Allen Hill on Health and Fitness Internet Marketing

Here's a fitness business and personal training internet marketing interview I did with one of the top people in the health and fitness marketing industry Allen Hill

Chris McCombs: All right, I’m here with Allen Hill. Allen, how are you doing?

Allen Hill: I’m doing very good. How are you?

CM: I am excellent. Allen, can you tell us a little bit about what you do?

AH: Yeah. I build websites for marketing for personal trainers, fitness professionals, and health club marketing campaigns, and they’re not just typical websites. I build them as a direct response kind of marketing material. That way, I can help you generate more leads for your offline business, and more sales for either your offline business, your services, boot camps, or even information products that you might have to sell on your site. I handle anything from custom designing websites and setting up shopping carts and payment processing, to search engine optimization, search engine positioning, building as much traffic as humanly possible, all the way to writing sales copy.

CM: All right. Let me ask you, what are the biggest mistakes you see with trainers’ websites? I’ll see a lot of personal trainer’s, and it’s like “Welcome To My Website.” I don’t think they’re getting very good results with it. Personally, I have a sales copy page and I get amazing results with it. Can you tell us a little bit about the mistakes you see most trainers make?

AH: Yeah. Probably the top three biggest mistakes are, they don’t do enough to build traffic to the site– they do exactly what you said, they say “Hi, welcome to my website, and here’s what I do, here’s how many certifications I have, me-me-me, I-I-I”, and that doesn’t really tell the visitor what’s in it for me, and doesn’t give them any reason to be interested in what you have to offer, and it usually doesn’t lead to a very good response. And the other big mistake that I’ve seen people make, is they get entirely too focused on how pretty the site is, how flashy the site is, how much graphics are on it, the Flash animation, all kinds of things like that, that really don’t make a difference in the amount of sales you get.

CM: So, what kind of website works better?

AH: Really, a text-base, content site works the best. If you look at a lot of the biggest business on the Internet right now, like Yahoo!, and Google, and Amazon, and Paypal, most of the site is 90% or more text-based. At most, they’ll have a graphic logo, and maybe a couple of buttons here and there, but the vast majority of the most successful sites are almost entirely text-based. That is exactly what’s going to get you scored well in the search engines, and really, that’s what it all comes down to. You can have the best sales message in the world, and the prettiest website in the world, but if people can’t find you when they’re looking for specific information, then you stand very little chance of being successful.

CM: Now, are you talking about the pay-per-click searches? Are you talking about the free listings? What are you talking about?

AH: I’m talking about the actual organic listings that you would get in Yahoo!, Google, or MSN. The pay-per-click advertising, that has its place, if you’re selling something that has a high enough profit margin, and a high enough success rate where you can afford to sink money into bringing people to your site. But, far and away, when people search for any kind of fitness-related thing on the Internet, they’re not looking to buy a product or a service. What they’re looking for is information. It’s not the graphics or the Flash in the information that they want, it’s the text on the page. The search engines are in business to help you find the information that you want.

When you go to Google, and you do a search for ‘weight training routines,’ it’s their job to provide you with relevant sites that are about weight training routines. If your site consists mainly of graphics and Flash animation, there’s really nothing for the search engine to see, and nothing for them to rank, which means you’re not going to score very well in the actual search results. That means you’re not going to get very many people coming to your site, which also means you’re not going to make very much money. If you can track that, and do the opposite way, and have a site that’s simple and clean and professional-looking, but it’s 90 percent or more text-based, that gives the search engines a lot of text to scan, and it gives them a much better chance of determining that your page is really about ‘weight training routines’, and it gives you a much better chance of being ranked well because that’s what your page delivers, content on weight training routines, which is what Google and Yahoo!’s customers are actually looking for. Does that make sense?

CM: It does. So, what kind of content should be on the page?

AH: Really, that depends on your target market and what your business is all about. For the most part, what you want to do with the content on your website, is keeping in mind the end user of your services and products is looking for information. If you can give them a sample of the information that they’re actually looking for– if they’re looking for a weight-loss routine, then if you can write an article about a weight-loss routine and “Here’s what you can do on your own to apply this information and speed your weight loss results,” that’s going to do two things. It’s going to help them find you at the search engines, but more importantly than that, even, it’s going to establish you as a qualified expert, someone that has credibility in their eyes.

