Joe Vitale on Fitness Marketing and Wealth Attraction

Here's an interview I did with Joe Vitale from the DVD 'The Secret' on how to attract more clients, wealth and success through outrageous marketing strategies and using The Law of Attraction

Chris:    All right, I’m here with Joe Vitale.  Joe, what is it that you do?

Joe:    Well I do whatever I feel like and basically it’s in the field of writing books, writing information products, being a little bit of an Internet marketer, copywriter, these days becoming a little bit of self-help guru, but I would say, at heart, I do whatever my passion is directing me to do.  And that leads me down a whole lot of different roads.  Since the beginning I’ve been a writer so I am an author first and marketing consultant, I guess, second, and a spiritual teacher probably third – teaching people about the law of attraction, teaching them the principles of the secret, teaching them the principles that are in my book – The Attractor Factor, as well as some of my book that will be coming out soon.  But at heart, the key message for me is I live by my passion.  That’s what I do.

Chris:    Perfect.  Tell us a little about your take on The Law of Attraction?

Joe:    Well simply put, the law of attraction means you get whatever you are internally, unconsciously vibrating to.  And I am specifically mentioning internally and unconsciously because a lot of people mistake the law of attraction to being you get whatever you think about, and that’s not necessarily true.  And that’s actually good news because a whole lot of us are thinking some pretty bad thoughts, pretty negative thoughts, that if they came true would have a pretty lousy life.  So it’s good that there’s some down time or lag time between what you are thinking and what you are getting.  It gives you a chance to review what you really want.  What you are actually getting when you implement the law of attraction is what you are thinking unconsciously.  It’s not your conscious beliefs so much as your unconscious belief that’s pulling into your orbit the thing that you are experiencing.  So when people want to change their lives they have to go and engage the law of attraction, but they don’t do it consciously, they have to do it unconsciously.  And that’s something a whole lot of people don’t know – that’s one of the missing secrets to success in life.  Yeah the law of attraction – it’s pretty fascinating and it’s pretty fantastic but if you assume it’s just what you think is what you attract then you are making a big mistake because it works on a deeper level.  It’s on the invisible, vibratory, energy level.  It’s not on the thought level but it can begin with thought.  So I don’t to dismiss thought but I’m not going to give it full credit either.

Chris:    What are the five steps of the Attractor Factor?

Joe:    Well I can give you the five steps to the Attractor Factor in a cliff notes version:

The first step is to know what you don’t want.  And this is really important.  Most of mankind, most of humankind is stuck on that step because they are just complaining.  That’s the gossip level step, that’s the complaining level step.  That’s where they’re just looking around their circumstances, they’re looking at their reality and they’re complaining about it.  Most people don’t leave the first step but I think recognizing that first step is important in order to get to the second step.

The second step is to choose what you prefer.  So you use the first step – you use your complaint, you use your problem and transform it into an intention.  So the second step is all about stating your intention.  Intention is powerful.  When you state an intention, you align the internal part of you – your body and mind, your unconscious, your conscious – all starts to go in the direction of your intention.  And also something magical happens is that when you state your intention the universe picks up on it and pretty much rearranges itself, rearranges people and places and puts you in situations to help make your manifestation, your intention come to be.  So the second step is to state your intention.

The third is to get clear.  This is important.  This is powerful.  This is the missing secret to just about every self help law of attraction program that is out there.  Getting clear means you have to get clear within yourself of the counter-intentions within you.  My favorite example is on January 1st everybody states their intentions: I want to lose weight, I’m going to exercise, I’m going to do more marketing, I’m going to quit smoking, I’m going to do such and such and such.  By January 2nd most of those intentions have gone with the wind.  Why?  Because there were counter intentions that were stronger than their intentions.  And unless people get clear of those counter intentions, they will keep tripping themselves up.  They will self sabotage themselves.  So this, to me, is the missing secret to getting results in the world.  It is step three: get clear.

