The 5 Hour Blog Week Formula

As mentioned in my previous post 'The 5 Hour Blog Week; It Can Be Done', I briefly addressed one of the most common concerns that personal trainers, fitness professionals and most people in general raise when deciding whether to start a blog for their business; time.

In today's mega-post, I'll outline a strategy and review several of the tools I use for you to build an interactive online social community (blog, twitter account and facebook page) while spending the least amount of time online, using what I call 'compound' social media activities.

Let me put The 5 Hour Blog Week strategy into perspective. If you only had minimal time to spend in the gym each week, would you waste hours on the pec deck or doing wrist curls? I know I wouldn't; I'd stick to compound exercises like squats, dead lifts and the bench press.

For the purpose of my 5 Hour Blog Week; our compound online activities are as follows:

• Content Creation (blog post writing)
• Article Marketing
• Provide Value To Your Social Media Channels
• Replying To Comments (on blog and social media)

For this strategy to be effective, I'm going to assume that you already have the aforementioned social media accounts and platforms i.e a blog, a twitter account and a facebook fan page.

I'm also going to assume that you've established your blogs keywords and niche market (who you're social media channels are targeted towards) and have a subscriber base (numbers are irrelevant).

Content Creation:

Writing your posts will be the most time consuming part of your blogging week and for the purpose of being online only 5 hours a week, 3 of those hours will be dedicated to article construction.

In my article: 102 Blog Post Ideas For Personal Trainers, I mention a strategy that I use when coming up with new material. Every time an idea for a post comes into my head, or I see a headline somewhere that I can interpret to suit my readers, I write it down or text it to myself (if there's no pen and paper available).

I encourage you to take a look through that post and start by choosing 3 topics that you can write about.

Once you've decided on your subject there are some techniques you can use to make writing your articles very simple:

Write your headline.

Your headline can be the toughest thing to come up with, but a rule of thumb is that if it's a headline that grabs your attention or that you would click on, then other people probably will as well.

Don't worry too much about keywords in your headline either. If your articles are on topic (which they should be) your keywords will find there way in there, not to mention that your article will be full of them as well.

Some good attention grabbing headlines can begin:

• How To...
• 10 Ways I...
• 3 Things I Never Knew About...
• Have You Ever...

'How to' and list posts are not only relatively easy to write, they're a favorite among readers.

Write bullet points:

Once you have your headline, write down 5 or 6 bullet points that you plan to cover in your article.

If for example you're writing an article about correct bench press technique, you might jot down things like:

• Why bench press
• How often should you bench press
• When is the best time to bench press
• How to begin bench pressing
• Spotting the bench press
• etc.

As you can imagine, once you have your headline and bullet points, all that's left to do is fill in the blanks.

For some people, 3 hours of writing time could produce 3 quality articles, for others, maybe 2; but the point of this exercise is to spend the least amount of time yet still produce quality material.

Be sure to also include a call to action at the end of every article by asking readers to Like and Tweet your post with their friends.

NB. Don't just write articles for the sake of writing articles. If you can only produce 1 awesome piece of content in the time allowed, then that is all you write. While we might be skimping on time, don't skimp on the quality.

How To Write Blog Content

Article Marketing:

What this basically means is that once you've created your masterpiece, we need to let people know that it exists. Article marketing does tie in with providing social media value, but for now let's look at some time efficient ways to get your work in front of as many people as possible.

If you haven't already; you need to add Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet buttons to your blog posts.

How To Add Facebook Like Button To Your Blogger Blog.

It depends on your blogging platform, though you can easily find instructions on how to install these buttons by simply googling "How to add facebook like button to my blog posts".

Once your article is published, tweet that you have new content up. Let your friends know to retweet for you (of course you return the favor) and follow up periodically.

I generally tweet my articles twice in a day since I have readers in the north and southern hemispheres. My Business Is Fitness's market is global, however you may not have the same desires or it might simply not be in your niches best interest. Regardless, consider when your audience will be online to ensure your alerts will create the most impact.