So, as you start to deliver that content, they’re not thinking– If you run an advertisement for pay-per-click campaign on Google, in the back of your mind, if you see my link there, you know that I paid money to be placed there, and that’s means that you’re going to have to pay money to me at some point in time for me to make that money back. There has to be some kind of trade-off there, and you understand that in the back of your mind.

You arrive to my site in the mindset, “Okay, what’s for sale, and how much is it?” But, if you find me in the natural search results for “weight loss plan”, then you don’t arrive to my site feeling pitched, and feeling like there’s a sales pitch coming your way. You land on my site thinking “I just found what I was looking for. Maybe this site is what I’ve been looking for the whole time.”

As you start to read the content that I provide, about how you can lose weight on your own without my help, that establishes me as an expert in your eyes and you’re much more likely to take my recommendation. If I recommend a great book on the topic of weight loss, you’re more than likely going to click on that link to see what that book’s about, and that happens to be my affiliate links, so if you buy it, than I get a small commission. Or if I recommend a supplement program, you’re much more likely to take my recommendation, and that goes all the way down to your info products, whether it’s an e-book or a workout DVD or even, coming into my studio to train with me. You’re much more likely to take my recommendation if you’ve already read content that I provide that establishes me as a credible person to listen to.

CM: Let me ask you a question. You mention affiliate links. What is an affiliate link, and how can trainers use this?

AH: An affiliate link is– let’s say you want to sell more personal training … or no… even better… let's say you want to sell nutritional supplements. Well, you have a couple of options. You can buy nutritional supplements in bulk, and keep an inventory and try to sell those to people. Hopefully, they don’t go bad by the time you get them sold. Or, you can establish a relationship with a company that already sells nutritional supplements, and join what’s called an affiliate program. So, if on your site, if you provide a link to, let’s say, EAS supplements, to their website, if anyone clicks on your link and purchases one of those supplements off of it, then you’ll make a commission off of that. And there are a couple different ways that you can use that.

Besides nutritional supplements, there’s e-books, and there are regular books at Amazon or any other publishing company, exercise equipment, there are any number of things that you can recommend that way, and you can also do that in reverse. You have your own products. People can join your affiliate program, place links on their website and in their e-mail newsletters that point to your website. So, if they send traffic to you that make a purchase, then they’ll earn a commission because they just helped you make a sale.

CM: If there’s a certain product a trainer wants to sell, how would he go about getting that affiliate link? Would he contact the website? Would he type their product name with “affiliate” into Google? How would he go about it?

AH: The best way to do is– if you already know a company that you’re interested in working with, it’s just to look on their website. I would say 90 percent of website out there have some sort of affiliate program/link on their site, where you can just sign up right there. But, if you’re looking for something that you may not already have a company in mind that you want to work with, say you want to sell kettlebells from your website, you can just go to Yahoo! or Google and do a search for “kettlebells”, with quotation marks around it, then the ‘+’ (plus) sign, and “affiliate program” with quotation marks around it. That will ask Google to look for any website that has the word ‘kettlebells’ plus the words ‘affiliate program’ on the same page. That will return results for pretty much any company out there that sells kettlebells that has an affiliate program that you can sign up for. And you can do that with anything, whether it’s a pedometer or treadmills. Anything in the middle there, you can type in “nutritional supplements” + “affiliate program”, and it will get you the same kind of results.

CM: Interesting. Okay, so you were saying about having content-based information, should this be on your homepage? Should your homepage be a sales copy? Should you have informational articles on the homepage?

AH: That really depends on what your goal is.

CM: Let’s say a trainer’s goal is, let’s say a trainer lives in Dallas, Texas. And he wants to find people who are actively searching for a personal training business in Dallas, Texas, let’s say that’s his first market that he’s going for. How should he go about that?

AH: And his ultimate goal would be to find new clients, right?

CM: Right.

AH: In that case, what I would do, is build a small, maybe five or six page website. The home page will basically just capture new visitors’ attention. It will promise them a major benefit that they’re looking for, whether that’s weight loss or improved athletic performance, whatever that specific trainer’s market would be. Promise that main benefit in the opening headline, and then have some text on the page that kind of leads in to “Here’s what you’re going to get from working with us”, and kind-of-a-little-bit explain what you do, just enough to get their attention and get their interest, and then use the remaining pages on the website to give them more information.