Step four – again this is all in the Attractor Factor - is to feel what it would be like to already have, do or be the very thing that you set out as your intention.  It is important to feel it not just visualize it, not just imagine it, not just talk about it, not just write it down, but to feel it as if it is already done.  Now this is a bit of a metaphysical principle, but what you are doing is activating the Law of Attraction by adding your feeling to it.  Feeling is the accelerator.  This is what makes it have momentum.  This is what gets it into overdrive and puts it into warp speed.  When you feel it in your body as if it is done, you accelerate the entire process of attracting whatever it is that you want to experience into your life as fast as I was going to say humanly possible but it is actually divinely possible.  So the key in step four is to feel it as if it’s done, not feel what would it be like when you have it, you pretend you already have it and you feel “I already have the money, I already have the house, I already have the relationship, I already have the body” whatever you want.  You’ve got it now, what does that feel like.  That is step four.

Step five is to let go while taking inspired action.  This is a biggie.  Most of us, especially in the western society, can’t do it very well because it means letting go of your attachments.  Letting go of your addiction, letting go of your need to have it a certain way.  Most people who set an intention are desperate about it.  They need to have the money by Friday.  The need to have this relationship.  And that need is actually the energy that’s going out and attracting what they get, which is more need.  So you want to be able to playfully say I would love to have more income, I would love to have a better business, I would love to have my physical body, whatever you want it to be.  But you are not addicted to it.  You are not attached to it.  There’s a playful quality about it.  That non-attachment, that neutral play makes it happen faster.  And then the other aspect of this is one part is letting go and the other aspect is taking inspired action.  Letting go doesn’t mean you sit on your thumb, you just sit around waiting for the phone to ring, you do relax but if you get inspired – a nudge from inside to make a phone call to buy a particular book, to attend the program, to invest in something, to go left when you normally go right on a driveway on a road – whatever it is, your part of the bargain with the universe is to take that action.  It’s inspired action.  

So all five steps are what’s needed, in my opinion, as the training wheels to learn how to implement the Law of Attraction in your life.  Once you have learned how to use these five steps then you can probably cut them down to what I think is just one step.  And that one step is:
Be Happy Now
Happy people tend to get more of what they want and they are happy whether they get it or not.  But that’s one step and most of us can’t do it so I say use the five steps in the Attractor Factor.

Chris:    What are some of your favorite tools for reconditioning the subconscious like visualization, affirmations, vision board, scripting, EFT, things like that.  What are some of your favorites?

Joe:    Well I have a giant bag of tricks that I can pull from because I’ve been doing this for decades and I’ve managed to have read a lot of books and hang out with a lot of people who have written a lot books.  I would say that you have to keep in mind that the unconscious, the subconscious mind responds best to two things: repetition and emotion.

Repetition wise, if you are writing down your intention, you are sending it in to your unconscious, into your subconscious mind, into that massive operating system that works below your conscious awareness.  So one of my favorite techniques is to find ways to have repetition.  It could be an audio tape that’s on a loop and I have an affirmation that’s playing on it at a low level because I don’t need to particularly hear it consciously – it needs to go in unconsciously.  And so that may be playing.  I also have some affirmations which are intentions for me.  They are not directly affirmations.  They are more better stated as intentions that are on my screen saver.  Right now I am in front of my computer and the screen saver just kicked in and I can see five or six of my intentions floating around on my screen.  So that’s very powerful is to write them down.  

The second is to do what step four is in the Attractor Factor and that is to have a few minutes playing with the feeling of whatever it is you want already being done in your life.  When I sit around and I feel what it would be like to have the car, the house or the relationship or the vacation or the wealth or whatever it happens to be for me, and I take a few moments to imagine what it feels like for it to be done now, I am in a incredibly exquisite place.  My energy is higher, I feel exhilarated by life and I am in a place of gratitude because I am feeling this is already done.  And all of these elements are emotions that my subconscious mind responds to.  So there is a lot of things in my bag of tricks.  Yeah occasionally I use the tapping technique, EFT, I’ve known about that ever since the early days and I would say that my two favorite things would be writing down and visualizing with feeling the end result.

Chris:    You might have already answered this but let me ask you: Let’s say a personal fitness trainer has not had a lot of success in the past and is not really able to get into the feeling place of knowing his desired business outcome will come true.  What would you suggest?

