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

“Don’t Go for cute, pick something that will sell!”

Naming you book should be super easy, but so often we make out we need to come out with something cool, sexy or cute. The same goes for our fitness businesses, we try to name it something cute.  Zenith Training, Apex Performance, etc etc…

This generally means nothing to your passing traffic. What’s wrong with just calling it what it is.

“London Personal Training Studios”

“New York Personal Trainer”

The problem really comes when you buy a domain name… we all try to think of something cute, rather than thinking about the obvious stuff, the stuff people search on. For example, if you have a personal training studio in london, why not buy londonpersonaltrainingstudio.com (don’t worry, my mentor and good friend Dax Moy already has this)

One of the big benefits of claiming these type of domains and USING them, is you get the benefit of easy ranking on google.

For about the last 3 years I have pretty much dominated the search rankings for the search personal “Luxembourg Personal Training”. Go check it out right now if you want… I am the ONLY choice up there. However the one site I couldn’t beat for total domination on those listings was “www.personaltraining.lu”.

Why? because it had the major keywords in the domain name itself.

The sad part is I created that site for a previous business JV I had with another trainer in Luxembourg, but even when I cut lose from the JV, the website was so well set up by me… it kept on beating my other sites in the rankings!

Even with slightly defective Search Engine Optimisation, zero updates to the site for literally 3 years or more, no new links created back to the site from authority sites… the site still beat my well set up sites, with MORE backlinks from authority sites, better SEO and regularly updated content.

It did all this from just having the stronger keywords in the domain.

Take this as a MASSIVE clue!

Don’t go for cute, go for what people are searching for.

Tell me what your website URL is, and backlink within the comments section…if anything it’ll help you with a simple backlink.

I additionally posted the article to my http://timgoodwin.eu BLOG as well as the http://personaltrainerluxembourg.com BLOG.

7 hours in and I am on Page 1 for the search term “Paul James Personal Trainer”

I am going to try to push this a little more and see where it gets too… then feed back with the results in a few more hours.

Plus I’ve just noticed that my article is linked from the number 9 entry on the first page, which is a social bookmarking site link.

There is a real buzz around this guy at the moment, so I thought I would post an article and track how my posting got on on Google.

The local time here is now about 17.30 and I have just taken a screen shot from Google to show you where this is at right now.

Click the image to view a larger version, and you’ll see that it is currently number 21 on Google for the search term “Paul James Personal Trainer”

I’ll check back later to see how I am getting on…. but this is a combination of things I do with my BLOGs to ensure I get great exposure with every one of my articles for specific keywords.

Whilst I believe there is a niche which likes to get a military style bootcamp beasting 3 times a week, this is not necessarily what a majority of the population are looking for in a training program.

Like many personal trainers, coaches and other fitness professionals have done over the last few years, I was attracted to creating a “boot camp”, the lure of solid profits and short working hours seemed to make sense. The downside of all this was, i didn’t want to run a “boot camp”, I hated the concept and the kind of people it would have attracted.

I had a venue, I had the programs written, and I had the marketing systems and website all in place, but I was struggling with the name. Every time I said the name “boot camp” I would cringe. And having tried to run something before I didn’t believe in, I knew it would a struggle to run from the outset.

Doing some tests on google for what people are searching for also brought up some interesting results, and confirmed in my mind that “boot camp” was not necessarily the best thing to try to market with. Google has a very powerful tool that I believe everyone should use to figure out what they are going to have set as their keywords for their site… It is all well being ranked no.1 on google for the keyword phrase “boot camp your town” if no one is searching for it, and this tool will tell you exactly this information!

Google Keyword Tool

Yes people are searching for bootcamps, but is there really enough to justify spending the time and money on search engine optimisation for these keywords! Is there other organic search terms that people are searching for more?

I have used the keyword “tempe” as an example, I have used this location in the state of Arizona as one of my myfitgeek clients runs a bootcamp from this town, so I thought it would be an interesting real world example.

Search Term                               Monthly Search Volume

boot camp tempe                     210
bootcamp tempe                      22
weight loss tempe                    170
workout tempe                         36
personal training tempe       210
exercise tempe                         73
pilates tempe                             320
gym tempe                                 1000
fitness tempe                             4,400

Whilst not conclusive evidence to warrant changing your website just yet, I would be very tempted to get the keyword phrase “fitness tempe” in to my website and online marketing efforts as well as including “boot camp tempe”.

Note the surprising difference with NOT having a space between “boot” and “camp” warrants a dismal return per month!

My guess is most trainers have not really thought about this side of marketing their group training programs. My advice use the tool and figure out what is better for your site… If it turns out that most people are NOT looking for boot camps I would remove it from your marketing and create a fitness group training program that will net more people…

that is unless you love giving a boot camp style beasting )

As ever I’d love to hear your feedback, use the tool and tell me how you faired in your area.

The Group Training Success System is a completely different approach to marketing and building your bootcamp business, this is not one of those usual products that is full of 100’s of exercises you already know. It is a step by step guide to building a massive group training program, what ever your niche.

Two things:

1. Tell me what you want me to cover, answer in the comments below…

2. Tell me that you are interested in watching/listening in to this.

Thinking somewhere around the middle of the month to do this…

Tell me what you want to know…

Tim

HTML is one of those weird things that people either get or don’t get… The general comments I get from people I help with HTML is that I am some kind of genius, a man with a magic wand. You probably think I am some techie nerd sat behind the computer screen, developing a beautiful thoracic curve to rival the hunchback of notre dame.

