Hey there, hope you’re doing great and cashing in on the fitness market.

It’s been a while since I posted anything, and that’s because I just moved back home to Canada and it’s taken a bit to get back into the groove, but I have 7 killer tips to help you build your fitness business.

I have decided to get back into the trenches and build a local fitness business.

You see, Katrina (My beloved Girlfriend) and I have been travelling through South, Central, and North America over the past few years.

About a month ago Katrina wanted to start a fitness boot camp with a unique spin on it. I though it was a good idea as we where moving home, so I decided to do the marketing for her.

We arrived in our home town in beautiful BC May 1^st and her boot camp started May 3^rd. All of the marketing efforts where done online except for a few fliers we had printed and asked some friend to post around town.

What do you think two weeks worth of internet marketing can bring in to a new instructor, with no boot camp experience, and no personal training certificate?

5 Clients? 10 Client?

We had 33 people register for our 4 week boot camp with the majority of the people signing up for 5 days a week!

There are a number of other boot camp instructors and classes going on right now in our town, some of which have been here for years, we are by far the busiest and most popular and we have only been in town for 2 weeks.

How did we do it? And how can you duplicate our success?

Tip #1 Read more…

Running a fitness boot camp is always a good idea. But it’s especially a good (and profitable!) idea right now.  Here are five reasons why you should get your next boot camp organized ASAP…

Reason 1. Increase Revenue Now Before the Summer Slow Down

Soon enough, your boot camp prospects are going to get wrapped up in their summer activities. They’re going to go on vacation, chauffeur the kids back and forth to summer activities and spend more time relaxing. They’ll spend less time thinking about fitness, which means you’ll experience the summer slow down.

And that’s why now is such a great time to organize your next boot camp.  It’s easy to get your prospect’s attention now (see Reason #3) – and you get the benefit of a nice boost to revenue.

Reason 2. You Can Run Theme Boot Camps

Many of your clients are going to join your boot camps for specific reasons. For example, you may have a Read more…

If you’re looking for an easy way to earn extra money, try getting paid to recommend nutritional supplement products that you believe in. You could be recommending your favorite nutritional supplements to clients for a cash kickback and watching your business revenue grow.

The best part is, your clients succeed physically while you succeed financially, and the supplement manufacturer succeeds in gaining visibility with new clients. It’s a classic example of a win-win-win.

If It Works for You, It Can Work for Them

Your supplements can really help achieve results. You probably recommend products to your clients all the time anyway. You could earn a kickback for your referral, and then sit back and watch your business account grow. How does it work, you ask?

If you don’t already know this as a small business owner or independent fitness instructor, then let me enlighten you. Word-of-mouth advertising is the best form of advertising. It holds the highest level of credibility of any kind of marketing strategy you could implement. This is because people believe what you say about a product when you’re not getting paid to say it.

Actors are liars. They are paid to lie. You know it. I know it. Your potential clients know it, too.

The Benefits of Word-of-Mouth Advertising

It’s a fitness marketing strategy that can work in your own personal trainer business. Satisfied clients who talk up your business earn you new clients. In fact, if you aren’t offering referral credits to your existing clients, you may be missing out on an advertising gold mine. Offer a discount on your client’s next bill if she brings a new client in your door.

Likewise, satisfied sports supplement customers who talk up the benefits of taking the supplements earn business for the manufacturer. Therefore, if you’re a talking satisfied supplement customer, you’re worth your weight in gold to a fitness supplement manufacturer. Read more…

Maybe you’re new to the personal trainer world, or maybe you’ve been a fitness instructor for years and years. Either way, you probably know that word-of-mouth advertising speaks volumes in this business.

Clients who meet their fitness goals are noticed by their friends and family. People ask, “What did you do to get in such great shape?” and your client enthusiastically explains that his personal trainer (that’s you) helped him achieve his fitness goals.

Voila. Open your door a little wider to let in his friends and family, because they all want to sculpt their bodies or build their strength, too.