So, the homepage doesn’t necessarily have to be a long sales copy. It should probably be more like, if you’re interested in weight loss, then you need to click on this link and go down that path. If you’re interested in increasing your vertical leap for basketball, then you need to click on this link and go down this path. And then each of those separate paths would finish in a most warming response, in other words, what you most want that visitor to do. And in this case, it’s probably to fill out a form to generate a lead, so you can follow up with them, set a face-to-face meeting, and hopefully convert them into an actual paying client, as opposed to just a lead. So, on the page about weight loss, you would just have sales copy that focuses on weight loss; here’s what you’re going to get by working with us; here’s how is going to benefit you; here’s what in it for you; if you would like more information on that, give us your name and e-mail address, and maybe your phone number, and someone will get back to you, and we’ll help you out.

Another way that you can do that is, instead of trying to get them to give their contact information up on the premise that someone will contact them– you know, a lot of people are going to be kinda leery about that, because the last thing they want is for someone to call them while they’re in the middle of dinner with their family and hit them with a sales pitch. So, one thing that I’ve done with my training company’s websites, is I’ve set up some free reports that give away information that say “Here’s how you can lose weight on our own, even without my help!” “Here’s how you can rectify some back pain without my help!” “Here’s how you can manage your diabetes without my help!” And in order to download that free report, they have to give you their name and their e-mail address. And then that allows me to add them to my database and follow up with them later on down the line, and see if they need more help on that, or if they have any questions they’d like to ask, and you can offer that as a free service, just to start to build a little rapport and a little bit more trust and credibility with these people.

That way, when they do eventually sit down with you face to face, then you already know them, or they already know you, anyway. It makes them feel like they do; they’ve read your website; they’ve read your report; they’ve contacted you through e-mail one or two, maybe more times. In their minds, you’re no longer a salesman with a sales pitch. You’re someone that can actually help them solve their problems. It’s much easier to convince them to become a new client, then it is for someone who has never met you face to face, and you’re just trying to sell them something directly from your website.

CM: Okay. How long should the free reports be? Should this be like an e-book, or a PDF file? How should this be?

AH: One thing I like to do with my free reports is I like to mix in a fair amount of sales copy with that. I mean, you really give them enough valuable information that they can use the material that you provide them with to start working towards achieving their goals, whether they hire you or not. But, you don’t want to cross the line to where you’re giving away everything for free. You still want to leave no doubt in their mind where the best part of working with you is, and that’s in your one-on-one services.

So, in order to give them enough valuable information and content to actually be useful- that depends on the topic- but you’re probably looking at four or five pages worth of information. And once you mix the sales copy in, and then a strong offer– you never really just say “Here’s the information. Have a nice day!” You say “Here’s the information” to get them interested, then “If you’d like to learn more, or if you would like some personal one-on-one help”, and then have an offer for how they can get a hold of you, or how they can join your health club, or how they can get four or five personal training sessions at a discounted fee, just so you can get them in the door. Or maybe even, “Here’s how you can get your own free one-on-one personal consultation with one of our trainers!” However you decide to structure your business, whether you charge for that initial consultation, or whether you give it away for free, that really is the ultimate goal of the free report. You’re using the information to build trust and credibility, and establish yourself as the expert and someone that can help this person. But, in return you want to take something, too. You want to take an appointment with them, or you want to take some money in exchange for a few sessions, at the very least, just so you can give them a taste of what you have to offer, and convince them that working with you is the best option for them.

CM: Awesome. What are your thoughts on viral marketing?

AH: Viral marketing. You just can’t beat that. Any way that you can spread your marketing message to as many people as possible is only going to help you. For the people who don’t know what viral marketing is, it’s any kind of marketing that you have that can be freely passed around to other people. The reason they call it “viral marketing” is that it kind of spreads like a virus. So, if I have a free e-book that’s all about how to lose weight, and you download that e-book because you’re interested in losing weight, inside that e-book there needs to be contact information where you can call me on the phone, or you can email me, or you can visit one of my websites for more information on that. Now, I know that if you want to lose weight, you know people that are your friends, your family, your co-workers, people you go to church with, people that are in organizations that you belong to, that also need to lose weight. If you read that e-book and you feel the information is valuable enough and helpful enough to you, then you’re more than likely going to pass that e-book on to your friends and family and neighbors. And the same — they also know people that are interested in that kind of stuff, so they’re going to pass it on.

