Why do you not “get” Twitter?

Written by Fit Geek on November 21, 2008

Twitter is one of those weird things on the internet that should NOT work… but it does.

Twitter is something that many people just do not “get” when they look at it… If I was being honest I didn’t “get” it the first time I came across it.

Twitter is Web 2.0 in its most simple, raw state.

Twitter has such a simple interface, it’s hard to believe it has become one of the most powerful and useful marketing tools on the internet today.

What the hell is Twitter and why as a fitness professional should you care?

Basically twitter is a status display for its users. You have 140 characters to tell people what you are doing right now. You’ll see people posting everything from what they had for dinner that morning, the workout they just did, to telling people about the book they are currently reading. The unique part of twitter is that you can follow anyone including some quite famous people from Stephen Fry (actor) through to Lance Armstrong!

People are generally interested in what other people are doing, finding a connection with people who follow you and people you follow.

As it happens many of your potential clients both online and offline are likely to be twitter users. It is quite easy to build up a decent group or followers, so when it comes to releasing your latest e-book, or training video, you’ll have a bunch of people to tell about it.

Tell People About Your Stuff

I regularly use twitter to update people about BLOG posts I have created, or updates to my general website, new articles I have created, youtube videos I have submitted etc etc. All this generates followers, people viewing, bookmarking and commenting on all these different things. When there is a stream of interest in something on the internet you can easily bring in a whole host of new subscribers to your autoresponder lists and potential customers.

A future BLOG post will go in to the usage of Twitter more and some of the many new tools that are appearing to make the usage of Twitter even more viral and useful for Fitness Professionals.

For now, get over to Twitter, set up an account and start by following me by clicking on http://www.Twitter.com/MyFitGeek

Tim is MyFitGeek

PS. Don’t forget to comment on this posting below AND do the whole social bookmarking thing by clicking on the appropriate link below.

Are you focussing on the wrong search terms?

Written by Fit Geek on November 17, 2008

Personal Trainer websites are generally quite poorly optimised for search engines.

BORING!!!

OK I am going to try to make this BLOG posting vaguely interesting cos most people really want to switch off when it comes to this stuff, and really I couldn’t agree more with you…

IT IS REALLY BORING!

I’ve been told that sex sells and placing stuff like pictures of cute girls or ripped guys will get people to read your post. Of course you would never catch me doing this so here is my contribution for “eye-candy”

OK now I have your undivided attention, I’ll talk to you about google…

What do we want from Google?

We want to appear when someone searches for something that is relevant to what we do and who we are. Really that is all there is to it with Google. There is little point appearing for the search term “Britney Spears” when our service is “Real Man Strength Training in NYC”

Certain search terms are really difficult to get top rankings with, unless you devote your entire life to doing everything right for this specific search term. For example the term “Fat Loss” has a huge level of competition and would require a lot of geek work and a certain element of luck to get to the top of Google.

Why don’t I Want To Appear Top For Fat Loss?

To be honest with you, your website doesn’t want to appear at the top of google for “fat loss”, especially if you are a real man strength expert in NYC. As soon as someone clicks on your site and sees that it is not relevant to what they are looking for, they’ll just click the back button!

So why is it that when you put keywords in to website, do you use the term “fat loss”?

It is pointless and unnecessary!

Whoa there I am getting boring again!!!

Urm, how can I make this interesting again… I know lets talk about money…

Filling your local bootcamp makes you a lot of money, so what search term will your prospects search for?

Fat Loss (your city)

Bootcamp (your city)

Workouts in (your city)

Now tell your web guy to set the following things on your web sites front page to include these search terms:

• title tag
• description tag
• keyword list
• H1 tag
• image file names
• image alt tags
• first paragraph content

Really that is it. Make you web page relevant to these search terms and google will love you, and your clients will find you.

In marketing terms you are looking for the “long-tail”, ie. the search terms that only the people in your local area are going to search for, not the generic, highly competitive search terms. Fewer people will come to your site, but they will be much more likely to be interested in you and your site.

Now there are a few other factors including site link popularity, and link quality and all that kind of stuff, but when you are looking at the long tail your sites optimisation is much more critical.

An Experiment For You To Try

OK, how can I finish with an interesting close so you remember what I have put here and you might actually apply it to your site today?

Here is an experiment for you, go check out your competition on google, by doing a search for “Personal Trainer xxxx” where xxx is your local town/city/area. Click the top entry and view their site.

Now right click and select the view source and see how they stack up on the list of items I gave above… How do they look… usually not that great… see how easy it would be to get to the top of google! Go do it!

Tim

P.S. Let me know how you get on, tell me what your site needs, tell me which bits you don’t understand. comment below.

Why should you not discount your products?

