Do you have a web presence? This site, a piece of my web presence, is geared to the fitness professional and is on a blogging platform. It allows for your comments and interactions. That is one of the great benefits of a simple blog in that it can be interactive and allows for input and conversation.
The blog is an excellent on-line tool because it is relatively simple, can be optimized for the search engines, and is interactive with your community, but do know that many options exist.
The first on-line presence we had was back in 1997. At that time the internet was booming with anticipation, but little else. Modems were slow, people still used the yellow pages, and used speech rather than text.
Today it is a different world.
Our clients are not only surfing the web for pleasure, they are surfing for information, and business, and companionship, and whatever you can
think of.
If you are not there at this point you have begun to fall behind.
Your clients expect you to be reachable on the internet.
Now, not everybody in the fitness industry is a personal trainer and has “clients”. Group fitness & yoga instructors might think they have
no need of an online presence.
I’m telling you, you’re wrong. Those students look to you as an expert… their expert. They would love your articles, commentary, videos and newsletters.
I’m also telling you, you’re leaving additional streams of income on the table and someone else is picking it up. Everyone of the above communications is another opportunity to teach and to offer other programs, yours or a third party service.
Good content comes first, but this simple location provides you opportunities to inform and even sell on-line and off-line offerings.
Websites are no longer need to be a mysterious secret.
You do not have to have a 10 thousand dollar plus web site to serve your clients or students. You do not need the expensive fancy site to make an extra 10 thousand dollars a month either.
You now have many options available to you and I encourage you to seek them out and establish your on-line presence sooner rather than later.
To get yourself started you have many great resources… Search Google on building your own website or blog. Try YouTube and you’ll find many tutorials on getting yourself set up.
The social media sites are essential even if you already have a presence, but you can also start with those. Get a FaceBook account and you’ll be amazed at how many of your clients and students are already there. Create a fan page around your business and you’ll have a legit spot to promote your offerings.
WordPress provides you a simple blogging system and Joomla is a bit more complex, but provides a nice content management platform. Both are free.
Yes, we can offer you assistance if you want to stay totally hands off or if you have plans for something more sophisticated. Fitness Pro Travel can provide you many promotional tools. Through our Fit Pro Biz services we can put it all together for you including high end sites that are membership based.
But don’t be afraid of getting started yourself either. It is important that you at the very least have a landing page that people can utilize to contact you… and you can do that yourself with just a small amount of research.
If you are already there/here, great. If not, why not?
