This is a Fitness Marketing Guest Post by Craig Ballantyne

This is a Personal Trainer Marketing Post by Chris McCombs

This is a Fitness Internet Marketing Post By Chris McCombs

Here's a video interview I did for my Market Annihilator members a few months back and I thought I'd share it with you here on the blog as well… Enjoy

As you probably know, I'm a huge fan of long salescopy and have been for a long time… the best conversions I've seen on a sales site ( not blog, but sales site) is from long copy with no nav bar links at the top of the page, it's worked great for me for years… plus, all the content on the page gives you plenty of chances to stick in a whole bunch of variations of my main keywords, which is great for the search engines.

The biggest problem I've found with long salescopy is that it takes a while to learn how to do it properly, and often times people think that if they just make it long, that it'll help with conversions… but rarely is this the case… bad copy is bad copy and almost always equals bad conversions… that's why one method I suggest is headline, benefits, video, before and afters with testimonials, and a call to action. Simple and to the point.

This is a fitness marketing and copywriting guest post by Leanne Ellington

Have you ever been on a cruise? If not, you gotta go… they're the best deal in town.

I just checked the web. You could book a 5-night cruise for two people with an upgraded ocean view room leaving from Miami for $600. That includes taxes and port charges. Alcohol and gambling are the only items not included.

Did you read that? $600 for TWO people for FIVE nights! EVERYTHING included. And when I say EVERYTHING-I mean absolutely EVERYTHING!

5 nights in a luxury hotel room: A little smaller than you're used to…but much nicer. Maid service twice every day. When you leave in the morning, they'll clean and set it up for daytime. When you go to dinner, they clean and set it up for night time-and put a little chocolate on your pillow. It's sweet. Pun intended J

This is a Fitness Email Marketing Post by Chris McCombs

Hey there, hope you're great…

I'm out in Orlando, just got done speaking at the Fitness Info Summit and now enjoying a few days with my family and the Keuilians and the Hochmans… we all have lil' tikes and rug rats about the same age… so we're hittin' Disney World and all that kinda stuff.

I just wanted to get a quick blog post out to you to help you with your email marketing… here's a few quick tips…

1. The subject line is what gets the email read… that's all it's supposed to do…

Most people are bombarded with emails, so you really need to get your subscribers attention… HOWEVER, the body of the email must in some way be congruent with the subject line… otherwise you'll probably tick a bunch of people off who will feel baited and switched.

Here's some of my subject lines that got the highest open rates, now keep in mind these may not work for you because of your niche or personality, I'm just showing what's worked well for me in my fitness marketing business…

Hey… hope you're good…

If you wanna get as many clients as possible from the internet, then you're gonna wanna have web salescopy that converts ( converts visitors into???… phone calls inquiring about your services… or online registrations for your boot camps… or opt-ins to your email list… or money$$$ )

I don't care if you're sites are number one in Google, if you can't convert your visitors into money at the end of the day… you're #1 listings are worthless…

Here's a video I made ripping into one of my salescopies so you can learn some of the tips, tricks and strategies myself and other high level copywriters use to convert as many visitors as possible.

It's 47 minutes long and in it I share a TON of my favorite website conversion strategies…. definitely watch this video…

This is a video I created for my buddies over at PTU. This video will show you how to create KILLER headlines for your personal training business. Personal Trainer Universtity ( PTU ) has TONS of killer content showing personal trainers how to really get a handle on the "business" side of their business.

I'll be adding tons of unique content to their site that'll be available nowhere else on the web. PTU also has content from some of the top guys in the industry, like Pat Rigsby, Jim Labadie, Ryan Lee, Brian Brasso and Alywn Cosgrove… it's definitely a resource you want to have in your arsenal.

I've noticed a lot of people in our industry write copy that is WAY too hypey, especially in their headlines. It's literally scaring the prospects away cold. BIG PROBLEM when you're marketing personal fitness training , advertising a health club, marketing a fitness boot camp or ANYTHING for that matter.

So I asked Michel Fortin about what fitness professionals should to NOT sound hypey in their salescopy. Here's what he said…

"The secret to sounding less hypey is to reduce adjectives and adverbs, and replace them with verbs and nouns that paint vivid mental pictures, and imply the power of what you’re saying. (In fact, and even better tactic is to use analogies and metaphors.)

Think of the 10 commandments as copy (I’m not speaking to the religious aspect but the words). It contains 10 verbs but not one adjective!

Now, it’s OK to add adjectives and adverbs. But keep them to a minimum. For example, here’s an example I use in seminars. Let’s say you were watching the baseball game in which Mark McGuire beat Hank Arron’s record a few years back. Right after breaking the record, he steps up to the plate once again.