CM: Yeah, I’ve found viral marketing to be quite effective, myself. Let me ask you about traffic. Besides the search engines - are there any other ways besides search engines and free reports - are there any other ways that trainers can drive traffic to their website? Are there any kind of listings they should be involved in, or any communities, any other ideas?

AH: Yeah. One of the other things you want to make sure you get listed with are the major directories. Now, they’re not quite as important as they used to be, and they’re no where near as important traffic-wise as the search engines are, but if you can get your site listed with Google’s directory, BookSmart, DMOZ - those are really the big three. They’re not going to bring you a lot of traffic in and of themselves, but Google does deem them to be very important sites, so just having those sites linking to you is going to give you a base to link popularity, it’s going to give you a base in Google page rank, and therefore, that’s going to boost your search engine ranking over the long term. Does that make sense?

CM: Yeah, it does. What about links going back to you from other people’s sites?

AH: Now there’s a lot of mixed information on that. Most of the stuff that I see being touted all over the internet is how important it is to have as many sites as possible linking to you. And that’s not necessarily true. The way that they determine the link popularity isn’t so much about the number of sites that link to you, it’s about the quality of those sites that link to you. For example, you could have - if you have a fitness related website that’s all about, let’s say, weight loss, you can have used car part websites, and computer part websites, and websites that sell discount pharmaceutical products linking to you, and you can have 3000 of those linking to you, but that doesn’t mean nearly as much as having one major weigh loss related website linking to you.

So, it’s not so much how many sites link to you, it’s how important the sites that do link to you are. How well respected they are in the major search engines’ eyes and if their content is related to your content. Search engines really like to see theme based things. They don’t want to see websites that aren’t related linking back and forth to each other because they interpret that as someone’s way of trying to manipulate the search results by increasing link popularity through shady means. But if you have other sites that are related to what you do, that are also high traffic sites, and they also have a relatively high Google page rank, that will boost your rankings at the search engine.

CM: So, how does one go about getting a site with similar content to link back to them?

AH: Well, there are a lot of link exchange programs that are out there that want to charge a monthly fee. Or, there are pieces of software that can supposedly go through the search engines and find sites that are related to you, then they have template letters where you can just submit those to the site owners and, hopefully, everything goes like you want it to. But really, that’s kind of a big waste of time and effort, and you really have no way to ensure that the people you agreed to swap links with are actually going to keep your link on their site. So, it all ends up being a big waste of time.

But one thing you can do is, there is a link exchange program called Value Exchange. Value Exchange is not a typical exchange program. In fact, they screen all the applicants that come into the system, and they determine if you have enough content on your site to be worthwhile for anyone else who belongs to the program to link to you. They also analyze your Google page rank to make sure your site is, again, worthwhile for anyone else to get a link from you. Then they kind of match everybody up based on similar topics and similar content. So, if you have a website that’s all about golf training, you’re really only going to show up for other people who have sites that are about golf, in some way, shape, or form. So you’re not going to get a bunch of used car part websites finding you and wanting to trade links. So, that matching sites up that are related to each other, that have similar levels of traffic, similar levels of respect from Google, and they kind of put you hand in hand with other people that are related to what you do and it makes the process a lot easier.

I’ve found, for fitness related topics, that’s not a bad way to go. I mean, it just depends on what your particular niche is. The more niche-out you are, the more detailed of a niche you are, the more specific your site is to one particular thing that may not be widely popular yet, the harder a time you’re going to have actually finding other sites that are related to you. But that’s probably a good thing.

What I’ve found is actually the best way to do a link exchange is not something that you actually attempt to do on your own, it’s just when it happens, it happens. When I first started my FitnessWebsiteDesign.com site, I had no sites linking to me at all. I’ve done absolutely nothing to attempt to get other sites to link to me, but over the course of time, as people find me in the search engines, they like what they see on the site. It goes back to the content being good and valuable, and they find value in what I have to say, and the articles that the site contains. So they just add links on their own to their website as kind of a service to their visitors.