Joe:    Well that’s a great question.  I would suggest first of all that they look within to find what that block is because if somebody is not feeling what it would be like to have the very thing they say they want there is some sort of counter intention that’s blocking it for them.  And it may be that they’ve described an incomplete picture for them.  It may be something to the effect of yes I want to have 200 clients a month but I’m making up a number because I don’t know what it is in the fitness industry, but it may be that I want 200 clients a month.  But in the back of their mind they are saying I can’t handle that many people or I have no idea how to get that many people or I wouldn’t know what to do with that many people.  Some sort of objection is surfacing in their thought process which is making it hard for them to go ahead and feel the end result of the success they say they want.  And so what I tell people that are in that boat is that you paint the picture the way you want it.  So if you are telling yourself I want to make a half a million bucks next month and a big part of you rushes in and says that’s impossible, you’ve never made more than five thousand dollars in a month or whatever the figure is, then you want to make it a stretch but believable.  This is your painting.  You are painting your life the way you want it to be.  So if some aspect of the painting seems like it’s a little dark or it’s a little uncomfortable or too bright or a little out of focus, well it’s your painting – you’re the artist.  Repaint it so that it feels better.  And then once you start for it to feel better you will be in that place where you can easily imagine what it would be like to have that as your end result.  So I would say that they have to be ruthlessly honest with themselves and look at the internal blocks which are going to be some sort of objections that show up in their mind.  And at first it may not even be hearing them.  It may be so unconscious to it that they just feel like Well I really want that but I can’t have it.  Explore the phrase “I can’t have it.”  Why can’t you have it?  And what will start coming up will be some of these beliefs.  As the beliefs come up you take them and – thinking of the five steps again – you take them as the first part is you don’t want it.  And then you change it in what you do want.  So once again you reframe, you repaint, you keep in mind that you are the person who is painting the picture that is going to become your life.  Change it so it feels right.

The other thought I would say is if you have never experienced the thing that you want to have in your life – if you have never had it before – you may find it a little difficult to get into the feeling state of pretending you do have it.  Well, imagine an actor or an actress.  You have probably seen a movie where somebody had achieved the thing that you want.  Imagine what they might have felt like.  So do whatever it takes to clean up your internal system so you can easily imagine it and if you have to reach out into Hollywood and find somebody who has already done it before and imagine what they felt like when they had it.

Chris:    Let’s say a personal training business loses some business.  Is there any way he can reframe that or attach a new meaning to that situation that would serve him in a positive way in regards to his business goals?

Joe:    Yeah absolutely.  We have to get out of the mindset of failure and take it as feedback for one thing.  But I also want to escalate this to a much more spiritual overview of life.  In the end of my book The Attractor Factor, I talk about having the mindset that everything that happens in your life is happening for your highest good.  That it’s all happening to take you in the direction of your dreams.  It’s all happening and though you may be confused by it, for reasons that will all make sense down the road.  So it’s a matter of being okay – not being desperate.  Not interpreting it as failure.  One of my favorite stories is a few years ago I interviewed a billionaire who has now become a friend of mine.  And he’s elderly and so forth and he said that he had learned something remarkable about failure.  And I wanted to know what he had learned.  He said that he had tried a lot of businesses, he failed quite a few times.  He had declared bankruptcy a couple of times and of course he kept going, he kept moving, he kept growing, he kept getting back up and now of course he’s a legendary billionaire.  And I said well what did you learn about failure?  And he said, “Nothing bad ever happens to you.  The world forgets and the world forgives.  The only person that ever beats you up is you.  And if you can just learn from it and move on you will go on to the greater success.”  

So if a trainer has a few people who have dropped out, that’s totally fine.  They may not have been a right match for you.  It might be an indication of something you have to adjust in your marketing so you attract the people that are more appropriate for your training and your classes and your schedule.  It may mean any number of things.  It doesn’t have to mean failure.  So the reframe is it’s all for good, learn from it, see if there’s a lesson there.  Don’t beat yourself up.  Move on and you will achieve success.  Moving forward is the key.

