7 Steps To Becoming a Successful Fitness Writer

This is a fitness marketing interview with Amanda Vogel. Amanda, who are you, and what do you do?

I'm a fitness professional; I've been for 14 or 15 years now, and, after I completed my Master’s degree in human kinetics, I decided that I wanted to share a lot of the information I got from my thesis, the topic being “body image and the role of the fitness instructor.”

I wanted to share that information with other fitness professionals, so, that's how I started getting into writing articles and figuring out how to pitch article ideas to editors. And it just kind of snowballed from there, to the point where I found that I was really enjoying writing articles and decided to move a little bit more into being a fitness writer as a career, as opposed to working full-time in the fitness industry.

So, I certainly still do stuff in the fitness industry, and I call myself a fitness professional, but I'm also a health and fitness writer. And I write for fitness trade and consumer magazines.

I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and I also own a writing and editing service called Active Voice, which helps fitness professionals and fitness organizations improve the quality and effectiveness of their writing and marketing material. As part of that business, I offer a free e-book called 51 Need-To-Know Writing and Marketing Tips For Fitness Pros, which is available on my website, www.activevoice.ca.

I think that sums it up.

How can a personal trainer get him- or herself to celebrity trainer status?

Wow. Okay, that's a huge question, and the good news is, I have a number of answers that I think can satisfy that question.

I think probably the best place for fitness professionals - personal trainers who want to bring themselves to some sort of celebrity status - and, just let me define what we're talking about by celebrity status, here: It could be anything from being a household name and being very recognizable because you're on TV or in fitness DVDs, to being recognized because you're mentioned a lot in magazines, to being recognized just in your community, which can certainly be enough for a lot of personal trainers.

You could be recognized in just your specific area of specialization, and I'm going to be talking about specialization a little bit later. So, it can be, sort of, a whole spectrum of what “fitness celebrity” is, and what's going to work for you. You don't necessarily have to be in a national magazine, or have to be on TV, or have your own fitness DVD to achieve some level of fitness celebrity.

It can be simply in your community. But no matter what your level of fitness celebrity, the idea is to really get your name, and also, preferably, your face, your image, known to people. That would, of course, be the people you want to become familiar with you: your prospects and your clients, and that kind of thing.

The idea is to have some sort of platform as a fitness professional, and by that, I mean, people know who you are, they're familiar with your work, they're familiar with what your expertise is, and they're familiar with your specialization in some area.

So you might be the “go-to” person that people think of for: "We want to do something on in-home training or online training. This is definitely the person to go to." So that's the idea of creating a platform, so that people really know who you are. They’re familiar with your image.

So how do you do that? That's what I want to talk about here today. And what I'm going do is kind of break it down for personal trainers in terms of seven points, seven steps that they can take to create more a celebrity image for themselves.

Step 1: Specialize

And the first step is something that I alluded to just a moment ago, and that is to create some sort of specialization by boosting your visibility in a niche market. So the reason I'm suggesting this as the first step to creating a celebrity image is because we all know that the fitness industry is very competitive. There are lots of personal trainers out there doing very, very similar things, and it can be really confusing for consumers to - "I know that I want to find a personal trainer," they might say, "but I have no idea which one is better than the other. Where do I look? How do I get started with all that?" So if you can actually present yourself as someone who specializes in one or more particular areas, that helps consumers find you and narrow their search down a little bit.

What it also does is help people in the media - which I'm going to be talking about a little bit later - identify you as a possible expert source for the pieces that they're working on. So instead of: "here's a million trainers to choose from." They say: "Hey, this person seems to be someone to really go to for information specifically on online training," or anything, training kids, training brides, specializing in fitness for women, specializing in fitness for families. Any number of things you can choose to specialize in.

There's a huge market for various types of specialization, but it helps media people also narrow down their search for certain expert sources if they see your name popping up a lot in reference to certain types of fitness, whether it's kids’ fitness, or brides’ fitness, or online training.