Another great way to alert your readers of your latest articles is to send out a weekly newsletter to your subscriber database.

Give a brief rundown and a link to each post as they may have missed it when you originally published. They may also not have been in a position to read the first time you promoted, now they might.

Hint: Include a call to action in your email as well to encourage them to share your articles with their friends if they feel it may provide value.

Post a link on your facebook page and like it. This will not only alert your fans that you have a new article up, but your friends on your personal page as well.

You can also set up an automated RSS feed to send your articles direct to your pages; again, simply google how to do this dependant upon your blogging platform. I use this as again, it's all about using your time efficiently.

You have to be ruthless with your online time.

Provide Value To Your Social Media Channels

As mentioned in the article marketing section, tweeting and putting links of your own content is one way to add value to your social media accounts, but in order to create discussion and community you have to share other things of value.

Google Alerts

In order to find interesting or helpful articles without spending hours online trolling around, I set up 'Google Alerts' within my GMail account.

The way Google Alerts work is you simply type in key words that come up in articles you think your community would like to read. For example, 'Weight Loss Tips' would be a pretty effective alert term I would imagine and would generate a lot of articles.

You nominate how often you would like to receive alerts direct to your inbox and basically GMail does all the trolling on your behalf. Simply scroll through what google sends you and post/tweet the ones you think your audience will enjoy.

Other Resources

Besides linking to relevant articles, find a good 'quote' resource online like thinkexist and bookmark it. Every few days put up/tweet out a new quote about goals or whatever you like and that your audience will find value in.

It's endless really. Bookmark a quick and easy nutritional site with quick recipes you can link to. Post quick exercise tips and hints for your readers, but have these sites all bookmarked so you can simply scroll/copy/paste.

Remember, organisation is the key to minimising your online time.

Reply To Blog Comments And Social Media Discussions:

If you stumble upon a great article or if your blog post strikes a nerve with your readers they are going to want to interact with you.

This is a fantastic result and the goal of all of your social media efforts, however it can be the most time consuming.

Make an effort to respond to every comment that comes your way but do it in a most time efficient way.

There are a few ways to do this. On my blog, I have the comments section set up so that I have to approve all comments. Spam is rife in the online world so I do recommend this for you also. The way I find time to approve and reply is to have alerts come to my phone.

That way, if I'm waiting for an appointment, or walking on a treadmill, I will literally approve and respond to comments that way. Sometimes I can't respond but I will still approve them and come back later.

As with your facebook discussions. Simply address each person who has commented or contributed by placing an @ symbol in front of their name and reply in one go rather than individually. It may only save you a few minutes each time, but those minutes add up fast and before you know it, you're online for an hour discussing completely unrelated, irrelevant topics.

I'm not saying don't chat with your friends, but be selective on what you chat about. Ask yourself "is this conversation really adding value to my audience or am I wasting time?"

The 5 Hour Blog Week Formula:

This is the formula I used several weeks ago when I was desperately pressed for time and I encourage you to give it a try. You may need to adjust to suit your hours but essentially, this is what worked for me.

Sunday Morning:

I spent 3 hours pre-writing my blog posts and setting them to publish Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. This is extremely simple to do as I'm sure you're aware. Simply select the date and time in the publish options part of your dashboard.

I used the above techniques to construct my articles and managed to get three posts written in that time...they weren't my best work, but they were at least 300 words, on topic and rich in keywords.

Now that my posts were organised I breathed a sigh of relief as that is the most demanding part of the week.

Monday - Friday:

Each morning I went onto my blog to confirm my post had published. I tweeted the article from my blog and posted a link on my facebook.

I went through my quote site or google alerts and updated my fan page status and scrolled down my facebook home page to 'like', briefly comment on related topics, retweet some friends tweets and then logged off. This took me 10 minutes.

In the evening I pretty much repeated that sequence and responded to comments; another 15 minutes.

