A short time ago one of my coaching clients was doing something really cool with Facebook that I wanted to share with you. This works especially well for fitness boot camps and group personal training. (Additionally check out my update at the end that can make this work for pretty much any program you offer.)

By now you may have heard of the “human billboard” concept or offering deep discounts to people that can generate referrals for you. Today we’re going to take that a step further with Facebook. We all know just about everyone has a Facebook account, and if they are one of the rare few that don’t, it’s only a matter of time. What my coaching client is doing is having clients “tag” his studio in comments. Each time someone tags his facility in a comment it will also show on his studio fanpage, this makes it easy to hold your foot soldiers accountable.

So how does this help you? Well on average most people have 200 or more friends on Facebook, every time they make a comment that comment get’s shown multiple times on all of their friends news feeds. The more interaction with those impressions the more times it’s shown, it’s that simple. You can quickly see how you can suddenly have a third party endorsement or viral marketing span across 100s of people in a very short time because they’re all on Facebook way too often. (To further validate this the statistics of four fanpage show that with less than 1000 fans our social reach in our community is extending into the tens of thousands on a weekly basis, we are reaching an insane amount of local people on a weekly basis just with our fanpage, imagine how much further you can go if people are tagging and talking about you.)

Now you don’t have to do this for billboards, it’s easy to run challenges, ask people to tag your studio or you in comments, set a goal like the first person to comment on such a day wins a prize…you know what they say early bird get’s the worm. Or the first person to make 3 unique comments, it could be anything really.

Important things to remember:

• Posts don’t need to be (and likely shouldn’t be) sales oriented.
• The best posts are just legitimate comments, like “My workout @PersonalTrainingRedDeer was amazing today!” or even better, “My trainer @PersonalTrainingRedDeer weighed me today, I’ve lost 20lbs!”
• Facebook is about natural conversation, don’t encourage spamming people will just ignore it.

(TIP: If you don’t know how to set your page username go to www.facebook.com/username.)

A little tip that can go a long way for generating massive referrals and creating your tribe, the ideas are endless from referral contests, referral rewards, fan building and much much more. Use your imagination….in fact in the spirit of Facebook here is my latest update.

At One-to-1 we have a very defined marketing funnel. We religiously track our new leads and specifically what we’re offering to people and how many are buying. At any given time I can tell you how many people inquired, were booked, purchased and what they purchased for any month in the last couple years.

If you don’t have a similar system you will want to read this post.

I can now see the patterns of the ebb flow of our business each year. This has allowed me to design and develop promotion and awareness campaigns that allow us to keep leading our market. One of the things that I think is critically important is having a plan for ensuring you meet or exceed what you did the previous year. For instance let’s say last year in February you had 30 new people inquire about your services, and 20 signed up or bought something. But this year it’s already the 15^th of February and only 8 people have inquired, what are you going to do?

Ok I'm not actually suggesting you punch your clients.

Here’s a facebook idea to solve this problem. If you have a fanpage (and if you don’t you will have your personal profile which you should be ‘friending’ your clients) if you edit page and review the insights you will see a graph of how many people like, visit your page, etc. On the right side there is a link that allows you to ‘view likes’ or see all your fans.

Click on a fan, you end up on their personal profile, and ultimately quite often can even see their friends and ultimately navigate to a number of their local friends where you could post on their wall…

“Hey it’s Cabel from One-to-1 Fitness, a facebook friend of yours is a fan of ours, we’ve selected you for our BFF friend of a fan award. We have a special (prize/program) just for you, please contact us at ________ to claim before (5-7 day expiry/dedline.)”

The response at first may be low, but be diligent, I bet with copy and past you could do a few hundred of these in an hour, I’m guessing math wise 1-4% should ultimately respond, meaning you could calculate roughly how many people you need to contact to generate your missing inquiries. Your only cost, a couple hours or hours of your assistant.

There are numerous ways you can use or improve this, you can direct them to a private link and explain exactly what you have for them, sweeten the deal with an instant gift of content or videos (give them something of real value, expect nothing in return.) The law of reciprocity will assist you.

