Prior Preparation & Planning Prevents P*ss Poor Performance

I new my years in the army weren’t wasted. Tonnes of crazy abbreviations and sayings locked in my memory for life!
But their is method to the madness. Prior Preparation & Planning Prevents P*ss Poor Performance!

Personal Trainers all have diaries to book in their clients sessions, but 99% off trainers are missing one MAJOR thing!
The main marketing dates!

If you plan these in now, you’ll be one step ahead of your competition

Hopefully you’ve already got your marketing ready and sorted for January 1st and all those New Year resolutions?

Here are all those important dates, give yourself a good couple of weeks prior to plan your marketing activity…

1 – New Year Resolutions – Make sure you are advertising your services online and offline to reap the rewards of all these people seeking your services

2 – January 31st /February 1st – Most peoples first pay day in the New Year. People are flush with cash again and you will see a second wave of people who have made resolutions take up Personal Training. An ideal time to boost your online pay per click marketing

3 – February 14th – Valentines Day – Get your mrs / girlfriend a gift and get marketing to all those who need to buy their partners a gift – remember!!! This is the biggest day for wedding proposals!!! Get marketing your Wedding Packages NOW

4 – March to September – Spring and Summer Wedding season! Are your wedding packages on your website?

5 – April 1st to 24th July – The start of the 6 weeks summer holiday period – work back 12 weeks from 24th July, thats April 1st!! get your 12 weeks of fitness programs launched
Think boot camps! think group training!

6 – Sept to March – Autumn and Winter Wedding season - people are looking to start working out indoors, so you need to change your wedding marketing plans.

7 - December – Bloody hell its christmas again! here we go again! PT as a christmas gift!

Other opportunities to advertise include….

Babies  – Mothers wanting to get back in shape, remember think pre and post natal.
S.A.D Seasonal Affective Disorder – market to those suffering from winter blues.
Ski season – PT for people going on ski holidays (think of other sports specific training too, e.g. Improve your golf through core stability etc)

What have i missed?…

Manage Your Accounts Better

Accounting, I know its the boring bit, but we all have to do it and it helps us ensure we’re all profitable!
It helps us see how much we’re earning each month, what our expenses were and ensures we keep a track of who owes us what. So why do most of us ignore our accounting? Because until now its never been straight forward.

I’ve personally used Quickbooks and Sage in the past. It took me several months to actually get my head around using quickbooks properly, but when i changed my computer to a new version i found i had lost my disc with quickbooks on and i’d have to buy a new version.  So i did a bit of research on what accounting products were available and how easy they are to use and i came across Kash Flow.  

I thought i’d share this with you all as i know how frustrating and time consuming doing your accounts can be.

The benefits of Kash Flow are..

1) Totally Online – Means you dont need to download anything, buy (and lose) a disc and means you can access it from any internet connection anywhere

2) Very simple interface to use

3) Totally customisable – add your own logo etc

4) Integrates with PayPal

And to top it all off, PTHub visitors can get a
60 Day Free Trial and a monthly discount by using our coupon code PTHUB

Social Networking – Why all Personal Trainers should be doing it

You will know that some of your email enquiries wont buy Personal Training from you straight away. Theres a number of reasons for this…

1. It may be too expensive for them today
2. It may be they are reviewing several trainers in the area
3. It may be that they still arent sure whether they need a Personal Trainer
4. It may be they are a little shy and dont know you yet

Whatever the reason happens to be, YOU should be starting to build a rapport with these enquiries straight away!

There’s a simple step you can follow to build this relationship!

Invite them into your Social Network

When you reply to that initial email enquiry, invite them to follow you on Twitter, to join your Personal Training Face Book Group and to Network with you on Linked In.

You can use this as an ice breaker and build rapport with this potential client. They may even refer you to there own network groups building your following and increasing your Personal Training Clients

To help you make it easy for people to find out how to join your Social Network groups ive added a new feature to PTHub.co.uk personal trainers profiles. You can promote your social network easily to thousands of people monthly.
Watch this short video to see how to add social network features to your profile now

Unique Christmas Present – Personal Training

Have you started marketing yet for the New Year rush of resolutions from people who will sign up with a Personal Trainer and / or Join a Gym so they can shed those extra seasonal pounds they’ve gained ?

Hopefully you’ve answered yes, but if you havent, GET YOUR SKATES ON!

People are already buying Christmas presents and you should be marketing your Personal Training accordingly.