While I did neglect a lot of the things that I really enjoy doing, like writing long articles (like this one), commenting on other blogs, writing guest articles and digging my heels into online discussions, I was able to maintain a presence and therefore keep my business building.

The beauty of successful blogging and social media marketing isn't always the amount of time you put in, but rather the quality of time and how you prioritize your tasks.

Social media's greatest feature is also it's greatest flaw in regards to while you want people to spend time on your pages, you don't always have the time to spend hours on everyone elses.

I hope that this strategy gives you some clarity and helps you organise your online time better to be more productive and essentially build yourself a network to connect with more people.

No matter what your goals are for your social media channels, consistency always shines through, so get your voice heard and start creating a niche for yourself and your future.

If you have any questions or suggestions, or tips or advice of your own on how to be more productive online, I'd love to read it in the comment section below!

And of course, if you found this article helpful, I would greatly appreciate it if you took 2 seconds to Like and Tweet on facebook and twitter by clicking the icons at the top of the post.

Happy Blogging!

Ben

How To Add A Facebook Like Button To Your Personal Training And Fitness Blogger Blog

You may have noticed the small facebook 'Like' icon at the top of each of the My Business Is Fitness articles and wondered how and/or why it's up there.

Here's Some Of The Whys:

• If you enjoy the article, you can very conveniently 'Like' it and share with your facebook friends, essentially thanking the author by giving their article more exposure (which is AWESOME!).
• Liking the article shows me that I'm on the right track and that people are responding. It shows me what you guys like to read.
• It shows visitors to the blog that the article is worth reading i.e helpful, entertaining etc.. Someone new to the blog can see that so many people enjoyed the article that it must be worth reading; aka Social Proof.
• It may contribute to search engine ranking (this is pure speculation as no-one really knows how search engine algorithms are calculated however, there are signs that suggest that a well 'liked' article can rank higher than a similar article not as heavily shared).

One of the great things about the personal training and fitness industry is that it's very well represented online compared to many other channels.

This is a good thing AND a bad thing. On the bright side, your potential clients and customers are online and searching for quality information and services, the downside is that it's VERY competitive; so any edge that you can add to your blog will help and adding a facebook Like button is one of those edges.

Convinced you need a Like button yet? This is the exact method and code I used to put it on my blogger blog:

Here's The How:

NB. You should always 'back up' your HTML template by simply clicking the 'back up' button before toying around with your codes. That way if something does accidentally go wrong, you can easily just go back.

Step 1.

Log into your blogger account, then go to 'Layout' or 'Design' (depending on the type of account you have) and click the 'Edit Html' tab.

You will see a tick box on the right that says 'Expand Widget Template'; tick that.

Step 2.

You will need to find the following code:

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

If you have trouble locating it (which you probably will), you can hit '[Ctrl] F' on your keyboard which will open a search box that you can copy/paste the code into and it will highlight it for you within the template.

Step 3.

Immediately AFTER that code, copy/paste the following facebook button code into your template:

<iframe allowTransparency='true' expr:src='&quot;http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=100&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&quot;' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:40px;'/>

If you have a custom template and you can't find the first code, look for this one instead:

<data:post.body/>

And paste your button code immediately BEFORE it.

Hit 'Preview' at the bottom and if you're happy with what you see, then hit 'Save'.

If you have any questions or problems adding the facebook like button code to your blogger blog, please let me know in the comments section below.

Here it comes...if you enjoyed or found this article helpful; please share it on facebook and twitter by clicking the icons at the top. :)

Happy blogging!

Ben

Related Articles:
102 Personal Training And Fitness Blog Post Ideas
SEO For Fitness Blogs And Websites
How To Write Blog Content

The 5 Hour Blog Week: It Can Be Done!

How much time do you spend on facebook, tweeting and blogging each week?

One of the most common objections I hear from personal trainers about starting and operating a fitness business blog, is the perceived notion that it takes hours and hours of work to maintain.

