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

March 19, 2009 By Fit Geek Leave a Comment

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…

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Filed Under: Blogging, Search Engine Optimisation Tagged With: , , , ,

How To Beat A Geek Fitness Professional

January 9, 2009 By Fit Geek 1 Comment

With a bloody great stick is probably your best starting point… :o )

As it happens, you have a lot going for you if you want to compete with a geek fitness professional. All this HTML, FTP, JS voodoo that geeks band about to confuse non-geeks is simply a cover for our own inadequacies!

So what follows is the five steps to successfully getting one up on a geek fitness professsional.

Step 1. Know what you want in a website and stick to your guns. Geeks get too easily distracted by the latest widget, gadget and cool technology. We are pulled off track from what we really wanted our site to do in the first place.

Step 2. Once you get your website built, be happy with the being ignorant to how it works and how to change stuff. Geeks want to fiddle with bits of code to make them “better”. We are too fussy and forget to actually USE the site for its main purpose of marketing and attracting new clients.

Step 3. Have an eye for design. I have the artistic talent of an one eyed wombat, trapped in a paper bag! Techically, geeks are stunning, graphically we suck!

Step 4. Concentrate on providing high quality content that your web site visitors will love you for. Geeks have ZERO attention span (that’s why it took your web-guy months to make that really simple change!). We hate to actually sit and write anything intelligent, witty or vaguely entertaining.

Step 5. Communicate with real people in the real world. Geeks are generally social failures and cannot relate to ordinary non-geeks. You biggest advantage is your charisma and ability to be a real human being on the other side of the internet. Pick up the phone talk and meet your clients in the real world.

I both hate and love the label of being a “geek”.

I am a geek trying to beat off the stigma and personal traits that make it difficult to compete with you!

Rather than let technology and geeks beat you, embrace the technology and use your advantages to beat us.

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Filed Under: Damn Those Geeks Tagged With: ,

Two resources you should be using.

November 24, 2008 By Fit Geek Leave a Comment

It’s the FitGeek – Tim Goodwin and I thought I would share with you a recent discovery I made about the average technical knowledge of the fitness professional.

You see one of my flaws as a “geek in remission” is I expect my peers in the fitness industry to know lots about techy geek stuff. In general this is really not the case.

In fact I have counted the number of fitness professionals who are tech-savvy that I know of on just one hand!

This puts me in a bit of a predicament really, as the products I have had planned for the “average” fitness professional are probably all wrong.

You see I really want to help you get your web sites and Internet presence up to scratch for the new year, to boost the image of our profession going in to a year which is likely to be really tough for those people in our industry that are just not up to scratch.

I am spending much of my time in two personal trainer forums on the Internet helping its members out with their tech queries. If you are not a member of these two areas, I recommend both as they are both highly active with lots of great ego-free members.

The first is Personal Trainer Success:

http://personaltrainersuccess.ning.com

The second is The Fitness Bootcamp Inner Circle:

http://thefitnessbootcampinnercircle.com/

Drop me a message when you come on board or leave comments on some of my posts. I really want to know what your biggest problems and concerns when it comes to tech stuff to get my products back in order.

See you there.

Tim

PS. Thanks for reading this through to the end, I know that we all get bombarded with information we don’t care about. Hopefully the information here will help you out immeasurably.

Follow MyFitGeek on Twitter
http://www.twitter.com/MyFitGeek

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Filed Under: Damn Those Geeks, Resources, Social Media, twitter Tagged With:

7 Reasons Being A Fit Geek Is Easy

November 9, 2008 By Fit Geek 2 Comments
Geek

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 :o )

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 :o )

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!!

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