So I'm not saying that you have to specialize and that's all you do, like you would only do online training or you would only do at home training. You can certainly keep a more general client base, but it really helps to align yourself with a certain specialty to make you stand out, and that's what's going to help you create that celebrity image. So that's our step one.

Question?

Yeah, how can one go about having more than one niche? How would you suggest - I actually kind of want to focus on two niches. One would be the busy, kind of wealthy, executive male who's between the ages of 35 and 60, and who's already very successful. And I also want to focus on women between, say, 20 and 40 who want to lose between 5 and 30 pounds. Not really obese, but they want to get in a lot better shape. How would I go about focusing on those two niches?

Obviously you would start collecting - or not collecting - you would start going to clients or prospects who fall into those categories. So you would start actively marketing yourself to those areas. And my suggestion is - you bring up a good question because it allows me to give some advice that I think would help a lot of personal trainers, because I see it as a major problem. And that is, in their marketing, a lot of personal trainers tend to try and please everybody all at once with the same marketing piece. So they're trying to reach too many audiences with the same message. If you want to specialize in different niches, my recommendation is to create marketing pieces that speak specifically to those different groups. So rather than trying to connect with busy executives and women at the same time.

As for 20s to 40s. Those groups might definitely overlap, but you might have some differences as well. So my suggestion would be to create marketing pieces and figure out how to reach those markets with your materials with slightly different language, slightly different messages, and bringing up slightly different benefits. Does that answer your question, does that help?

Step 2: Writing Articles

My second step, then. I talked a little bit about creating specializations, in addition to perhaps doing more general training. This second thing that I would suggest if you're wanting to pursue a celebrity image in the fitness industry is to figure out how you're going to get into the media, and that is through publicity and writing articles. So I'm going to talk first about writing articles.

There's a lot of choices for people. Again, at the beginning of our conversation I talked about, well, you could become a fitness celebrity on more of a national level and be in national magazines or on television, or you can just do it more in your community and be quite well known in your community. And that might be all you need because you're going to be getting a lot of clients that way. So the same thing applies for writing articles.

You could try and hit a more national or international level, or you could stick with the publications that are specific to your community and really get your name known in them. Whatever you choose, the process is kind of the same for getting your articles accepted by editors; however, people should know that when you're approaching, obviously, some of the national and international magazines that it's highly competitive, and that there's a lot more scrutiny usually from the editors about the information that you're providing. So it's a lot harder to get into and it's more competitive, but it's still worth a shot because it's definitely something that a lot of people, a lot of the clients I've worked with, have been able to achieve.

So I guess - if you could guide me a little bit, Chris, what would be the first thing that you would want to know about getting your articles published?

How do you get them published? Where do you go? Let's say a trainer has an article. How big should the article be and where should he or she focus on getting it published? How should he or she go about that? Is there a certain process?

 I’m glad that you brought up the question in that way, because here's my biggest piece of advice for trying to get your articles published, whether it's your local newspaper, a local magazine - and especially for a national or international magazine: Nine times out of ten, you don't actually want to write the article.

You want to pitch the idea of the article to an editor without actually having written it. That's not to say that if you do have an article written, it's always a horrible idea to just present that to the editor. I mean, you could in some situations say, "Here, I have this article written. Is it something you would be interested in?" But especially when you're wanting to deal with these larger competitive magazines, anything from Shape to Men's Fitness to Health, Cooking Light, any of those magazines that you're seeing on newsstands, the standard approach is really to go to those editors with what's called a query letter. And that's simply, in one to two pages, let's say, pitching your article idea to them saying, "Here's the article idea I have. Is it something that would interest you? Would you like to buy it?"

So the reason I’m suggesting this is, number one, it's absolutely standard practice to do it that way. A lot of times editors simply do not have the time to read an entire article. Sometimes I have people pitch me articles and say, "Is this something you would be able to use for the website?" I edit a website so I'm always looking for articles for that. I just don't have time to read the entire article sometimes. I want them to sum it up for me in a number of sentences and lay out for me exactly what the article will be so that I can just go through it really quickly. It'll take me 30 seconds as opposed to taking me several minutes, which a lot of editors just don't even have.

