The Only 3 Ways to Make More Money
There are only 3 ways to make more money as a personal trainer. I explain what they are and how you can use them in this short video.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvayrrlM5ro[/youtube]
Raving Fans of a Facebook Personal Trainer
If you don’t have a Fanpage for your business you are missing out on a lot of potential customers. Facebook is so well populated with so many people spending so much time on Facebook the search and traffic volume is ridiculous. As such any new page create on Facebook is crawled and indexed by the search engines soon after. I talk about it a lot because I believe that using the internet is easily the least expensive with the highest rate of return strategy for attracting many new clients.
Go create a Fanpage right now but make sure you set it up right.
Your Fanpage name should begin with your dominant key words. (ie. Red Deer Personal Trainer – One-to-1 Fitness, Red Deer Fitness Boot Camp – FIT Camp by One-to-1 Fitness)
Make sure to complete all areas of your Fanpage, the more information the better. Next make sure you have all your Fanpages linked to your Twitter account, the more tweets you send the more people that are going to follow and pay attention to them, automating this process will save you massive amounts of time.
Now if you’ve been following my blog you know that it’s critical that you add new content to your website every week, in fact multiple times a week is preferred. Each time you add new content add the link to your Fanpage AND share that to your profile. You will soon find your Fanpage with a high listing on key word search engine searches and by sharing to your profile often you create more traffic to the page further enhancing its ranking.
Now you can also easily and quickly send a broadcast to all your fans, just use the edit page link on your Fanpage and on the subsequent screen on the right side you should find the option to send an update to fans. Content and regular communication builds a loyal group of listeners that will hear and respond to an offer when you are ready to present one.
Additionally once or twice a month suggest your Fanpages to all of your friends, not often or they’ll just ignore it.
Now for the icing on the cake, use the friend locater, find people with similar interests (fitness, personal training, weight loss, working out, boot camp, etc) and begin inviting all kinds of new friends. In my opinion this is the true power of Facebook it’s an advanced social network that the astute marketer can use to funnel new prospects to your services.
How to Get on the Map!
Have you ever noticed that when you are looking for a business on the internet that Google usually pops up with a little map and all the similar businesses near your location?
It’s now easier than ever to get listed on this map and something you should do immediately today, it will almost guarantee you a first page top link in a matter of days.
Here’s how simple it is…
1) Goto Google.com
2) In the top right corner if you hover with your mouse you should see the option to sign in. Click here and if you haven’t already created an account do so now.
3) Once you have signed into your account the main page should have a number of links on it. Mid way down there should be a section titled “my products”. On the right hand side of this section there is a link for “Places” click here.
4) On this page you should see the option to Add a New Buisiness.
5) Complete all the details of your listing, once it’s complete and saved you will need to verify your listing with a PIN entry. This is now super easy as they will call or text you with the PIN. A quick entry and your listing is now complete and will begin appearing on Google Maps and local searches shortly.
6) When completing your listing take advantage of being able to list in 5 different categories, start typing your keywords and choose the best results accordingly.
Make sure when you write your description you use your primary key word, make it real easy for people to find you. Additionally I highly recommend you attach videos to your profile, the internet now is all about video people want to check you out long before they ever talk to you. Gain an edge over your competition by always having the best listings.
Special Guest: Steve Hochman “The Boot Camp Dominator”
My colleague and buddy the crazy Steve Hochman took the time to send me this video to amp you up to go get lot’s of new personal training and fitness boot camp clients. This is perfect timing for this, while you’re at it you may really want to check out Steve’s Boot Camp Formula 5 for more ways to take yout boot camp over the top!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqj5yEzgxMg[/youtube]
How to instantly earn an extra $5760 a year or more.
Today we had our monthly team meeting. Our discussion had a very important focus for everyone to consider, is it easier to attract new clients or retain the ones you have? You guessed it, keep the ones you have, but have you ever considered the math behind it?
In any given geographical area there are only so many people. Of those people it’s generally accepted that 8-13% of the total population will possibly be looking or using a service like ours. For easy numbers use 10%. Now list out all of your competition, it’s easy to see these numbers dwindle.