Think about 3 different offerings and offer them on your website (or in your PTHub.co.uk profile)

1) A low cost Personal Trainer Taster session – Say £30. This fits nearly everyones budget
2) A Mid range offering. Say £99. Offering 3 sessions valid in January 2010
3) Your block of 12 Personal Training sessions for the dedicated, who have made a resolution to get in shape in the New Year

Now start promoting
A simple Adwords / Yahoo Search marketing campaign is the easiest way to market this
Target keywords like…
Christmas gift ideas
Unique christmas gift ideas
Christmas present ideas etc etc

get more ideas on Keywords here

Other places to promote…
1) In the Gym
2) Local Offices (Do a flyer drop, but do it NOW)
3) Existing clients for family and friends
4) Online forums and communities (e.g. PTHub profiles will have this feature added within the next week)
5) In Shops, visit a fitness store and offer them a voucher entitling anyone who buys a piece of fitness equipment over £100 a free taster PT session / Consultation. Make it time limited. E.g. They must register there interest within 7 days
6) On a banner outside your house – Looking for a Unique Xmas Present? Buy a Personal Training Session!
7) To your email subscribers (havent got a email subscriber list yet? Shocking! start one now!)
Call your local Newspaper, Lifestyle Magazine, Radio Station or TV News Station and get them thinking about different Christmas presents! Personal Training!!!
9) In your local dentist, beauticians, hairdressers etc etc

Come on get thinking! You could book a years worth of PT in the next 2 months alone!

Why Post in Forums?

We spend time optimising our websites for a few keywords, the sort of keywords most people will use to find us by, but what about all those ‘long tail’ keywords people search everyday that we should also be targeting?

Well this is where forum and blog posting comes in.

Everyday people search the internet for information. Infact more people search for information than people searching to buy, so it makes sense to put ourselves in front of these people as the next time they search they may well be in the mood to buy!

PTHub.co.uk has a Fitness Forum that has an SEO friendly plugin that is dedicated to helping you promote yourself using long tail keywords.

So what is a long tail keyword. Well short tail words are things like Personal Trainer London, or Personal Training, so long tail words are more like short sentences that maybe only a few people are searching for but are still valuable enough to start a quick forum post about, e.g. How to lose weight quickly, How to drop a dress size for my wedding, Which diet works the best etc etc
Its not worth spending days optimising a site for these words, but in a few minutes you can start a forum post and rank for these keywords!!!

Remember…
1) Never spam forums with pointless posts!
2) Ensure you place a signature link – e.g. Personal Training Advice – Link it to your own website
3) Post in the correct forum sections (PTHUB.co.uk has loads of sections dedicated to every fitness niche)
4) Dont duplicate post
5) Check back and follow up on replies

Forum posting can …
1)  Add valuable links to your own website
2) Make you an authority in your industry
3) Build you a following
4) Bring you NEW CLIENTS!!!

Check out PTHub.co.uk Fitness Forum (it ranks on Page one of Google for Personal Trainer and Training Search Terms

A Quick Way To Increase Your Personal Training Revenue

We all want and need to increase our Personal Training Revenue if we want to afford the better things in life and it needn’t be difficult to do this. Here’s just one way to add thousands of pounds of extra income into your bank account.

Instead of selling sessions in your usual 5 or 10 sessions. Only sell in blocks of 6 and 12 and 24
Here’s the maths…
Say i currently sell in blocks of 5 and 10 and i charge £30 per session
Thats £150 for 5 and £300 for 10. Now lets look at it when i sell in blocks of 6 and 12
6 X £30 = £180 and 12 x £30 = £360
Now say my clients on average buy 4 blocks of 12 sessions per year. At £30 per session thats 48 sessions = £1440 compared to 40 (4 blocks of 10 at £30) = £1200

Now say i have 25 regular clients buying 4 blocks of sessions over the year.
£1440 x 25 clients = £36,000 of income compared to
£1200 x 25 clients = £30,000
Now thats an instant increase of £6000 per year!!! Simple!!!

Now some Top Tips.
Clients should buy in blocks of 12, Why?
1) They should train at least twice per week with you
2) 12 sessions will last them 6 weeks (plenty of time to start delivering results!)
3) 4 Blocks of 12 sessions gives you plenty of time to deliver their expected results

Now if a client cant afford to pay for 12 sessions upfront, this is where you offer the option of buying 6 sessions at a time to help spread the cost, but your contract MUST be for 12 sessions!
Never sell single sessions, What can you deliver in 1 session? and where is the committment from the client to achieve their goals if they are only prepared to pay for 1 sessions at a time?

Make the change today and reap the rewards!

If you enjoyed this article please ReTweet it by clicking the link at the start or end of the post or link back to it from your own blog. I’d also appreciate you leaving a comment below

How to Rank on Page 1 of Google – Part 1

Over the coming weeks I will post a series of articles on How to Rank on Page 1 of Google. Thats how to get your own website onto page 1 of Googles search results. One of the benefits of being a Personal Trainer is that your work is based in a geographic location, so it makes sense that you would want to rank for something like Personal Trainer Nottingham, or Personal Training Leeds or Lose Weight Manchester.

So lets say you’re a Personal Trainer in Manchester and you want to rank for this search term. Google decides who ranks the highest in its search results based on a large number of factors and in part one of our series on How to Rank on Page 1 of Google we’ll look just one of these elements (dont worry, i’ll reveal them all over the coming weeks).