So the first step is to approach them with a query letter, because 1) editors don't have time to read the entire article, and 2) even if you wrote an article that they really loved the idea for, chances are it's going to need to be re-written anyway, either because of a certain word count they need that might not match the article length you have, or because they want it in a certain voice that will match their particular magazine (that's pretty important). It's hard to write an article and then submit it to 100 places and have 100 places say, "Oh, yes, this is perfect for our magazine." It just doesn’t work like that.

And then, finally, the third reason would probably be because editors tend to have their own ideas about things that they would like to put in the article. So they might think, "Okay, this is a good idea, we like it, but instead of XYZ we prefer ABC in this section." So you'll probably end up having to re-write a large portion of it anyway. So that kind of sums up why you want to approach editors specifically with a query letter. It's going to take you much less time than writing an entire piece anyway, so that's to your benefit.

Is this an email or an actual paper letter?

You could do either.

Is it good to do both of them?

I would just do one. I mean, what I do, I send my queries pretty much exclusively by email, but if I’m approaching a new magazine that I haven't worked with before I like to send them clips of my articles in the mail, snail mail. Now a clip of an article is just a good quality photocopy of articles you've had published in the past. So I like to send them some clips in the mail, and at that time I might include a hard copy of the query that I've already sent through email. But most of this stuff is done through email these days. Most editors prefer that, and it's really a lot quicker and easier for you. You don't have to spend a lot of time dealing with your printer, getting paper, doing the postage, figuring out all that kind of stuff. So email is probably the way I would suggest doing it.

In order to figure out all the details of your query letter, the first place I would suggest people start is by studying whatever media outlet they want to get involved with. If you want to approach a magazine, it's a great idea in most situations to know what that magazine is, who their audience is, and what kind of articles they tend to buy. You might be pitching a really great workout piece that shows six different exercises for such-and-such, but if that magazine doesn't include any workout pieces whatsoever, you're wasting your time. It benefits you to know that in advance.

The second thing that you want to do in your query letter is try and come up with something interesting that's going to catch an editor's attention, something maybe that they haven't seen before or thought of before. It might be something that you've seen before and thought of many times because you work in the fitness industry. But it might not be something they're thinking of. So that's really the idea of what the magazine industry calls “packaging” a story, or packaging an idea. You want to create an interesting package around your story, so it is something that appears to be a new concept, or something that is very timely or associated with possibly a news story that's happening at that particular time.

I'm going to give you one example of what I mean by packaging. A few years ago, I received a press release for a new type of stability ball that had come out. Now I could have approached an editor and said, "Here's a new type of stability ball that came out. Is there a possibility of writing a story on this new type of stability ball? Or writing a story about stability ball exercises?" Well, at that time, a lot of stories had already been done on stability ball exercises, so it was kind of a little bit of an overused topic.

What I did, though, is I packaged the story so that it became about new types of stability balls. I called it "The Next Generation of Fitness Balls.” Instead of just talking about what is a normal stability ball, or here are stability ball exercises that people might have seen before, I packaged the story around the idea of, here's a new type of stability ball. Here's a few other different types that fall into the category of stability training or stability balls, but they’re not that traditional fitness ball that people are seeing in their gyms. These ones are a little bit different and here's why: this reason, this reason, and this reason, and here's where to get them. So the general story was about stability balls, but the package was more around this concept of the next generation of stability balls, and why these ones are a little bit different. Does that make sense?

Yeah, perfect sense.

Okay, so that's why I'm talking about packaging. Then, finally, after you study the magazine or the newspaper that you want to get into and you've packaged your idea in some sort of interesting way, then you, of course, want to send the query. And the idea would be to send the query to the right editor at the magazine. And here's a word of advice: It's probably not the Editor-in-Chief. If it's a big magazine, you definitely don't really want to approach the Editor-in-Chief. If it's a very small magazine, a local community publication, then most definitely the main editor, the one that would be at the top of the masthead of the magazine is the one that you might approach. And the masthead is that page in a magazine where you will see the list of all the editors that work at that magazine.

