Having a website for your personal training business can be great but most people assume having a website is enough.
Most fitness professionals end up scratching their heads over how to actually use it and you can imagine their frustrations when they have a beautiful site set up and they got nothing from it.
In this article, I want to make sure that that’s not you and I’ll do that by teaching you how to get more of the one thing that makes a fitness website work.
Traffic.
Traffic, especially targeted traffic, is oxygen to a website. No traffic and you may as well have bought business cards that you have to hand out individually yourself. Not ideal when you’re trying to run a business.
Furthermore, if like most fitness business owners, you’re a lean startup, you’ll more than likely prefer free traffic over paid.
Let’s get started.
1. Optimise Your Website
There’s little point getting more traffic to your website if it isn’t optimised well. It would be like building the foundations of a house on chocolate pudding.
Plus, a well optimised website can get you more targeted traffic all by itself, with little to no input from you.
Plus, a well optimised website can get you more targeted traffic all by itself, with little to no input from you.
Here’s how you do it.
Optimise Your Pages
Each page of your fitness website should have a very specific purpose. For example, your home page should introduce the other pages of your site and help a website visitor take their next logical step with you.
It shouldn’t bully them in to subscribing to your latest lead magnet with home page sign up forms and pop ups.
RELATED: POPUP BEST PRACTICES FOR YOUR FITNESS WEBSITE
Give each page a primary purpose and make that purpose clear in the headers and structure of the page.
Link Your Pages
This one is so simple but often forgotten. Google uses the links in your website to help decide what each page is about.
For example, if you were to link from the About page to your Home page using the words “personal trainer”, Google will assume that your Home page is about the word “personal trainer”.
Try to link from each of your sub pages upward to your main page. Think of your site like an upside down tree and each link is a branch that makes its way back to the Home page (the trunk).
Write More Content
Content is the backbone of any personal trainer website. Sure, you can get traffic without creating content but content creation will speed up the process 10 fold.
Why? Because potential clients and Google both love content.
Write More Content
Content is the backbone of any personal trainer website. Sure, you can get traffic without creating content but content creation will speed up the process 10 fold.
Why? Because potential clients and Google both love content.
Your potential clients are searching for answers to their problems and your blog or video could help them.
Google is searching for relevant keywords and topics that people love to read. If you become the go to source of information for your topic, you get all the website traffic.
2. Social Media
It’s almost impossible to have a conversation about free traffic for your fitness website without mentioning social media.
It’s still one of the best ways to get loads of free traffic. Here’s how.
Create a Posting Schedule
There are apps like Recurpost that you can not only add all of your content to and it will post for you, but it will also recycle all posts so you don’t have to keep creating more posts.
For example, if you have 5 blog posts you can create a schedule like this:
Here's one we set up for one of our fitness website design clients.
It’s still one of the best ways to get loads of free traffic. Here’s how.
Create a Posting Schedule
There are apps like Recurpost that you can not only add all of your content to and it will post for you, but it will also recycle all posts so you don’t have to keep creating more posts.
For example, if you have 5 blog posts you can create a schedule like this:
- Mon - Post 1
- Tue - Post 2
- Wed - Post 3
- Thur - Post 4
- Fri - Post 5
Here's one we set up for one of our fitness website design clients.
And then Recurpost will continue to post your content on Saturday, Sunday and beyond like this:
- Sat - Post 1
- Sun- Post 2
- Mon - Post 3
- Etc
You can also schedule these posts on all of your social media feeds like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
I know what you’re thinking. Won’t that annoy people? Well no, because Facebook doesn’t show every post to your whole audience each time. Actually only a few percent of your audience will see each post.
Facebook Groups
If your content is being pushed out regularly and on autopilot, you now have time to do some of the manual work like connecting with people who have questions.
Facebook Groups are the best place to do this because they’re usually packed with your ideal clients and you can make yourself useful quite easily. Join some groups and start contributing to those groups. Just keep in mind there are a few rules.
- Don’t be spammy
- Only link to your site where relevant and if group rules allow it
- Give without expecting anything in return
Finally, be consistent. This isn’t a one time thing. Eight years in and this is something I still regularly do on a daily basis.