Actually I thinking coding in general is something you either understand or is a bit like Swahili to you.

However there is some many good reasons why you should know some HTML as a fitness professional. Not knowing will probably leave you behind in getting your site found by google, getting screwed by some dodgy web developer, and missing out on some easy business development.

You could outsource EVERYTHING to do with HTML, however there are some things that are simply not worth outsourcing, or even possible to outsource.

So here is my little list of why you MUST learn some HTML.

1. Getting screwed by some lazy ass developer(LAD)… I was the only time I flipped big time about a month ago when a good friend had a site “built”, but couldn’t figure out why google was not finding the site… Upon investigation, by looking at the code I saw what the LAD had done. They had created a website by taking a screen print of the word document my friend had used to demo what they wanted to appear, then just created the site just from the images.

This meant the site had no content (in the eyes of google) and would never had been found.

Avoid the LAD’s by understanding some of the nasty things they get up to.

2. When commenting in a forum, it is good practice to follow up you comments with a “hyperlink”(one of this links embedded in to the text) back to your website. To do this requires a little knowledge of HTML. Thankfully many communities and forums will now automatically insert the links with a little tool, but some do require a little bit of coding.

Each time you do this you create a back link to your site, helping to elevate your site up the google rankings.

3. Editing the meta tags on your site: The META tags are the “hidden” text in your site for making sure your site is properly indexed on Google. So for example the title, description and keyword tags are essential for search engine optimisation. Knowing a little HTML will allow you to make these simple changes without needed to “trust” a LAD with the SEO aspects of your site.

I have heard people be charged in excess of 1000 USD for SEO stuff on their site… it is a 5 minute job that ANYONE can do.

4. Making minor textual changes to your site without needing a LAD. If you don’t need to change the layout of your site, but you do want to change the text content, then if you understand a little HTML you can do this without the need to hire a developer.

Most textual changes take minutes, not days or weeks, an don’t require the services of a LAD

5. Inserting video and audio in to your site: understanding a little HTML will mean you can add the clever little script text in to a web page or BLOG posting to include a YouTube video or an audio hosted by a company such as Audio Generator.

Once again simple little changes that with a tiny amount of HTML knowledge are really easy.

Over the next few weeks I am going to do some really simple HTML tutorials, so let me know EXACTLY what things you would like to know about HTML so I can cover the most popular things.

Whilst you can do so much more to get your posts found than the system I am going to explain here, what I would say is there is always a balance between spending inordinate amounts of time on search engine optimisation, the reality is as fitness professionals we have clients to train and much better things to do with our time.

Before I start I will remind you all that Search Engine optimization for your website or BLOG is NOT a one shot thing. Many personal trainers have paid developers to sort all the SEO stuff out for them but ended up being disappointed that their sites are still not being ranked well.

RELEVANT  and REGULAR NEW content is king for a highly ranked site. Google likes quality content, google likes new content.

So you need to be posting new posts regularly, probably once or twice a week is about optimal… I don’t always achieve this but I try to sit and write content whenever I have a gap in my day between clients to get new posts down on paper…

I do sit and write on a daily basis as a matter of habit, it will certainly improve your “voice” on screen and make your content more genuine.

When it comes to putting the new BLOG post up this is the process  I go through.

1. Type up the article and create a keyword rich title for the post.
2. Search for a handful of relevant and interesting images that fit with the article. Google Images is a really useful place to “borrow” images. When inserting them make sure you add alternate descriptions which match the keywords of the title.
3. Bold some of the key terms and keywords through the article.
4. Where relevant I create hyperlinks to other articles and pages on my main website to give my normal sites backlinks!
5. Using the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin on wordpress, I update the meta tags for the post… which includes the title tag (the one that appears in the very top bar of the browser). A descriptive and keyword rich description tag, and the keywords tag, which includes the top 4 or 5 keywords I am using for that article
6. I use the tags feature on Wordpress to add keyword rich tags for the post.
7. And finally use the categories section to categorize the post… which just happen to be keyword rich category names too!
8. I then publish the post and send an email to my list telling them about the new post, and asking them to make comments against the post, and if they like it to bookmark it on facebook or twitter.
9. Then a really important stage to maximise your posts exposure… Go to http://www.pingler.com and register the link to the post and this will update about 100 directory services for BLOGs
10. Finally go to all the social bookmarking services you use and bookmark your new post. For example facebook, twitter, stumbleupon, Myspace etc etc

And that’s it.

The whole process takes about 45 minutes depending on the article length and how many bookmarking sites you use.

Yes I could do more things, but if I end up spending more time I don’t believe you necessarily get much more benefit for the time spent.

Give this process a go with your next BLOG posting and I assure you your posts and site will appear higher up in the google rankings.

As ever provide your comments below, I really want to hear about your experiences with this, and if you like this post please bookmark on your favourite social bookmarking sites )

Tim

PS. I’ve reopened the website for Easy Fitness BLOGs. Get a professionally designed BLOG, optimised and ready for you to start posting for only $297. Click the link below to get yours today.

Easy Fitness BLOGS

“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…