Chris:    Before we switch to the fitness marketing portion of the interview, any last thoughts on the Law of Attraction or tips for anybody new to this stuff?

Joe:    You know the movie, The Secret, is so profound I think this one movie alone can awaken humanity.  It is getting underground attention and word of mouth attention and of course as we make this audio right now I am going to be on Larry King tomorrow night talking about all of these principles about how to change your mind by changing your life or changing your life by changing your mind or even vice-versa.  And this is very much based in the movie, The Secret.  I strongly recommend that people watch that movie.  There’s been some early studies that say if you watch the movie The Secret seven times, just seven times, it permanently changes your brainwave patterns.  You start to think differently. You start to see opportunities.  You start to see solutions, you start to be more inspired.  You start to engage the Law of Attraction without even thinking about it.  You watch the movie The Secret seven times then all of the principles in the book, my book The Attractor Factor, come to life.  But you are not working at it.  You are not consciously dwelling on any of it.  You just begin to live it.

So I would say of course surround yourself with positive people.  I have a book called Meet and Grow Rich, which is on how to create your own mastermind group.  So I would say surround yourself with positive people.  Create your own mastermind.  But I would also say read positive books.  Read Jack Canfield’s book The Success Principles.  Read my book The Attractor Factor.  Read my book that will be coming out in a few months called The Zero Limits.  But also watch The Secret.  Watch it at least seven times.  Share it with people.  Watch it with other people.  A lot of people are having little parties where they get together and they bring food and they have a potluck and they all sit and watch the movie The Secret.  Doing all of these things are positive, are nuturing, they are inspiring, and they can help you stay on track so you attract the things you prefer in your life.

Chris:    In building a fitness business, how important is marketing?

Joe:    Marketing is the number one most important thing you can do and should be doing in any and all businesses across the board.  If you look at some of the giant companies in the world whether it’s Coca Cola or anyone that’s been around for a very long time and they are huge, they keep marketing.  They can probably relax a little bit but they keep shoveling money into marketing.  Why?  Because marketing keeps them alive.  You look at any business that has dried up.  Any business that was big a long time ago and one of the reasons they are not big now is they did not keep marketing.  It’s been said that in good times you want to keep marketing because if you do in bad times they will still remember you and in bad times you want to keep marketing because that’s when you want people to keep coming back to you.  Marketing marketing marketing is the solution to staying and thriving in business.  You must market.  Underline that and put it in big bold letters with neon lights all around it and a big circle!  You must market.  There is no exception.  You market or you die.

Chris:    What is marketing?

Joe:    Marketing is broadcasting your message to the target audience who most wants to receive it.  Now I redefine marketing a little bit.  My own definition of marketing is “sharing your passion for what you do with the people who would most welcome hearing about it.”  That’s marketing.  So a lot of people think marketing is forcing or selling or manipulating people.  And that’s a negative view of marketing that is not my view of marketing at all.  I’m much more of a spiritual marketer.  I’m much more interested in sharing my passion which of course is how I live my life.  So I encourage people who are in business I encourage them to share their love for their business.  Hopefully you love what you do or else what are you doing in it?  And share the love for what you do with the people who will love hearing about it once that connection is made.  So marketing to me is sharing your heart, your passion, your love for whatever it is you do with the people who are going to most welcome receiving it.  And you may do that in a wide variety of ways, whether it’s on the Internet or emails or advertisements or yellow pages – there’s a long, long list of ways to do it. But the bottom line for me is marketing is sharing your heart to connect to the hearts of the people who are really going to welcome your news.  They are waiting to hear from you and that’s the match, that’s the Attractor Factor that you want to see happen right there.

Chris:    What are the three steps of hypnotic marketing?

Joe:    What are the three steps of hypnotic marketing?  I don’t know what the three steps of hypnotic marketing are.  Are you talking about my hypnotic marketing formula?