While this can be true depending on the goals you have in place for your social media accounts; for the average personal trainer wanting to simply enhance their online presence, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Almost everybody is time poor these days, so prioritizing and systemizing tasks is the only way to survive if you want to maximise your productivity and efficiency AND stay motivated, which is what I was essentially forced to do last week.

I had to run a little experiment in better managing my time online due to a lot of end of year obligations and family visiting. I anticipated to have about 5 hours online over the course of seven days, so I had to come up with a formula and strategy.

I began by noting what I normally do and then listed them in order of importance, then put a line through about 80% of the 'non core' activities. What I was left with and allocated my precious 5 hours to achieving was the following:

• Blog Posts
• Facebook Updates
• Twitter Updates
• Commenting (On my blog only)
• Basic Marketing Tasks
• Basic Blog Maintenance

You see, I love blogging, I could easily spend 30-40 hours a week if time allowed, but I generally try and limit my online time to about 15 - 20 hours per week (I do work a full time job and have a life! Haha).

To some of you guys even that might sound excessive (trust me, it adds up fast), but as I said, I also consider facebook, twitter and commenting on posts all part of blogging; along with writing content for My Business Is Fitness and other bits and pieces...basically anything I do online.

So how did I squeeze my regular 20 hours of online time into only 5 hours?

Firstly and just to be honest; I didn't do many of the things that I regularly do; like work on my new product, write guest posts or spend as much time marketing articles and promoting MBIF.

That being said, I did manage to do all of my main tasks like writing several articles, adding value to my facebook and twitter accounts and replying to comments.

As mentioned, I began by getting rid of all of the "non core' activities and these are things like:

• Reading EVERY email that I receive
• Reading all of my RSS feeds
• Visiting some of the blogs that I enjoy
• Spending more than 15 minutes on my Facebook and Twitter accounts a day
• Commenting on other blogs
• Writing for other blogs
• Visiting forums

Then it was a matter of prioritizing tasks:

I planned my articles and pre wrote the headlines, bullet points and found images/video.

I sourced several articles and quotes for my social media channels

Once I had these things set aside, it was just a matter of using what time I had most efficiently to make sure the content got online.

Each blog post I write takes about an hour to two hours just putting down the content. Add to that sourcing images, adding internal and external links, bullet points and formatting so about another 30 minutes total.

Article Writing Tip:

One thing I've learned about writing blog posts is that sometimes while writing one, I'll go off on a tangent so I'll leave the original post and start writing another. This is a great way to essentially write two at once, or at least get down enough points to come back to later.

As mentioned, I shoot for three articles per week; you may be happy to write less frequently and that's fine depending on your goals, but it was surprising to me that I was able to get as much done as I did in such a short amount of time (hence this article).

To sum up; blogging 5 hours a week isn't for me, I just enjoy it way too much! That being said, for anyone that thinks that it's too much work, or too hard, then think again because like anything, if you plan and put systems in place you can still achieve great results and build your fitness business even faster.

How much time do you spend on social media each week?

If you enjoyed this post (or didn't), I'd love to read your comments below and please share with your friends on twitter and facebook by clicking the icons at the top of the article!

Thanks for reading!

Ben

Additional Reading:
102 Blog Post Ideas For Fitness Professionals
The 3 C's Of Successful Social Media Channels
How To Set Social Media Goals
How To Get Hundreds Of Targeted Twitter Followers

The 3 C's Of Successful Social Media Channels

Just yesterday while preparing some notes for a podcast interview on the power of social media for fitness businesses (in particular blogging); I was scribbling down some fundamentals and 3 of them (three of the most important in my opinion) happen to begin with the letter C.

Clarity, Commitment, Consistency.

It occurred to me that if we can all adhere to these three principles as a bare minimum, then the chances of building a successful online fitness empire will improve significantly, probably more than significantly...uber significantly if you will!

As fitness professionals and personal trainers, we use these same principles everyday with ourselves and with our clients when we're setting physical goals.

The clarity of what we want to achieve, be it weight loss or muscle gain etc. The commitment to make the decision to change and start living a healthier lifestyle and of course consistently working out, eating right and making healthful decisions.