So in a nutshell that's how to get started writing an article for a magazine.

Step 3: Get Publicity

Now, I've talked about the idea of fitness professionals being the authors of articles that appear in magazines or newspapers. Now I want to move on to what step three would be for creating this image of fitness celebrity for yourself. And that is to become a fitness expert in the media through getting publicity. Now this is where you would be what people in the media call an “expert source.” You're not the one who's writing the article, you're the one who would appear in the article written by somebody else with maybe your exercise suggestions, or a quotation that you said, or your ideas. It's where, you know, everyone's seen in magazines where they say, "Personal trainer so-and-so from New York City at this particular studio offers these three suggestions for workouts you can do in your backyard," or whatever. That's what I’m talking about by expert source. So that's another great way to get your name in the media without having to write the articles, because articles, of course, can often be quite competitive in some of these huge national magazines, and it might be a little bit easier to get your name into, at least, a little blurb in a big magazine. So becoming a fitness expert in the media is our third step.

There's a number of ways you can do this. You can sit back and kind of wait for someone of the media to come to you, and that might happen or it might never happen. So my suggestion is to always be very pro-active and contact members of the media yourself. You can do that with press releases, or what I like to suggest often is to approach people with a tailored pitch specifically for their magazine. So you've already been studying the magazine, hopefully, and you might approach them with, "Hey, here's an idea that I think you might be able to use, and I would be more than happy to be an expert source for that piece."

Can you go into a press release a little bit?

Sure. A press release - I just finished talking about a pitch and tailoring a pitch to a magazine. That would be really specific, where you're offering a specific story idea to a specific editor at a specific time. A press release tends to be a little bit more of a blanket approach to contacting the media. You might send a press release to 5, 10, 20, 100 media outlets all at the same time. And what a press release does is just really convey some sort of news-type information, maybe about you, your services, your business. It can also hint at or even pitch a story idea; however, considering the fact that it's going to hundreds of people, possibly, I find it a little bit more effective to send a very specific pitch with a story idea to specific magazines and keep your press releases for stuff that's a little bit more general.

A press release is a good way to let members of the media become aware of you. Maybe you have just come out with a new fitness DVD. That's a good way to let them know about it is to send a press release letting them know this new fitness DVD on, whatever, going with the theme from before, Training in Your Backyard, is now out and available. And this personal trainer is available to speak on the matter and for interviews and to act as an expert source. So that's one thing you can use a press release for.

The format of a press release is pretty simple. I mean, it would be easier - it's hard to explain verbally, it's kind of easier to just eyeball it, but it usually has - it always has - a really strong headline that is going to let people reading that press release immediately understand what the point of that press release is, and the headline really needs to grab attention. I get so many press releases that have really boring headlines, or headlines that name some obscure company and how they've maybe merged with some other company or something like that. And while there's a time and place for those press releases, often I don't know who those companies are. The merge means absolutely nothing to me, or whatever news that's being conveyed in the headline means nothing to me, so I don't bother reading the rest of the press release. I just delete it.

So understand that when you send a press release, people are not clamoring over themselves to read from start to finish. They might just glance at your headline. They might not even read the whole thing. They're just going to glance at it, and if certain things stand out to them then they're going to take notice and maybe start reading a little bit more. So the headline needs to be really attention-grabbing.

And think about this when you're writing the headline: Who's going to be reading it? Editors are going to be reading it, members of the media are going to be reading it, but ultimately they're reading that information because they're trying to figure out if it's something that they want to pass on. Is this worthy of passing on to our readership, to our audience? Is this something that our readers and audience members want to know about, or would be interested to know about, or should know about? So always kind of have that in the back of your mind. The headline might be of interest to you, but is it of interest to the end user, so called, which is the reader and the audience member, perhaps, in a TV show.

