10 Ways Most Fitness Professionals Overdo Their Personal Training Websites (part 1)
Your site’s the supporting leg holding your training practice up, for a lot of obvious reasons. But it seems to me that most trainers are still clueless when it comes to creating their sites. They’re throwing all of their time and money into them and still getting horrible results. Just get this part handled and your float of 10-15 high-paying clients established, and you can basically “retire from training, so to speak.
Leonardo Da Vinci once said, Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.
We may not always take life and career advice from this man, but that little tidbit is profound, especially when talking about your website. The following definitive a guide to getting a high performing website up and running fast for your personal training business:
The first thing to remember is to keep it simple. You cannot take your cues from Madison Avenue (the big-money marketing companies) or from entertainment promotion sites. You don't need to pretend to be a billion dollar, big-shot training business to get clients.
There's a more proven field of advertising to take your cues from, and that's direct-mail marketing. The direct marketing people have actually tested what type of formats and messages work best. They've done the work for you - just follow directions and you'll get results. And the message is simplicity wins!
The info I'm going to share with you now comes from the world of direct marketing. That means its validity has been tested in split testing, response rates, and against multiple variables. If until now the only advertising you've studied has been in magazines, billboards, and television, you'll probably fight me tooth and nail on a lot of what I've written here.
But let your mind chew on it and look into it yourself. It'll get you on your way to saving tons of time and money and boosting the effectiveness of everything you do by as much as 10 times, if not more! Here are the most common mistakes.
1. Too much flash
Remember, a prospect looking at your site either because of a web search or a piece of off-line advertising you put out, is in seeking mode. They don't want to wait for your page to load, or have their time wasted by flashy graphics and music. These flashy sites have been proven to perform worse than, clear, simple sites. Even if you are extremely good looking and have unbelievably ripped abs and have photo-shoot pictures of yourself everywhere, you'll still lose to someone that obeys the rules of providing solid information that benefits the client.
2. Ugly
As kind of a side note to point 1, you don't want to be too flashy, but your site can’t be ugly either. Everything on there has to lead to a sale in some way. I had this same conversation with a coaching client yesterday. He had videos on his site, which is the right thing to do, but some were ugly. I told him to leave them out.
3. Over-budget
As a trainer, you only need a few clients to get fully established and highly profitable. Once you're there, you can start planning world domination, but get there first! To get to that level, you do not need to spend a fortune. Your entire site should cost you only a few hundred bucks - that's design and all tech work included! If people are talking into the thousands for design or set-up work, take it as an opportunity to get in some cardio and start running away!
4. Too much time
Your site also should not take you too much time to get started. The main time will come in writing and fine-tuning the text, especially if you don't like to write. But first, just get the damn thing up!
5. Perfectionism
Don't wait until it's the perfect time to put your site up - you can't improve something that doesn't even exist yet. Just get something up that you're more or less happy with, and tweak it every day based on the new things you learn and other sites you see that you like.
Be sure to check out part 2 of this article for the next five ways you can improve your personal training website today.