But for today, let's apply these rules to your social media accounts:

Clarity:

Clarity can relate to many different things; in the context of social media marketing, what I'm referring to is:

• Knowing who your audience is. Use the same principles to discover and market to your readership as you would your target market in the gym.
• Know the objective of your blog, facebook and twitter accounts. What outcome do you want for all of your work?
• Staying on topic. You can use many variables, but essentially, most of your content should relate back to your original agenda; i.e. health and fitness.

Commitment:

Once you've decided on all of the above, make the commitment to stick to your blog for the long haul and set measurable goals.

Measurable goals can be:

• Traffic to your blog or site
• Subscriber numbers
• How many comments you're articles are getting
• Number of fans or followers

When you have measurable goals, the commitment side of social media becomes a lot clearer and easier.

Consistency:

Now you know who your people are and you've decided you're committed to your blog, it's time to make consistent efforts to not only please your readers, but increase your audience.

This could be by:

• How many posts you're going to write per week
• How many other blogs you'll comment on
• How much value you will give to your fans and followers on your social media channels

Consistency is so important in social media, for branding, credibility and reader engagement so planning your activities is the best route to ensure you get things done.

What do you guys think...Have I missed a C, does it seem a bit overwhelming?

Would love to read your comments below and please share this post on twitter and facebook by clicking the links at the top of the article!

Be Awesome!

Ben

PS. The podcast interview was for a new product coming soon by Mr. PT Business In A Box Rick Watson; I'll keep you updated on that as well!

Additional Reading
102 Personal Training Blog Post Ideas
How To Set Social Media Goals
Personal Training Blog Content Ideas
SEO For Personal Training And Fitness Blogs

102 Blog Post Ideas For Personal Trainers

Ever had one of those days when you have absolutely no idea what to write your next personal training blog post or article about? I have them all the time, so I try to keep about 50 post ideas up my sleeve.

Having a bit of a topic cushion can be a great thing when you have a brain drain, so I try and write down (or text myself if there's no pen and paper around) any post ideas I have, whenever they pop in my head.

Today's post is one I've wanted to put up for some time but haven't been able to come up with 102 topics to give you guys, but I think I got it...well, I should by the end of the article!

102 Blog Post Ideas For Personal Trainers

Write about:

1. A celebrity in the news and their exercise routine or habits
2. A relevant upcoming event that you're attending
3. A relevant event you've been to
4. A health or fitness product you're using
5. A product you've used
6. A product you're thinking of using
7. Disagree with a celebrity personal trainer and back it up with fact
8. A health and fitness magazine that you like and why
9. Your favorite healthy meal
10. Your favorite cheat meal
11. One of your personal training clients success stories
12. A hurdle you've overcome in life
13. Why you became a personal trainer
14. You're sporting past
15. Your favorite personal trainer icon and why
16. Your favorite person (anyone) and why
17. Fitness apps you use on your phone
18. Your favorite fitness website
19. Your favorite motivational book
20. Why you do what you do with your clients
21. Upcoming training programs you're implementing
22. Past training programs you've used
23. Holiday specific articles, like getting ready for Christmas holidays
24. A product that doesn't work
25. A product that does work
26. What runners you wear and why
27. Your opinion on different types of workout gear
28. Complain about a fitness television show
29. Praise a fitness television show
30. Write about the latest personal training course you've taken
31. Write about all the courses you've taken
32. Write about courses you're considering taking and how they will benefit your clients.
33. Complain about a celebrity personal trainer
34. Praise a celebrity trainer
35. Write why you wouldn't want to be a celebrity personal trainer
36. Write why you should be a celebrity trainer
37. Explain what a celebrity personal trainer really is
38. Your favorite workout music
39. You favorite chill out music
40. Write about some personal training gossip you've heard about
41. Write about the gym you train your clients in
42. Write about why you're a mobile personal trainer (if you are)
43. What sports/activities you like to do on the weekends
44. Write about a popular athlete and the fact that they too have trainers
45. Holiday workout tips
46. Holiday eating tips
47. How to choose good foods in a supermarket
48. How to choose good runners
49. Write about your testimonials
50. Get a client/member to guest write a testimonial post
51. Write about health myths
52. Write a list of health facts
53. Make a list post of quick easy healthy recipes
54. Explain the importance of a good breakfast
55. Write a post about some of your favorite past posts you've written
56. Share fitness warnings, cautions or concerns you think your clients should know about
57. Interview a colleague or client
58. Host a poll on health and fitness, find out what your clients are doing or want
59. Run a contest on your blog
60. Write about a new website or blog you think your readers could benefit from
61. If you have a newsletter, write a post about what people who subscribe can expect
62. If you have an RSS feed, write a post explaining what it is and how it works
63. Write an FAQ post about your business/services
64. Find a good YouTube video, post it and write about what it means to you
65. Write a post about the plans for your fitness business for the next year
66. Write a post reviewing the year that you've had
67. If you see a good movie, write about it and relate something about it for your clients/readers
68. Review a healthy nutrition book or website
69. Write about a quote that you love and what it means to you
70. Write about what gets you up in the morning
71. Write a funny post, maybe something that happened to you while training or training a client
72. Find an image online, post it and what it means to you
73. Write about how personal training and the fitness industry has changed over say the past 10 years
74. Write an article about all of the services you offer
75. Write about some of the bad things about being a personal trainer
76. Debunk some myths about being a personal trainer
77. Write about a piece of equipment you saw advertised on TV
78. Have you ever bought a piece of fitness equipment you saw on TV?
79. Weight loss myths
80. Muscle gain myths
81. Nutrition myths
82. Your favorite exercises
83. Write an article about something that's good, but not great in the industry
84. Write a post discussing the results from your poll you wrote from number 58
85. Write only about a particular theme for one week; have a nutrition week for example
86. Write a post about if you could only tell your clients 10 things, these would be them
87. Make a list of good books
88. Make a list of great websites
89. Take a stand on a particular topic; say for example you think that kettlebells are a complete waste of time and money
90. Write about a mistake you've made and what you learned from it
91. Review a sports supplement or vitamin
92. Write about your point of difference as a fitness professional
93. Have a look at your blogs stats and write about some of the countries that visit.
94. Write about and invite your readers to join your other social media channels like Facebook and Twitter
95. Find a funny piece of fitness equipment (there's some junk out there) and review it
96. Write a post about some tricks that most people don't know about like how easy it is to do a one armed push up
97. Write a post about something you disagree with in popular media; for example an exercise that the trainers did on Biggest Loser and why you think it sucks
98. Write about any awards you've won
99. Write about and highlight any online or offline articles you've had published
100. Write about a cause or charity that you believe in and support
101. Write about why you work where you work, as in the town, suburb or community
102. Write a 10 ways how to pick a personal trainer post...







...KIDDING! (If you're a regular reader of My Business Is Fitness you'd know what I mean, otherwise click on the link).

I would love to read any comments that you have below and of course, if you enjoyed this article, please share it on facebook and twitter by clicking the icons at the top of the post and to never miss an update, make sure to add your email address below and click "Get Updates"!

Blogging Tools I Use On My Business Is Fitness

As you may or may not know, I've been blogging for about three years and over this time I've used a lot of different tools to try and create better blogs and blogs that rank in search engines for specific keywords by using search engine optimization, or SEO.

My business is fitness is a relatively new blog (about six months now) and it's been a bit of a test case scenario for me, as it's the first blog I've really wanted to do well and put a LOT of effort into.

The problem with new blogs like mine and especially blogs in any competitive niche is that it's difficult to rank well, at least for a while.

The first year is the toughest with blogging; building an audience, building links and building credibility with search engines takes time and consistent work.