You could also post on your fans walls about the ‘BFF Referral Award’ and since they’re a fan any of their friends receive special treatment or a special offer for a very short period of time. (Scarcity is essential.)

This is just one of a number of simple business building ideas I’ll be sharing in express detail at the upcoming www.ProfitablePersonalTrainerLive.com workshop.

I’d love to hear what you think or your results if you use any of these strategies.

It’s been amazing to watch Joshua grow, he’s really a product of his environment as I’ve always aimed to share what I’m learning with our whole team in an effort to see each of them grow in this industry, yet I’d hardly take credit for what he has achieved.

I wanted to share this with you simply because no matter where you are now, unless your career or business is exactly what you want it to be, you can quickly grow more than you thought imaginable just as I’ve seen Joshua grow over these last couple years. Beyond your passion understanding your niche is the next critical step.

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After establishing what it is you want in life, it is important to find a way to leverage that passion so that you can continue to do it for as long as you so choose. The great thing about passion is the motivation to be better always exists; however, it is also important to stay mindful of your lifestyle and the types of things you still need to account for (ie. Mortgage, family, bills…etc.). Therefore, after defining your passion it is important to establish the types of things you wish to keep in the remainder of your life, more specifically the amount of cash-flow you need to continue your lifestyle.

What do you need to make your world go around?

After establishing some absolute numbers for income, break it down further on a quarterly, monthly, and evenly weekly basis as to how much you really need to generate to allow for your lifestyle to continue while pursuing your passion. Dependent upon your situation it may be necessary at this point to control some variables in your life according to the amount of income you can generate in a given location. As well, be mindful of the fact that you ALWAYS get out of situations what you put into them. So when pursuing your passion, do so whole-heartedly.

In the fitness industry passion is plentiful, but developing a niche to leverage can be difficult. Consider populations that are unaccounted for and begin to develop ways that you can cater specifically to them and how you can convince these individuals that the service you offer is worth the dollars they earn. At the end of the day any true fitness professional would agree that all individuals (without exception) can benefit from the effects of proper training and nutritional coaching. Therefore, step outside the box and explore populations that have been overlooked by the rest of the industry and by your competitors!

It’s no secret that weight loss is always going to dominate the fitness industry, and given the latest trends in childhood obesity and the poor activity and nutritional habits of the majority of North Americans this is not going to change. But in business sometimes it is better to be a big fish in a small pond, than the opposite. Rather, by stepping away from the “norm” of weight loss clients and going after special populations with more specific needs you will soon establish yourself as a given expert in your “pond” and will leverage your income in a way that most “dime-a-dozen” trainers simply cannot.

The idea is not necessarily to be better, but rather to be different! When walking into a gym for the first time a middle-aged individual will have a hard time determining which trainer will suit them best and in turn your chances of landing that client are slim. BUT! If you can establish yourself as an expert in a given field, and masterfully market yourself to those individuals then you will have successfully established not only a niche clientele but also a definitive and secure place for yourself inside the industry.

Joshua K. Neufeld, Neufitness.ca

This blog post isn’t about business, marketing, lead generations or pushing profits into the stratosphere. Yet if it get’s you thinking and improves your skill as a trainer (or mine, or someone else’s) then it is absolutely about business, clients success, retention and industry longevity. All are inclusive of exactly what the Profitable Personal Trainer is all about.

So let’s have some fun, let’s talk about bicep curls. (And for the record I can’t even mention the word bicep without thinking about Pumping Iron and good old Arnold and Franco training back in the day.)

Barbell bicep curls are for me a product of an era gone by, my bodybuilding days. When I think about bicep curls I can’t help but think about one of my major mentors and role models from my younger days, you might recognize him. When vanity was my primary objective and having those big hanging biceps was part of the job description I did a lot of bicep curls. Over the years as I evolved as a trainer their use faded, as truly for most it’s not a movement that serves for much of a variety of purpose. We know that many of our clients will often present with rounded shoulders, the sign of a deteriorating upper shoulder girth, shortened pecs, internal rotators and quite often shortened biceps.