But that strategy won’t work on fitness boot camps.

The Difference When It Comes to Marketing Fitness Boot Camps

As a fitness instructor, you meet regularly with clients. They pay you a fee every month, every week, or even every session, but you still expect them to come back to the next session. You have an ongoing trainer-client relationship with each of your customers.

Meanwhile, your ongoing clients talk about you as others start noticing their achievements. Little by little, month by month, new clients trickle in and your business grows. Read more…

Your clients are looking for results. You’re looking for revenue. Your nutrition expertise can help both you and your clients meet your goals. Advertising that nutrition expertise in your fitness marketing plan are the first step.

Why Advertise Nutrition Expertise?

If you or someone on your staff has earned a sports nutrition certification, that sets your personal trainer business apart from your local competition. But that only earns you more clients, and hence more revenue, if your potential clients know about it.

You need to let your clients know about your enhanced qualifications. You need to let your clients know how these qualifications will help them meet their goals. This is from Marketing 101: any good fitness marketing strategy involves informing clients of the benefits of your services, not the features.

How Do You Advertise Nutrition Expertise?

Clients don’t want to know that you or someone on your staff is a certified nutritionist. They want to know what’s in it for them. So what is in it for them? Clients can see faster results if they follow a sports nutrition regimen that aligns with their recommended workout.

Clients are interested in faster results. Therefore, convince them that a carefully structured menu and workout combination will earn them those faster results, and you’ll bring them in the door.

Where to Advertise Nutrition Expertise?

This is a little trickier, and it depends on your area. Overall, most clients looking for a personal training business will either perform a Google search for personal trainers, or they’ll ask about personal training services at the gym. Read more…

What are you spending your advertising dollars on?

You may be wasting your fitness marketing dollars on useless ads. Marketing dollars are only worth spending if they bring you new clients.

Therefore, you need to figure out which ones are bringing in the clients, and can the rest.

Your money is better spent on that vacation in Costa Rica you’ve been planning for five years.

So, how do you figure out which ads are bringing in the clients? Finding the right fitness marketing strategy is all about asking questions and seeking honest answers.

Using Consumer Feedback to Massage Your Strategy

Consumer feedback can help you get rid of fitness marketing strategies that aren’t working. You may be spending money unnecessarily, because potential clients aren’t noticing your ads anyway. You can determine which ads are working and which ads are not working by polling your clients.

First, you have to collect the data. The easiest way to do this is to survey your clients with a form.

Collecting the Data: Surveying Your Clients at Registration

You should be using a registration form of some kind anyway to enroll your clients in fitness instruction. If you aren’t doing this, consider creating a simple sheet that your new clients can fill out. It should include the client’s name, contact information, service or services that he or she is interested in or enrolled in, fitness goals, and any other information that you find yourself asking verbally a lot. Read more…

In a time when businesses are tanking, companies are slashing jobs, and layoffs are ushering hordes of hard-working people to the unemployment lines, job security is more important than ever. Thousands of Americans are struggling to find stable work to pay the bills and keep food on their plates – and that means getting jobs that won’t blow over in the stormy economic climate.

Fortunately, the health and wellness industry is holding strong. Fitness instructor jobs aren’t just withstanding the recession – they’re actually skyrocketing. Here’s why.

1. People are fat – and getting fatter.

In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Let that number sink in for a minute. That means two out of every three people are at risk for weight-related conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease if they don’t blast their flab. And with obesity now striking children, we’re only going to see more fat Americans as the years go by.

So what does this mean for jobs? If you’re a personal trainer, right now you have more potential clients than ever before – and that won’t be changing any time soon. Talk about being in high demand!

2. People are putting their health as a top priority.

Now more than ever, people are realizing the consequences of unhealthy living: they’re seeing their parents die of heart disease, they’re watching their friends gulp down cholesterol medication, they’re witnessing their kids grow obese, and they’re hearing news stories about how sedentary living is linked to every health woe under the sun.