If someone’s interested in - let’s say you’re a kettlebell training expert. Someone has a fitness training website and they just stumble across your kettlebell related website. They are going to link to you just so they can provide their visitors with more information about kettlebells, which may be something that they’re not an expert on, but you are. So instead of creating content all on their own, they just link to you instead. And over time, that’s just going to happen all on its own. Before you know it, you’ve got twenty or thirty sites, all related to what you have to do, linking to you. So, it kind of works itself out in the long run.

CM: What about the meta code, or the meta tech, going in and working on stuff like that? I know there’s a lot of search engine optimization experts who say they can go in and change your code and get you into the first page of Google. What are your thoughts on that?

AH: Well, if you look at the webmaster guidelines on Google, one thing that they tell you in their own words, is that any company out there who promises you or guarantees you that they can get you a top ten ranking at Google - turn around and run. And those are their exact words. You know, so many search engine optimization companies out there that promise you the world, and “we can get you listed in the top ten with whatever key word you want, just pay us the monthly fee of x number of dollars and we’ll get it done.”

The problem with that is - see, I do search engine optimization myself, but I have no direct control over what Google or Yahoo does. It’s not like I can pick up the phone and go, “All right, Google. I’ve got a new client who’s paying me $600 a month to make sure he scores well for the key word ‘personal trainer.’ So, if you don’t mind, can you go ahead and bump his site up?” I mean, they would laugh at me and hang up. I have no control over that at all. Each of the search engines has their own set of rules of how they rank sites. So, anyone that tells you they can get your site ranked well in all the major search engines for any given keyword is blowing smoke. They can’t do that. They have no more control over that then I do. It’s just absurd.

Most of the search engine optimization “experts” - they spend all their time analyzing the search results at Google and Yahoo and MSN, trying to figure out why the site that’s in the number one position is ranked higher than the site that’s in the number two position. They’ll spend hours and hours every single day, every day of the week, trying to figure this stuff out, and they’ll come up with a formula that they believe will help you get ranked well, as long as you follow the formula and put your keyword in this spot versus the spot that it’s already in, that you’re going to outrank five sites above you and you’ll jump in the search engine rankings. The only problem with that is, they change their algorithms to determine what sites rank well so often, and they have so many different variables that they’re actually looking at on each website, that you’re kind of just chasing your tale if you buy into all that.

It’s possible to change your website and jump from being number 150 to being ranked in the top 20, in a matter of a week or two. But it’s also possible that if they change the way their ranking website and what they’re looking at to determine who ranks where, it’s also possible for you to drop all the way back down to 150 overnight again. So, any kind of search engine optimization, by that means, is really a waste of time and money, too.

Really, you just need to understand what search engines are about, how they think, and give them what they want to see. If you look at it from a logical point of view, Google is in business, just like you and I are, to make a profit. And the way they make their money is through the advertising that they sell on their website. Now in order to sell that advertising space, they need a constant flow of visitors coming in to view that advertising. Because if people are coming and they’re seeing that advertising, and they click on it, then their advertisers are going to continue paying them money. Now the only way they can get that constant supply of traffic and keep their advertisers happy, is to provide a valuable service. So when you go to Google and you do a search for any keyword that you’re looking for information about, it’s in Google’s best interest to provide you with the information that you want, and make sure that that information - and all the sites they give you - are relevant to what you’re looking for.

So if, for example, you do a search for weight training exercises, and out of the top ten results, three pages are about Britney Spears, that’s not really giving what you want. So eventually, if that continues to happen, you’re going to leave Google and you’re going to start searching on Yahoo instead, which means over time, as a number of people start to leave that search engine, they are going to lose advertisers, they are going to lose money, they are going to go bankrupt. So the search engines really are trying to provide their users with valuable, relevant search results and in order to do that, they just follow a common sense principle.

All these factors that they look at to determine how they’re going to rank a page, there are over 200 different things that they look at, and no one on this planet knows exactly what they look at, and how much weight they give each piece. But it just stands to reason that if you write a page that’s about a personal trainer in Dallas, the title of the page should have the words “Dallas personal trainer” in it. Meta description tag, and meta keyword tag should both have “Dallas personal trainer” in it. The main headline should have “Dallas personal trainer” in it. Same with the actual text on the page and the links on the page. If they analyze your page and they see that “Dallas personal trainer” is in all the appropriate spots, from their point of view, it stands to reason this page is about a personal trainer in Dallas, and it will rank accordingly.

