Cabel

Read, Set, Grow! Done-For-You Personal Trainer Marketing

Published by Cabel on August 9, 2011 | 3 Responses

Ok we’re now into August, that means that September is a hop, skip and a jump away and we all know what that means. Kids back to school, parents in regular routines, time to act on those fitness goals, it’s the beginning of the peak season for the fitness industry. Today I have a gift for you, I’m going to share with you a tried, true, totally effective personal trainer marketing campaign that has been used by myself and my coaching clients in multiple markets.

This promotion uses the following proven marketing strategies, I’m going to share with you exactly what I did AND tell you blankly what I would do next time to make it even better.

A visual direct mail advertising piece.
An opt-in to ensure you are growing your mailing list.
A hot button questionnaire to qualify your prospect.
A placement fee (deposit) conditioning the prospect to feel comfortable spending money with you.
Scarcity in volume and deadline.
Risk reversal with a money back guarantee and the deposit being refundable, increasing the “know, like, trust” factor with the prospect.

Ok the following is a sample of the exact ad I ran in a local coupon book. We selected the coupon book because it is well known here, inexpensive and could be completed easily on short notice, next time I would use a standalone piece now that I have evaluated the results.

Though this coupon was effective it could be improved, see below for details.

Even though this coupon was effective it could be greatly improved as a stand alone piece. Because at the time it was untested we wanted to ensure we received enough value from this ad to cover it’s cost, which is why we opted for the very low barrier “Win an iPad” offer to grow our list.

Your version of the 3 week promotion should include an emotional, questioning headline, something like “Can you believe this? or Does this sound like you?”

You should then use social proof to wow the prospect with a strong before and after photo and a compelling one sentence testimonial outlining their results.

Free or not to be free, depending on the response you are looking for you may opt not to advertise it as a free program. Free generally will produce more people to the next step, but then these people are less qualified and can at times be more problematic. If you do list a price point ensure that it translates to a heck of a deal that is justified with scarcity in terms of limited availability and a deadline. In this case this ad is a poor example, as “Limited spots” is not sufficient enough, define the number, and the deadline was missed altogether. (This was my bad as I was in a rush to get this to approval and realized after i had missed the expiry date.)

Now the offer was compelling enough to lead people to check out our website, which is all the offline ad was really supposed to do. Our website (www.PersonalTrainingRedDeer.com) as you can see represents high value to the visitor, with lot’s of social proof and valuable information immediately available, this ensures that most people will stay a few minutes or return when they have time to look around. Having a big website is not the suggestion here, having rich, valuable, compelling content is.

Where the consult form now resides the following web form was positioned for the duration of the promo.

This form served as an opt-in for anyone interested in the promotion, they could not find out any further details about the program unless they entered their email or called us directly. You could argue this would turn some people away but honestly, they’ll never be your customer if you don’t get to contact them at some point in the process, so it becomes your first filter. Once they complete the form you have a number of ways to convert them. Either they:

a) continue the process and buy into the promotion.

b) Navigate away in which case you can have an autoresponder that sends itself within 24-48 hours indicating perhaps there was a website error and make them the same or slightly different offer in a effort to convert them.

c) continue to indoctrinate them with regular valuable content such as that from your newsletter eventually leading them to contact you about your services.

Once they clicked through the opt-in they were met with the real magic behind this promotion, the emotional hot button qualifier that helped them decide to move forward. You can see this final element below:

Done for you personal trainer marketing campaign, final step

Click to view full size image.

You can see in this final step the line of questioning is to serve one purpose, to validate with the reader why they have went this far, confirm that this is the solution for what they have been thinking and direct them to buy risk and worry free.

Now depending where you are in the world you may or may not want them to purchase online, we sometimes find in our community that people still disconnect at the point of actually making an online purchase, so you may want the submission to simply be a step where they give you their phone number so you can contact them and handle it directly (this generally works better for us) but if people in your community are conditioned to buy online then you can fully automated this process making it inexpensive, easy, repeatable and easy to evaluate. It could work with direct mail, addressed mail, email marketing, or PPC such as Facebook advertising, all viable options.

As a final note, we never execute a promotion without pre-determined conversion offers to long term programs which I’ve details in my “3 Point Conversion” post. I can tell you that a high percentage of our long term conversion occurs on day one, most people know at that time they will need something longer to reach their goals, with enough value and solid risk reversal many people will make that step on the very first day, this is good for you and good for them.

Now take this strategy and apply it in your own business, I’d love to hear about your experiences and results.

The Calm Before the Storm

Published by Cabel on August 2, 2011 | Leave a response

July has finally ended! Most would agree that July is likely the slowest month of the year in the fitness industry. This is the time for many of us to slow down, wind down, relax and rejuvenate, but it’s also the time to be working on the systems of your business.

The reason many personal trainers continue to struggle week after week, month after month is that they never really take the time to develop the systems that run their business for them, rather than just making decisions or working to solve the same problems over and over and over. I’m sure you know what I mean and likely agree that your career as a personal trainer is a bit of a rollercoaster; you go from being busy to realizing you need more clients, to finding ways to attract those clients, to being busy, to needing more clients. You might say sometimes it’s like feast or famine.

Since we opened One-to-1 Fitness in 2007 I’m continually amazed by how much has changed, I can’t even imagine being the solo personal trainer I was a few years ago, and the times I find myself reminiscing I usually end up wondering how on earth I ever managed to stick it out? I mean we all strive for our lifestyle of choice which usually includes a healthy dose of financial security in one fashion or another. So my question to you today is; is your business on the road to delivering the lifestyle you want it to? If not, why?