Chris:    Yeah, I’m just getting it from the seminar that I’ve watched online.  But if you can just talk about hypnotic marketing or whatever …

Joe:    Yeah, I gotcha.  I’m with you now.  All right.  I have a book called Hypnotic Marketing and there is a three step formula that I tell people that can work in any business.  And this is a formula that has taken me decades to perfect and to test and a lot of my early clients paid $50,000 to hear this formula and if any of them want to hear it and have me implement it today they are talking about paying me $150,000 or more.  So this is a very powerful, very persuasive, very guaranteed way of getting business.

The first step is to use publicity.  Almost nobody is using publicity and those who do use publicity are using it very poorly.  The media is out there starving for news.  There are newspapers that need stories all the time; radio, tv, Internet web campaigns, PR services, news bureaus, wire services.  The list goes on and on and on.  The media is starving.  They never get fed, they never get satisfied.  They always want more.  If you give them a story about you, about your business, about your product about your service and there’s a real story, a unique angle, a human interest piece – they will write about you or talk about you or broadcast about you and they can send folks to you for next to nothing.  So I say use publicity.  It’s a wonderful way to throw a net out into the world and pull a whole new group of people to you.  

Number two in this three step formula is to have an information rich web site.  Too many web sites are very self serving.  They are a big picture of the coach or the big picture of the logo or the big picture of the founder and who cares?  Nobody cares.  People care about their own problems.  They care about their own lives; they care about their own health, their own fitness, their own longevity.  So when they hit your web site maybe as a result of step one – all the publicity that might drive them to your web site – there better be information there that speaks to the consumer.  Information rich web sites help do that.  On that web site, you must must must have an email box for people to sign up to receive memos from you or email messages from you or specials or coupons or news or newsflashes.  You must have an email sign up box.

Because step one is bringing traffic to your web site.

Step two, you are keeping the traffic there but you want to start a relationship so you must have their email to begin it.

Step three is you create a long term relationship with these people by email.  This is one of my favorite things to do.  You share your life, you share your tips, you share products, you offer them things to buy but you create a long term relationship in step three.

So hypnotic marketing and my three step formula is:

Step One is Publicity
Step Two is an Information Rich Web Site
Step Three is Building a Relationship with these people through email which will mean long term profit.

Chris:    What personal training marketing strategies can we learn from PT Barnum?

Joe:    PT Barnum was a marketing genius.  The man was an entrepreneur who is worth studying today.  He was a politician, he was a best selling author, he was an amazing speaker, he was a brilliant promoter.  He took the average and turned it into historic or into legend.  He took the average and turned it into a legendary event.  Barnum, on his deathbed, five days before he died, said he owed the great wealth that he had earned to the newspapers of the world.  Now this was a man who started unknown and dirt poor back in the mid 1800s up in Connecticut and ended up being one of the world’s most famous circus promoters, promoters of superstars, a name we still know today.  And how did he do it?  He did it with his wits, he did it with creativity and he largely depended on publicity.  He thought out of the box, he wasn’t afraid to be a little outrageous, he wasn’t afraid to do things that were colorful and he always wanted people to talk.  He wanted them to talk about him, his services, his products, his museum that he so loved, his circuses that he so loved and we can learn from that today.  I wrote a whole book on him and on his 10 principles and it’s called There’s a Customer Born Every Minute.  PT Barnum never said “there’s a sucker born every minute.”  That was not his mindset, that’s not the kind of language he ever would have used.  He was so spiritual, his neighbors called him Reverend Barnum.  He loved people and in that time period, when there was no radio or television or Internet or faxes or games or anything, videos, IPods, you name it – they didn’t have it.  They had to entertain themselves.  He was a source of entertainment.  And that’s another thing we can learn: that people want to be entertained.  Entertain them and they’ll spend their last few dollars to have fun, to be in that situation.  So Barnum is worth study, I can talk about him for a long time.  I love my book on him, I’d recommend that to everybody if you are interested in Barnum or outrageous marketing, get There’s a Customer Born Every Minute and you might be interested in my audio program from Nightingale ______(incoherent) called The Power of Outrageous Marketing.  I talk a little bit about Barnum there but I also talk about other flamboyant business people: Richard Branson, Harry Houdini, Donald Trump, or even people who created things like the Sweetest Bikini Team in order to promote a product.  There’s a lot to be learned from Barnum and his disciples and I encourage you to look there.