3. Content Outreach
There are couple of great reasons to create a content outreach campaign:
With that said, content outreach is hard work. You have to create relationships with other site owners, submit guest post ideas and usually get rejected 99 out of 100 times.
But there are a few ways to get your content out there without all of the hassle.
Free Blogging Sites
Write content for free blog sites like Medium and eZine Articles. These sites usually have a huge audience already searching for content and links from their site to yours are great for your own website rankings.
Quora
Posting on Quora could go in the Social Media section but the types of posts Quora needs to work are way more in the content marketing spectrum.
Quora is a question/answer engine. Someone asks a question and users get the chance to answer it. However, answers are voted on and if you give short, crappy answers with no value, you get voted down.
- Reach loads of new people outside of your existing audience
- Get a great link from authority websites to yours
With that said, content outreach is hard work. You have to create relationships with other site owners, submit guest post ideas and usually get rejected 99 out of 100 times.
But there are a few ways to get your content out there without all of the hassle.
Free Blogging Sites
Write content for free blog sites like Medium and eZine Articles. These sites usually have a huge audience already searching for content and links from their site to yours are great for your own website rankings.
Quora
Posting on Quora could go in the Social Media section but the types of posts Quora needs to work are way more in the content marketing spectrum.
Quora is a question/answer engine. Someone asks a question and users get the chance to answer it. However, answers are voted on and if you give short, crappy answers with no value, you get voted down.
If you want to use Quora, and you should, be sure to write great answers to questions, longer and more thorough than the ones you already see and full of value added content.
When it feels right, drop a link in there too.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is very similar to using the free blogging sites. The only difference is that you hand pick the sites and do the outreach. Usually manually and via email.
To get your guest blog on someone else's site, you need to create content the readers of that site would like to read and then submit that content to the site owner for review.
Most people want content for their site because they know that more content equals better rankings. So you’re quite likely to succeed unless your content sucks or your outreach method needs work.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing still works and it’s one of the best ways to secure your business lead generation for the long term.
One day, social networks like Facebook or search engines like Google can change the way they distribute content and if you rely on them as a source of traffic, you’re out of the game.
Building and email list can prevent that. If you don’t have one yet, the best time to start was yesterday. The second best time to start building one is today.
If you do have one, here are a few things you can do.
Make Your Site Email Friendly
Or in other words, integrate your email marketing forms on your website. Be sure not to spam your website visitors with lead magnets they don’t need.
For example, Home page visitors do NOT need to subscribe to your list. They just got there. Let them look around a bit.
Someone on your services page might be interested in your free comparison chart though.
And someone reading a blog about your fat loss tips might like a free checklist.
Cater your content to the type of reader who would be looking at that page and keep pop ups to a minimum.
Set Up Automations
Hopefully people are starting to subscribe to your list so it’s time to follow up. But not every subscriber needs the same follow up.
The website visitor who downloaded your comparison chart from the services page is probably a hot lead and thinking about buying. Follow up emails might include answers to FAQ’s and testimonials to show competence.
Here are just a few templates we created for our Managed Website clients:
The website visitor who downloaded the checklist from your blog is still trying to fix their own problem so they might like weekly updates on new content.
5. Re-purpose Content
It’s impossible to create content forever. Hey, even this post is a combination of many other posts re-purposed with a new headline and re-written to create a new goal.
But potential clients need to be exposed to your business over and over again before they buy into you or your services. This is called the mere-exposed effect.
Here are a few ideas to help you re-purpose your existing content.
But potential clients need to be exposed to your business over and over again before they buy into you or your services. This is called the mere-exposed effect.
Here are a few ideas to help you re-purpose your existing content.
- Update your existing blogs regularly
- Get your videos transcribed and turn them into blog
- Take excerpts from your blogs and use them as social media posts
- Take your best Facebook posts and turn them in to one blog
- Turn your written blogs in to videos
- Turn your blogs into infographics
- Take quotes from your blogs and turn them in to images.
That’s It
That’s how the best in the business are getting the most free traffic to their fitness websites.
If you take action on these time tested systems, you could massively increase the number of visitors to your personal training website.
If you take action on these time tested systems, you could massively increase the number of visitors to your personal training website.