In its simplest form the bicep curl doesn’t really seem like a logical choice dealing with someone with rounded shoulders and deteriorating posture. In no way am I disputing this but then sometimes the most difficult part of working with a client as actually physically getting them to perform, activate or use the actual muscles that you want them to. I’m sure like I have, you’ve found scapular retraction/manipulation to be one the most common, and often difficult, focal points of improvement for clients.

Recently I’ve taken a keen interest in Serratus Anterior and it’s role. I’ve always found it interesting that if we removed all the muscles from our shoulder blade it’s basically only attached to our skeleton at the end of the collarbone where it meets the sternum. Without the muscles holding it in place it could move all over the place, yet containing the shoulder joint it’s a major stabilization point for our arm and many of its movements as well as our head. It’s easy to see through our life, with most of our life spent moving in front of us, why the muscles of the shoulder girth could become unbalanced and dysfunctional. To me it’s even more frightening to think about how bad it really could get with the only structural anchor point for the shoulder girth to be at the sternum, this creates a broad range of displacement for a lot of muscles involved in a lot of movements.

Anyways, serratus, as you probably know the serratus originates on the back side of the shoulder blade, it wraps around our torso attaching to a number of ribs on the front side of our body. In conjunction with other muscles of the shoulder girth one of the big things it can do is flatten the shoulder blades (scapula) against the rib cage. Because of the convenience generally of our lives this is typical point of dysfunction. Our lives are typically not physically demanding enough to encourage efficient, regular neurological recruitment of the serratus to flatten the shoulder blades.

If you Google or search YouTube for improving serratus function you’ll undoubtedly find modified versions of push ups and presses, all of which I am a fan of and use extensively. However from a pure coaching standpoint recently I have had tremendous success with my clients using a light barbell bicep curl.

When my client is performing the barbell bicep curl I will stand behind them cuing them to flatten the shoulder blades and squeeze the bottom of the scapula together. I ask them to try to maintain this position while performing the bicep curl. I then place my hands on top of the shoulder with my thumbs sitting just below the ridge separating supraspinatus and infraspinatus so I can detect any movement.

Just about everyone moves a little, and this greatly decreases the efficiency of movement of the bicep curl. But what it does do is give them an immediate sense of what their scapula is doing, feeling the activation of lower trapezius and serratus as the attempt to keep the scapula from moving or stabilizing by elevating the traps with their upper fibers. This ineffective bicep curl has proven to be extremely beneficial in establishing the mind to muscle connection for better serratus activation and postural improvement.

The best part is your clients can see and feel an immediate difference. We all know with great results comes great client retention, increased customer referrals, and the development of your brand. Just maybe bicep curls can find a place into your business building strategy afterall.

To do what you love, and be able to make money doing it, is something few individuals have the opportunity to truly experience in their lives. The fitness industry is such that if you don’t show up to work every day with a passion for changing lives, then your existence will be short and unsuccessful. In order to be truly effective in such a vast and complex industry it is important to not only adapt, but identify what it is that truly makes you tick. What do you wake up every morning hoping you accomplish with your clients? Better yet, define your client. Your IDEAL client. Who is it you want to work with, and why? This is your passion, and this is what makes getting out of bed so much easier.

Simply put, a life without passion is one of monotony.

A passion is something that you do with the expectation of nothing in return. Therefore, income generation is not necessarily the goal. Rather the idea that when one is passionate enough and is willing to pursue such interests, riches are bound to follow. Separate yourself from the idea that your passion HAS to make you money and ask yourself: If I already had all the money and riches I desired, what would I do with my time? Guess what! This is your true passion. How you would spend your time if money was no object is the ultimate determining factor of one’s passion in life. Therefore, money cannot be ones motivation as it is more often than not the only factor limiting one from their passion.

A man’s fortune is not of riches but of experiences; fulfillment, not to be confused with accumulation.

With a passion comes an otherwise unattainable level of focus and drive towards your commitments. The internal motivation that comes with doing something you love everyday and knowing your lifestyle will be catered too because the effort put forth (although seemingly similar) will be much greater when the idea of time and hourly wage are no longer prevalent and you are simply going about your dreams, instead of punching a clock. Wake up with purpose beyond cash-flow. Remember, pursue your dreams and riches will follow once you put yourself in a position to be truly successful emotionally and mentally. Financially, the success will follow.