Now, there are little things that you can do to tweak it, to make it rank a little higher, but it’s not really all that important to do that, because as long as you’re in the top ten to twenty spot, you’re going to continue to get traffic. And if they decide tomorrow to change how they rank sites and place a little bit more weight on something and reduce the amount of weight they put on something else as being important, you’re still going to stay roughly in your same spot. But all the people that are paying for these search engine optimization experts, they are going to drop like a rock, because all the time and effort that the search engine expert put into getting their page rank according to what Google was doing this week, well when they’re not doing that anymore you drop like a rock out of the search engine rankings and you’re right back to where you started from. And you’ve got to start the whole process over again.

CM: Yeah, I’ve seen trainers come from out of no where, go up to number one on Google, and then disappear the next day and I’ve never seen them again.

AH: Yeah. And a lot of times when they do that they’re - Google is commonly referred to as black hat search engine optimization, which means they found some kind of flaw in the system that Google or Yahoo are using to analyze pages, and they worked their website to fit through that loophole, pretty much. Which means they jumped really high in the rankings, and like you said, they can come out of no where and be ranked number one, but eventually they realize that “oops, we made a mistake in our algorithm and we need to go back and change that.” And the minute they change that, you’re gone. If they catch you doing some kind of black hat trick that’s pretty much spamming their search engine and interfering with their ability to provide their customers with relevant search results, not only are you going to drop in ranking, they can actually ban you completely and remove your site from their index entirely. And that’s a bad, bad spot to be in.

CM: Yeah. This is great information, Allen. Let me ask you about sales copy. What is - like I said, most trainers, a lot of their sites are “welcome to my website,” and there’s no really headline that jumps out at you. There’s no benefits; maybe one testimonial, without a picture. There’s no call to action. Could you explain what a sales copy is and how a trainer can go about creating one?

AH: Sales copy - well, first of all, I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not all about you. It’s not all about your business or your product, or the service you provide, because you have to keep the customer’s mindset in your mind at all times. So, when they go to the search engine and they’re looking for something that’s fitness related, they don’t want to buy a product, they don’t want to buy a service, they don’t want to buy anything. They just want information. So, when they go looking for that information, nine times out of ten, they have a problem, whether they’re overweight, or get out of breath just climbing up the steps, or they just want to change the way their body looks or the way they feel. So, you have to kind of touch on those main benefits. You have to promise them - you need to have the number one benefit that you can provide them in your opening headline.

There’s an old marketing saying that goes like this, it says: “Tell me not how you and your product came to be, just tell me what the damn thing does for me.” That’s really all the people care about when they’re on your site. They want to know, “What’s in it for me? What can you do for me? Why should I spend the next ten minutes of my life reading this website, versus the two billion other websites that are out there?” If you don’t promise them a major benefit that tells them exactly “what’s in it for me, what am I going to get out of this,” they are going to leave. They are not going to read your sales copy. They are not going to look at the pictures or the testimonials, or anything like that. If you don’t tell them within three seconds, “what’s in it for me” they’re gone.

So, really what you need to do is list out all the benefits that working with you - if you’re selling personal training - you need to list out all the benefits that your target customer would get from working with you. If you’re selling an e-book or an exercise DVD, or whatever kind of product, what are the benefits that I would get if I buy that from you?

A lot of people get confused with features and benefits. A feature is what a product is or does, but a benefit is what it does for me. So, people really don’t care about features. You can say it’s a 32-page e-book. Well that’s great, but so what? What’s that going to do for me? Really, that’s one of the really good tricks for developing a strong list of benefits and really good sales copy, is to picture your target customer. By target customer I mean your most ideal, most likely to buy from you individual person. Picture them sitting across the table from you, and you read off the benefits that you just listed out on the piece of paper, that your benefits can provide them. Every benefit you list out, you just picture them asking you “so what?” Then you answer that. When you answer that, you’re going to have no choice but to word that in a way that’s going to work for them. You have to answer that “so what” question, and when you do, you just add that to your benefit list. You keep asking “so what” until it doesn’t make sense anymore.