If you answered no consider the following:

1) Are you selling sessions or results? (You might rephrase this as do you count reps or do you actually train people?) You see the truth is the idea of selling someone 10, 20 or 30 training sessions really implies that what you do has limited or short term value, that it’s a casual endeavour, and to me the idea of “buying a few personal training sessions” equates to, “I’m bored of my exercise plan and I’m too lazy to look at the latest issue of Muscle & Fitness for new ideas.”

The truth is someone looking to lose weight, feel better, improve health or overall well being is never going to achieve any of these things with a package of sessions. We’re usually talking about a major overhaul of lifestyle habits and this can only be achieved by a long period of accountability. So why would you confuse this issue by suggesting someone buy a handful of sessions? Sell the lifestyle, explain the importance of long term accountability, and stress that there is no such thing as a diet or exercise “program,” your body’s very adaptive nature requires the continual evolution of your nutrition and exercise habits to be continually effective.

2) EFT/Continuity, the foundation of your security. Now that you understand that sessions by nature are ineffective in delivering the results your clients are seeking; you need to be reminded of the importance of using an automated billing process. Continuity is both critical to their success and yours. By conditioning your clients to understand the importance of being committed to an ongoing monthly program you will improve their results by continually reinforcing the idea of accountability as well as ease your stress with the financial security of predictable and repeatable revenues. We could argue all day about the frustration of the bank fees that go along with but at the end of the day there is still no doubt having an automated (electronic funds transfer) billing program will be the cornerstone of your business.

3) Go with a giving hand. The thing trainers struggle with the most is gaining the initial momentum of their business; you know the ability to go from zero clients to not only a reasonably full schedule and a steady stream of new clients beyond. Let me ask you something, if you regularly attended a health club where 2 trainers worked, appeared to have the same credentials, experience, were equally personable and charged the same rate. The only difference you could see is that one was there with clients 7 hours a day while the other you only seen for an hour or so a couple times of week, which one would you naturally lean toward contacting or hiring? If you said the busy trainer than you would be part of the majority, but what you don’t know is that the busy trainer was training the majority of those clients at a deep discount and some even potentially for free! My point is there is some truth to the old adage of, “fake it until you make it.” Now I’m not saying it’s ok to pretend you have more knowledge than what you do, but what I am saying is that in our free market economy the consumer always has a choice and will usually choose the item or service that is: the most trusted, been on the market the longest, appears to be liked or valued by others.

Obviously when you are new to the industry it can be difficult to gain this credibility if this is the general attitude of your most likely customers, so your opportunity is to go with a giving hand and often invest more of your time for less compensation and in exchange they provide the credibility you need to quickly attract more customers.

4) The art of retention. Once you’ve gained the trust and loyalty of paying clients, how long can you keep them? It seems like this is a huge fatal flaw amongst new trainers entering the industry. Go stand in front of a mirror and think about the last really big purchase you made in your life, maybe you bought a brand new car, a house or something else that required serious thought and attention because it was going to have a long term financial impact on your life. As you think back to that transaction begin to speak out loud about anything that was really positive or negative about your experience in terms of dealing with the sales people that helped you along the way. Go a step further and begin to think and speak out loud your expectations if you were to make another similar purchase.

My point is in most major transactions these days, in our fast paced society, it seems like our expectations are often never met. In my opinion one of the major reasons customer service seems to be on the decline is because we’re all constantly so distracted by so many other things.

Don’t forget the little things:

Confirming your client’s next appointment at the end of every session.
Acknowledging their achievement past and even of that very workout.
Making an effort to call, email or text them randomly to tell them how great they are doing.
Send thank you and birth day cards.
Acknowledge their successes publicly (yet carefully as not everyone feels comfortable with this.)

If any of this seems weird please revisit the mirror and repeat the exercise above, what you should start to notice is most often our most positive experiences are the ones where we felt: valued, appreciated, respected or a sense of achievement that was noticed by others.

Posted in Personal Trainer Marketing

Fitness Marketing Math

Published by Cabel on July 6, 2011 | 1 Response

Tim Borys shares his success working with Profitable Personal Trainer Marketing.

Tim knows his marketing math, check out his results.

It’s amazing how much has changed in the last 4 years. Going from a struggling solo trainer to owning a 7 figure studio, from training people to training trainers and trying to manage, teach and motivate them to work together to outperform and avoid the pitfalls that seemingly all trainers make.

What I’ve come to realize is that business is continually just one big mathematical equation, today I’m going to try to shed light on this, to share an idea with you that you past, present and future can be evaluated, planned and predicted with simple math.

Eventually if you read enough business books or talk to enough business people you’ll hear the term KPI or Key Performance Indicators. Every business has them, the handful of vital components that statistically and predictably explain your business revenues in the past months or can predict with accuracy what they will be in the future.

Some of the most notable would be the size of our audience, the number of new potential clients each month and the number of actual new clients each month. These are often referred to as prospects, leads and converts. Do you know the number of prospects leads and converts of your own business? If not this should be a top priority for you to learn or track. (Search for sales report, or set, show, close for more information on tracking.)

Based on my own experience I’m going to give you some numbers which you may use as goals and targets or simply at least for a point of illustration. Your audience will vary dependent upon the size of your email list, or the number of pieces for a direct or addressed mail campaign, or the listeners of a radio audience, etc. As for leads you should be striving to generate at least 1-2 per business day or 20-30 people that inquire or ask about your services. From there the question is how many people can you convert to paying customers? If this number is below 50% improving this should be your biggest and top priority as you strive for a benchmark average of 80% conversion.

How big do you want your business to be? How much monthly revenue do you wish to generate? Do the math.