Read more…

Hiring a certified nutrition specialist attracts more clients to your personal trainer business. However, earning a sports nutrition certification for yourself enhances your value as a trainer. It also saves your fitness business the expense of paying for that employee with the higher qualifications.

You get to pay yourself more instead. Who doesn’t want that?

Setting Yourself Apart from the Rest

Your personal trainer business needs a marketing strategy that sets it apart from its local competition. We’ve joked about standing by the road in an elephant costume once or twice last week, which of course is as ironic as it is cheap and ridiculous. Who wants to hire a personal trainer who looks like an elephant?

But you could try standing by the road in a swimsuit waving that sign around, which might actually work if you look like either of the lead characters in Terminator 2. Hell, even I’d hire Arnie or Linda Hamilton, if they were trainers.

Still, you might try resorting to less obnoxious (and time-consuming) tactics. You might shoot for increasing your credibility as a trainer instead. You can do this by adding sports nutrition certification to your qualifications.

The Role of Sports Nutrition Certification

Whether you run your own business with employees, work as a freelance trainer, or work for someone else, qualifications equal income. Qualifications come in two forms: experience and education. Unfortunately, experience only comes with time and can’t be rushed. Also, your competitors are earning it at the same rate that you are. Read more…

Certified nutrition expertise doesn’t just help grow your personal trainer business client base. Your fitness boot camp business can benefit from nutrition expertise as well. Unless you’d rather get out the elephant costume and wave at cars again, try hiring a certified nutritionist for your fitness boot camp staff.

It beats sweating under all that fake fur and pink tutu, not to mention the blow to your ego and your personal trainer business credibility.

Fitness boot camps come in any number of shapes and sizes, but the overall goal tends to remain the same. Clients can enroll in your fitness boot camp and achieve their difficult fitness goals in record time. They do this with concentrated effort and your expert help. Focus, achieve, and win the prize – a fitter, healthier, sexier body.

Nutrition expertise from your certified nutrition specialist can help clients win the fitness race that much faster.

Qualifications Win the Race

Clients are looking for results, not elephants in pink tutus. Without results, your fitness boot camp service is a waste of clients’ hard-earned cash. Clients enter into a business arrangement with a fitness boot camp instructor with the expectation that they will achieve their fitness goals. This is why you can assume that potential clients looking to pay for fitness boot camp services are likely to be swayed by qualifications and a great personality.

With this in mind, a certified nutritionist might be just the ammunition your fitness boot camp marketing strategy needs to kick the competitor’s butt.

Fitness Boot Camp Marketing Strategies that Win the Competition

Kicking your fitness boot camp competitor’s butt in the marketplace is about winning market share. It’s not much different from competitive sports. Technique, practice, drive, some amount of natural talent, and sometimes a touch of finesse are what it takes to win in the business world. Read more…

Getting a job is tough these days – and even though the fitness industry is booming, competition for employment is still an uphill battle. Fortunately, you can gain an advantage once you know how to navigate through the job-hunting process and knock the socks off of fitness employers. By following these key tips, you can sail through the application process and land a job you love.

1. Don’t just look in the newspaper for jobs.

If you’re searching for work, the “Help Wanted” section might be the first place you go – but keep in mind that hundreds or even thousands of other people will see the same employment ads you do. Employers who advertise personal trainer jobs in the paper get flooded with more applications that you could imagine – and if you limit your search to classifieds, you’ll be up against some fierce competition. Use other ways to find job openings, such as checking health-club websites, calling potential employers, networking, and asking fellow personal trainers for job leads.

2. Research your employer before you apply.

What are the company’s goals and values? What’s their history? What kind of reputation do they have – both with clients and with the personal trainers who work there? Along with helping you decide whether this is a place you really want to work, familiarizing yourself with the employer gives you and edge in the hot seat at an interview. Employers love applicants who’ve Read more…