If you have a trainer website then you need visitors. Website visitors are everything and personal trainers like yourself use a multitude of tools to make that happen.
From Pay Per Click and Facebook ads to search engine optimisation and content marketing (like this post).
In this post I will be explaining:
From Pay Per Click and Facebook ads to search engine optimisation and content marketing (like this post).
In this post I will be explaining:
- How to get cheap targeted traffic to your trainer website
- How to make sure your website is optimised to turn traffic in to sales
- How to attract hundreds of qualified clients to your website
- And how to put all of this on auto pilot… sort of :)
It will take approximately 10 minutes to read and several weeks to implement (<— What? There’s no such thing as instant results!)
Step 1: Test Your Trainer Website
When I speak to personal trainers about testing their fitness website design I normally get asked these questions. And rightly so:
So, for the purposes of this post and to ensure you don’t have “died optimising his website” on your gravestone, here are some basic fundamentals you can measure:
Now to answer those questions; how to test your trainer website without traffic, what metrics and what tools to use.
To test your website you can use one or both of the following steps:
Step 1a: Criticue
(Note: If you’re one of my clients you don’t need to do this step as I’ve already done it for you. Skip to Step 1b)
- How do I test my website if I’m getting no traffic?
- What metrics am I measuring?
- What tools do I use to test my trainer website?
- Can you do it for me? (<— Yes but it’ll cost you)
So, for the purposes of this post and to ensure you don’t have “died optimising his website” on your gravestone, here are some basic fundamentals you can measure:
- Navigation - how easy it is to get around
- Content - how well your site is written and optimised for search engines (headers, images, call to action)
- Opt In Offer - the sign up incentive to capture the emails of potential clients
Now to answer those questions; how to test your trainer website without traffic, what metrics and what tools to use.
To test your website you can use one or both of the following steps:
Step 1a: Criticue
(Note: If you’re one of my clients you don’t need to do this step as I’ve already done it for you. Skip to Step 1b)
This is the strategy to use if your website is reasonably new and you don’t have the marketing funds yet to pay for ads. Criticue is a free website review service that asks random people from every industry to visit your site and answer your questions. For example you may want to send visitors to your home page and ask:
- How easy is it to navigate my site and what improvements would you suggest?
- What does the content say about me or my service and how well written is it?
- If you were a middle aged house wife, what would you think of my opt in offer?
Critique tips:
- Critique has reputation management system so make sure to review other member sites properly. If you don’t then you get a bad rep.
- Be sure to ask open questions. Instead of “do you like my site?”, ask “what improvements would you suggest to improve my website?”
- Be specific. Ask questions about specific areas of your site so you can get more accurate feedback.
- Don’t be greedy. Don’t ask too many questions. If you do, the members might skip your site in search of an easier review.
Step 1b: Pay Per Click
You’ve probably seen pay per click ads already. They’re the ads at the top of Google search results. A pay per click ad allows you to bid to be ranked at the top for a specific keyword. For example, if you were a personal trainer in New York, you might bid to rank at the top for “personal trainer New York” and all the other related variables.
Ironically though, I wouldn’t suggest using Google. Google ads are expensive, there’s loads of competition and their dashboard can be a bit overwhelming if you’re not used to it. Instead, use:
With these PPC search engines you can get cheap, targeted, instant traffic to start testing your trainer website.
Pay Per Click tips:
Bid on specific keywords - Instead of bidding for “personal trainer” bid for “personal trainer New York”. If you’re going to get traffic it may as well be targeted.
Be location specific where possible - Most PPC search engines will allow you to narrow your niche down to a specific location. I would suggest a 50km radius around the locations your proved personal training services to.
Bid on specific keywords - Instead of bidding for “personal trainer” bid for “personal trainer New York”. If you’re going to get traffic it may as well be targeted.
Be location specific where possible - Most PPC search engines will allow you to narrow your niche down to a specific location. I would suggest a 50km radius around the locations your proved personal training services to.
Step 2: Get Free Organic Traffic From Google
Now that you’re getting some targeted traffic and made changes based on user behaviour and Criticue member reviews of your website, it’s time to become an SEO ninja!
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as us cool kids call it, is the process of ranking high in search results for specific keywords. For example, if you type “personal trainer website design” in to Google, you’ll see my website lands in the top 3 in the ORGANIC search results (after the ads). That no accident. Everything about my site (including this blog) is optimised to appear high in organic search.
Why? Two reasons;
It’s also important to rank high in the other searches like Yahoo and Bing too and the best way to increase the chances of your website ranking high in these search engines is to submit them.
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as us cool kids call it, is the process of ranking high in search results for specific keywords. For example, if you type “personal trainer website design” in to Google, you’ll see my website lands in the top 3 in the ORGANIC search results (after the ads). That no accident. Everything about my site (including this blog) is optimised to appear high in organic search.
