Thanks to today's relatively cheap technology, every fitness expert has the potential to be an online celebrity. From YouTube videos to blogs, you have the opportunity to be discovered by countless potential online customers.
Within hours of setting up a website, you could be selling your fitness expertise to men and women from all corners of the globe. While you sleep in America, you can get orders from New Zealand, Japan, Australia and even insomniacs from New York, allowing you to wake up to the same amount of money it would take you all day to earn by training people in person.
One of the greatest things about starting an online business is the almost complete elimination of overhead costs in your business. Websites are dirt cheap, and digital products are almost free to create and sell online. You might pay a small percent to a merchant account or other online distributor (such as clickbank.com or 1shoppingcart.com), but the remainder (often about 90% of gross) is yours as profit.
No Money? No Problem!
If you have absolutely no budget for a website, the easiest thing for you to do would be to start with a free blog from www.blogger.com — it will help your articles get found on the Internet easily. You can still make money with a free blog by offering your products for sale via offline payment, accepting money through PayPal.com or selling other people's products as an affiliate.
A blog is short for "web log," which is really just an online journal that you can easily update as much as you want with whatever content you choose. It takes three easy steps to get your blog up on the Internet:
1. Visit www.blogger.com and create an account.
2. Pick a name for your blog — something that represents what you will talk about, such as "PersonalTrainerForFatLoss."
3. Finally, pick your blog design from the templates available (choose black text on a white background for easy reading). You now have a website where you can post content about your business, workout programs, thoughts on fitness and anything else you choose.
Sell Other People's Products Until You Have Your Own
You could sign up to be an affiliate for other fitness products and post your affiliate link in your blog articles. An affiliate link is a piece of computer code that you get when you sign up for someone's affiliate program. Just paste your affiliate link in one of your blog articles promoting the product, and when readers click on your affiliate link and go through to order, you'll receive a commission for each sale you refer. By using this method, you can save money while making money until you are ready to purchase a real website and use a merchant account to sell your own products.
Creating Your Own Product
If you have a website and are ready to create a digital product, then you'll need to determine whether you want to create an ebook, an audio program or a video program. To keep overhead costs low, your best bets are either an ebook or an audio program.
To create an ebook, all you need to do is write out your information or workouts in a Word document and then use a service like www.adobe.com to transform your Word document into a PDF file (these look more professional than a Word document and can't be altered by the reader). Now you have a digital product. It's that simple!
If you want to create an audio product, all you need to do is use a free conference call service. You then call the line and record your product over the phone — you can talk by yourself, interview others or have others interview you. Within minutes, you'll be given access to a recording of the call, which you can sell online.
Once you have your website and digital products ready for sale, get the right type of people to your website. You want people who are already looking for your type of product or, more importantly, the solution to a problem — and the exact solution is your product.
Join the YouTube Revolution
The stories you might have heard about online success are not just hype. Remember the buzz associated with the "300 workout?" Well, many trainers posted YouTube videos about the workout and benefited from a huge number of people who watched their videos and visited their websites. You can't neglect the power that video can have on your sales and client base and how it can boost the number of customers to your online and offline business.
Here's a simple trick that will help your business show up on page one of Google for searches involving your city and the phrase "personal trainer." First, film a short, 30-90 second video and upload it to YouTube. Not sure how to do that? Ask any teenager in your neighborhood; they'll show you how. Next, name the video "Louisville Personal Trainer" (or whatever city you live in). Within days, that video should show up on page one of the Google search results for that specific phrase. If you include your studio's information in the video, both verbally and in the form of a screenshot or watermark (a watermark is where you see text "stamped" on the video while it plays) then viewers will be able to contact you.
You can also use YouTube videos to promote your digital products and post short workout lessons to increase rapport with your audience. One of the biggest obstacles in online success is overcoming the lack of trust between you and your audience. By posting videos, giving away lessons and creating a relationship with viewers, you'll get more traffic and, as a result, more sales.
Write Articles for Other Websites
Article directories are another essential part of every online marketing campaign. When you submit an article to an article directory such as EzineArticles.com (a website that hosts hundreds and thousands of articles on various topics), you have the potential to get your website name in front of thousands of eyeballs. Each time other websites take your articles and post them on their site, they link back to your website, sending more and more people to check out what you have to offer.
The bottom line in online marketing is to create entertaining, informative content that helps you develop a relationship with your audience. Just like you do in your offline business, spend your time creating a strong bond with your readers and viewers and earning their trust so they will be happy to buy your fitness expertise.
Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, is a regular contributor to Men's Health, the author of the best-selling fat loss e-book, Turbulence Training, and is the number one Internet marketing coach for fitness experts. For more info, visit www.OnlineSuperProfits.com.
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Jan. 14 2008
