Arsenal and Allies for the Successful Fitness Marketer

As a fitness marketer, which is what you REALLY are if you own a fitness or personal training business, there are number of tools you’re gonna want to have in your arsenal. I mean, even the best craftsman in the world needs a tool belt fool of goodies right? And you wouldn't want our government to send a soldier to war without plenty of artillery and other soldiers to back them up…

Having a full bag of tricks, a loaded tool box and army of close allies to help you build your little fitness empire is paramount to your success. Discovering some of these resources can immediately take your business to the next level. Sometimes all it takes is one idea, one resource or one tool.

Here’s a list of things I strongly consider you ad to your arsenal (by the way, none of the following are affiliate links, just good products, services, ideas and resources that have helped me a lot and I wanted to make sure you're using)

A team –

Other trainers – Whether or not they actually work for you yet isn't important, someday there's a good chance they will. You want to know as many other quality trainers as you can, so when it comes time to start outsourcing some or all of the training, you’ve got easy access to the right people for the job. Trust me, it's much easier to find quality trainers when you KNOW a lot of quality trainers.

A writer – I strongly suggest you hire a good writer to help you create pages on your website and other sites on the web. Go with someone who’s first language is English, especially if the content is going to be for your own site. You can find quality writers to write 600 word articles for anywhere from $10 - $20 a page. Go on Craigslist and Guru.com (links are down below) and find a few writers and pay them each to write a small handful articles. Then whoever does the best job you can hire them to write for you in bulk. Make sure it's not plagiarized, do a search on Google for a few short strands of text in the article surrounded by parenthesis to make sure it's clean and not stolen from someone else or that the writer isn't giving it to multiple people.

A good web guy – You gotta know a good web guy, even if your site is in Wordpress or something simple like that. Knowing a good web guy can be indispensable. The key is to find someone who is reliable, will have stuff done when you need it done, will listen to you and do the work exactly how you want it and is willing to quickly fix any mistakes they made without wanting to charge you more money. Plus, don't let them link to their site from your homepage like many web designers will try and do, that can rob your homepage of some good page rank. Your web master gets money, NOT a link.

As I write this I’m actually at my web guys house right now and he’s doing a bunch of work for me. Don’t skimp on price here, I’m not saying you have to bleed out of the wallet here by the bucket, but definitely don’t go with the cheapest guy around.  And if the person you hire doesn’t get stuff done on time drop em’ like some obsessed stalker chick you met at a bar at 2am last Saturday night and find someone else.

A personal assistant - A personal assistant can do wonders for your productivity. They can take much of the day to day burden of dealing with the little repetitive minutia off of your back so you can focus on the really important stuff like strategizing, marketing and taking vacations. If you can't afford to hire one consider bartering with one (or a few!)

A coach or mentor – Hire someone who has a greater understanding of whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish than you do. I have a few coaches ( Rich Golisch, Andy Miller, Michel Fortin, Pat Rigsby and Brian Jones) and can't imagine where I'd be without them. They all bring something unique to the table.

Mastermind group– Start or join a group of other people into business and marketing who will support and challenge you. I'm in a local mastermind and think I'm the only guy in the group who isn't a multi-millionaire. We meet once a month for 6 hours and the it has made a GIANT difference in my business.

Tools

Blogging software – You gotta publish content on a regular basis if you want people and search engine spiders to visit your site. I suggest Wordpress with the Semiologic plug-ins

Info products – Books, audios, videos on sales, marketing and business… load that stuff into your mind constantly. I suggest Dan Kennedy, Michel Fortin, John Carlton, John Caples, Claude Hopkins, Joe Polish, Michael Gerber, Eben Pagan, Don Crowther, Howie Schwartz, John Reese, Bedros Keuilian, Pat Rigsby and Jim Labadie just to name a few.

Swipe File - Collect great ads to get ideas from. Get on peoples autoresponder lists and save their entire email series. I have the entire Muscle Media magazine collection in digital format plus TONS of print ads Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert, John Carlton, Gary Bencivenga and Clayton Makepeace. The stuff is priceless. Whenever I need a good idea for an ad I just dig in and soon I'm well on my way (Swipe, don't plagiarize)

Copytalk – Copytalk is a service that will send you transcriptions of your spoken words if you’ll just call a their number from your cell phone and talk away. A great way to create content quick and easy for your website, blog, ebooks, and emails. They email to you within 24 hours and the cost is extremely inexpensive.

Camtasia - An easy way to make screen capture videos for quick and easy outsourcing of any computer work. Can also be used for videos in your salescopy or on your website. A lot of the info products created these days is made with Camtasia.

A timer – I suggest getting a timer for your computer and sticking to hard and fast start and stop times for various tasks. You’ll be amazed at how much more work you get done when you do this.

Mindjet - The best mind mapping software I know of for planning out your business. It works very much like the human brain works and make strategizing and brainstorming easy and productive.

A voice recorder – Take it with you wherever you go. Don’t let important ideas slip your mind. Record important meetings, get audio testimonials on the fly and make bootleg copies of seminars (Just joking)

A good autoresponder – You gotta build an opt-in list of locals in your area who are interested in your services. Aweber and Getresponse are two of the best.

Small video camera – Anytime a client says ANYTHING positive about your services whip that bad boy out and get it on video so you can use it in your marketing. I like the Flip Video.

A good automatic billing company - Automatic monthly out-of-site and out-of-mind payments are the ONLY way to go as far as I'm concerned for billing your clients. Doing this one small thing can easily add 25 - 50% to your bottom line. I like ASF International.

Guru.com - A cool place for outsourcing tasks.

Design Outpost - Post your project and how much you're willing to pay. Multiple people will actually do the project for you then you award a winner. Best for design and graphic work.

All Custom Content - They'll create high quality content for you at a fair price for your website, blog, autoresponder, special reports, ebooks and so on.

Google Docs - I got this one from Pat Rigsby. You can have all kind of documents and spreadsheets available online and give multiple people access to them.

Google Analytics - Free tool from Google that helps you monitor your web visitors so you can increase your sites traffic and conversions.

Online Advertising

Google Adwords - One of the best ways to get paid traffic. Just do it smarter than your competition and you'll pay a lot less per click and get more traffic.

Craigslist - A good way to get clients easy and free.

Citysearch - The best IYP at this time. Watch out though, I know some people who pay 10 times as much per click for the same search terms other people do all because they didn't know how to assert themselves and what they wanted with their agent.

Traffic Geyeser - A great way to blast your videos to TONS of video sharing sites and get your videos to rank high in the engines

Social Networking Sites

Myspace - Not as good as it used to be. But you can still get some clients from it by adding friends in your demographic and blasting out bulletins driving the traffic to quality content on your blog with the occasional promotion for your services.

Facebook - Get friends and start groups, it's a good way to stay connected. The Facebook Social Ads feature is also a pretty sweet way to get targeted local traffic to your site for pennies a click ( at least it's only pennies a click as of this writing)

Twitter- Haven't really found a way to monetize this yet but you definitely want to stay hip with the conversations going on in Twitter as this seems to be the way the internet is headed

Youtube - Get some videos on YouTube with your kw's in the title and description. If you do it right you can get those videos to come up high in the engines sometimes. Use articles to fire links to these videos.

There you have it… these are some tools I use or have used with some level of success in my own business and highly recommend you consider adding to your arsenal. And like I said, not one of them is an affiliate link.

Keep Rockin'