Wordpress Plugins vital for Search Engine Optimisation

Written by Fit Geek on March 29, 2009

Another feature of Wordpress BLOGs when you have them installed on your own host rather than via Wordpress.com is the ability to use Plugins.

Plugins are basically little added programs that increase the functionality of your BLOG. There are plugins for stopping SPAM, editing tags more easily, adding fancy menus, automatic updating of your social media as well as many other things.

For the fitness professional there is one plugin that is vital for your BLOG, relating to Search Engine Optimization of your site. This plugin is called “All In One SEO Pack”.

This is a little extra couple of boxes to fill out when you write your post, but will mean your site is mean easily indexed and found by google and other search engines. It gives you the ability to directly edit the title, description and keyword tags for the post. It requires about 2 minutes extra work on your part when preparing your post but will make a massive difference to your google rankings.

Adding plugins to your site is exactly like adding a theme discussed in the previous post on Themes For WordPress. The only difference is you put the downloaded plugin in to the “plugins” folder.

Once you have uploaded the plugin, just open the dashboard and click the plugins box on the left hand menu bar. Select the plugin and activate it. Using it is as simple as editing the boxes below the area where you edit your post.

You can get the All In One SEO Pack plugin from wordpress plugins area.

I have a whole host of other plugins that I use, but this one is key to blogging success.

Wordpress BLOG Themes For Fitness Professionals

Written by Fit Geek on March 25, 2009

Wordpress has pretty much become the industry standard for BLOGGING. It is well liked by bloggers for its versatility and useability. It is also well loved by developers who continue to create great looking themes and extremely powerful plugins, many of which are free to use.

For the fitness professional this is great news as most of us are not tech savvy enough to get down and dirty with the code, but we can now do many things to our blogs to make them look more attractive and professional as well as deal with the all important Search Engine Optimization stuff!

The theme of your BLOG changes the overall look of your BLOG. The colours, the layout, fonts and well as functionality. Using Wordpress standard themes are pretty dull, if you are creating a wordpress blog via Wordpress.com then your selection is limited to some pretty basic looking sites.

However as discussed in the previous BLOG post, getting your own domain and a webhost to install Wordpress on to, makes your choices much wider.

You have the ability to upload ANY theme you like when you go this route. This is the way 95% of my BLOGs are created, specifically my Personal Training in Luxembourg business.

The process for uploading a new theme is pretty simply, if you are not so tech savvy, getting a geek to do this is not a particularly tough job.

First of all you’ll need to find a BLOG theme that you like. There are hundreds out there for free, or you pay for a premium theme or pay for a developer/designer to create one from scratch for you. Here is my list of bookmarks I use to find a theme:

Wordpress Themes

WPHACKS

Template Monster

WooThemes

1. When you find a theme you like download it, or tell your geek where to download it
2. They normally come as a zipped file, which you’ll need to extract on to your computer
3. You’ll need to access your webhost via FTP and browse to the following folder where Wordpress is installed /wp-content/themes/ This is where you’ll need to copy the entire folder of your theme you downloaded.
4. Once copied across, enter the dashboard of your BLOG and select “Appearance” and then “Themes”
5. You’ll see options to select either the standard BLOG themes or the one you just uploaded. Click on it and it will display a preview of the page. To activate click on the link in the top right hand side of the preview screen.

That’s it done!

Open your Blog to see what it now looks like.

You may want to hire a designer to change the header graphic on some themes so it fits with your content. Other than that there is little else to do with the theme.

I appreciate technically this may seem beyond your current knowledge. I want to hear your comments on how comfortable you are at doing this yourself or if it is completely alien to you?

Boxing Class Sold Out In FIVE Hours

Written by Fit Geek on March 25, 2009

Imagine what it would be like to sell out your bootcamp this month in less than five hours. 4000 dollars in five hours is something I think all of us would get excited by.

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!

Blogging Hell Part 2: WordPress is Powerful If You Use It Like This…

Written by Fit Geek on March 19, 2009

The other day I posted about creating separate BLOGs for each aspect of your business.

Now before you go crazy and start creating dozens of little BLOGs for each part of your personal training business, using Wordpress or Blogger’s free tool there are a few things you should consider.

Whilst the “free” tool on wordpress.com and blogger.com is excellent there are some limitations with it.

1. You have a limitation with the themes you can use, most of the standard wordpress ones look awful.
2. On a standard wordpress BLOG I am yet to find a way of inserting the code required to put an opt-in form, to allow you to collect names and email addresses.
3. There are a number of really important “plugins” (clever add-ons for Wordpress) that cannot be used on the “free” site. The plugins I am talking about are ones that will accelerate your search engine rankings and optimise your site better.
4. The standard domain name you use with the free site is not very pretty or easy to remember. For example TimIsAFatLossGod.wordpress.com compared to TimIsAFatLossGod.com (although it is possible to set up with a redirect it is not particularly search engine friendly.)

These issues may not seem like a long list of problems BUT they are significant enough if you want massive success with your BLOG.

The solution is relatively simply, but as always not necessarily easy if you are a bit wary of the tech stuff. It is likely you will need a geek to help you out on this, but it is possible to do yourself. You’ll need the following…

• A domain name, buy it from GoDaddy.com
• A web site host with the ability to install wordpress on it. HostGator does have this, as do I on my own server.
• … erm that’s it! For the moment.

You may want to find a theme to use on the site as well, there are plenty of free themes out there as well as ones you can purchase. I can recommend TemplateMonster.com for some fantastic paid for themes…

Blogging Hell – The Fitness Professionals Guide to Blogging

Written by Fit Geek on March 17, 2009

So tell me what is your BLOG actually about?

I mean what information and entertainment are you providing and to what audience? Like many BLOG’s I see created by fitness professionals, it is a fairly generic “fitness” BLOG

There is a problem with this in the same way that a visitor will be confused when they visit your generic “fitness” website. You’ll have posts about softly, softly, fat loss for females, followed by a high testosterone, muscle pumping video post, followed by a goal setting/mindset post… and so on.

Not only is your audience confused, but google will be confused too!

1. Google works on relevancy, meaning the more relevant and focussed your site is to a users search terms, the easier it will be for Google to index and rank your site.

2. BY having multiple posts on similar or the same topics, if the posts are prepared well, the keyword density of the site improves and google will index and list your pages more for certain search terms

3. Creating multiple BLOGs each with their own closely defined readership, increases your internet “real estate” allowing you to catch more prospects and dominate the google rankings in many different areas.On the third point you should be creating separate BLOGs for each aspect of your business:

• If your main product/service is fat loss personal training, then create a BLOG dedicated to fat loss in your catchment area.
• If in addition to fat loss, 25% of your clients are rugby players wanting strength and conditioning for rugby, create a separate BLOG for this.
• If you also sell an ebook on knee-rehab, consider creating a BLOG that covers exactly this.

By all means link to each BLOG, in fact this is a MUST to help with back link, but certainly keep the BLOGs separate.

Before you go forward and create a load of BLOGs using Wordpress or Blogger’s free blogging service the next post will take you a step beyond these tools and why you should avoid Blogger and Wordpress.