Desired monthly revenue / amount of average monthly purpose = total required # of clients for desired monthly revenue. (Let’s say this works out to 100.)

For easy numbers let’s say you’re closing only 50% of the interested leads or potential clients. This means to reach our desired revenue we need to reach 200 prospects. If we could hit our benchmark of about 1-2 leads per business day we’ll need approximately 6-7 months to reach the required number of leads to achieve our desired income.

So how do we generate the leads?

Well on average most marketing mediums have about a 3-4% response rate. This means if our audience was about 100 people a well designed message and offer should attract on average 3-4 people who will want to know more about our services, or 3-4 leads ultimately becoming 1-2 new clients.

So here’s where we start doing some math. 200 is 4% of 5000, we can safely assume to acquire 100 paying clients at a 50% close ratio we’ll need to reach an audience of approximately 5000-7500 people or about 850-1100 per month to reach our goal in 6-7 months. (Comparatively if we could reach that benchmark average of an 80% close ratio this number drops to 3100-4500 people.)

As we break it down even further we could consider we somehow need to find approximately 200-300 people per week that have any sort of connection to health, wellness, or image consciousness and to somehow get them a message. Does this seem like a daunting task? It doesn’t have to be.

Here are 6 ways you can reach your audience each week:

1) Do you have an email list? A facebook fanpage? If not now is a great time to start, build a mailing list by sharing quality information with people like blog posts, or an email newsletter like FitPro Newsletter, etc. Ask past and present clients to refer their friends and build this list. You shouldn’t be pitching offers to your email list every time you mail them but after providing about 3-4 items of value it’s time to make an offer. So if you send out 4 blog posts per month you’ve certainly earned the opportunity to give them an offer once per month.

2) Where can you find a gathering of people you might talk to? Could you talk to 50 people per week? At the mall, farmers market, park, or a lunch and learn? This could easily add up to another 200 people for your required monthly audience.

3) Those pesky lead boxes. Every 4 names in a lead box you can potentially assume that the equivalent of 100 people of your audience looked at it. How many boxes would you need to get just 4 names per week? This could easily account for almost half of your required monthly audience.

4) Direct mail or addressed mail. Canada Post allows you to pick postal codes of desired neighbourhoods; you can easily dictate how many pieces you send. This can be a great way to top up your audience reach a few times per year.

5) Endorsed letters. Who loves you? Would your accountant, lawyer, real estate agent send a letter on your behalf telling their clients how great they think you are? Maybe you should ask them, and here’s a tip, write the letter for them.

6) Referrals. Your clients love you, when people find good value they like to tell others, encourage them with incentives and deadlines this can easily add up and bolster your audience reach.

My point is when you think about it it’s not that hard to find people to talk to, most of us are just generally way too sensitive to the people that say no leading us to not pursue enough people. Maybe now that you understand the math you will be more resilient and persistent.

The application of this will have a staggering result, I know this because it’s one of the key KPIs in our business, it’s one of the primary ways we do all of our planning and have maintained steady growth through all four of the previous years. With cashflow planning you can see how you can even calculate months in advance how much money you may need to spend on marketing to reach your goals and exactly what you need the results to be.

Posted in Personal Trainer Marketing, Personal Training Business Tips

Do you make it easy to do business with you?

Published by Cabel on June 21, 2011 | 2 Responses

An interesting thing happened yesterday that I felt was worth blogging about, something not just important to personal trainer marketing but really to anyone running a business.

We recently ran another of our 6 Week Body Transformation Challenges, one of the prizes for the winner was a vacation on us, a $1000 travel voucher.

This is the second time we’ve given away such a prize, and something we intend to do on a regular basis, that is until I can figure out how to give away cars.

Anyways, I stopped by the same travel agency I did last time, the same travel agency I used to handle all of my arrangements for my adventure to Africa last year. By no means am I a big customer to them, but none the less I am a repeat customer. Now even if I weren’t I think we can all agree how valuable a customer is. If for any reason you’re unsure you should really be using a sales report to determine your average sale, and comparing your new leads to the money spent on advertising from your cash flow statement as a means to determine the average cost of a customer.

Ok…so here’s where this get’s interesting. When I asked to purchase the voucher the agent kindly asked me how I would be paying. I indicated I would pay with my company Visa, her response was that because I was paying by Visa there would be an additional charge for the fees they face from the bank for someone using a Visa. This was instantly a problem for me, can you see why? I think this is something many business owners might overlook, or think that passing on this charge would be more than fine (including the owner of the travel agency) but as I then indicated to the agent it was enough for me to take my future business elsewhere. The agent was puzzled, and if you are too, you shouldn’t be.

Bank fees are frustrating; we pay thousands of dollars of bank related fees every month. In this instance the fee from the travel agency for their Visa processing was 2.8% or $28 on the $1000 voucher. But as a customer what it said to me, is we’d like you to pay this additional fee for giving us a referral. The voucher, once purchased, cannot be exchanged for cash and even has a 1 year expiry. So I have just provided them $1000 worth of guaranteed business (interestingly enough when I worked in electronic sales the statistic for gift cards was $7 spent for every $1 on the gift card, I’m sure it’s different for travel but it’s an example of how valuable this kind of business could be) and introduced them to one of my customers whom they may never have met otherwise. Why am I paying a $28 customer acquisition fee on their behalf? Shouldn’t they be paying me or rewarding me instead? I can pretty much guarantee they pay a much higher customer acquisition fee through every other marketing channel they use.

My point in all of this, I know it seems like a bit of a rant, is that in this day and age where more and more things are automated, every step is met with a challenge, inconvenience or a price one of the greatest opportunities you have within your personal trainer marketing efforts is to make life simple and more enjoyable for your customers.