Why? Two reasons;
- Organic search is FREE. Once your site is well optimised it is exceptionally easy to maintain.
- People trust organic search. Marketing research shows that users STILL click on organic search results over ads. Users know that ads are paid for and therefore endorsed by the company paying for them. If you’re in the organic search results, GOOGLE is recommending you! And who doesn’t love Google (except Yahoo and Bing).
It’s also important to rank high in the other searches like Yahoo and Bing too and the best way to increase the chances of your website ranking high in these search engines is to submit them.
Click here to have us do this for you
Submitting your website simply let’s the search engine know your website exists and allows the “spiders” of each search engine to “crawl” your site. This means they’ll look through your site and take note of all of the pages in your trainer website and store it in the memory banks so it can later decide if you’re worthy of the top spot for a specific keyword.
I’d need a whole new blog to explain how to submit your website to each search engine. Instead, I’ve placed some convenient links to their instructional pages here:
- For Google, go to www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
- For Yahoo Directory, go to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
- For Yahoo! Search, go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com
- For MSN, go to http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
- For AOL, submit your site to the Open Directory Project, which uses ODP data. Here's the link: http://dmoz.org/add.html
Search engine submission tip:
Don’t pay for companies that offer to submit your site for you. These companies usually use robots to submit your site to numerous low level search engines using the same info despite each search engine using different criteria to rank your site.
Content marketing is one of the best ways for a personal trainer to market their trainer website in my opinion. Why? Well, for one, we know load of stuff that potential clients don’t know. This means that we, as professionals, are business assets. And for two, it personally helped my business grow from a sketchy 10 hours per week to a wallet busting 50 hours of clients per week.
It try to encourage my clients to do this a lot and some of the replies I get are:
But creating great content is easy, even for the “non-writer”, when you know how. Some of you will be able to write some awesome content based off of the conversations you have with clients. I know I can petty much recite the script I use to explain exactly how the lactate threshold works. If you have any of these explanations you use with clients, write them down!!
For those of you that have no idea what to write and feel as though they would struggle to write down what they talk about with clients, simply Google a topic you know you’re good at, have a read through the existing articles out there and use those articles to create your own content.
This is called a Content Upgrade and I think every PT should be doing it! Plagiarism? NO! The content you re-write in your own words with your own thoughts, opinions, experiences and facts might very well appeal to someone that previously didn’t understand that particular topic.
You’re not plagiarising. You’re using existing content that you already know does well and making it yours. No copy/pasting!!
OK, now you’re writing great content. What do you do with it?
It’s tempting to go all super proud of the article you’ve written and post it straight up on your blog. This is good and I do that too as it provides great content to the site, you can then link to it from social networks and get a tonne of visitors.
But you can also capitalise on your content by giving it away. Find other health and fitness websites that are doing well in search results and ask them if they would like some great content for their site. This bit is easy. Simply search for a personal trainer in your area, find another PT who is actively blogging and offer him your content in exchange for a link back to your website (link backs to Google are like “votes” for your website. More links = better ranking).
Failing that you can add your article to one of the many article directories out there and link back to your website from within the text or from a bio at the bottom of the article. Here are some directories:
It try to encourage my clients to do this a lot and some of the replies I get are:
- I don’t have time
- I’m no good at writing
- I have nothing to write about
- Can you do it for me? (<— Yes, for a fee)
But creating great content is easy, even for the “non-writer”, when you know how. Some of you will be able to write some awesome content based off of the conversations you have with clients. I know I can petty much recite the script I use to explain exactly how the lactate threshold works. If you have any of these explanations you use with clients, write them down!!
For those of you that have no idea what to write and feel as though they would struggle to write down what they talk about with clients, simply Google a topic you know you’re good at, have a read through the existing articles out there and use those articles to create your own content.
This is called a Content Upgrade and I think every PT should be doing it! Plagiarism? NO! The content you re-write in your own words with your own thoughts, opinions, experiences and facts might very well appeal to someone that previously didn’t understand that particular topic.
You’re not plagiarising. You’re using existing content that you already know does well and making it yours. No copy/pasting!!
OK, now you’re writing great content. What do you do with it?
It’s tempting to go all super proud of the article you’ve written and post it straight up on your blog. This is good and I do that too as it provides great content to the site, you can then link to it from social networks and get a tonne of visitors.
But you can also capitalise on your content by giving it away. Find other health and fitness websites that are doing well in search results and ask them if they would like some great content for their site. This bit is easy. Simply search for a personal trainer in your area, find another PT who is actively blogging and offer him your content in exchange for a link back to your website (link backs to Google are like “votes” for your website. More links = better ranking).