And then from there, after the headline, you just maybe write one to two pages of a press release. I like to keep mine to about a page, and I like to put most of the pertinent information, or all of the pertinent information, in the very first paragraph of that press release, because often what some media outlets will do - especially if you're sending a press release to a local newspaper - is they might print your press release word for word, but if they don't have enough space they might start cutting off the bottom. So the bottom part of your press release should be reserved for stuff that's really not all that important, maybe a paragraph about who you are as a trainer, or your business, or a little bit more general information. The more specific stuff should be at the very top where, even if they printed just the headline and the first paragraph of your press release, readers of that press release will have all the pertinent information that they need. So that's a press release in a nutshell there.

Step 4: Recycle Your Publicity

So I've talked about writing articles, I've talked about being an expert source in the media, now I want to talk about step four of creating fitness celebrity, which is recycle your publicity. And that is huge. I think a lot of fitness professionals, they might get a media hit, they might get an article published, and then they kind of go, "That's neat." And they see it on TV, or they see it in a magazine that it's published in, and then they file it away and that's that. That's the end of it.

But what you really want to do is take full advantage of any kind of media promotion that you get by recycling that media promotion, making sure your prospects know about it, making sure your clients know about it, making sure your peers know about it, putting that kind of stuff in your studio so that when people come in they say, "This person is media savvy. This person's been in the media before. She's been quoted as an expert source in whatever large magazine." Or, "This person is a columnist for my local newspaper." All that kind of stuff is not only going to help  breed your familiarity with the people you want to be familiar to, but it also helps to build your credibility as a fitness professional and in the fitness industry. It helps you stand out.

There's no sense getting a media hit and then just filing it away and not telling anybody about it. You want to make it known as much as possible. And there are tons of different things you can do, but just off the top of my head, some of the things you can do are obviously you want to put that on your website. Let people who are visiting your website know that you've just been interviewed for CNN or whatever it is - it could be your local newspaper, anything you have, mention it on your website. You can hang up - say you had an article published in a nice magazine, or you've been quoted as an expert source in a newspaper or magazine, make a good quality photocopy of that, or even just tear out the page from the magazine and frame it. Put it in your personal training studio. Let people coming into your facility see that you've been in the media. Mention it in your newsletter. Mention it in your email signature. When you visit fitness forums, mention it in your signature there, that you've been a featured fitness expert in XYZ magazine, October 2007, or whatever the case may be. That kind of stuff is really important to just snowball on even a few media hits.

Another thing that you want to do in terms of - I've been talking about this idea of recycling the publicity that you get by showing other people when you've been printed in a magazine, or even if you've shown up on television, and you mention that on your website. But here's another thing that you can do that I guarantee you most fitness professionals do not think to do. And I know this because I've worked in the media for many years now and I've interviewed hundred of fitness professionals. And that is, recycle your publicity by keeping in touch with the media people that you come in contact with.

So what happens to me a lot of time is, I'll do an interview with somebody, they've been a great interview or whatever, and then I don't hear from them again. Or I might forget that I enjoyed the interview that I did with them, or their name just kind of gets lost in my email inbox and I just don't think to use them as a source again. But if they were more at the top of my mind I probably would. So keeping in contact with members of the media that you have worked with in the past is a great way to recycle your publicity without having to go to the trouble of then making new contacts with new media people. It's exactly the same concept as keeping your current clients happy so that they keep renewing their personal training sessions with you, versus having to go out into the community and find new people to bring in.

The way you can keep in contact with members of the media is as simple as sending them story ideas every once in a while, keeping them on your press release list, sending a thank-you card after a piece they've written with you in that piece comes out. It's really simple stuff. It's just kind of staying at the top of their minds. I'm not talking about being a nuisance and contacting them every week, or even every month necessarily, but just sort of staying on their radar, that's what I'm talking about.

Step 5: Be a Presenter

Okay, step number five, and this is something that takes a little bit of time, but I think it's worth it if you really want to cultivate this idea of a celebrity image in the fitness industry, and that is to apply to present at major fitness conferences, and also, to do as much as you can to present in your community. What this does is, again, makes your face familiar to people. It makes your name more familiar to people. They're going to see your name in a fitness conference brochure, they're going to see your name in the community newspaper, because you're speaking at the local library or at a business lunch meeting, or something like that; so, again, it's this idea of keeping yourself familiar with the people that you want to be familiar with - your prospects, your clients, and that kind of thing.