Chris:    How can a fitness trainer use joint ventures to market their business?

Joe:    My philosophy in marketing is always look for the win-win, meaning that I don’t see competitors out there, I see future joint venture partners.  So first of all I would have people take off the visors that says we are all in competition, and start putting on glasses that says we’re all in cooperation, I just don’t know what the win-win is yet.  One of the easiest things to do in order to create a joint venture, and this is something I explain in my Nightingale Conant program, The Power of Outrageous Marketing, is to do some cross promotion.  What you would do is you would take a blank sheet of paper and in the center of it you put a circle and in it you write down a description of your customers.  And they might be men, they might be women, they might be both, but just write down your customers and describe them if you can.  And then write a line out from that circle extending out and on all these other lines start writing down in circles all the non-competing businesses that serve those same people.  So in the beginning in the center of your page you have a circle and you’ve written down your customers.  Then there’s a line going out maybe to the right or to the left it doesn’t matter and at the end of that line you put another circle and you put down dry cleaning.  Because your customers get their clothes dry cleaned somewhere.  That’s a non-competing business but they are serving your customers.  Then you might put down another circle and maybe it’s the local pizza delivery place.  They probably get pizza.  So your customers are ordering pizza from this place.  Then you write down something like the movie theater.  Your customers are going to the movies occasionally so the movie theater is a non-competing business that also serves your customers.  And you just keep writing them down.  There will be a whole bunch of them.  It could be the local drugstore, it could be the local supermarket.  It can be from small items that are unique to your area, your situation, your neighborhood.  And what you’ve just created is a map of all the potential cross-promotion, joint venture partners that you can go to.  And one of the easiest things to do is you would print up some coupons for your personal training business.  Maybe they get a week free or a member a month free or a free DVD, I don’t know what it would be.  And you go to each one of these non-competing businesses.  You might go to the dry cleaners and say, “look, would you set out these coupons for your customers.  Just give it to them when they come in, and in exchange you give me coupons to the dry cleaning place, I will give out the dry cleaning coupons to my customers, you give out the fitness coupons to your customers, neither one of us has to pay anything except for the printing of those coupons and what we’ll both be doing is telling new potential customers about each of our services.

So if you can imagine doing this with all of these non-competing businesses, you can create a tiny little army that is out there promoting you to all of these folks.  So that’s a quick example of how to do it.

Chris:    In marketing and in customer service, what can we learn from dogs?

Joe:    (laughs)  I had forgotten that I had ever written anything about dogs but I think I – I forget where I wrote it but …

Chris:    Outrageous Marketing.

Joe:    It is in Outrageous Marketing?  Thanks for reminding me.  I had forgotten about that.  I recorded that thing seven years ago or eight years ago.

Chris:    It’s a great system.

Joe:    Thanks.  One thing I noticed is that when I come home, my dog is so happy to see me, he pees all over me.  My dog is so happy to see me he’s jumping up, he’s slobbering all over me and so forth.  I mean, genuinely loving and glad to be here, glad to see me, where’ve ya been, I’ve missed you!  And I thought what if our service was to that degree?  What if when a customer calls or walks in your door and you don’t ignore them, you’re not cold to them, you’re not officially polite to them.  You are loving them!  And I don’t mean lusting them and I don’t mean touching them and I don’t mean peeing on them – but you take some of the elements of that love that’s radiating from a puppy for its owner and you radiate that love to your customers.  I keep telling people that you know what people want more than anything else?  They want to be recognized.  They want that more than they want money, more than they want fame, more than they want fortune.  They want to be recognized.  And they may want a whole lot of other stuff, but each of us wants to know that somebody knows my name, somebody knows I count, somebody thinks I am important, somebody loves me.  I tell people that when you talk to folks, in the back of your mind – you don’t have to say this out loud – but in the back of your mind you should be saying something like “I love you.  I appreciate you.  I am grateful for you.” And again, you don’t have to say those words to the person.  Not out loud.  But you are saying it inside yourself as you are talking or looking at the person.  And then if you are acting like you really appreciate the person, I mean paying attention to them, finding out about their likes, their dislikes, their loves, their disappointments, their life –you are listening, you are acknowledging them.  Then you are doing what a puppy dog is doing.  A puppy dog is showing pure love.  And that’s what people want and they will pay.  They’ll pay not directly for that but they will pay to the person who is giving that.  That’s what they want.  

