails I am getting. Let me say that it will NOT be $999, and it will NOT be even $499.(these are some of the numbers that have been getting thrown around in comments I am getting). Don’t worry – it will be FAR less than that. I will be addressing this question soon…

The basic concept is around creating a BLOG, with some content getting enough traffic and then selling advertising on your site. Great idea in theory, but in practice it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it, it wasted more time, effort and money than it made. In fact I made nothing, cos I didn’t get anyone to advertise on it (

The other option is to create a BLOG and then put google adsense on your page. The idea is that you get enough traffic on to your blog who will read your content and then click on the google adwords adverts that appear and you get a cut of the money the advertiser has paid for the click. Once again great in theory, but in practice it doesn’t really work. I’ve tried this too and made a whopping 0.23 USD from it.

Now for some people this does work, if you have enough visitors, you can start making some money, but to be honest it is much to much like hard work.

It seems as if these marketing gurus have been misleading us, those sneaky guys!

However, I know of a way that is actually more likely to make you money from your BLOG that is much more accessible and doesn’t require a critical mass of traffic or any selling of advertising space.

When you create a BLOG you are building relationships with your readers, that IS the primary purpose of having a BLOG. It is a means of engaging new people in to your ethos of fitness and showing them you know your stuff by writing posts that are both informative and conversational (hopefully a bit like this BLOG). Also adding videos that you have created and possibly finding others that are entertaining and informative, related to your BLOGs subject.

Over time your readers will grow to know, like and trust you, but ultimately the reason you are writing the BLOG is to bring those readers in to your group of paying clients/customers.

You’re not writing this BLOG for fun are you! Are YOU?

So what do you sell them?

OK, obviously you are going to sell them your stuff. Personal Training, your bootcamp, weight loss classes, e-book if you have one. But really the amount of stuff you have to sell them is kinda limited.

Selling other peoples stuff is where you can also look to monetise your BLOG. This is easy, many products out there have what’s called an affiliate program, where you can register as an affiliate and sell their e-book, course, software on their behalf.

Think Turbulence Training, or Dax Moy’s Magic Hundred, they can be sold by you as an affiliate. Often you’ll make 50% commission on every sale, sometimes much more! This can have a very positive influence on your bank balance, and truely make good money from blogging.

There is one caveat to this, ONLY sell stuff that you believe in yourself, that means you have to buy it yourself, use it and actually like it.

You don’t want to annoy your trusting readers with products and services that suck do you… You’ll see from time to time I will recommend a product, or the adverts on the right hand side of this page are all of stuff I have used and continue to use. They are products that I really think you would benefit from, the same should go for what you recommend too.

So certainly making money from your fitness blog is possible, but remember to be selective with what products you promote and always continue to provide entertaining and informative content.

COMING SOON

Now if you don’t have a BLOG yet, or you are still using Wordpress.com or Blogger.com to host your BLOG, then in just a weeks time, on June 8th, I will be releasing a brand new MyFitGeek service to help you get your blogging really working for you. So make sure you keep a check on your emails over the coming week for more information about this exciting new project.

You’ll want to stay alert too because you really cannot miss out on what I have coming.

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.

If you want to provide some feedback please do so here.

If you are not on the MyFitGeek Priority Notification list go to the following web page and you can get access to the report from there.

http://www.MyFitGeek.com

One of the things I am going to try is going back to some more traditional “direct-marketing” principles. You know using real postage and send sales letters to my list.

I think, no scrub that, I know that our prospects perception of email is that of apprehension and it takes a lot of effort to build trust and rapport with our prospects. At least with mailing the level of trust ( in my opinion ) is higher.

Problem is the only names and addresses I have are from current and previous clients. So I have spent 20 minutes or so this afternoon creating a web form to collect name and addresse, the client gets sent to this form after filling out the email auto-responder box.

There is just some simple files that are needed to be uploaded to your server and a simple form added to a web page.  A seasoned web developer should be able to do this for 10 dollars…

Stop hiding behind your email autoresponder and start really communicating with your prospects.

Surveying your clients can be both a humbling and confidence boosting exercise. But either way very valuable.

Rather than talk about the psychology of surveys, and because this is a geek site for explaining how to do some techy stuff, I thought I would tell you about some of the online surveying tools I have used in the past.

First of all one of the autoresponder services I use is iContact.com and this actually has a surveying tool built in to its system… It is quite an easy service to use and it will embed the survey in to an email and send it out to all your contacts. It will then collate all the results and provide some pretty nifty and cool looking reports.

Then there is a free service called SurveyMonkey. The basic FREE version does have limitations but the service is great if you are only surveying a couple of hundred people. However, I am not a fan of the reports and the interface is not so obvious to use.

The one service I have recently started using is called WuFoo.com . WuFoo is similar to SurveyMonkey, but the interface is much more user friendly, you can embed your survey into an email or web page, as easily as it takes to embed a youTube video in to your website (ie. copy and paste a simple code snippet).

One of the great features with WuFoo is you can allow people to upload files as part of the survey, send out automated confirmation emails, send them to another web page on successful completition of the survey and request money from your survey participant if required too.

The cost of WuFoo for the basic package is just 9.95 a month and much easier and quicker than hiring a developer to create a customised survey on your site.

I used WuFoo recently for the 12days of fitness sign up for fitness professionals and made my life really easy for that job, I also sent out a survey to my bootcamp members getting feedback on the stuff they enjoyed and the things they would change about my bootcamps and got some fantastic feedback.

Take a look at WuFoo I think you’ll like it!

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.