Do as much as you can to present at conferences and in your community. I guess my piece of advice for this would be to go back to my first point, which was to create some sort of niche for yourself and a specialization. Again, presenting at conferences, and even, presenting in your community can be sometimes quite competitive. There's, maybe, a lot of personal trainers who want to be speaking to the same groups that you want to speak to in the town or city that you live in.

At fitness conferences, of course, they get hundreds of applications. If you can present something to conference organizers or to people who are interested in bringing speakers in for their lunch meetings, or at the library, or anything else - if you can present them with really specialized information rather than general topics, you might be more successful with piquing their interest, and finding yourself at these conferences presenting, and speaking in your community. That goes back to thinking about how can I position myself a little bit differently than the other personal trainers who I'm competing with. And that's really what I'm talking about, in general, here today.

So, step number five is to apply and present at conferences and in your community. It sets the stage for your role as a fitness expert and a fitness educator.

Step 6: Have a Website

Step number six is to have a professional-looking website - a professional-looking website that includes key ingredients. This is, again, for people who want to cultivate a celebrity image. When I'm surfing around for possible expert sources that I can use for my articles, I'm probably going to check them out first before I contact them, unless - and this is key to what I'm talking about here - unless I already know them for some reason. I'm familiar with them. It doesn't mean I have to personally know them, but I'm familiar with them. I know their name. I know they're affiliated with organizations that are reputable, and that kind of thing. What I’m talking about is getting your name, your image, familiar with people who you want to be familiar with your name and image.

If I don't really know that expert source, but I'm thinking of using somebody, I'm going to check them out first. And the first place I’m going to go to check them out is their website. What does their website look like? What do they have on their website? Does their website look pretty professional? What kinds of things are they offering? What's the language like on their website? All that kind of stuff I’m looking for. A professional-looking website is great, not only obviously for attracting prospects and clients, but even for attracting members of the media if you're sending them there. You're probably going to have your website address on your press releases, and then your article pitches and things like that, so people are going to be looking at your website from the media.

Now if you want to really position yourself as somebody who is an expert source and you want to get a lot of publicity, my strong suggestion is to have this key ingredient on your website, and that is some sort of media section. And it might be just a page that's called "Press" or "Press Room" or "Media Room," something like that. I always feel great as a fitness writer when I go onto someone's website and I can go directly there. Now this is not a make-or-break thing. I will certainly use someone as a source who doesn’t have a Media Room on their website, but if it's something that you're really focusing on publicity, creating a Media Room is really going to help with that because I know right away that this person obviously has some media experience, they have a Media Room, they have somewhere for press to go. I'm going to go check it out.

So here's what you need to know about your Media Room. There's a number of things that I would strongly suggest people put in their Media Room. Actually, you don't have to list all of these things in your Media Room, these are some ideas that you can put in your Media Room. And that would be a list of your most recent media occurrences. If you have a lot of media experience and it's going way back five, six, seven years, I probably don't want to see that entire list of hundred of media hits, probably just your most recent or your best ones just to give a general idea. It doesn’t have to be every one. You can put recent press releases in there. You should probably put your bio in there; product or company information if that's relevant; photos of yourself, especially photos that the media can use; articles written by or about you, but if you do that, if there are articles written about you, it's a very, very good idea that you have the publication's and especially the author's permission to put those articles on your website. They don't belong to you, they belong to the publication or the author. So that's something you want to get permission for.

Here's a good one: suggested interview questions. These are things that members of the media could ask you if they're going to use you as an expert source in a piece. It's a really nice idea to put that in because, first of all, it saves members of the media time, they don't have to cook up these interview questions on their own. Second, it helps you answer the questions because you already know exactly what they're going to ask and you have spent some time formulating an answer that you can say in a number of sentences, in sound-bytes, and that really gets to the point quickly. So interview questions is a great thing to put in your Media Room.

