Building a website for your fitness business can be a daunting task if you’ve never done it before. Its actually a lot easier and cheaper today than it used to be before WordPress came along, but there are still so many things to remember and rules that must be followed to keep the search engines happy, especially Big Brother Google.

Domain Name

Finding a good domain name these days is difficult but if you’re starting your own fitness business and you’re using your own name that can be a lot easier. Make sure your domain name is relevant and easy to remember, .com is still the extension to go for.

Choosing a Host

You’ll need a host with great customer service 24/7 and one with a good reputation with secure servers, backup and minimal downtime.

Content

With a blog or a personal training website you’re going to need content – and lots of it, posted regularly. It can be disappointing at first because the key to a successful website is traffic, and attracting a steady stream of visitors is one of the hardest parts of starting a brand new website. You’ll have to dedicate time every day to the task. But by using social media, including making videos for YouTube, and building a FaceBook business page you can drive traffic to your site more easily.

But it’s still time-consuming.

Two pages you must have on your site – an About Me page and a page telling people how they can contact you. These are essential. When you check your stats you’ll be surprised how many people check out your About Me page – so make it short, interesting and promotional – letting people know exactly what you can do for them.

The rest of your site’s content should be compiled with the reader in mind – what she wants – and not be all about you and your big ol' biceps!

Use before and after pictures of clients. Add video content of people enjoying themselves at your fitness boot camp. Write stories (with permission) about your clients’ success stories, and always have a good picture of yourself smiling.

If people “feel” they know you, it will spur them into joining your list, picking up the phone or visiting your facility.

SEO

If you are starting a fitness business, search engine optimization for your local business isn't too difficult, but it goes hand in hand with choices of good keywords. By using a simple tool such as the free Google Keyword tool you will quickly discover what people are looking for pertaining to the fitness industry.

Write content containing those keywords and keyword phrases at the beginning and end of your article and a couple of times in the middle, and people will find your page. The trick is to use keywords that are not used by hundreds of thousands of people because it will be hard to rank for them. Think about related phrases that you can use with low competition and your page will appear higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and attract more traffic.

You can shell out a lot of money for a specialist company to optimize your pages for you. Save your money and take a day to get to grips with basic SEO – it isn’t rocket science.

Start by reading Google’s guidelines for webmasters, it tells you what to do and what not to do.

Local Business

The good news is that because you’re in a localized business the search engines are on your side.  By using keywords and the name of the town where your business is located, you should always be able to appear on the first page of the SERPs.

Add your business to all the major search engine directories like Google Places, Yelp and Yahoo Local and you’ll be set.

Build an Email List

One of the biggest mistakes when starting a website is not capturing visitors’ email addresses. The easiest way to do this is to sign up with a good autoresponder service such as AWeber. Craft a FREE Fitness Ebook to give to people that subscribe to your page. This will increased the opt-ins you get.

Keep in touch with your subscribers regularly and address their questions.  Because you’re a local business, building relationships with potential clients is very important.

Backlinks

Backlinks are considered votes of confidence by the search engines; they’re links from other sites that are relevant to yours.

A webmaster of another site may decide the information you’ve provided in an article would be helpful for his visitors.  They are difficult to get, but the more links you get the better your site will rank. But they must be relevant!  Links from sites about flower arranging to your fitness business site are not going to count much and always look for quality links.

Layout, Design & Navigation

The key is K.I.S.S here. Title your content right and design your pages so people will see they’re easy to read.

Use

• Short paragraphs,
• Words people can understand
• Bullets and numbered points and lists
• Pictures, videos and graphics

And leave lots of white space - they don’t want to read a thesis.

If you refer to another article on your site, or somewhere else, link to it. Make sure your site is easy to navigate, attractive and easy on the eye.

Don’t be tempted to splatter affiliate links and banners, Google ads and other advertising all over your site. It’s off-putting for visitors and Google hates lots of advertising, especially above the fold.  Your site is there for information – to help people – it’s not an online billboard so you can make money from advertising.

Conversion

It’s one thing getting hoards of visitors to your site; it takes even more skill to convert them into paying customers. It takes SEO skills, adept copywriting, great articles, special offers and enticements to even get folks to sign up for your monthly newsletter! It will take hours of work – long before you get your first sign-up.

But I’m a Fitness Professional not a Web Geek!

Don’t feel like going through all that? (And BTW the above points are just a small part of what you should know about maintaining and attracting traffic to a successful website).

You’re a fitness business owner after all – not a full time webmaster!

Feel like crying? Let me offer a simple solution. Fit Body Boot Camp fitness boot camp franchise owners don’t go through any of the above, they get their own personalized, attractive, ready-made website that convert without all the, work and frustration and months spent waiting for a site to rank

That’s why FBBC franchise owners become successful faster. They start earning substantial incomes in their first few weeks, while many are stuck trying to figure out HTML and what their DNS address is.

If you understand the importance of time management you’ll realize that spending months building a website isn’t very smart.

You should be doing what you want to do – building your successful business - not a website. Let FBBC do that for you. 😉

This entry was posted on March 12, 2013 at 2:24 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Boot Camp Business, Boot Camp Marketing, Fitness Marketing, How To Start a Fitness Boot Camp Business, Internet Marketing, Personal Training Business by Steve Hochman | 1 Comment