Online Content Principles
Have you ever wondered why your blog doesn't have any comments or shares?
Or why your Twitter account doesn't have any followers? What about your email marketing? Are you getting responses? Is your website getting the hits you want it to?
What are you going to do when no one is accessing your content?
Have you ever sat down and thought about the principles that go into the content that you put out there? You want people to engage with your content. You want them to feel like it hits a chord and means something to them.
The bottom line is that without engaging content, you are never going to be able to turn around and make courses, products and programs that will sell.
There's a sequence to moving people to making a buying decision.
When sitting down to create your content, there are a couple of things you need to understand as principles.
The Three Pillars of Content
1 – You Need to Educate
You need to educate people about whatever your niche or specialty is.
When you create PDFs, reports, videos and blog series; these are your opportunities to start moving people along their journey of understanding and knowledge. What you have to teach should be relevant to their struggles, frustrations, ambitions and aspirations.
Educate your tribe about how you can take them from their present state to a future self they're craving.
2 – It's Time to Automate
Automation will save you time when creating your content. Do the work once and then automate the distribution of the content.
Do you have an email management system that allows you to automate your emails? Do you have a digital newsletter platform with a template where you can cut and paste content? Do you have a website that is easy to update?
Automation of content will free up your time for more important tasks like focusing on the marketing and sales tools that will lead to sales.
3 – It's Time to Commit
You’ve got to strap in and set aside the time to learn what it takes to be successful online.
You’ve got to decide not to dabble and to make a commitment because there's a learning curve you have to work your way through.
Do this, and you can set up your fitness business to run on autopilot and give you the lifestyle you've always wanted, the fitnesspreneur's life. You can launch your income and make a difference but you've got to commit to learning the tools that you need.
The time to get started is now.
What are the online tools that you need to get your online fitness business rocking and rolling?
Nowadays, it's not as complicated as you might think to get email marketing up, to get a website set up, to get a newsletter going, or to get a blog on social media. With the technology available today, there are a lot of templates available so it's very easy to get these things up and running.
To set up your world stage, you'll need to set up your Five Media Platforms. From these platforms you can start the process of getting your content distribution out to the online world. This is how you'll set up your authority in the fitness business and position yourself in the market.
Blogs
There are a lot of services out there that you can use, but what's most important is how you present your content.
You know your tribe. You know who you are trying to talk to and serve. Start creating content and articles that are based around that tribe and don’t try talking to everybody out there. You have to focus in to your niche, your tribe because otherwise nobody will hear you.
Newsletter
It's important to vary the content of your newsletter so it’s not just boring technical stuff.
Just like with your blogs, the most important thing inside your email newsletter is to Educate, Entertain, and Empower. You can include stuff about travel, high performance, marketing, leadership, communication and even little puzzles.
Social Media
Pretty much anybody can set up a Facebook, Instagram and Twitter account.
Ensure that you're creating business pages in Facebook and your other social media. Compared to your website, setting these up is free to do and the only expenses you'll have will be to drive traffic to them with ads and content. Remember to focus on creating, branding and establishing your tribe.
Websites and Opt-ins
These can be more costly and can be a little bit more of a pain. They can range from a couple grand into the tens of thousands of dollars. Unless you really know how to go in and create those yourself, it’s better to go with the template version.
AOL, Yahoo and Gmail are great for personal use but not for your business
You'll want to utilize a professional service when building your business email servers so you can automate your email management systems. You'll want to create auto-responders as you start to build email sequences. So once someone opts in to your content, the funnel of communication they receive is on autopilot.
So go out there and make a difference in the online world. Six billion people are waiting for your message.
It's time to take your fitness business online.
But before you can dig into the question of 'How' you're going to do that, you need to understand a more important question first. 'Why?' If you own a brick-and-mortar studio, you're competing with all the other gyms in a 3 to 5 mile radius for the same people in your community as potential clients.
Right now there are 3 billion people online.
The current estimates are that an additional 3 billion more people are coming online in the next five years. Do you want to be marketing to 6 billion people over the next five years or do you want to always be competing within your 3 to 5 mile radius?
It's easy to feel overwhelmed when transitioning to an online fitness business but once you understand the necessary principles and fundamentals of going online it makes it a lot easier. So it's important that you understand why it is critical to have your business online.
1 - The number 1 reason to be online is to build a list.
Your list is your collection of emails and addresses for your current and potential clients.
Think of your list like an ATM machine, an insurance policy. If your business burned down but you still have your list, you can rebuild that business within a certain amount of time. You want to grow that list so you can make money on the backend of that list.
2 - Going online is about spreading your message.
You have a message that you want to communicate to clients, to prospects, and to the world about the differences you can make in their lives. And if no one knows your message, you're not as successful as you could be.
3 - Going online is about Making Money
To start making big dollars and start making a big impact you have to stop the one to one selling, marketing, and communication. In the online world, you can stop the one to one selling and go to the one to many.
Going online takes your voice and amplifies it so you can go out and make a bigger difference.
So 'Why' are you going online?
You are going out there so you can actually solve people's problems and frustrations. You are there to help them move closer to their wants and desires. And today, with a camera and a few tools, you can set up multiple platforms to build your own stage so you can reach those people.
If making a bigger impact and making more money appeals to you, stay tuned when we tackle the Big Five Platforms you need to succeed online.
As a fitness professional in the industry, you want to go out there and serve your clients. You want to help people get fit and healthy. You want to help them live an extraordinary life.
For you to be able to do that, your fitness business needs to thrive.
There are a lot of challenges on the road to success in the fitness industry. One of the biggest problems that trainers and fitness professionals experience in the business is the feeling that 'nobody knows you.'
If no one knows about you, then people aren't going to come to you to help them on their journey into fitness and into leading a healthy lifestyle.
If you are going to go out there and get people to invest in you and sign up for your programs and fitness business, you’ve got to be ahead of the game with your marketing and how you are designing out your programs. It's getting tougher out there.
The competition is getting fiercer. People are getting smarter. If you are not keeping up with the times and digging into the marketing side of the fitness industry, you are going to see others passing you by. It's going to be frustrating to you and it will limit your business.
Don’t be one of those people who just sit there and ignore their marketing just hating it because they don't want to feel 'salesy' because most trainers only last 3 to 5 years and make no more than 42,000 dollars.
Before you even go out there and build any sort of a business or suite of products, you've got to know who you are talking to, who your tribe is. You need to find and speak to your specific tribe that you want to serve in a way that makes them jump at the chance to work with you. The best way to do that is; to solve their problems. You need to give them the solution that they are after.
Don't make it a complicated thing.
You're starting here with an unhappy, sad-faced person. This is their before state and you have to understand it completely. Who are they? What's going on in their life? What problems are they having?
And then there's this gap to the other side, where they want to be.
Over there, you have a happy person with a big smile on their face and they're feeling good about life. They feel accomplished. They've reached some goals. This is the after state they're heading towards.
Your business is creating the bridge to overcome the gap.
When you can be this bridge, your business wins. When you are solving people’s problems, they will flock to your door. Your name will start to be known because you found the solutions to people's problems.