Here's my final piece of advice, and I'm surprised that I even have to say this as a tip, but I’m going to say it because you'd be shocked at how often this doesn’t happen for me when I'm looking in Media Rooms. And that is, specific contact information that the media can use. Now I'm not saying that you have to have an email address that's media@suchandsuch, or that it's only a phone number that the media uses, or only an email address. But I'm shocked at how often I go to someone's website and they have a Media Room or all kinds of information about how they've been in the media, and then there's nowhere for me to contact them. Or there might be a very general mailbox and I think, "Gee, if I send them -" often I'm on a deadline, and this is true of most people in the media. I don't have weeks or even days, sometimes, to sit around and wait for someone to get back to me. So I start to worry if there's just a general mailbox. I think, "Am I going to be able to hear back from this person? Or is this going to get funneled somewhere else, into a company mailbox, and then eventually get to them in a number of days?" I don't know. I'll usually use it, but it always worries me a little bit. So even if they just say, "Members of the media use this email address and someone will get back to you right away," that makes me feel at ease right away. It sort of puts my worries aside.

One thing that doesn't work very well for me when I'm searching for expert sources is when I can't get any email address whatsoever and I just have to plug in my information and then hopefully someone will get back to me. I don't know why, but I don't like doing that. I like to have the email address. I like to have everything kind of working through my email program so that I can refer back to it if I need to rather than trying to approach someone through a website and then kind of forgetting about it later if nobody gets back to me. So, anyway, that's just a tip based on my experience working in the media and what works for me when looking at fitness professionals' websites.

Step 7: Brand Yourself with a Professional Photo

Okay. So number seven, and this is something that I kind of - tip number seven or step number seven is nothing that most people would think of, but I think it's super important and that is to have some - at least one professional photo of yourself. This is for people who are really going for that celebrity image in the fitness industry. There's a huge difference - if you look at any of the fitness professionals out there who have their names mentioned quite often in the media - a lot of the people I work with who come from reputable fitness associations, most of the people or all the people who have professional fitness DVDs done, they also have professional photos. That's often what sets them apart. Just when you're looking at their websites, that often is what sets them apart from those who do not have that on their website, or who aren't very well known, and that is professional photos. It could be even just one.

But it should be - when I'm talking about professional photos, it doesn't mean you have to go and spend a whole lot of money on getting a whole lot of photos done in different outfits or in different scenarios and all that kind of stuff, although that's often something some fitness pros do, and it doesn’t hurt. What I'm talking about here is trying not to squeak by on some Polaroid that your uncle took, and trying to scan that into your website, or use that in conference brochures and that kind of thing, because it looks like a snapshot and it creates an immediate impression about you as a fitness expert and as a professional in the fitness industry. It's really kind of a small thing, and it's quite subtle, but it can make a huge difference.

I remember a few years ago I was working with a team of people to launch a personal training program at a chain of fitness facilities. And there hadn't been a personal training program there before, so we were getting all the personal trainers together, hiring everybody, and one of the things that we needed for our marketing was headshots of all these personal trainers. Well you wouldn't believe - it was like pulling teeth trying to get headshots from people. In my opinion, if you're a personal trainer working for yourself, and you've got a business going, you should have something available right away, "Here's my headshot. Take it. It's professional. Go ahead and use it." But a lot of the excuses we were hearing were, "I have to wait for my sister to come so that she can take a Polaroid of me," and we were getting things like people sort of having their headshot taken right after they worked out, in front of a wall in their living room, or something like that. And it just shows. It shows that it was a photograph that didn't really take a lot of time or consideration.

It can be a really simple thing to do. It can be a really subtle impression that is made on members of the media, or clients, or prospects, or conference committee members who are deciding whether to put you in a conference brochure or not. It can really be something that helps you build this celebrity status in the fitness industry because, as I mentioned at the very beginning of our discussion, it's about name recognition, but it's often about familiarity in terms of people see your face and recognize your face. You want to have that out there. Consider a professional photo as just one more way that you are branding your fitness business, and branding yourself in the media.