Written by Fit Geek on November 16, 2008

I came across an interesting article the other day that demonstrated why discounting your prices is sometimes a psychological turn off for your potential clients. You can check out the article here…

In the UK, like many other countries around the world car dealers are experiencing their slowest months on record, with showrooms being deserted for days on end… One particular dealer for the Dodge brand was trying everything it knew to drum up some interest and clear their stocks.

Discounting Their Prices Didn’t Work

They tried heavily discounting their prices, cutting as much as 50% off the price of brand new cars! But with no interest. Then they tried something different and 22,000 phone calls later they realised they were on to something.

They increased the VALUE of a sale, by making the unprecedented step for car dealers of offering a “buy one get one free” on one of their models.

Essentially the same as a 50% discount in money terms, but psychologically very different.

I certainly believe that discounting a product heavily has the opposite effect on a potential buyer, it sends a message to your prospect that the product was NOT worth the original asking price in the first place. However increasing the perceived value shows that your product is still valued at the asking price, but adding something else in sweetens the pot.

Bonuses For Bonuses Sake

On the other hand I am not a believer in adding a huge amount of extra bonuses like we see in our industry. A million extra reports or any additional widgets, sparkly things and gadgets from any source we can obtain them from, just devalues your product… however giving extra, truly valuable bonuses is going to entice your buyer to dig out their credit card.

For my bootcamps, I have tried a different kind of discount that promotes positive action AFTER they have bought their place. Actually I offer 3 bonuses, one is my Goal Achievement Strategy workbook, which I use with all my Personal Training clients, access to the PRIVATE community site for all the bootcamp attendees and the discount!

Discount for Exercise Adherence

The discount works like this, if the client comes to EVERY single workout during the month, then they will get a 25% discount on the NEXT bootcamp. This is not offering a discount for discounting sake, but rewarding commitment to sticking with the training. See how that is very different.

Let me know your thoughts on discounting, and what things you have tried in the past, add your comments below and don’t forget to do the old social bookmarking thing…

Tim
Follow me on Twitter

BTW all my bootcamp filling tactics are available in the Group Training Success System, click here now to get your charter member access today

Are You Missing Out On Facebook Ads?

Written by Fit Geek on November 13, 2008

PPC 0r Pay Per Click scared the hell out of me when I first tried it a few years ago. Like many fitness professionals I have spoken to over the last 12 months or so, Google AdWords is a thing that confuses many of you and puts you off the thought of advertising via PPC.

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.

7 Reasons Being A Fit Geek Is Easy

Written by Fit Geek on November 9, 2008

Geek

Have you noticed how tough most geeks make it for themselves? I mean they create an acronym for stuff that just doesn’t neeed an acronym just to confuse the F**K out of non-geeks. They create NEW technology just cos its a cool idea to create a new technology, and they write the most tedious and boring BLOGs you’ll ever find.

They have no mates in the real world, and they are doing a mighty fine job of having no mates on-line either.

However, the best geeks in the world have really started to break down some barriers with giving more people access to geek technology.

What follows is my 7 most useful and easy ways that being a Fit Geek is attainable by everyone.

1. Starting a BLOG is so easy. If you can type you can BLOG. Blogger.com is the easiest BLOG system to use, Wordpress is slightly tougher… but the WordPress system is getting easy to use and has more fancy features. Start blogging today.

2. Getting a COOL website is not difficult. Don’t try to do it yourself cos that is boring and geeky! Hire a developer, Elance.com, RentaCoder.com, ScriptLance.com, Guru.com. All these options are easy to use… Elance is probably the easiest!

3. Do you TWIT? A lot of people just don’t get twitter.com. it is a simple little program that allows you to tell people what you are doing in 140 characters or less. People start to follow you, you can follow people too to see what they are saying… When you have something important to say, such as “My cool new wesite is built, check out www.mywebsite.com blah blah blah” you’ll have instantly a few people who will take a look

4. Online video has become THE big thing in the last few years, creating a video has become accessible to EVERYONE. Buy a Flip cam, they are cheap, so EASY to use, and you can create and upload a fitness video to Youtube.com in about 10 minutes without any techie/geekie knowledge. Then Twitter and BLOG about it

5. Creating a weekly fitness radio show for iTunes is easy. Set up an account with AudioGenerator, ring a phone line and talk. 3 minutes after you finish the call, you’ll have a link to download the MP3 file… upload to your iTunes account… Then Twitter and BLOG  about it )

6. Create a Bootcamp without ever needing a website!!! Use MeetUp.com to tell people about your group. I just a search for groups in the country of Luxembourg… do you know what came up top? “Luxembourg Mac Users Group” how sad is that, but they have 61 members who meetup!!!! Oh yes when you have created your event on there… BLOG and Twitter )

7. Don’t Panic! In the words of the ultimate geek book “The hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy”. Technology has become SOOO easy to use that we can all become geeks (but not like the picture at the top, I promise). If you don’t know how to do something ask a nice friendly geek, there are plenty of us out there in cyberspace!!