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

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.

The solutions your “friendly” web developer will suggest will often be their excellent in house content management system (or CMS). Having been exposed to some of these in my time, exactly NONE of them have been particularly useful for all the things suggested in the first paragraph!

If your developer suggests their CMS, politely decline!

The only one I have come across that is any good is WordPress. Having already discussed wordpress in previous posts you’ll get the idea that I do like this software.

I like it a lot!

Not only do we get some cool wordpress themes, some top class wordpress plugins, but also the best CMS you’ll ever find.

The wordpress CMS has gone through many iterations and is now considered a “mature” software, meaning it is relatively bug free, extremely user friendly and has a really easy learning curve.

The fact that there are literally thousands of add ons and themes for this software tells you it is really well liked by the “geeks” of the world too and is certainly here to stay for at least the next few years, which is more than you can say for the CMS from your developer!

I’ve set up quite a few BLOGs now for my own business and other peoples businesses, and the CMS back end is easily adopted by my clients, which makes my life really simple too!

One other thing with WordPress, it is not restricted to just BLOGs, you can set up actual websites with it too! Whilst a little cumbersome for a simple website, more complex sites can happily thrive on a WordPress back end, making updating and managing you web site an absolute doddle!

So the next time you are wanting to get a BLOG or a website built, consider using WordPress, or asking your developer to build it using wordpress, so that you have much more control over the management of the site.

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?

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.