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” –Timothy Ferris

Much the same, the uncomfortable conversation you must have with yourself when deciding to abandon the status quo and go after a dream. Define your passion, and then go after it, relentlessly.

Come learn from Josh on April 21-22 in Edomonton at www.ProfitablePersonalTrainerLive.com

I’ve cherished the moments and learned as much as I’ve taught, it’s taken some time but I feel I’ve finally found my voice. I’m very excited about 2012. Watch for the evolution of Profitable Personal Trainer, I have big goals as far as providing more resources to fitness professionals throughout North America (and beyond) to become more successful in the industry we love.

There will be an evolution beyond my current focus of marketing and systems.

This evolution will take a bit of time, so I may not be posting regularly in the next short while but do stay tuned for some exciting announcements.

You may want to save the dates of April 21-22, 2012 as I’ll be hosting “Profitable Personal Trainer Live” likely in the Edmonton market with my good friend and mentor Bedros Keuilian. We’ll also be featuring other fitness professionals with some killer content on some of the top training techniques, practices and niche markets. (Like specific training for the MMA crazy, or specialized nutritional coaching.)

Watch for these changes and further announcements coming soon, and in the meantime have a very Merry Christmas.

Just one more thing…

I couldn’t post something without giving you something great you can use right now. Below is an image of my most effective facebook ad for generating new “likes.” These likes are funnelled into an immediate lead generation offer that gets them in our door.

This ad leads to our page where ppl are met with a gateway page offering free training if they simply like the page, you can view this at www.facebook.com/personaltrainingreddeer

The easiest way to add one of these pages on your own facebook page is using a free little plugin called WooBox from www.woobox.com.

I just wanted to share this with you because it could be a great tool for last minute New Year’s marketing.

As a personal trainer and fitness marketer looking to maximize your fitness marketing strategy you should take note of the industry related topics that are hitting the headlines. One of the fastest ways I know to become the local expert is to simply make sure that you have an opinion on the most current topics. Voice them on Facebook, Twitter and especially in blog posts that are optimized for your primary keywords.

There’s no doubt that thousands of people were searching major search engines to find out just what was going on in this crazy pizza controversy. There’s no doubt that main people with your local area were amongst that group and likely a number of them may be people that fit your target customer profile.

At a local level it’s great if this audience begins to find you or assists in boosting your rankings by visiting and commenting on your posts relating to these hot topics. Just by following the media you have an immediate opportunity to quickly increase your organic traffic and be known as the savvy fitness expert of your area.

This has served me well in my local market in fact it ultimately lead to a regularly running column in both the major local newspapers a relationship, credibility and marketing vehicle that my competitors can’t touch.

I can’t stress enough how important is to know your niche or be able to close your eyes and literally see your most likely customer standing before you. Once you have this very complete description you will be amazed at how your ability to communicate and generate interest from your potential audience increases. You will begin to think of ideas on how to reach, meet and recruit clients in ways your competitors will never catch on to. I know that may sound ridiculous so let me try to put it in a simpler more dramatic fashion. Would a gun enthusiast read an opera magazine? Would the language used to describe last night’s performance contain fitting and descriptive adjectives to describe the latest hunting paraphernalia? I think you get my drift.

Here’s a little exercise, begin with the following questions, answer them for who you think your most likely customer is, then try to develop 10 more questions for an even more through description.

(HINT: If you’re uncertain of who your most likely customer is then answer these questions for each the following: 1) Who would you like to train? (ie. Athletes, not recommended but common) 2) Who do you think is most around you population wise? 3) Who do you think is currently shopping for services like yours? Once you’ve answered for all three of these you will generally have one that stands out to you leading you to begin exploring that niche’s viability.)

1. Are they male or female?
2. How old are they? (10-15 year range is fine)
3. What would be their primary goal?
4. Why would they benefit from working with someone like you? Be specific.
5. How much income does their household earn annually?
6. What kinds of careers do they have?
7. What kinds of hobbies and interests do they have?
8. What kind of vehicles do they, or would they like to drive?
9. How do they dress?
10. Where would they buy clothes?
11. Where would they go out for dinner?
12. What organizations might they belong to?