My keywords for this blog are terms like fitness business, personal training business etc. and to be honest, it's been very tough to get Google to pay attention to me. At the time of writing this, even my blog name search term of, 'my business is fitness', is still on page two (but thankfully climbing steadily).

The way I've overcome the frustration of waiting for sites like Google to recognise that this blog is the real deal and to nail me to page one, is to rank well for longer terms or 'long tail' search queries.

One tool I've used in the past and the one I want to show you today is a fantastic way to research what keywords you want to use on your fitness business website or blog; it's also absolutely free (for a two week trial period).

The product is called Market Samurai and it's a keyword tool that takes away a lot of the headaches that can be associated with narrowing down your particular keywords.

For you guys and why I'm sharing this with you today, is as I'm sure you're aware, ranking high on Google's front page will put more money in your pocket.

In an article I wrote a few months back called SEO For Personal Training Blogs And Websites, I used an example of a personal training business located in a random town called Richmond.

For this example, I used the keywords personal training Richmond as a good place to start.

Find the full article here: SEO For Personal Training Blogs And Websites

What Market Samurai does for you is, rather than leaving it to guess work on what keywords you should go with and hopefully rank, you simply type them in and it gives you a report on how much search traffic (potential clients) is looking for your keywords, the keyword competitors and suggested alternatives, amongst a host of other things.

Here's a brief video about the program:



The program itself comes with a host of instructional videos which make it very simple to use and let me remind you that you have full access for the trial period which is absolutely free.

If you're serious about taking your business to the next level and keeping your competitors guessing why you're ahead of them on Google, this is one program I highly recommend that you check out!

Market Samurai Website

Ben

Additional Reading:
Build Your Own Personal Training Or Fitness Business Blog For Free
How To SEO Your Personal Training YouTube Videos
How To SEO Your Personal Training Blog And Websites Images

Personal Training Blog Content

So you've decided to take action and build a blog for your personal training business (congratulations); but now comes the tricky part, you need to fill it with content!

Before you get started on your blog, you should attempt to have a basic goal and direction; define your niche and decide what outcome you're seeking?

If you're building it for your personal training business then you shouldn't stray from that topic. Much like my business is fitness is about helping personal trainers build their fitness businesses; if I started writing about my weekend or the golf scores, not only would search engines have a tough time figuring out where to categorize my blog, you would probably lose interest (besides, I'm terrible at golf).

Ask yourself these questions:

Why are you making a personal training blog?

• To make money from? 
• To help potential clients find you? 
• To use as an information portal for your existing clients?

What do you want to achieve with your blog?

• More clients? 
• Establish yourself as an authority within your location and/or niche?
• To become a full time blogger?

How much time to you have to invest in your blog?

• Is this something you are going to build and leave?
• Are you going to be updating it regularly?

In blogging circles they say that 'content is king' and for the most part that's true. Today I'm going to talk about some of the articles or posts that you should have on your site as a bare minimum, regardless of what outcome you're seeking.

What Should I Call My Blog?

That's entirely up to you, again it may come down to the goals you have set for it. If for example it is purely for client information and generation, then you might consider having your location and or specialty in the name. You may decide that you're building your blog to create an authority site on a particular health and fitness subject, therefore you may use your own name, or you may simply name it after your personal training business for branding purposes.

How Long Should Posts Be?

As a basic rule, your posts should range between 250-500 words. 250 as a minimum for search engines and to show you know at least a little bit about the topic, 500 because most people get bored with much more.

Don't feel compelled to stick to these figures; sometimes you have to just keep writing and sometimes a certain topic just isn't that interesting, but it's the general consensus for most articles length. If you do want to write a huge expose or something super long, consider breaking it down into a series of posts, or as a part 1 / part 2 type article.

What Types Of Articles Should I Write About?