Failing that you can add your article to one of the many article directories out there and link back to your website from within the text or from a bio at the bottom of the article. Here are some directories:
- www.articles-hub.com
- www.ezinearticles.com
- www.articlebiz.com
- www.articlecity.com
- www.goarticles.com
- www.isnare.com
- www.a1articles.com
- www.article-mania.com
- www.articlealley.com
- www.articledepot.co.uk
Step 3: Create Amazeballs Content
Content marketing tip:
Make sure to add a link to your website from within the article or from the bio you add to the bottom.
Advertise your article on social networks. For example “Here is an article I wrote for Ezine Articles [link]”. This will help get the article indexed and therefore the link back to your site index. Plus a few more visits to your website.
Make sure to add a link to your website from within the article or from the bio you add to the bottom.
Advertise your article on social networks. For example “Here is an article I wrote for Ezine Articles [link]”. This will help get the article indexed and therefore the link back to your site index. Plus a few more visits to your website.
Step 4: We're Going Viral Baby!!
Viral marketing is becoming increasingly popular and for good reason. Viral marketing is a strategy marketers use to encourage people to spread information about your website. Viral marketing and content marketing often go hand in hand because it’s easier to make great content spread than offers for services.
How do you make things go viral? It’s actually pretty simple. All you do is ask people to take an action in the right place.
For example:
But how does this relate to content? I read hundreds of blogs a week (well, maybe not 100 every week) and I always see the simplest form of viral marketing missing. I even forget to do it myself sometimes.
How do you make things go viral? It’s actually pretty simple. All you do is ask people to take an action in the right place.
For example:
- "If you liked this post, share it with a friend"
- "Share this with a friend who needs to know"
- "Share this post to win..."
But how does this relate to content? I read hundreds of blogs a week (well, maybe not 100 every week) and I always see the simplest form of viral marketing missing. I even forget to do it myself sometimes.
Viral marketing tip:
Adding this to the end of your articles:
"If you've enjoyed this article, please be sure to forward it to a friend!”
That’s it. Simply ASKING readers to share your work. By simply encouraging people to "share this resource with friends," you can attract some great word-of-mouth traffic.
Step 5: Get Votes For Your Trainer Website
Exchanging links with other industry related websites (link exchange, or link swaps) is probably the fastest, cheapest way of getting massive link love, high rankings in search engines and therefore visitors, ever devised. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters.
The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange.
Note: The important thing you need to remember is that the sites you exchange links with must be topically-related to your site. That is, the theme of your site must complement, but not compete with that of your link partners.
Example: For us personal trainers, it's a good idea to swap links with other personal trainers and/or health and fitness related websites. But it would be a bad idea to exchange links with real estate or gambling sites.
Finding high-quality theme-related partners is a tedious task. So to save you the trouble, below is a great list of link partners you should swap links with. All these are considered high-class topically-related by ALL major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
Also, the majority of these sites actually do link exchange, so you will have no problem getting them to link to you. The way in which I created this list was by looking in Google for sites about personal trainers that include the words "Add URL" somewhere on the site. You can do this yourself by typing the following in to the Google search engine:
personal trainer "add url"
The text in quotation marks asks Google to find sites that quote those particular words somewhere in their site. I've done that for you and linked to the results pages below.
Here's the list. Just click on the links below to view specific pages.
The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange.
Note: The important thing you need to remember is that the sites you exchange links with must be topically-related to your site. That is, the theme of your site must complement, but not compete with that of your link partners.
Example: For us personal trainers, it's a good idea to swap links with other personal trainers and/or health and fitness related websites. But it would be a bad idea to exchange links with real estate or gambling sites.
Finding high-quality theme-related partners is a tedious task. So to save you the trouble, below is a great list of link partners you should swap links with. All these are considered high-class topically-related by ALL major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
Also, the majority of these sites actually do link exchange, so you will have no problem getting them to link to you. The way in which I created this list was by looking in Google for sites about personal trainers that include the words "Add URL" somewhere on the site. You can do this yourself by typing the following in to the Google search engine:
personal trainer "add url"
The text in quotation marks asks Google to find sites that quote those particular words somewhere in their site. I've done that for you and linked to the results pages below.
Here's the list. Just click on the links below to view specific pages.
- Here's portion 1 of pages Google considers quality link partners for your site...
- Here's portion 2 of pages Google considers quality link partners for your site...
- Here's portion 3 of pages Google considers quality link partners for your site...
Link building tip:
If you wanted to get super technical you could also perform your own search with your location or niche in it (e.g personal trainer your location "add url)
If you wanted to get super technical you could also perform your own search with your location or niche in it (e.g personal trainer your location "add url)
Step 6: Email Marketing
If you’ve followed the steps above you will definitely start receiving a lot more traffic to your personal trainer website. So it makes sense to make site visitors repeat visitors, right?