Let me give you an example of that. Online personal training is pretty popular right now, and a high tech trainer is one of the most popular ways that trainers can utilize online personal training. So, one of the benefits of - maybe even one of the features of a high tech trainer - is it’s a complete online system for training clients on the internet. If you picture your customer asking you “so what,” then you have to be able to word that in a way that tells them why that’s important for them. One of those benefits might be, it’s cheaper than working with a personal trainer. I mean, you picture them saying, “so what,” and you say, “that means you can get better results than you are currently without the large investment of a personal trainer.”

Then you picture them asking “so what” again. You just keep answering that until it doesn’t make any sense. Eventually, you’ll get to the point where you can’t go much further than that. You get better results that you’re getting now without the investment. I mean, if they say “so what” to that, then I don’t know what to tell those people. They’re not interested to begin with. See what I mean?

CM: That is awesome. I love that, by the way. “Well, so what?” That’s great, Allen. How about testimonials? How important are testimonials, and what should a testimonial include? Should it just be general? Should it be specific? Should it have a picture? What should it be like?

AH: Testimonials are super important. I mean, it’s one thing for me to tell you how great my product, or how great my service is. It’s a completely other thing for some of my customers, who have already purchased the product or service, to tell you what kind of results they got from it. So, basically, testimonials are a form of social proof. It’s saying, “not only am I telling you how good it is, but so are all these people that have already used it.”

A good testimonial, has to, number one has to stress a major benefit of what you offer. So, again, the testimonial has to come from a person that has already used your product or service, but it has to tell them what they got from it. Instead of “what’s in it for me,” it’s “what I got from it, here’s what you’re probably going to get too.”

Beyond that, it has to be verifiable. It has to give the impression that it’s a real testimonial. I know you’ve seen them all over the internet, and even on infomercials on t.v., it’ll say “this product was absolutely fantastic, it helped me lose 15 pounds in two weeks,” Suzie Q from Pennsylvania. Well, who is in the world is Suzie Q, and where at in Pennsylvania? She’s probably thinking, “Is this a real testimonial, or is this something that you just made up?” So, the testimonials, in order for them to appear real, they have to give the person their real name, first and last name. It would be even better if you could put a picture of that person there to make it feel more like it’s a real person and not just some arbitrary text that you typed in on your own.

To go one step further from that, make it verifiable by putting the person’s email address under their name. Now, I wouldn’t include that as an actual working link, where if you click on that email address it will open up your email software and you can send them an email. Just have it typed out under there where it’s not a link. That way, if I have any doubt that your testimonial is real, or if I think your product may be exactly what I’m looking for, if I want to, I can copy and paste that person’s email address into my email software and ask them, “Did you really provide this testimonial? Was the product really as good as you said it was? What kind of results did you get from it?”

Now ninety-nine out of a hundred people are not going to do that, but just knowing that I could if I wanted to is a big relief to me. I know you’re not going to put that testimonial there, and give me the ability to check on it and make sure it’s real, if it’s not. So, now I know in the back of my mind that just because I have the ability to check that if I want to, it probably is real. And that gives me some comfort.

CM: Yeah. I’ve found that true to myself in my own sales copy on my personal training page I have. I have around 40 testimonials right now, with pictures. Some of them have before and after pictures, and I’ve just gotten amazing results with that. As soon as anyone I’m training tells me that they’re happy with the results, or as soon as I see the results, or anything, I’m on them, “Hey, can I get a testimonial from you.” And I carry a digital camera and a voice recorder with me, because I’ve found that is the quickest way to just, boom-bam, right there take a picture of them, have them talk into the voice recorder, and those testimonials I just find to be gold.

AH: Absolutely. I mean, when it goes back to social proof, it’s way better if you have 48 of your clients telling me how great you are, then it is for you to be telling me how great you are. Because, of course you think you’re great, but if you’ve got other people to back that up and say, “He really is what he says he is,” then I’m much more likely to believe them because they don’t have a vested interest in getting my business. You do.

CM: Yeah. Exactly. Anything else that a sales copy should contain? How about a call to action, or what else would you suggest?