Acknowledge their value, absorb annoying little fees because you know that other businesses won’t and your customers will remember that. After all would you turn away a $1000 sale for $28? I most certainly wouldn’t.

Posted in Personal Trainer Marketing

Offline Personal Trainer Marketing

Published by Cabel on June 14, 2011 | 1 Response

Is your current personal trainer marketing strategy producing continual growth in your business? I’ve really noticed something with a lot of fitness professionals lately, and in some ways even within my own business. With a number of personal trainer marketing experts sharing ideas and business building strategies there has been a huge shift to using the internet to attract new clients and grow your business. Now there is nothing wrong with this, in fact if you don’t have an effective website, aren’t using online classifieds and Facebook you are likely really missing out when it comes to gaining new clients.

The problem is I see so many fitness professionals so focused on online personal trainer marketing strategies that it is literally becoming their only vehicle for lead generation and business growth. Is this happening to you? It got me thinking about the really successful people I know, even the internet marketers I know. Almost all of them had something in common; their first big success wasn’t online at all. In almost all cases the most successful people I know grew their initial businesses offline, belly to belly, the old fashioned way.

So consider your own efforts, remember that building a successful business is about creating a marketing engine that continually produces perpetual growth. It’s critical to consider using more than one medium, so if your current efforts are really focused online than try to systemize some of those processes and then turn your attention back to developing your offline efforts.

Here are 6 effective offline marketing vehicles that I have and continue to use:

1) The Lunch and Learn – Hands down this was one of the most effective tools for me to establish myself as a personal trainer repeatedly in 3 different markets before settling in Red Deer. If you’ve had but one client who’s experienced great results I guarantee you’ve been asked questions or overcome obstacles experienced by almost anyone trying to reach a fitness goal. Develop this information into 2-3 20-40 minute presentations and then get out and share it with anyone who will listen. Talk to businesses, call local clubs and service groups, talk to schools (specifically teachers and parents if possible), fundraisers, chamber events, and so on. Some people say no but don’t let that discourage you keep asking, I guarantee this can radically change your business in 30 days or less.

2) Networking Groups – It seems there are more of these than ever. As a personal trainer you are an expert at building relationships and rapport. Perfect for networking groups, get out, meet people, and share what you know. Distribute your business cards but what an even better time to distribute gift cards, or run a referral program.

3) Strategic Business Alliances – share credibility by forming relationships with complimentary businesses. Promote each other knowing your clients might be their audience and vice versa.

4) Leadboxes – An inexpensive branding tool and a continual source of leads, the key is the right offer and the involvement of the business displaying the box. Get them involved in your programs, have them contribute to the prize package so they work harder to promote it.

5) Endorsed Mailing – Have you worked with certain professionals forever? Have you trained any of their clients to amazing success? Would they consider sending an endorsed letter to their clients introducing them to you and your services? You often don’t know until you ask.

6) Direct Mail and Addressed Mail Campaigns – There is a cost to these, but because there is a cost it also limits how much competition you will have for your given industry. A well designed direct mail or addressed mail piece can produce thousands of dollars in sales. Canadapost allows you to target specific routes and postal codes so you can target your audience to those within your target area. www.infocanada.ca provides addressed mail lists for many regions with an amazing amount of demographic data so you may select a very targeted audience.

Have you used any or all of these strategies? Have they worked for you? What pitches worked the best? What other offline personal trainer marketing strategies do you use? Your comments will help others and theirs might be the next breakthrough for your business. Pay it forward and share. 🙂

Posted in Personal Trainer Marketing

Inspiration and Everything You Need to Know

Published by Cabel on June 7, 2011 | 2 Responses

An amazing reason to continue to help other trainers.

Yesterday afternoon I received the text I’ve attached to this post. My coaching client Sean out in Vancouver crossed the $100,000 threshold, what an amazing feeling this must be for him. In just 5 months Sean went from 3 personal training clients buying a handful of sessions at a time to building a real business boasting reoccurring contract revenue to the tune of over $100,000 annually. He’s quickly outgrown his schedule to the point where he has had to hire trainers and become more focused on systems, marketing and handling the rigours of continual growth. Not bad what he did in 5 months only took me years by comparison, yet if you moved him to a brand new city tomorrow with no connections I bet he would agree that he could duplicate the same or greater success in the same or less time.

So how did he do it, some kind of magic? A whole bunch of luck? Is he a superior trainer? Truth is he’s just learned some of the simple secrets that allowed him to avoid the common pitfalls most trainers make.

If I was to move somewhere else and start brand new here’s what I would do (and in fact it is what I’m doing as I’m planning my next facility in a new market right now.)

1) I’d do some keyword research using the Google external keyword tool. Then based on search volumes, the number of results, and the consistency of those search results I’d get a general idea of some of the competition in my desired market.

2) I’d use wordpress with an optimized link structure and optimized content and setup a website and see how quickly I could rank in that new market.

3) I’d use FitPro Newsletter to create some high value low barrier opt-ins to begin building a list in that market.

4) I’d use Facebook advertising to drive more targeted traffic to my website as well as a Facebook fanpage with a customized optin to build my list even faster with the smallest budget possible.

5) Next I’d head there and setup a bootcamp which I’d fill with human billboards from free online classified ads.

6) At the same time I’d visit many local businesses and offer free lunch seminars to establish myself as the local expert, at the same time I’d offer them a trial of my bootcamp.

7) Once I had 20 human billboards I’d begin an email referral contest and build my list even faster.

8) Then I’d start an email marketing program using high value low dollar promotions to enrol a large volume of people.