Now consider how many people are left for you to draw from and attract as personal training clients. People are going to come and go but the question becomes can you keep them longer? It may not seem like much to lose 1-3 clients a month but when you start to do the mat it can be pretty staggering. Let’s use the average of 2 per month. On average the majority of our clients see us 3 times per week for 30 minute sessions, let’s assume your training rates are the national average of about a $1/min. So each client lost is costing you about $360/month or a grand total of $8640 over the course of the year! ($30X3X2X12)
Now you won’t prevent everyone from quitting but let me tell you, and we know this from tracking within our facility, that only about 1/3 of people quit for reasons other than they are not getting enough value. Sure they may tell they can’t afford it or they are just ready to work on their own but in truth all they are saying is that your services are no longer providing enough value for them to justify the cost. A classic example of this is that thing you want so bad you scrimp, save, cut corners and get it anyways. We all do it, and we will all do it again.
Simple steps to retaining clients:
- Recognize their successes more often. Not just during their sessions, make a point to give them a quick call, send them an email, congratulate them on Facebook or make some kind of simple silly little award.
- Ask yourself can you feel 100% sincere and comfortable and believe that you deserve to mention at the end of every session, “great job today! By the way I am never too busy for referrals, I’d really like to train more people like you.” You might think it weird to say this all the time but in truth you need to because your clients are talking about you or thinking about what they are doing but many won’t actively think to refer if you don’t remind them.
- Deliver over the top service, the next time a client cancels suddenly just take 1/3 of the time you had planned to be with them to call, email, or Facebook them and other clients to tell them how great they are and how much you appreciate them. If you just invested these few precious minutes all the time you will be the busiest trainer in your area in no time.
- As my buddy Steve Hochman says go “APE” shit in every session with your clients. Appreciate them, be Passionate and Enthusiastic.
It’s really that simple, we always make things harder than they are. I see the numbers and the math behind our business every day; I know if you just work on these things and make them habit you will retain more clients longer. After all wouldn’t you like to instantly increase your earnings by $5760 a year? ($8460 less the 1/3 of client cancels for reasons beyond your control.)
Business Ignition Workshop – What Did You Learn?
Always meet new challenges head on!
Man what a weekend, first rafting down the Kicking Horse on Saturday with Apline Rafting and then spending the day with North America’s top fitness marketer Bedros Keuilian at my Personal Trainer Business Ignition Workshop in Calgary.
38 of Canada’s soon to be top fitness experts were drenched with nearly 8 hours of super valuable content ranging from getting going as a solo trainer, to expanding to operate your own studio, to every dirty little trade secret used by the world’s top internet marketers to dominate the search engines, out position, out perform, and out earn just about anyone in your path.
I’ve been coaching with Bedros for over 3 years; I’m part of his elite seven figure mastermind group. It was an honour to speak alongside him for the second time but it’s truly amazing how many new ideas and how much I learn still every single time I hear him speak.
Bedros Keuilian comes to Canada.
My favourite parts are still always the list building and conversion tactics, your list is so critical to rapid physical growth. For those of you that weren’t there this weekend I will share something with you that only my elite coaching clients have known or talked about to this point that was shared this weekend.
A little while ago working with one of my elite coaching clients we discovered something. Recipes are powerful list builders. By posting a simple classified with a catch title and the instruction to simply reply to the ad he has been growing his email list by as much as a 100 new contacts a week. By using ongoing contacts you can quickly grow a big list of warm prospects in as little as 30 days. A list of 500 people can easily produce a $100,000+ income for a personal trainer. So far he’s taken a list of a couple hundred to nearly a thousand in roughly 60 days.
Here’s a sample of what your ad might look like:
Mouth Water, Good For You, Chocolate Muffins
Everyone has a sweet tooth, satisfy yours while still getting in great shape. Simply reply to this ad with your name and email and I will send you this recipe and others like it for free. Recipes provided by (your area)’s top personal trainers.
This can be run on electronic classifieds; it could even be run in print. It has been one of our absolute best list building, high converting classifieds.
What were some of the “big” items you learned this weekend? If there’s enough interest I may make the workshop video available. Leave your comments let me know the big take away items for you and if you’d like to get your hands on the workshop video.
The Conversion Pitch
Yes Star Wars is my favorite all time movie!
If you’ve been reading Profitable Personal Trainer at all you know that the fitness marketing strategies I like to employ the most are the ones that revolve around giving over the top value to your prospects. It’s not rocket science, its simple rapport, invest in people and they in turn will invest in you. As Zig Zigler so profoundly says, “the more you help others get what they want the more likely you will get what you want.”