First off we need to optimise our own website / web pages. A standard web page is made up of 2 key areas. A Head Section and a Body Section. The Head section contains all the information required for the browser and search engines to interpret and display the web page properly both on your computer screen and in the search engine results.

In Part 1 of this series of articles we’ll look at the head section and specifically the Title Tag, The Description and The Keywords. (to view yours quickly, go to your website in a browser and right click the page and select view source)

You’ll see in the picture above are the three key components of the Head Section. There may well be much more in this section on your website but for this example thats all we need in there when we’re looking at SEO (search engine optimisation).

Title Tags – Now these are possibly one of the most important things as far as SEO is concerned but they are often under utilised. You’ll often see these replaced with Home Page or Company Name. Google often uses this tag as the title of your site in the search engine results. It also assumes that whatever you have in your title tags is a very good indication of what your site is all about so therefore what to rank you for. So you should put your main keyword/phrase in here. E.g. Personal Trainer Manchester (use a maximum of 70 characters in your title tags)

Description Tags – Well again Google uses this as its description of your site in its search engine results. It also assumes that this is also a good description of what your site is about. So it makes sense to write a small paragraph with your keywords within this body of text. Use a maximum of 155 characters in this area and write a proper sentence and dont stuff it with keywords. See the example in the picture above.

Keywords – Google NO LONGER USES THE KEYWORD ATTRIBUTE. Thats a fact, go and check it in Matt Cutts Blog. Matt is a head search engine expert at Google. However, maybe other search engines do? All i would say about this is stop stuffing it full of hundreds of keywords and just put 2 – 3 of your desired keywords in this section. Google doesnt use it today, but may well in the future.

Thats it for part one. Simply changing this section of your website / web pages will make a massive difference on how Google views your web presence. Do it now and reap the rewards.

If you need to hire an SEO Consultant, please visit CaspianSEO.co.uk

If you enjoyed this article please ReTweet it by clicking the link at the start of the post or link back to it from your own blog. I’d also appreciate you leaving a comment below

How to Get an Article Published in the Newspapers

A great way to generate new clients is through local newspapers. Now not all of us Personal Train Celebrities, So how do you get a newspaper article published?  Here’s a few tips to follow…

1) Check your local newspaper, does it have a Health and Fitness section? If not ask to be a freelancer and submit articles to be published. If it does, see if you can add something a little extra or more niche specific.

2) Invite a local reporter to come and experience your services. Spend a couple of hours putting them through there paces in return for a review article.

3) Generate a local news worthy story of your own. E.g. Ex Investment Banker Now Working On Other Peoples Figures. An article about an investment banker who was made redundant and who also lost 2 stone in weight and trained as a Personal Trainer and who set up a new business in his local area. Tie your story to a local or national trend or news feature like the one above relating to the credit crunch.

4) Buy an Advertorial – If you cant get an article published pay for one. Dont be shy in coming forward. Approach a local paper, tell them you only have a £100 budget but want an advertorial and if it works for you you’ll consider future advertising opportunities, you’ll be surprised, i recently did this for one of my businesses and got a 1/3rd of a page for £120 in a major city newspaper (and i got business from it)

5) Submit a Press Release through one of the online services, e.g. PRNewswire. These often get picked up by regional papers. Think about your title when you do this, it works like SEO so you should think what you want your press release to rank for in the search engines and include it in the title.

Good luck and please reply with your own ideas

The Power of P.S.

Want a simple way to improve your email / newsletter / mailshot response rate by 10% ?

Thought so! Remember to add a p.s.
Adding a P.S. is statiscally proven to increase reader response rates by 10%. So if you are emailing 100 potential clients and expect 10 replies, adding a p.s. should see you increase this to 20 replies.

Here’s an example…
P.S. I am offering a FREE £30 voucher that can be redeemed off a block of 12 Personal Training Sessions to the first 10 people who reply to this email

Try it for yourself today! & remember to read my article… Are you losing your email enquiry clients

Personal Trainer Business Cards

In my FREE Personal Trainer Marketing Plan i go into how to turn your standard Business Card into a Full On Marketing Machine!

In this post i give those of you considering downloading my free plan, a quick insight into the basics on what should be on every Trainers Business Card.

1) Ditch the plain old business card and aim for High Impact!

2) Add Your Picture to the card. People are 3 times as likely to make a purchase if they know who they are dealing with. Think, If your business card is next to 10 other trainers in the gym and a potential client see’s you training in the gym but cant approach you as you are already with a client, how will they know which is your card? Are you going to let them guess?

3) Add an offer to your card, e.g. FREE Consultation!

4) Make the offer time sensitive, e.g. Available to the next 3 clients only

5) Add your website and email details in bold

6) Add a slogan that offers benefits and not features or hard to justify statements about yourself. E.g. Lose weight whilst having fun and not, I am the best Personal Trainer in Manchester.

Remember to ask yourself…
Is My Business Card working for me?

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