9) At first contact I’d begin using my 3 Point Conversion strategy to convert them to paying EFT clients.

10) Now with an immediate base of revenue to offset some operating costs I’d be looking for a brick and mortar building to setup shop in so I was no longer restricted by weather, time or anything else.

11) Once setup in the building I’d begin using resources like www.infocanada.ca to run addressed mail campaigns or selecting the wealthiest communities and run direct mail campaigns.

Maybe this sounds easier than it is or more likely we make it more difficult by letting our own fears or the ideas of “waiting for the right moment” get in the way.

The truth is it’s far easier to succeed than you think and the two biggest factors are:

How fast can you implement and execute?
Stick to the simple things they are always the better ones in the long run.

Today Erik at www.FitnessBusinessInterviews.com published an interview we did a while back, it pretty leaves no stone unturned about how I built my business and how you can too.

Click here to watch the interview.

Posted in Personal Trainer Marketing, Personal Training Business Tips, Selling Personal Training

What I’m Doing Wrong and You are Too

Published by Cabel on May 24, 2011 | 4 Responses

Do you know what your weaknesses are? I know exactly what my primary weakness is and I think it’s something you will relate to. I’ve been working to overcome it for years, with all the progress I’ve made I still have much work to do. I’m undoubtedly a control freak and what’s worse not only do I like to be in control of everything I still get wrapped up in a scarcity mindset. You know exactly what I mean, that little voice that says, “It won’t take long, and it would be cheaper and easier to just do it myself.”

Can you relate? I think just about any entrepreneur can, I mean at heart we all start as technicians, we’re really good at something and that something generally ties into a skill that we can easily sell because we’re so good at it leading to some people writing us cheques. Somewhere along the line you get this idea to turn that skill or service into a business, you work hard reach your physical limit and after a great amount of fear and trepidation you leap and begin to hire people.

Once you take this gigantic and critical step new fears and problems arise, and you are their creator. At first you resist giving up control, you resist letting people make decisions and ultimately mistakes, after all it’s your name on the line. As you work to overcome these fears and slowly let them take some responsibilities you then take on new projects, now you are doing things you may not necessarily be really good at but you persist. You justify that you need to do it, that that was the reason you hired these other people that are now doing what you were really good at. You further justify that in order to be profitable it’s just better if you do it yourself.

The truth is these are all big fat lies; believe it, because even I’m still doing it wrong too often. Writing this is like therapy, it’s often easier to tell others what to do than do it yourself, yet it’s also that first step in changing your own paradigm or mindset.

When you make the transition from job to self-employed you do so with a passion for what you do, you love what you do and it makes you leap out of bed each morning with vigour and enthusiasm. Once you reach the point of hiring other people you then face responsibilities for things you’re not good at and often don’t enjoy, but the right answer is that if you don’t enjoy it with the absolute passion that you started your business with you shouldn’t be doing them but rather these are the tasks you should be hiring and delegating to other people. You may think you can’t afford to but the truth is you can’t afford not to. Now if you’re like me I’ve read and heard that in many success books and audios and I often was left thinking, “yah but these guys forget what it was like to be really small with no budgets for these kinds of things.” Truth is that’s just your scarcity mindset.

If I wanted to give you this car, could you raise $25,000 for it? Of course you could, yet we often don't trust ourselves that things will "work out."

At our recent workshop in Calgary I remember Bedros talking about something, an example, like someone had a Ferrari sitting in front of them that was worth like $250,000 or more and that person was going to offer it to you on one condition, you had to raise $25,000 in the next 24 hours. The question is, could you do it? Sure you could, anyone could, I mean you could literally approach an almost near stranger to borrow the money on the premise of selling the car at a gigantic discount, paying them a healthy return and pocketing enough to go buy a brand new less expensive sports car of your choosing, it would be that simple. My point is, is that any time you tell yourself you can’t afford to do something in your business you are probably lying to yourself because if you needed to do something you would find a way, there are no if’s ands or buts, it would just happen. That’s how the universe works if you believe in something or commit to something with every fiber of your being it generally just happens.

So now let’s put this back in perspective with your business and the problem with being a control freak and a scarcity mindset. Do you ever feel burnt out? Sure you do, everyone does at times. I was recently listening to an audio program by Dan Sullivan and he said something about when you do things with passion it should fill you with energy, even more than you already have. You shouldn’t burn out very often from doing the things you really like to do. What an amazing concept for the success of your business, don’t bog yourself down with the things you don’t like to do, they will only kill your creativity, your productivity and they obviously aren’t your strengths or you would like to do them.

Find others who have the strengths to do the things you don’t like to do and aren’t good at, let them shine by doing what they are good at. This is now easier than ever from www.kijiji.ca classifieds to www.elance.com and www.odesk.com you can find someone to just about anything you need in hours. By freeing you up to do what you are good at it will be easy to produce the revenue you need to pay for this new service in fact if you doubt this just look at your current to-do list, look for 1-2 things that have been on there for way too long. What have you been putting off? Everyone dreads or avoids something that seems to never get done. What would you have had to pay someone else to do this for you? How much new revenue could this have created your business if this had been done when you originally thought of it? Truly these numbers can be frightening and staggering when you begin to add up the lost opportunity of all the tasks you’ve been procrastinating on.

What does this mean?

1) Dan Sullivan teaches “define your 10 best habits.” What are the things you do every day that you really enjoy doing, give you more energy, and you are really good at? These are the things you should be doing, try to delegate all other things to people that have those skills in their 10 Best Habits. (Make the 10 Best Habits and exercise for any prospect you are considering hiring, if they enjoy what they do, do you think they will work hard and be highly productive?)