Now it is that simple, and yet it isn’t. If you’ve been planning re-packaged short term free programs to massively attract new leads, if you’ve been offering up blockbuster high value trial packages so it’s a no brainer for people to try your services, don’t forget you still have to ask them or present them with an offer to continue. In other words at some point you still have to sell.
High value marketing systems will continually allow you to create a steady influx of new prospects and will rapidly position you as the good guy expert in your community. But without a conversion plan you will only see about 10-15% of your clients turn over into loyal paying clients with little to no effort.
Each time you execute a high value free program (like a 21 day rapid fat loss bootcamp) at just over the half way mark you should be converting clients. Now here’s the easy steps to making sure 80-90% of your people stay:
1) Make sure your service is over the top, they have to absolutely love what they are doing when they are training with you. (duh)
2) Make sure they get results. Give them all your best stuff and go the extra mile with accountability to ensure rapid results do happen. (duh #2)
3) Present them an irresistible offer. Discount their first month, offer them extra bonuses that cost you nothing. (An Infrared Sauna works so wonderful for this, in Red Deer a sauna drop-in cost like $15, but 10 sessions in the sauna costs me about $1.00 worth of power.) Free bonuses from professional partners. The e-book you recently wrote. The 100 healthy recipes you compiled from all across the internet. It doesn’t take much to really crank up the value.
4) Present everything to them with emotion.
Mrs. Jones you came to me 50 lbs overweight, you are on high blood pressure medication and type II diabetes runs in your family. It’s been just 2 weeks and you have already dropped 11 lbs, and just last week I noticed you were able to complete 40 squats and on day 1 you could only do 2. You mentioned you are sleeping better and your clothes are getting loose. I know you’re not yet done your trial but I am so proud of your results I wanted to give you this…(insert high value offer). There is no pressure at all to continue but man your results are going so good, I really want to see you lose that 50lbs in no time, don’t you agree things are going well?
How can she really say no? The only likely objection might be a financial one which means either the value you are providing isn’t high enough or she can’t afford it.
5) The secret weapon, the downsell. – Some clients may genuinely not be able to afford your most typical program, so offer them something for $97 a month. Even if it’s a nutritional meeting once a week, or a couple of bootcamps and a follow up call. The point is if they’re getting results and having fun they will continue but they are not going to tell you how much they are willing to pay.
Bottom line is you have to close, I see too many trainers lately applying some of the great fitness marketing strategies that have been listed here but they are not booking the sales consults to convert their leads to paying clients. Your goal has to be at least 1 new sales appointment per day.
Why I Think You Should Use WordPress
Whether you are a personal trainer or not you may find this post helpful when it comes to setting up your first website.
Just about every hosting company out there offers some kind of simple tool to quickly build an attractive website and maybe even have it operational in the next 60 minutes. Though I am not intensely familiar with all of these basic HTML editors I can tell you that their ease of use may seem appealing but over the long term they will require far more knowledge and time commitment to produce a website that works the way you want it to.
The problem with the HTML editors is they are not made to provide easy optimization for the less tech savvy individual. If you understand the ins and outs of website coding and optimization you can easily overcome this but I would still argue that WordPress will handle it easier, faster, and better. If you are not familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization understand that an optimized website will be more likely to be found on the first search page and will typically drive visitors to your website that you didn’t send there by word of mouth.
Personal trainer websites should be on wordpress in my opinion.
Using WordPress makes adding new pages and items to your website nearly as easy as writing an email. Visually it can be reconfigured with drag and drop widgets and only the smallest amount of direct HTML knowledge is really required.
Now when you combine WordPress with a number of powerful plugins it really goes to work for you. Starting with All in One SEO Pack you will be given the opportunity to give each new post a search engine crawler friendly keyword title, description and even a list of specific key words. Additionally you can also configure a number of options like to create meta tags from your post tags for instance. Meta tags are placed specifically for the search engine crawlers to read, identify and categorize your website and its content. None of these happen with a website builder included in most host packages unless you do it all manually.
Other plugins like SEO Images and SEO smart links will create automatic keyword links within your content, allow you to apply keyword titles to your images and so on. All these little things will likely go unnoticed to you for a time but you will see the effect they soon have in your site rank and its ability to generate traffic (ie. Potential customers) to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are thousands of plugins available and not just for better ranking but also for time saving features like posting video content as well as all kinds of elements to utilize social networking to its fullest.
