The goal of maintaining a fitness blog is to create regular content which your potential clients find valuable. Your blog can only be a method of generating leads if what you write is useful to your audience. This will lead to them sharing the articles with their peers thus helping to increase the traffic to your website. With more people reading your tips and advice, the opportunity to create leads from your website improves.
Publishing articles regularly on your personal trainer website is an excellent way to showcase your expertise in a given area, particularly if you serve an unusual niche. You can demonstrate your position on all things fitness, and a thoughtful, well-researched blog can be a real help to your clients and prospects.
Not to mention the boost you can achieve in your SEO ranking which then will drive even more traffic (and potential clients) to your site. This means that you get more people clicking onto your site for the first time to see what services you provide. Here are 5 useful tips to help you run a successful blog.
1. Use Stories to Connect with Your Readers
This is an indirect method of getting people to buy into your personal training services. People love stories and find personal connections with what you’re writing more easily when they are presented as a story.
Keep the people and their problem at the centre of the story and try to think of the service you provide as a background element.
Keep the people and their problem at the centre of the story and try to think of the service you provide as a background element.
Talk about your clients and what they did to overcome their problems, talk about how they worked towards their goal, talk about how they were able to make a change in their lives. Your service’s role in this will be inferred by the reader.
2. Include a Call-to-Action
This is a direct method of asking your readers to do something. It might be presented as a “quiz” element within your blog post, instructing them to perform a movement and to check if they experience outcome A or outcome B.
For example, in a blog post about squat depth, you might ask readers to stand up and perform a body weight squat.
For example, in a blog post about squat depth, you might ask readers to stand up and perform a body weight squat.
Outcome A: If they get to parallel and feel like they’re tipping over, you might conclude they have tight ankles and suggest some stretching tips to help them hit depth.
Outcome B: If they get to parallel and feel no loss of balance but can’t go further, you might conclude they have tight hips and suggest some mobility work to help them.
You’re still giving your readers useful tips with a problem they were looking to solve (the depth of their squat). By giving value upfront before we ask anything of our readers we are able to help them before we ask for anything from them.
If you have a more direct call to action, such as “click here to book a consultation call so I can help you with your squat depth” consider including it before the very end of your post.
If your CTA is at the very end of your post, people who are skim reading for a specific solution in your blog post might miss it. If you include a CTA closer to the top of your post, there’s a better chance they’ll see it and take the action you’re suggesting.
3. Have Multiple Solutions to Their Problems
Your personal training services won’t be the only way for a potential client to solve their problems. In fact, they’ve probably tried a number of other methods already. You can discuss these alternatives in your blog - it makes you seem more trustworthy if you’re not only pushing your own personal training services. You might present your personal training as an option among other solutions of different price points, or complexities.
This is Zach Pello's take on why strength training is important to women and gives them a few options on how to get into it into a safe and effective way. Only one of the solutions include a hyperlink to his online training services.
4. Tracking, Promoting and Measuring Performance
Tracking who clicks through on your post to check out your CTA could be a useful way to know how effective your post has been. You could even consider using an embedded pixel to retarget your paid advertising to the people that have shown an interest in your services. Knowing which metrics are important to track can be confusing, so we wrote a post about it to clarify that you can read here.
Once you know which posts in your blog are the most useful to your audience you can spend some time promoting them. You may find that most of your blog traffic comes from a small number of posts that continue to be useful and relevant long after you’ve published them.
Another way to figure out what topics are most popular is to keep an eye on the open and click through rate of your email campaigns and weekly blog updates. The below report is from a campaign one of our SEO clients, Aidan sent during the COVID-19 crisis. If you keep checking the reports of all your emails, you'll have a better idea of the topics and type of post that are more popular.
Once you know which posts in your blog are the most useful to your audience you can spend some time promoting them. You may find that most of your blog traffic comes from a small number of posts that continue to be useful and relevant long after you’ve published them.
Another way to figure out what topics are most popular is to keep an eye on the open and click through rate of your email campaigns and weekly blog updates. The below report is from a campaign one of our SEO clients, Aidan sent during the COVID-19 crisis. If you keep checking the reports of all your emails, you'll have a better idea of the topics and type of post that are more popular.
In your promotion, focus on explaining the benefits of your blog post and what a reader could expect to get out of reading it. You could add it to a signature that you include to your email list that week, or write about it on social media. Try to keep links in the comments on Facebook though - they don’t do as well in the main post.
Measuring the performance of the post might give you a clear indication of what type of post resonates with your audience and what to do more of. Maybe your readership on your blog is predominantly women in their 40s, but your personal training services are focused on men in their 20s. That could be something which influences how you market your services.
5. Use Different Styles of Post
Having a clear idea of the sort of content that your audience finds useful can give you an idea of how to present content in different ways. You could consider:
Knowing what your audience wants to achieve, and knowing the sort of content that works well for them can give you a recipe that’s successful every time. The combinations are endless.
- A how-to tutorial
- A case study on one of your clients
- Reviews
- Lists and comparisons
- Your story
Knowing what your audience wants to achieve, and knowing the sort of content that works well for them can give you a recipe that’s successful every time. The combinations are endless.