2) Don’t think about what you “can’t” afford, instead ask yourself how much will it cost to have someone else do it, then work backwards to determine how much new business you will need to create and if you can create that new business in the same or less time, I bet you can.

3) Let others make mistakes, it’s a hard lesson to learn but if you wish to grow a successful business you have to remember that you learned what you have by making mistakes. Let the people in your organization make mistakes also, by having confidence in them to learn from failure and right any wrongs along the way you will likely have a more loyal team that grows much faster.

4) Leave your comments in an effort to initiate your own “therapy” if you too are trying to overcome this weakness. 🙂

Posted in Success Mindset

Personal Trainer Marketing: Website Relevancy

Published by Cabel on May 17, 2011 | 2 Responses

What does personal trainer marketing have to do with the library? Likely more than you currently understand. If you’re interesting in an effective online personal trainer marketing strategy than you better understand how keyword relevancy works when it comes to your website.

Let’s say for a moment you are fairly new personal trainer in the industry, you are keen, knowledgeable, eager and ready to change the world. Chances are you will make many of the same mistakes I did, printing business cards first, then posters for the gym, maybe having a brochure made and talking to a few local businesses about displaying your propaganda. If you’re really savvy you might setup a website on some free hosting site using their overnight website builder, you’ll like come up with a cool name like I did “Cabel’s Fitness F/X” and was even lucky enough to buy www.fitnessfx.com way back when. Trust me this is not an effective personal trainer marketing strategy, but don’t feel bad because most of us start this way and usually struggle.

Once you realize this isn’t going to be effective you will probably go looking for information, instead of going to the actual library (do they still exist?) you will probably consult the online library of the internet. You’ll search for things like: how to sell personal training, how to get more personal training clients, personal trainer marketing, and personal trainer advertising. Low and behold Google performs like magic and delivers big, you never leave the first page, you navigate to different sites (that might even have been how you first found www.ProfitablePersonalTrainer.com) and begin to learn why what you are doing now isn’t working. The answer is in the process you just completed.

The search engines work like the old drawers of index cards in the library, they categorize information and website in multiple ways on how relevant they are to any topic but the search engines can of course do it way better. Now instead of a book being manually entered in a certain category the search engines can look, analyze and digest an endless number of variables and instantly compare to ensure they answer they give you is the most relevant to your query. Here is a list of things you should be aware of, some do’s and don’ts that will ensure people are finding you.

1) Don’t host on a free website host, often these sites have coded directions for search engines to ignore them or they aren’t listed for their relevancy to personal training but are listed for relevancy to easily building websites.

2) Understand what meta tags are and fill them with relevant information. Don’t make your “Meta Name” Cabel’s Fitness F/X instead make it Red Deer Personal Trainer, that’s what people are searching for. The same is true for the description and the keywords. Don’t know what meta tags are, Google it. J

3) Search engines look for NATURAL repetition, key word being natural. Have you noticed within this article I have used the words ‘Personal Trainer Marketing’ several times? Do you notice for the most part it still reads pretty natural? Though I’ve used it more times than I should have I wanted to demonstrate the point for relevancy, because the search engines see that ‘personal trainer marketing’ has been used repeatedly throughout this article it’s likely that’s what the article is about. Though be careful as these days they know some internet savvy people are on to that and if you just repeat the same phrases over and over they simply begin to overlook your articles because they determine you are just trying to manipulate the system rather than providing relevant, valuable information.

4) Which becomes the next point; ensure you use keywords in article titles and throughout articles but be sure they are still packed with value. The search engines will begin to watch how many people visit certain content, comments, link backs etc all add points to that piece of content for relevancy and ensure higher rankings.

5) What you don’t see. Your website should also revolve around keywords on the inside. Images should have key word file names; actual pages should have keyword file names and so on. Think of it like an investigation the more times a search engine sees that you keep mentioning a particular keyword phrase; in your content, in the file structure, links, meta tags and so on, do you see how a human would decide that this must be quite relevant on that topic? Now to get to the number one spot on the first page well you just need to be more relevant than that guy, meaning more content, better file structure, and it helps to have been around longer too.

Ok this is a super watered down version of how the internet is like a library and how to start building a more effective website. There is tonnes more to SEO than this but just this one thing will make a gigantic difference for just about any personal trainer in Canada as still many markets are just not that competitive yet for internet search traffic.

Posted in Personal Trainer Marketing

Personal Trainer Marketing: 3 Point Conversion

Published by Cabel on May 10, 2011 | 1 Response

No I’m not confused trying to explain the inner workings of either basketball or football but rather going to provide you a whole simple system that can fuel your personal trainer marketing engine.

As you know Bedros Keuilian has been my mentor for a number of years, recently he was in Calgary and we put on a business building workshop together for fitness professionals. In his usual fashion he left inspired and came up with something cool to give back to the fitness industry.

On his way home he crafted an awesome new client getting email series, the 28 Day Flat Belly Formula.

To compliment that program and his others that many of us have used with great success (The 14 Day Fat Flush and the 21 Day Rapid Fat Loss Program) I wanted to share with you the sales and conversion strategy we use with massive success at One-to-1 Fitness. (HINT: Bookmark the links above and this post so you can refer back to them any time you need to run a massive revenue generating promo.)

Personal trainers are often afraid to give away an extended period of service for a deep discount or no cost but if you truly understand and have a clear path to conversion than you will realize high value offers are not really discounted or free but rather are a deferred payment plan which can make consistent aggressive personal trainer marketing very cost effective.

