These are exciting times right now if you have your own fitness or personal training business. By harnessing the full potential that new technologies have to offer, you can put your fitness business on the map, helping you earn a higher salary and providing your customers and members with top-notch personalized service and all of this. and it could still be a one man band, and you don’t have to be a computer expert or techno geek to do it.
For many instructors who teach in the community or operate a personal training business, the power and potential of the Internet has allowed small one-man operations to compete with large corporations by giving them the ability to offer complete customer service and back.
Website and client list
Develop your business online
More and more independent fitness professionals are taking to online marketing. I’m seeing it everywhere, with a little knowledge and practice, you can develop and sell eBooks, eCourses, DVDs and CDROMs, and other information products to your customer base. As a fitness professional, you are an expert, you have the knowledge and experience your clients want and need and are willing to pay for it. Several years ago it was difficult and required a lot of effort to get a publisher to publish a book. Well now you can write your own book, turn it into an e-book and sell it online on your website or to your customers. All you need to do is spend some time writing and researching a suitable book.
Tracy McClaclen wrote her first Fitness Pilates e-book and sells it to her clients after classes and through her website. [http://www.pink-pineapple.com] it supplements your income and is a product you will continue to sell year after year.
“Many of my clients always asked me what Fitness Pilates exercises they could do at home, so I decided to turn it into a book and sell it. It has been one of the most profitable decisions I have ever made and only took me hours to write and produce.” “
If you really want to grow your fitness business and don’t want to spend all your time and energy teaching 25 classes a week for a living, you may need to branch out and offer multiple streams of income. Your first port of call should be a website Think of your website as a virtual store, your home page is like a storefront that needs to be changed and updated frequently.
If this is something you want to add to your business, here are some of my recommendations to get you started on the right foot.
1. Get a good website and learn how to update it yourself. You need to have the flexibility to make changes and add things as you go. You should be comfortable with the basic technical aspects of the web. And you need to have a site with good content. From there you can add pages for specific online products.
2. Build your email list. Perhaps nothing is more important than this. You can’t build a large, responsive list overnight, so start collecting email addresses now and enter them into an Excel spreadsheet. You need to collect the email address of everyone who reaches out to you or hand out their cards and ask members of your class to sign up for free on your site.
3. Send an ezine regularly. No, do it weekly. This isn’t the only way to do it, but you’ll grow your customer list much faster if you send your ezine out more often. The best subscribers actually come from word of mouth. And the more it goes out, the more
is transmitted. Ezine drives online sales. Period. Without my weekly newsletter, my local classes and the C2Go website would be nowhere.
While planning my website http://www.choreographytogo.com and working on the technical aspects, I began emailing a weekly instructor newsletter containing news, opinions, reviews, and business ideas. I collected the email addresses of all the instructors who attended my workshops and conventions. My list started with 50 email addresses and now I have 15,000 subscribers in 3 years.
4. Develop an online product. What will your online product be? As you know C2Go is downloadable choreographies, articles, a support system for Fitness professionals, support for my courses and workshops. Could you develop an ebook, cookbook, low fat cooking, weight loss information, could you develop your own DVD or CDROM?
5. Commit to mastering the ideas and principles of online marketing. Read books, e-books and attend seminars.
This is my model and it works great. The only downside is that I can’t develop products fast enough to meet the demand and I don’t have enough time in my schedule to do more workshops and shoot more choreography, but I guess those are good problems!
Conference calls and seminars
Large corporations and businesses have long invested in the technology to provide conference calling, which is basically a seminar or conference conducted over the phone where everyone in attendance uses their own phone and connects to a bridge line to enter the conference. . No more traveling for hours in your car, the business reduces travel costs and you can take the call from your own office. I predict this will have a massive impact on the fitness industry as more companies offer the technology and costs come down on line rentals. Just think you can host your own conference on weight loss, motivation, fitness compliance, or whatever you specialize in and charge your clients accordingly. Here at choreography togo I have been experimenting with this virtual lecturing method that helps instructors stay focused and motivated as well as lecturing on business ideas and public relations for their own business. You can even connect a webcam and record the live event and play it back on your website.
audio readings
Again, audio conferencing is gaining popularity on all kinds of websites and the fitness industry will once again be deeply affected by it. By purchasing a relatively inexpensive recording device, you can set it up to record a phone call, allowing you to conduct an interview over the phone and record it, convert it to a .windows audio file, and broadcast it on your website. I imagine that many presenters and fitness experts will be able to broadcast lectures and interviews this way so that we get the latest research and information through that expert’s website.
Mobile phones / multimedia messages and text messages
Many fitness professionals and personal trainers use texting as a way to motivate clients, keep them up to date, remind them of appointments, etc., but with the rise of 3G phones and video messaging, the next logical step would be to send clients a mini video of an exercise or routine. For instructors, I will send 1-minute choreography routines directly to your phone.
These are exciting times, so don’t be left behind and take your business into the next multimedia age.