Once you have a big long list of who, what, why, and where you can begin to search your local demographics and guess as to whether a number of these desired people are near by.

From that point forward all of your marketing, content and offers should be targeted to be of interest to these groups of people. You should use language that would make sense if you were conversing with them, you should refer to characteristics or roadblocks of the goals they may be trying to achieve. Your offers should be of high value based on what you think they may be looking for and you want to make sure both you and your marketing materials are present in multiple places they might frequent.

The more razor focused you can be on that one specific customer the easier it becomes to not only attract them but others also. Specialization adds value; people always want to work with the specialist.

Perhaps they may seem like common sense but repeatedly in front of audiences or more when I review this concept only a sparse few hands go up. I can guarantee this little exercise if taken seriously will completely change your business in weeks to months.

I’m certain by now you know the benefits of testimonials. Social proof is worth more than just about any pricey, elaborate marketing campaign. It’s worth more than ten certifications and all kinds of post-secondary education. So I’m sure you understand the marketing value of asking for testimonials. But there is a far more important reason to be asking your clients for testimonials on a regular basis.

Let me be blunt, and glaringly obvious.

If you asked your client for a testimonial today and they said NO; what does this say about your service or the value you are providing?

If you are providing the value, results, and service that you both think and say you are, shouldn’t you be 100% comfortable asking your clients for a testimonial? I mean if they say no, shouldn’t you be concerned?

Maybe concerned isn’t the right answer but you should most certainly be asking, “what is missing from my service that you don’t feel comfortable providing me a testimonial?”

Now this isn’t just true of testimonials but also referrals, they go hand in hand. If your clients over the top love your service it’s a natural occurrence that they will want to share and tell their experiences to others, if they don’t something isn’t right.

Start asking, the feedback will catapult your business forward.

One of the things we talked about in detail was about keywords and optimized content. Now if you don’t currently have a website there is likely plenty you need to understand in addition to keywords but this will still be a very relevant place for you to start. In fact relevancy really is our topic.

First let me give you a warning. If you’re working with a website designer make sure you ask them about keywords, make sure you know exactly what they are providing and feel comfortable with the answers they’re giving you. You should understand a little better by the end of this post but in my experience most local website designers have great photoshop and programming skills but no real comprehension of how to build a website that will quickly be noticed by the search engines and ensure your potential customers find you.

Ok relevancy. Remember the old dewy decimal system at the library? The index cards that had all the books organized by title and subject that gave you a number to which shelf you would find them on, well this is essentially exactly how the internet works. Now the search engines are like super librarians, when you type in a word they go hunting for all kinds of options related to that word or series of words. Let’s take (Your Town) Personal Trainer for example. Search engines will find domain names with that series of words, then it will look to see if the pages assigned to that domain have programming tags that correspond to those keywords then it will look further and skim through the content to see if those words are listed in sentences. It doesn’t end there, file names, video titles, image titles and descriptions and so on. The more times that same keyword string is mentioned the more relevant search engines feel that is to your query, this is one of the ways they will “rank” you and decide who gets listed first.

It’s far from being the only way, after all it’s a big world and there is now a lot of information competing for the top spot. A few of the other things that contribute to rank are:

• Age of your site
• Number of pages on your site, and the natural growth of the site.
• Back links, or people linking to your site.
• Reviews, and more.

So anyways, how to pick keywords. Start by asking yourself the following, what would my potential customers likely be typing into a search engine to find more information?

Here’s a few ideas:

(Your Town) Personal Trainer, (Your Town) weight loss, (Your Town) boot camp, (Your Town) personal training, etc.

From there it may stem into people looking for more information on subjects that ultimately pertain to or make them good candidates for your services. Some examples might be:

Low fat recipes, how to lose the last 10 lbs, best way to lose weight, best exercises for weight loss, etc.

These secondary keywords are really good indicators of the type of content it might be good to have on your website, but here’s a way you can get a little more clarification. Visit www.google.com and type in “external keyword tool.”

It should be one of the first link that comes up. This tool for PPC users can be very useful in deciding how to position your website. Follow the steps to set the search parameters for local and your country, then enter a few of the keyword ideas above.