Any time you sell or provide a high value discounted trial offer, before you even run the campaign you should develop your 3 Point Conversion strategy. This will work for pretty much any campaign in any medium. By now you better know what EFT is, and you realize that growing your EFT is the gateway to greatness, so naturally every campaign really has one final business objective: a larger EFT. (Of course service, value to the customer, etc should go without saying.)

In a 3 Point Conversion strategy the goal is to aggressively convert upon the first meeting and if that’s not possible to set the foundation and rapport with the prospect that conversion is practically assumed. This is not a pushy sales tactic, it is always win-win in an effort to be the assistant buyer that ensures people feel comfortable enough with you, know that you have their best interests at heart all in the name of being able to make a difficult decision or avoid procrastination any longer.

Conversion Point 1: The Consult Offer – We have achieved about 80% or more of our conversion on any promotion before our clients have even completed a workout in any trial program. If your offer has attracted prospects to inquire about your service it obviously provided enough value to overcome their fears of whether they trust you or not. Through the use of a meeting that helps the prospect become more aware of their emotional connection to their goals it likely won’t take them long to realize that the trial offer is not going to allow them to reach their goals. At this point you’ve also spent the least amount of time or investment on the prospect, if they are to make a long term commitment to you today you have the greatest amount of profitability. There is a strong win-win for you and the prospect to form a long term relationship at this point; the missing ingredient is trust. In a effort to make up for the missing trust this is where you should be providing the largest amount of additional value and the most emphasis on risk reversal to simply overcome the trust barrier with a “deal they can’t refuse.”

If this at all seems more difficult than it seems think about the last major items you bought as a consumer and the time it took you to make that decision. At some point we’ve all been sold faster than usual by a salesperson that was genuine, sincere and just helped us realize if we wanted to reach our goals we needed to act now.

So here is the premise of the consult deal:

Trade your whatever deal you came in today for this better deal. (ex. 10 class for 10 bucks, trade for first month at $14 then auto billing at 10-15% off normal rates) and you really want to add any bonus you can provide at no cost to you. Strategic business alliances work really well for this, tanning programs, haircuts, dollar value discounts on complimentary services, gift cards, trades, etc. The goal is to add about 2-3X the value of the desired monthly commitment. For example if I want them to pay $200/month I would try to provide a total value of $400-600 of extra value in this first offer.

Conversion Point 2: The Feedback call – If they don’t convert at the consult don’t worry, it simply means in spite of the extra value they still don’t know you or trust that you and your services are the answer and the extra value wasn’t enough to overcome that to the point that they were comfortable to take a chance that day. This is not uncommon in our consumerist society because we are all faced but so much advertising in an attempt to relieve us of our precious disposable dollars, once bitten twice shy.

Those that don’t convert at consult should start right into the trial program, and you should make every effort to provide your best possible service to build as much rapport with them as possible. At a little over half way through the trial you (better yet an assistant) should call them and ask what they love the program. You should always be happy to receive either positive or negative feedback, though negative may not help with converting that client to a long term EFT program it will provide even more valuable information to improve your product.

When the client gives you their positive feedback they’ve now put themselves in a positive state of mind in relation to thinking of your services this is your chance to remind them that they are not likely to reach their goals or experience the full benefits of the program during the trial.

At this point you ask them if they’d like to get on board, explain that many others jumped on board at the beginning of the program (which will be true based on our results) and as a result they can still get an amazing deal but spots are filling up. This offer should be similar to the first one but with about 1/3 less additional value. I recommend keeping any price point reductions the same as the initial offer but decrease the amount of the additional value offered accordingly. When met with resistance, see the TOP SECRET close at the end.

Conversion Point 3: The End of the Road – Anyone who didn’t yet convert at conversion point 2 should continue in the program of course, continue to do everything you can to provide them the best possible service. The last offer will place them in a position of a fear of loss, from which if they still don’t convert you should use any information you’ve gathered during the trial to overcome possible objections for time, price, or services. The final conversion process is best handled in a “near end of program results consultation.”

Again begin by asking what they loved about the program, once they have affirmed they have enjoyed and found value in the program create the fear of loss with the following scarcity type of script:

“Well you’re almost done, my promo spots have really filled up, I have only 2 spots left, I know you’ve been doing awesome, you should stay. I can save you $50 off your next month and give you 10% off my regular rates but only if you commit today as I can only promo these 2 more spots.” The deal is now not quite as strong as Conversion Point 1 or 2, the point is to get them a little remorseful that they should have committed sooner when all the extra value was provided as they now realize they do trust you and have seen value in your service first hand.

And here is the TOP SECRET CLOSE that you should be ready to use at any of the 3 conversion points that almost guarantees conversion.

If met with resistance bust out the good guy deal, Conversion Point 1, though it contains the highest value it should also be an offer you can live with at any point during this process. If it’s not I highly suggest adjusting your rates or building more strategic relationships to ensure you can provide all that additional value without sacrificing profitability.

“Well I am not supposed to do this, but I’ll tell you want, because your awesome I will give you the first offer today (Conversion Point 1() but you must get on board today, is that cool?”

Suddenly the relief from fear of loss that they should have jumped sooner puts the prospect at total ease and you both win. They reward you with their business and a bigger EFT and you reward them with an awesome experience, great value and dynamite results.

That’s it, the super simplified system for 3 Point Conversion, just rinse and repeat with all your promos and you’ll see why there are no free programs just powerful deferred payment plans.

Posted in Personal Trainer Marketing, Personal Training Business Tips, Selling Personal Training

The Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop – April 2011

Published by Cabel on May 3, 2011 | Leave a response

What a weekend!

Well if you missed out on Saturday’s Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop I wanted to give you a recap.

Bedros Keuilian is one of the world's leading fitness marketing experts and has been my personal coach for over 3 years.