This is where email marketing comes in. You should be collecting the emails of everyone who lands on your website. Naturally you’re going to get a lot of visitors who stumble upon your site aimlessly, not looking for your advice or services so you don’t want their email.
This is where an effective email opt in gift comes in. Ideally, you only want the emails of people who are interested in your service so if you provide in home personal training in New York, you might want to offer “10 Way To Make Personal Training At Home Fun!!” or something along those lines.
Those interested will be ideal clients and you can effectively follow up with them and reduce unsubscribes.
But what’s the best way to follow up? Another great question and one I have been asked many many times. So often in fact I created a little template:
This particular follow up series is used by expert marketers all over the globe. It’s all about establishing trust and rapport and turning thinkers in to action takers.
This is where email marketing comes in. You should be collecting the emails of everyone who lands on your website. Naturally you’re going to get a lot of visitors who stumble upon your site aimlessly, not looking for your advice or services so you don’t want their email.
This is where an effective email opt in gift comes in. Ideally, you only want the emails of people who are interested in your service so if you provide in home personal training in New York, you might want to offer “10 Way To Make Personal Training At Home Fun!!” or something along those lines.
Those interested will be ideal clients and you can effectively follow up with them and reduce unsubscribes.
But what’s the best way to follow up? Another great question and one I have been asked many many times. So often in fact I created a little template:
- Email 1 (sent immediately) – sets the tone Thank you email that provides a link to the free item OR mention of when they will get more info if they opted in for a newsletter.
- Email 2 (sent on Day 2) - to build rapport Check in and see how they liked your free gift and provide links to where else they can get to know you (like Facebook).
- Email 3 (sent on Day 3) - to demonstrate your expertise An email that provides another free gift and does not sell. It can be a video, your most popular blog post or some other bonus that shows them more of what you have to offer.
- Email 4 (sent on Day 4) - to demonstrate your credibility In the form of a short story, talk about a case study with a client of yours and what specifically changed after working with you. Close this email with a suggestion of how they might be able to use this in their life too. Start to “seed” or mention the package they used in your P.S. after your signature and include a link to the sales page where the reader can find out more.
- Email 5 (sent on Day 5) - to start building law of reciprocity This could be another digital free gift and should be quite substantial. The law of reciprocity states that by giving a gift to someone, they in turn feel like they will need to give back to you.
- Email 6 (sent on Day 6) - to build rapport Tell a personal story about you and how you have overcome something to get to where you are today. Tell them what your mission is and why you have created your products and services from this. Then of course provide the link to your main offering you mentioned in the previous emails.
- Email 7 (sent on Day 7) – call to action. This is your moment! Wow them! Ask them if they are ready to take that next step with you and remind them about how many people you have helped already. Tell them why they’d be missing out if they didn’t take advantage of this offer right now!
This particular follow up series is used by expert marketers all over the globe. It’s all about establishing trust and rapport and turning thinkers in to action takers.
Email marketing tip:
Following up with the addresses you gather is quick, easy and simple with e-mail management and automation software. You can create e-mail messages called "autoresponders" that potential customers receive automatically as soon as they opt-in on your site--within seconds--no matter what time of day it is or whether you're even at your desk!
Following up with the addresses you gather is quick, easy and simple with e-mail management and automation software. You can create e-mail messages called "autoresponders" that potential customers receive automatically as soon as they opt-in on your site--within seconds--no matter what time of day it is or whether you're even at your desk!
Let's Sum Up
OK. we’ve covered a lot of ground here and if you’ve made it to this point without curling up into the metal position and sobbing until you cry blood (<— bit dramatic), then you’ve already done exceptionally well.
Even though we’ve gone through a lot I would still recommend that you actively research each of the topic in depth. What I've given you is simply a clear roadmap of exactly what you need to do to help attract more visitors to your trainer website.
Before I go, I just want to make one thing clear; of all the personal trainers I work with, the ones who seem to be succeeding with their website are the ones that implement one or two of the above strategies but exceptionally well. So don’t go w=away thinking you need to become an expert in all of the personal trainer marketing strategies above.
If you think this content is awesome and you just know it will help some other personal trainers out, please send them a link, comment on the post I shared about it, comment or simply hit the like button below.
Even though we’ve gone through a lot I would still recommend that you actively research each of the topic in depth. What I've given you is simply a clear roadmap of exactly what you need to do to help attract more visitors to your trainer website.
Before I go, I just want to make one thing clear; of all the personal trainers I work with, the ones who seem to be succeeding with their website are the ones that implement one or two of the above strategies but exceptionally well. So don’t go w=away thinking you need to become an expert in all of the personal trainer marketing strategies above.
If you think this content is awesome and you just know it will help some other personal trainers out, please send them a link, comment on the post I shared about it, comment or simply hit the like button below.