So I asked Michel Fortin about what fitness professionals should to NOT sound hypey in their salescopy. Here's what he said…

When someone lands on your website you have very little time to get their attention and pull them head first into your copy. We are inundated with what a constant stream of marketing messages that we have to duck and avoid just to make it through our day.

Between the TV, radio, newspapers, internet, mail, e-mail, solicitors, billboards and people trying to get us in their MLM downline, the load of messages is enough to make your head spin.

We are conditioned to avoid all these messages, because if we paid attention to even 1% of them we wouldn't have time for ANYTHING else. We need to ignore these messages just to make it through the day.

Great copywriters will often time spend the majority of their time when they're writing an ad just coming up with the right headline, because they know if the headline doesn't pull people in, they've lost em' forever.

Recently I asked one of the best copywriters in the world Michel Fortin how busy personal trainers and fitness professionals could become better copywriters if they only had 30 minutes a day to work at it. If we really want to be successful in our fitness business and become personal training marketing experts than we're definitely gonna want to get pretty good at the art of copywriting.

Here's his exact answer word for word…

I would definitely write winning pieces of copy in long hand. I did it. And many of the top copywriters did it, too. But if time is of essence, typing it is just as good. It’s better than just reading, anyway.

On your website, or other fitness marketing pieces, if you really want to attract a lot of qualified prospects, you need to know exactly who your ideal client is.

For starters, you'll want to know things like:

Are they male or female?

Where do they live?

What kind of house do they live in?

How much income do they make?

Are they single or married?

By guest author Logan Strain

While marketing to potential new customers, it is always important to remember that, in many ways, they are a lot like you. They only have so many hours a day, they have a lot they want to get done, and they want to get as much free time as they can. So when you are writing your sales copy, you want to deliver as much information as you can in the quickest, most compact way you possibly can. And no tool in your copywriting repertoire allows you to do this more than bullet points.

Bullet points allow you hit your prime selling points directly.

For example:

• Now you can lose weight faster than you ever thought possible!
• Feel fantastic
• Be proud of what you see in the mirror

By guest author Logan Strain

A lot of fitness business owners assume because I earned my degree in English that I am some sort of super-stickler when it comes to grammar. Not true. Split infinitives don’t phase me. I care very little when I come across a dangling preposition. And if you can’t navigate the distinction between alumnus, alumni, alumna, and alumnae, welcome to the club.

Still, my inner pendant still cringes when I come across a few errors that pop up disturbingly frequently in copy.

Most notably:

Less/Fewer – Fewer is used when the objects are theoretically countable, such as cards, dollar bills or grains of sand. Fewer is used when the object is not countable, which means objects in bulk such as time, money, or sand. To clarify, if you have less sand, then you have fewer grains of sand.

Here's an interview I did on Copywriting and Health and Fitness Marketing with Anthony Coyne focused on how small business owners and businesses in the health and fitness industries can get more clients from writing better copy and creating effective lead generation systems. This info can be applied to just about any type of small business.

Anthony, who are you and what do you do?

Basically Chris, I am a professional copywriter and marketing consultant. I have a company called Ultimate Marketing Solutions. Basically, I help small to medium sized business increase their potential as well as find clients and things like that.

What is an effective method of lead generation for a fitness business ?

One of the things that we have been successful with is what they call a two-step method, or the two-step system. What it is is you have an ad, it could be a newspaper ad, a postcard, a sales letter, or even a flyer, and what that does is; it’s a very, very short ad that just catches the reader's attention. There is very little information in there and generally, it has a 1-800 number, which goes to a recorded message. What the person would do is they would call in for a free report and then the free report would elaborate more on the actual sales message. Did that make sense?

The first place to start when preparing to write fitness articles for your training business is to figure out where you intend to publish the fitness articles, and what your goal is. You need to know who your audience is, and what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to sell them on something? Get them to sign up for your program? Or just direct links towards your site from an article directory? Sometimes it can be a little bit of both. First I will talk about writing for an audience to motivate them to sign up or purchase something, and then I'll explain how to write for article directories.

If you are writing to an audience you are trying to motivate to sign up for your training, then you need your fitness articles to be well outlined and clearly guide the reader to why they should do what you are asking them to do. For instance, if you want someone to sign up for your training, don't just blast them right away with why they should sign up, try identifying their needs. What do they want that you can give them? Do they want to be sexier, happier, thinner, more muscular? Figure out who your audience is and then start off your article with how you understand where they are and how they desperately want to be in a difference place, a thinner, healthier, more attractive version of themselves.