Chris:    In marketing, how important is a good headline?

Joe:    Headlines are the most important part of any sales letter, web site, email, print ad, anything that you can think of.  The headline is the make it or break it point.  You might be able to save a poor ad if you have an interesting picture there because pictures can be hypnotic in themselves.  But the headline is without question the most important part because most people who are scanning web sites or flipping through magazines or newspapers or yellow pages only go up to the headline.  They are not looking at the whole ad, they are glancing at the headline to see if it connects.  If it doesn’t connect, if it doesn’t suggest a benefit or if it doesn’t call their attention, if it doesn’t seem like it’s a match to them, they’ve moved on, it doesn’t matter what you wrote underneath that headline ‘cause they’re not lookin’!  So the headline is the most important part of the marketing campaign.  It’s not uncommon for a copywriter – the person who writes headlines professionally to work on their headlines more than anything else.  They may write 50 to 100 or even more because they know if they don’t have a good headline, it doesn’t matter what they write after it.

Chris:    What is viral marketing, and how can trainers use it to build their business?

Joe:    Viral marketing is getting people to talk about something in particular.  It’s gone viral, much like a virus gets spread around.  Only this is positive.  That there’s a video somebody has shown or there’s a joke somebody has heard or any number of things that are very popular and somebody likes it so much they pass it to the next person.  That person likes so much they pass it to their family and friends.  Each of those people like it so much they pass it on to their family and friends; some may have mailing lists they pass it on to the mailing list.  Those people get it and they like it and they pass it on to everybody they know and before you know it this can spread the planet incredibly quickly.  I love viral marketing.  It’s a little bit of a hit or miss thing because you never really know what people are going to connect with and like but I’ll say that everybody should be considering it, particularly fitness trainers.

In the early days of Internet marketing, one of the things that went viral all the time was any humor.  And humor will still go viral.  If you had something like the top 10 most hilarious weight loss jokes or the top 10 fitness jokes or the top 10 gym one-liners and I am just brainstorming here but you get the sense that humor is one of the best things that will go viral these days because videos are so popular online, and you can create a one minute or a 30 second video – think of America’s Funniest Videos and the kind of thing that they would put on their line.  If you had a video or could create a video or capture a video and could start sending it around – you would post it on Google, post it on You Tube, put it on your web site, invite people to pass it around – if that goes viral it can make you famous almost overnight.  And the way to do it of course is you say something like “this has been presented to you by Chris of This Fitness Studio” or “Joe Vitale of Mr.Fire.com” so that you get a free ride – your name and your web site gets attention wherever it goes.  Viral marketing is incredible.  When it hits, you hit a homerun.  I say be playful about it because it’s a sense of humor, it’s a lightness, it’s an oddness, it’s a wackiness that makes those things work, that if when you make it work, hey, the cash register rings in a very big way.

Chris:    Joe, where can people learn more about you, The Attractor Factor, and hypnotic marketing?

Joe:    Well, the number one resource for learning anything about me is my main web site, which is www.mrfire.com.  Everything is there.  It links to my podcast, links to my video blog, links to my blog, links to my catalog, links to my article database, links to my programs– I have a Miracles Coaching program, I have a marketing mentoring program, Hypnotic Marketing, Inc. is my company.  It links to everything at MrFire.com.  My books are in all the bookstores, Amazon, of course, sells all of the books.  Barnes and Noble, Borders, all of your local bookstores are going to have The Attractor Factor and my book after it is Life’s Missing Instruction Manual.  My Barnum book should be in bookstores, as well, “There’s a Customer Born Every Minute.”  I have a long line of books out there, a lot of e-books.  Everything again the best way to begin poking around to learn more about Joe and his work is at MrFire.com.

Work Less and Make More

This has been a personal training business and health club marketing interview between Joe Vitale and Chris McCombs