What should you wear? Should this be just a headshot? And what should you be wearing in it?

That's a great question. I actually just - the reason that I decided to include this and I’m talking about it is because I wrote an article for IDEA Fitness Journal, so for those reading this, it will be out in February 2007 in IDEA Fitness Journal. And one of the things that I talked about in the article, I interviewed a professional photographer for that, and he said for the fitness industry there's no rule about whether it needs to be headshot or full-body shot, or three-quarter body shot, or even an action shot.

Whatever is going to communicate to your clients, to the people who you want to communicate to, something about you. You might want to communicate more of a business, kind of a professional, business, and serious approach, or you might want them to know that you're energetic and quite vivacious, or something like that. Your photos really just need to match what it is that is going to suit your style as a fitness professional and suit what it is that you want to communicate to the people who are looking at those photos. You can have more than one photo to communicate both those things. But I think a headshot or a full-body shot works.

Often if you've got a — like I have a professional photo that’s a three-quarter body shot. And often people will use either the whole thing or they just crop it to a headshot. So that's something you can do as well if you want a little bit more versatility.

In terms of what you wear, again, it just depends. You can have, again, different kinds of photos. You can have photos that maybe show a little bit more skin and show a lot of musculature and stuff like that, but there's a time and a place for those kinds of photos. And it might be a good idea if you're doing a photo shoot to also get some that are a little bit more business-like, maybe wearing a nice workout shirt with your company logo or a workout jacket or something with your company logo on it. So it really depends on what you're going for.

Let me ask you one question going back to, I think it was the first or second topic, and it dealt with having a couple of different niches.  Would you suggest maybe sending the niches to a different landing page on your website?

Yeah, that's a good question. Probably on your website what you want to do is if you are trying to come in contact with different, very specialized groups, you could have the same website, but then, yes, you want to clearly direct them to different pages on your website. I've kind of done that on my website, but not with specializations, just with areas that people might be interested in. So on my homepage, it's sort of got some general information, and then it has a graphic box that gives people four or five choices for where they might want to go: Get Published or Get Publicity or Fitness Marketing Tools, that kind of thing, depending on why they've come to my website. They might have seen marketing material about any one of those areas, and I'm just trying to help funnel them to the appropriate area on my website based on why they've come and what they're interested in.

So you could do something similar to that on your website. Executives or Specialized Fitness for Women, or that kind of thing, so that when people come to your website they know specifically where to go.

What kinds of marketing pieces do you suggest? Direct mail? Or what would you use?

I think it completely depends on who your prospects are. Obviously if you're going to do online training you're going to want to do online marketing. If you're doing fitness for older adults, online marketing might not work so well, or it might. It just kind of depends who your prospects are and who your clients are, so it really depends. Some people will pick up a flyer and that will be successful, some people will ignore flyers. Some people will hold on to a business card and then it'll fall out of their gym bag one day and they'll say, "Oh, yeah, I meant to call that person," and then they get on it. Some people will see a business card and toss it because they think it's a useless piece of paper. So I think it really just depends. It's a hard one to answer. I'm actually writing an article right now about how to market to different niche groups, but it's a hard one to answer in general terms - unless you know the specific client base that someone's looking for.

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Amanda Vogel, MA human kinetics, is a certified fitness professional
 and owner of Active Voice - a writing, editing and consulting service
 that helps fitness pros and organizations improve the effectiveness of
 their promotional and educational material.

As a prolific health/fitness writer, Amanda contributes to top
 magazines, including IDEA Fitness Journal, ACE Certified News, Fit Pregnancy,
 SELF, All You, Health, Shape and Prevention. Read her fitness writing
 tips at http://FitnessWriter.blogspot.com.

Receive your free copy of her e-book, 51 Need-to-Know Writing &
 Marketing Tips for Fitness Pros, at: Website:
 http://www.activevoice.ca/newsletter.shtml

 

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Chris McCombs is a personal fitness trainer marketing and fitness business specialist. You can learn more about him by reading this blog.