Drop your comments below… I appreciate that FTP is not the most sexy of topics, but hey anything can look sexy if it saves you some cash )

But this is exactly what one of my trainers has achieved just a few days ago, following the blueprint of the Group Training Success System.

It comes off the back of 6 months of selling out her boxing fitness class since implementing the blueprint, and she sent out a single email to her list on Friday at 3pm and she asked me to shut down her sign up page just before 8pm the same day.

The thing is Luxembourg is not the biggest place… in fact go look on a map to find it. It is about 40 miles wide east to west and about 70 miles north to south and that’s the whole country!!

To sell out a boxing class, NOT a bootcamp or spinning class, or pilates, but Boxing is something very specialised, appealing to a certain type of person… sold out in just 5 hours.

The Group Training Success System is available right now. Take action today and implement this incredible system to fill your groups and your bank balance every month!

Anyway I came across a great little resource the other day. It came right from Google itself, and it is a guide to website Search Engine Optimisation…

It doesn’t release any of Google’s algorithm secrets, but it does cover Google’s best practices for title tags, meta tags, URL structure, navigation, content, anchor text, headers, images and of course, Robots.txt, making this a good way to review the basics and make sure you have that stuff down correctly.

Hope you find this little gift useful and I’ll speak to you all again tomorrow, with details of the launch. I hope you are ready for all this?

Official Search Optimization Starter Guide (PDF)

Tim

Ouch, I was annoyed and angry with myself for making that mistake!

However there was one aspect I did get right from day 1 of my bootcamp and that was my focus on community!

…and for once I am not talking about those online communities like Facebook, Twitter, or your NING sites (however all of these can, and do, play a part in this)

Do you think this was a powerful interaction?

As much as I embrace technology for many things in my business, I recognise that real human face to face interaction is 100 times more powerful, and something to truely nurture and embrace at all possible occasions.

I have been to fitness classes in commercial gyms where no one talked to each other, the changing rooms are deathly quiet before and after the workouts. No body exchanging telephone numbers, email addresses or even comments about what they thought about the music the instructor played!

What a shame!!

So when I started the ForestFit bootcamp I was adamant this would never be the situation in any session EVER.

You can easily implement exercises that require interaction between participants, getting them up close and personal with each other, sharing the experience. This can happen in the warm up, the actual workout and in the stretches at the end.

I have found simple tricks for everyone to learn everybody elses name within 2 sessions. It really doesn’t take too much imagination to implement this in to your programs.

The key now is in the experienced members of the group knowing exactly how this works. They now introduce themselves and actively find people they don’t know at the first workout of the month.

This support role, as a community, is what creates retention in my bootcamps at extra ordinarily high levels.

Team spirit on the worst day of the year!

The community is strengthened yet further with joint sporting goals, doing a 5km run together, creating a touch rugby team for a local charity event, organising social occasions and celebrating group members birthdays.

Once you have created a bond between your clients they never want to miss a session, they never want to be left out the teams, and the socials are something really special.

If someone was to ask me why my bootcamp has been so successful, I would say just one word…

Community!

Tim

PS. On Monday you’ll hear more about community and why it can boost your bootcamp retention and referrals. Keep an eye on your email over the next few days for the big announcement. This is no 35 buck e-book, it is full blueprint to success with setting up and running a group training program.

This is why in general I will outsource any graphic elements I need for my websites, flyers and posters.

However I do still use graphics tools. Why?

Like the HTML editing stuff I was talking about yesterday, you don’t need to be a graphic genius to edit and adapt graphics.

I never start from a blank canvas, and neither should you.

When getting graphics created for your website or flyers, always ask the designer to provide the final result in PSD format, as well as JPG or GIF.

PSD is PhotoShop Design format, which is a fairly universal image file format used by designers. It can be a “layered” image file which means each element of the image can be edited. It allows you the ability to change the text, move or remove layers and change fonts, colours etc without having to completely redesign the image.

You’ll need a tool such as Adobe PhotoShop or CorelDraw to do this editing, but these tools will become an important part of your toolkit. Saving you time and money in the long run, for getting minor changes made to graphics.

So the next time you are getting your graphics, logos, flyers or posters created by a graphic designer, make sure you ask for a “layered PSD file” as part of the delivered package.

—————————————————————————

Photo editing is a different aspect entirely and something I cover in more detail in the new Group Training Success System program. Including how to do high quality photo editing with a freely available tool

I have had a big project on the go this last few months that has taken up an awful amount of my time and resources. This project has had many different aspects to it which at times has been difficult to keep track of, and it is too easy to get lost in the details rather than seeing the bigger picture.

You have access to some great online resources which can help you keep track of your projects, whether large or small.

You’ve probably heard of mind-mapping. Tony Buzznan’s books on the subject are world wide best sellers. Now there are many applications to help you create your mind maps, the desktop ones can often cost literally hundreds of dollars, some are better than others.

I have been using an online mind-mapping tool for my big project and it certainly has kept me on top of the project, keeping my eye on the big picture and avoiding getting bogged down in the details. This tool is MindMeister.com, the basic version will not cost you anything to use.

http://www.mindmeister.com

Mindmeister is a very simple to use and accessible online tool that you can easily share with other people. For example, the website aspect of my project was outsourced to a developer in India. I was able to provide the developer access to the mind map so he could see my thoughts on the site and where the web
site fitted in to the overall project.

I have now started to use this tool for all my projects whatever the size, even down to planning the emails and BLOG posts that you see each week.

If you are having problems with focus on your writing projects, bootcamp structure, personal training business… whatever then this tool may really make things much clearer.

Try MindMeister today, then come back and let me know on this BLOG how you have found it!

Tim

Un-geeking the internet for Fitness Professionals

PS. My new project is coming soon. If you run a bootcamp or any group training program then this will certainly be right up your street! More on this in another email.

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!

‘My website is not appearing on Google anymore and my web guy has gone AWOL, what am I going to do!’

The statement my ‘web-guy’ has gone AWOL is one I hear so much!

Are they really that unreliable?

Fitness professionals are not geeks (generally), so when stuff goes wrong and your web-guy is not answering your calls you end up being really stuck. These guys have you over a barrel too because they know you are stuck. Being at the mercy of some nerd behind their thick rimmed glasses is not your idea of good business, when your business relies on the internet.

In 2009, your web presence is essential, your clients expect  more than just a shoddy web page thrown together using FrontPage or your brothers mates idea of what looks good.

At the same time you still want to obtain some level of control over the content on your web page, so you are not at the mercy of the geeks.

Fortunately the technology is moving in your favour, I am seeing tools that are much more accessible to the normal human being! All this is good, but you do still need to get a handle on a little HTML.

There are some great books out there that will help out. On my personal page on the Personal Trainer Success I have put a list of my books that I recommend. The Visual QuickStart HTML book is one that is on my desk next to my monitor permanently. It’ll get you started in less than a few hours, and act as a reference you can come back to time and time again.

So get over to http://personaltrainersuccess.ning.com now and check out my book list.

Let me know how you get on with the book, drop me a message on twitter or at the Personal Trainer Success site.

Tim

PS. I know what its like to be held to ransom by a geek who knew more about my site than I did. I should never get in that position again, hopefully the information in this post will stop you getting in to this situation as well!

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