We were very fortunate to have North America’s top fitness business coach Bedros Keuilian in Calgary; not only an extreme privilege but the guy barely made it, for some reason Canadian Immigration seemed to think the information he was bringing was so valuable that it was barely legal! (Well no not really but he always has some rather amusing experience at the border and secondary inspection. 🙂

So here’s how it went…

We started off with something critically important to you, your business and your clients…recognition.

Throughout the day 4 of my superstar coaching clients were recognized for their successes over these last months. Humairah & Faraz have learned so much about sales and client attraction it’s crazy, Chas has continued to streamline her facility from the depths of a monthly burn rate to reaching profitability, Tim has paid of 10s of thousands of dollars in debt in just month and Sean basically went from zero to nearly $100,000 in program sales in just 4 months, talk about action takers! (And silly me forgot to make sure we got pictures to save the moment, perhaps the individuals mentioned will proudly provide some with their award. J)

Bedros Keuilian killing it at Cabel's Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop

On to content…I started off by sharing the 5 key things that trainers need to understand and do in order to quickly reach the 6 figure mark and beyond, this applies whether you’ve been in the industry for years or were certified last weekend.

1) Don’t be afraid to fail, simply keep taking action!

This means imperfect action is better than waiting too long to make it perfect.
This means don’t screw around because you are afraid which leads you to being “busy” and kills action and all momentum.
This means be 110% committed to your business but any new idea only needs to be 70% ready to put it into action, the best place to see and fix the problems is when they arise not sitting around guessing what they might be.
This means success loves speed, outsource where possible so you can be doing more things

2) Identify “Your Most Likely Customer”

This means completely describe them with a word picture as completely detailed as possible. And by that I mean try to explain exactly what you seen to your best friend if you drove by your customer standing in their own backyard watering their lawn. What type of clothing, what they enjoy, and every possible detail. Your marketing, promotions, everything needs to appear where your prospects frequent and in language that will both appeal and make sense to them. This is the basis of grassroots marketing and how you make a limited to no marketing dollars maximize their efforts.

3) Build a list and they will come.

Seminars and strategic alliances with local businesses work amazingly well to quickly build a list and a reputation offline.
Kijiji, Craigslist, Facebook and Adwords dominate for cost effectively finding new customers in your area, experimenting with these mediums can lead to quick and massive success.
Leverage technology, use email software and the ability to schedule content delivery in advance to chunk tasks and make your day more efficient.

4) The More you give the more you get.

This was the biggest take away in the 5 basics. After many years I didn’t get it either but there is one thing that has proved true over and over again, the most profitable and successful fitness professionals are the ones that get busy the fastest. The easiest way to get busy is to train people for free. Think about it your biggest immediate obstacle is no one knows you or your ability (and you may even doubt yourself) but even with that if you offerred 5-10 sessions free most people are likely to accept. You now have 5-10 opportunities to show them how great you are and why they should pay to continue, I think there is a far better chance in communicating this message in a free session than there is in a printed ad, a radio campaign or other generic marketing medium, don’t you agree? The bonus is that the people around you that suddenly see that you are really busy naturally assume you must be good at what you do because you suddenly were busy over night.

5) Nothing matters if you don’t take action.

I know sounds repetitive but most people leave a seminar like this so inspired to wind up the next day feeling so overwelmed they don’t know where to begin, this point of fear (essentially or old same limiting mindset) prevents them from taking any action at all. So here’s what you need to do, go through your notes if you were there or pick 1-2 things from this article if you weren’t and write it on a small piece of paper. Make that your top tasks to start tomorrow, it’s only 2 things not much you can procrastinate on or avoid you must begin with one or the other. If you simply did this every day just imagine how many great things you could accomplish.

Next Bedros took over and really knocked it out of the park with helping you to understand and shift your mindset. Even though him and I have spent a great deal of time talking about these things and I’d even heard this content before for some reason this time it really hit me differently. The underlying message is that we will at some point always revert to our “scarcity mindset” or whatever that starting point is that proves to be the toughest obstacle when it comes to reaching our goals and dreams. It’s important to find away to continually develop your mindset of “abundance” by surrounding yourself with people you wish to emulate while limiting your exposure to people and situations that would have you return to your “scarcity mindset.”

If this all sounds like gibberish to you, you need to check out the audio/book Bedros highly recommended; Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. (Trust me it is captivatingly interesting and will change your life.

Once afternoon hit we took things in a more serious direction, I gave everyone a look at the in depth systems behind our million dollar training studio. How we manage everything from recruitment to compensation, automatic billing, planned and controlled growth, client retention, trainer retention evaluation, sales, marketing and so much more. The best part I explained how we can analyze the performance of our business in 10 minutes or less from anywhere in the world and then coach our team as needed.

I noticed a number of people experiencing the signs of mass writing cramp as they tried to document each detail, though for some this lead to confusion it illustrated the importance of defined systems as you grow and that the ceiling of your growth will only be dictated by the systems you apply.

To wrap up the day Bedros took everyone through his specialty, the path of ascension and how we go about attracting prospects and leads and the exact steps to convert them to paying clients. Not just scripts, tactics and ideas were shared but the exact breakdown and mechanics of building a full sales format system

I think all attendees would agree that it was impossible to have been at the Profitable Personal Trainer Workshop and NOT taken at least one thing away that could potential double, triple or massively blow up their business.

You guys are so awesome, what an amazing day I appreciate you all so much! Look forward to more, I’m currently looking to schedule 1-2 more live workshops before the end of 2011.

Posted in Personal Trainer Certification, Personal Trainer Marketing, Personal Training Business Tips, Selling Personal Training, Success Mindset

Cabel

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