Craig Ballantyne on Marketing Health and Fitness Information Products

Recently fitness information marketer Craig Ballantyne, creator of the Turbulence Training Program answered a few questions for me about how health and fitness professionals can create and market their own information products. Craig is definitely the man and I would absorb everything he says if you're interested to fully leveraging your time

What kind of income potential is there in creating and selling your own fitness ebook?

The potential quickly overcomes the potential amount of money you could make training full-time. According to ACE and CNN Money, the average salary of a trainer is between $40-50K.

Now if you sell an e-book at $40, that means you have to sell 1000 copies in a year to make that much money. But if you write one e-book, you can probably write another. Put those together into a package at $70 for two (as I do on www.TurbulenceTraining.com), and now you only have to sell around 600 to make over $40K.

Add another couple of e-books, or maybe a DVD or audio series, or write another set of e-books for another niche, and you bring down your sales requirements even less.

Yes, it takes work to write an e-book. But once you write one, you’ll find it much easier to put together another. And once it’s made, you can sell it for life without having to do anything to it ever again.

Does this add credibility to a trainer?

Honestly, I think the other way around is more important. It’s easier to sell an e-book if you have credibility, than to get credibility from writing an e-book.

As it stands, you still need to have a physical book to establish credibility. No one is going to bring you on their show because you have an e-book. Now, you could self-publish a couple of physical copies of your e-book to send to radio stations or bring on shows, but again, the credibility is likely only going to be there if you have a physical product.

My credibility stems from my work in the magazines. That helps me sell e-books – not the other way around.

What are the quickest easiest ways to go about creating the ebook? (Please can include as many different ways as you’d can)

The most important is to leverage your time. All those emails you’ve answered for friends, family, or clients should be saved and compiled into the content section of your e-book. Then take your successful workouts, modify them so that they can easily be done by your target audience, and that’s pretty much it.

I deal with a target market of busy people. And busy people don’t need to read about every theory on fat loss and muscle growth or every different muscle fiber type and what it does. They just want to know what to do, how to do it, and how long it’s going to take. So that’s what I give them in my e-book. You shouldn’t feel that you need to write 300-page e-books, unless you can prove that your target audience expects it.

Give them meat, not fluff.

That’s pretty much all I have for creating e-books. Give them only the relevant info, give them the workouts, give them the exercise photos and descriptions, the meal plans if applicable, and give them a great offer. That’s it.

How do you go about marketing the ebook?

There are many ways, but the most important is to market it to your list. Having a list is more important than having an e-book.

With a list, you can sell other people’s e-books. If you just have an e-book but no list, you won’t sell anything.

So it’s less about marketing your e-book, and more about building your list. And you can do that with…
•    teleseminars
•    joint venture
•    building an affiliate sales team
•    submitting articles to ezine directories
•    submitting articles or interviews to other people’s lists
•    participating on forums
•    blogging
•    using google ad words and other Pay-per-click
•    setting up your site for proper search engine optimization

Once you have a list, send out newsletters with good content and a little promo for your book.

It’s also helpful to have a big official release launch for your book. I do these once in a while for new sites. Get some bonuses, get a team of affiliates, make an extraordinary offer to everyone’s list, and that will bring sales.

What kind of website works best to sell the product?

Probably one page sales sites. By that I mean one of those longer sales copy pages that just focuses on selling a single product.

It’s probably best to avoid focusing on “brochure” sites (i.e. where you have many different products for sale) because a “confused mind will say no”. That means, with so many choices, they won’t make a choice at all and will just leave your site.

I have both types of sites, but for different reasons…plus I have a lot of products, so that makes a brochure sales site worthwhile as a back-end offering (plus the membership section I offer).

What’s the value in having a newsletter for people who don’t buy right away?

Clearly, to offer them again in the future.

But you also want to use it to build a relationship. It can’t be an ad every time you contact them. But it can be a good newsletter full of content with a call to action at the end of the newsletter to either…
a)    buy your product
b)    buy an affiliate’s product

Plus, there’s nothing wrong with just helping people out with good content, and becoming known as a good, “go-to”, no B.S. source for fitness and health…something that is relatively hard to find in this wild, wild world of online fitness info.

How much of the process can you automate and how do you go about doing that?

You can automate a LOT of this, however I choose not to automate much at all.

You can set up autoresponders of 1, 5, 10, or dozens of emails that go out to each subscriber when they sign-up on your site. You create the messages in advance, put them in the autoresponder, and you don’t even have to touch anything again (although you will probably want to tweak it based on your results).

On the other hand, you can write fresh content for each newsletter or contact you send to your readership. Personally, I think this will be a more successful method, because it allows a more “personal touch” based on feedback from readers.

Test what works for you.

What are things that you should test to help maximize your sales?

Test everything.

First, find out your website conversion rate (how many sales divided by how many visitors). If it’s below 1% consistently, you need to work on your ad copy.

Test your newsletter headlines – see what words increase open rates and sales.

Test newsletter length.

Test HTML vs text newsletters. Text is easier to get through, but maybe your niche market needs to see graphics in the newsletter so you’ll need to use HTML.

Test your ad copy headline. The headline is the most important part of your sales copy. If you don’t have a good headline, people won’t read any more.

Test your offer. Maybe you need more bonuses. Maybe you need to increase the value of the offer.

Test your P.S. The second most read part of the sales letter is the P.S.

How much should you charge for the ebook?

I’ve sold e-books from $9.99 to $67. I’ve bought others that cost more. I suppose it all depends on the problem you are solving, and how well you convince the customer that your e-book is worth it.

But generally, the highest selling fat loss books go for $39.95. If I see one for less than $20, I tend to think it must not be very good.

On the other hand, I sell monthly 4-week workouts for $10-25. But they are only 4-week programs, and each month I write on a different theme based on some successful workouts I’ve used with clients in the past.

How can you use affiliates to sell your product?

I go through clickbank for my affiliate process, but you can use the built-in affiliate methods from 1-shopping cart or Website Wizard.

What you need to do is get your webpage set up, make your offer, and then start contacting other fitness (or related sites) about selling your product.

In addition, you should provide your affiliates with some content to help promote your product. For example, I have an entire affiliate section built at www.turbulencetraining.com with articles and newsletter content for affiliates to put in their emails and on their blogs and websites.

If you don’t help out your affiliates, it will be hard for them to help out you.

Craig Ballantyne is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist and writes for Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Maximum Fitness, Muscle and Fitness Hers, and Oxygen magazines. His trademarked Turbulence Training fat loss workouts have been featured multiple times in Men’s Fitness and Maximum Fitness magazines, and have helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat, gain muscle, and get lean in less than 45 minutes three times per week. For more information on the Turbulence Training workouts that will help you burn fat without long, slow cardio sessions or fancy equipment, visit:

www.TurbulenceTraining.com (1-page sales site)
www.WorkoutManuals.com (brochure site)
www.TTMembers.com (Membership site)

 

Chris McCombs specializes in Marketing Ideas for Personal Training for time management strategies for fitness business owners