AH:  The approach that I normally go by when I’m writing sales copy is an acronym called AIDA. That stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. In order for - let’s say my most wanted response, the action I most want you to take is to pull out your credit card and buy my e-book. In order for me to get to the point where you’re willing to part with your hard earned money for my e-book, I first have to catch your attention. If I can’t catch your attention, then I have no chance of prying that credit card out of your wallet. It’s just not going to happen. So, like we already discussed, the headline has to offer a major benefit that captures my attention, that tells me “this is what’s in it for me, that’s exactly what I was looking for, so I think I’m going to read the next couple paragraphs and see what this is about.”

Once I start reading the sales copy, it needs to build my interest, which is the “I.” The Interest - even if you catch my attention - you can put something really flashy on the screen and catch my attention, when I start to read, if I’m not interested in it, you’re not getting my credit card number. So, to build the interest, you have to keep expanding on the major benefit that you just promised in your opening headline. The remaining sub-headlines need to promise some other important benefits to me. Then the text underneath each of those sub-headlines need to expand on that major benefit. Tell me what’s in it for me, what am I going to get out of this.

As you start to develop my interest and promise all these benefits to me, then I’m going to start to desire your product. I’m going to want it. Now, people don’t buy things because they need them. They buy them because they want them. If we bought based on need, we would all eat bread and water, and that’s it. We need bread and water to live, because we need food in our belly. But sometimes I want a T-bone steak, and what if I said, “I don’t have to have a T-bone steak. It’s not required for me to live, but, damn it, I want one every once in a while.”

So, if you can build the benefits in your sales copy to not only get my attention and get me interested, but get me to want what you have, the next step is easy. You just give me a call to action. “If you really want this, all you have to do is click on this link and order,” or “All you have to do is fill out this form with your name and email address and download your free e-book,” or whatever your action that you want them to take is.

Normally when I build a website, the first thing that I decide on is what is my most wanted response? What do I most want you to do when you come to my website? Sometimes that will be to make a direct purchase of the product that I have. Sometimes my most wanted response is to get you to sign up for my newsletter, or to get you on my mailing list in some way, shape, or form. Sometimes that’s for the newsletter, sometimes it’s to download the free e-book, or download the free audio interview that I did with [indistinct]. The whole sales message is geared to get you to deliver that most wanted response, which is basically just your call to action.

CM: I can feel the difference. When I read a sales copy that isn’t very passionate, or structured very well, it doesn’t really go through the steps, compared to if I read something by Yanick Silver or Dan Kennedy, I get the sense of urgency. I have to have this product. It’s just a dramatic difference compared to when I read weak sales copy of if it’s really solid. It must be able to increase response hundreds of times over, compared to something weak without those points.

AH: The real difference between the strong sales copy and the weak sales copy is your mindset as you write it. Now, if you’re writing the sales copy and your sole reason for doing that is because you want to make more money. You want to talk me out of my credit card number so you can line your pocket. That’s going to show through in your sales copy. But if you keep you keep your visitor, or your customer, always in mind, and gear everything you write based on what they want - what’s in it for them, what are the problems that they need help with, what are the solutions they are looking for - and write everything about them, write everything geared and angled completely to them - what they want, what they need, what they’re after - and that’s the difference right there.

CM: Wow. This is great stuff, Allen. You truly are a master and this interview will definitely help increase personal training sales for a lot of guys out there. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we wrap this up?

AH: No, I think that’s a pretty good baseline. I don’t want to get too detailed, then we confuse people more than we help them.

CM: Sure. How can people get a hold of you, find your websites with your products and services and stuff?

AH: My main website is www.FitnessWebsiteDesign.com. There you can find information that will help you search engine optimize your website. It will help you write better sales copy. It will help you generate more leads and referrals, and more sales from your existing site. If you’re just starting out, it’ll show you some key things to focus on when you’re first creating your website. I also have a newsletter there that I send out weekly to bi-weekly, and it’s jam-packed with free information. And you can get that at FitnessWebsiteDesign.com/newsletter.html.

CM: Awesome. Allen, I really want to thank you for your time.

Work Less and Make More

Chris McCombs is fitness business and mixed martial arts marketing specialist, and helps many business to get more personal training referrals. If you liked this internet marketing interview with Allen Hill you might like the Pat Rigby Personal Trainer Marketing and the Bedros Keuilan Fitness Marketing on this blog as well. These guys are some of the best in the industry.