In my opinion WordPress is far superior if your goal is to build a website that brings you customers rather than one you like the look of but nobody ever sees.
Happy Birthday Canada and a FREE Gift For You!
Another birthday for the greatest country in the world, and an oddball day off in the middle of the week. Today’s post will be short as today is an RnR day and should be for you too. However I figured since our great country is celebrating a birthday that is as good a reason as any to give some of you a gift.
Where would you like your business to go? What could you do today that will make a world of difference tomorrow? How much would it help to know now what some of the most successful people in the industry know?
Here’s what I’d like you to do, write down 5-6 pressing questions or concerns you have about your business and email them to me. In celebration of Canada day I will be awarding the 4 people who respond with the best questions with a 30 minute phone coaching session. We will record this call and you will get a copy of your call (and with the permission of the others) a copy of their calls also. 30 minutes is enough time to easily discuss multiple high income generating strategies, in fact with the right questions 30 minutes can easily change the whole picture of your business in the next 90 days.
Pretty simple, all you need to do is think about what are the 5-6 things in your business right now that you struggle or need help with and send them in. Deadline to enter is a week from today, July 8, 2010. If you don’t already have my email address simply submit through the contact form here. (Never post your email on your site, spammers love it when you do.)
Are You a Crappy Trainer? (15 Point Self Assessment)
How many of these things are you already doing well?
June and the summer months are some of the toughest months for many personal trainers. I’ve been receiving all kinds of emails from trainers asking what they need to do differently to survive these difficult months. In the main time we’ve had a near record breaking month at One-to-1 Fitness for new business, the formula is simpler than you think. Below is a 15 point checklist, read each one and then ask yourself if you are doing this effectively, if not spend a few minutes jotting down how you might implement this or do it better, commit to this for the next 60 days and by September you will never believe the summer is bad for personal training again.
- Always Build the List. Your most important marketing task for successful anything (in this case personal training) is the campaigns that build your list. The list is king, the bigger it the easier, and more importantly, the more predictable sales/client attraction is.
- Recognize and reward. Every living being on the face of the earth emotionally thrives on recognition and reward; we are hard wired for it. Recognize your clients and your staff as often as possible. Build a cult following by providing reward, this can be as simple as a thank you card or a big gold star.
- Remember that success likes speed. Don’t wait too long on ideas, develop a plan and take immediate action. As one idea or campaign blends to the next the momentum will carry you to massively grow your business.
- Continually ask for testimonials. Social proof will allow you to sell anything. Results are an incredibly powerful tool, share those results with others and your services will sell themselves.
- Get out of your comfort zone. Volunteer, join social clubs, attend networking functions, book free seminar sessions and lunch and learns. Try to talk to at least 10 new people in your community each day. Get out there and get known.
- Deliver, big time. Call your clients, see how they are doing. Email them or send them text messages. Remember you are building a relationship, strong client relationships will keep them with you forever. These little things provide so much additional value your clients will make you the talk of the town.
- Always be asking for referrals. Find subtle and creative ways to ask for referrals and make sure it’s always on your clients minds.
- Use email marketing for constant contact. Email marketing is one of the most powerful cost effective tools available to you (and why your list building is so important.) Keep your list warm by constantly providing them value through killer content. This maintains and elevates your expert status and ensures business longevity.
- Sell the lifestyle not the session. Selling packages of sessions is dead, automated monthly billing (EFT) is the key to success, get it in action immediately, and at first even as simple as post-dated cheques while you work through the steps with your bank.
- Use high value free programs and special repackage offers to quickly attract tonnes of new customers.
- Develop win-win relationships with local businesses and develop a large scale bonus program for clients and prospects. Use these bonuses and special offers to convert new prospects to new EFT agreements.
- Write specific goals. Just like you tell your clients set your own goals and then work backwards week by week to develop your plan to achieve that goal and hold yourself accountable.
- Don’t re-invent the wheel. Use the tools of others, attend conferences, get a coach, look at a franchise.
- Systemize everything. Think of each process like you are going to have to complete it a 100 times or more, develop a system around each action, process, or marketing campaign. Soon situations are just a repeat process and planning becomes what system to engage next. You will soon be able to see weeks and months ahead.
- Most importantly, never give up!
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