You’ll find that some may have more search volume than others, now here’s where you have to be crafty. Realize that bigger is not always better, for instance in a major centre like Toronto, the key word stream “Toronto Personal Trainer” is likely very competitive, let’s say on the keyword tool it comes up as 8900 or something. Even though there is a lot of people searching for this you are going to find there are also a lot of websites listed for this, making it harder for you to reach the first page quickly.

What you may want to look for in this case is variations that have 300-1000 monthly searches, these key word streams will be much easier to rank for. In fact try searching a few, you will begin to notice that completely different listings show up on the first page, this is a good indication there isn’t as much competition, thus a few carefully crafted pages using that keyword stream in the title, description, file name, etc will ensure you quickly reach the first page. Do this for 5-6 less competitive variants and you can give your website an immediate boost in its ability to generate visitors and potential leads.

If you’re NOT making more than $100,000 a year in total revenues, you absolutely need to read and take note of the following:

Know Your Customer

You should be able to close your eyes and see the person you most wish to attract as a client. It should be one specific type or group of people. It doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t service other people with other goals but the specialist is always sought out and looked upon as much more valuable.

Under Promise and Over Deliver

Personal training has caught on, I think in my small city someone recently told me there are more than 26 gyms, personal training centres, bootcamps, etc all competing for customers. Additionally there are the main stream weight loss centres, rec department activities and support groups. If you’re going to not just survive but thrive you better bring something special to the table. Now more than ever service is an opportunity for the small entrepreneur, large business continues to cut corners, pinch pennies and reduce the customers feeling of being valued. They’ve painted themselves into corner they have no other option than to compete on price and push for volume, customer loyalty is at an all time low.

Find ways to increase the feeling of being appreciated and valued, this may even exceed results in the statistics of customer retention.

Be a Ferrari

Since the time I was a boy cars have been a commodity that generally involved price haggling, a commodity that on the right day of the month with the right ability to negotiate you could really save big. As time has went on dealerships have narrowed this ability to haggle more and more, and rightly so, with so much price fluctuation it must have been extremely difficult to really have accurate long term business planning. Now look at high end cars, there’s never been an ability to haggle, there’s never been compromise, they are and always have been expensive and if you didn’t like the price you didn’t buy because they were confident in the value they brought to the table.

Every truly successful personal trainer will find their own way to be like Ferrari, you don’t need to be the cheapest, you don’t need to worry about your competition’s price what you need to be is confident in what you bring to the table. If you can consistently deliver what you say you will you will find people willing to buy your service (within reason of course.)

Create Faster

I forget what book it was that I read an excerpt of a conversation with Ray Kroc. Someone was asking him if he was frustrated by other companies that copied or duplicated McDonalds. He responded, “no we simply create faster.”

I’ve faced everything from people stealing documents, copying my business, copying and pasting my website, marketing campaigns, even my fundraisers. It’s frustrating to say the least, and hard not to become emotional, but the truth is the answer is to be like Ray Kroc. Whether it’s dealing with competition or evolving economic conditions being able to “create faster” or rapidly evolve and adapt will be critical to your long term success. Success as a personal trainer is based on lifelong learning and the ability to create a unique selling proposition for your potential customers. Continually strive to offer something unique and you will never really have any competition.

Continually Give to Others

This may seem obvious, for without true compassion and giving it will be nearly impossible to consistently help your clients, but you mustn’t stop there. Give to others in your community, share your marketing successes with other businesses, communicate with other fitness professionals outside of your immediate area, form strategic partnerships and most importantly give us much of your wondrous fitness knowledge away as possible. Write articles, blogs and Facebook posts that enrich people’s lives and allow them to learn. Anything you do to improve someone else’s life always has a cumulative affect on your own it’s like being able to invest every dollar you every made in a totally secure high yielding investment.

Maybe if you’ve just finished reading this it all seems obvious but I challenge you to put that to the test, spend the next 30 minutes detailing each of these areas in your own business, what you are doing, how you are doing it, and any new idea on how you can make it better. I guarantee you will come up with one new idea that has the potential to dramatically change your business.