How To Not Sound Hypey in Your Headlines
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
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.
Creating a Great Headline
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
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.
How To Become a Better Copywriter in 30 Minutes a Day
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
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.
How to Attract Tons of Qualified Clients with Your Copy
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
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?
The Health and Fitness Sales Copy Tactic of Bullets
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
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
Grammar Mistakes Even Smart People Make
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
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.
Anthony Coyne on Copywriting
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
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?
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Writing Fitness Articles Made Easy
Monday, October 1st, 2007
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.