There are several categories that you must have on your personal training blog regardless of what outcome you're seeking:

• You're Location And Contact Details: VERY important if you want people to find you.
• An 'About Me' Page: Where you have come from/why you became a personal trainer.
• Client Testimonials: Social proof is priceless. You can set up a separate page for these or incorporate them into a signature, or even have them in a sidebar.
• Useful Information/Hints And Tips: Give away some knowledge, show the world you know what you're talking about.
• Your Personal Training Specialities: What people can expect if they hire you.
• Updates And Events: What you're up to, goals and plans for your fitness business and clients.

 How Often Should I Post Articles?

Again, this comes down to your goal. The more frequent you post, the more successful your blog will be as an overall. Ideally, you should be posting minimum 3-4 times per week consistently. If you're not the writing type and that seems quite daunting, make sure you study up on your search engine optimization, to make sure that every post you write counts.

Just like there are always new gyms and personal trainers popping up around you, there are tons of blogs in your niche created every day, so it's wise to spend some time considering the following:

• Be specific with your niche: The narrower and more targeted your blog is, the more likely you are to be found when people are searching a particular resource or service.
• Be prepared for no one to find your blog on Google or anywhere for a long time: This could be months depending on how you structure your blog and write your articles. My suggestion is to have your blog on business cards from the start and hand them out vigorously.
• It is a LOT of work to create a blog: Content is by far the most important aspect, however there are so many other factors that can influence your blogging success.
• Read all you can on related subjects: Read up on SEO, read up on 'how to blog' type websites, the trick with blogging is to outlast your competitors; so many people go hard for 3 months and then quit. If you battle on and be consistent, you will make it.
• Start Today: Blogs are not only ranked on content and links and a host of other things, but the age of the site is also a determining factor. Do something today to start your blog, even if it's something simple like buying your domain name.

If you have any other tips and advice for personal training blog content, please leave a comment below!

Ben

Further Reading:

SEO For Personel Training Blogs
How To SEO Your Personal Training Blog Images
How To SEO Your Personal Training Videos For YouTube
Problogging For Personal Trainers

How to SEO Your Personal Training Blog And Website's Images

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your personal training blogs and/or websites should not stop at post and title keywords. Regardless of what platform you're using, key wording your images should also be part of your 'must do' SEO practices.

Your images can be a great resource for organic search results, but there are a few tricks to make sure you come up in the right categories.

Google and other search engines don't know what your images are unless you tell them via things like anchor text and descriptive labelling.

Anchor text is the hyperlinked words on a web page, or the words you click on when you click a link.

For example: personal trainer marketing, in which "personal trainer marketing" is the anchor text. It should give your visitors information about the content of the page you're linking to.

Anchor text is important because it tells search engines about the page that you're linking to, especially Google.

If you use anchor text like "click on link" as the words people are going to click on, you're telling people the page is about the subject "click on link". You wouldn't want to rank highly for "click on link".

Think of image SEO as optimizing a tiny web page within your page. Images can drive traffic through image searches as well as inclusion in general search results.

To begin:

• Match your images to the article you're writing: A good image adds a new dimension to your posts and can make your articles stand out at a glance. When posting images to your blog or site though, if the image isn’t Creative Common licensed or you didn’t buy or create it, don’t post it. Companies can take legal action against you. Some places to find free, unlicensed images include: Flickr, stock.xchng and istockphoto.
• Use Keywords in the file name: Just the way you use keywords in your articles and posts for SEO, the same is true for images. Label your images accurately; for example, an image of someone doing a barbell squat, your image should have those keywords in the label.
• Don't keyword 'stuff': The same goes for images as it does for your articles. If you use too many keywords, Google will think that your image is spam.

You should be using every opportunity to rank well in the search engines and image optimizing is very often overlooked.

Ben

Problogging For Personal Trainers: Book Review

One of the cheapest and potentially most lucrative marketing and promotion tools you can have in your personal training business arsenal is a well written and consistently updated blog. The only catch is, getting people to actually read and participate on it is a completely different ballgame.

I'd been blogging for about three years before I started my business is fitness and had mixed success. To clarify, my idea of success is people actually finding my blogs.

I've blogged about golf, facebook, bodybuilding and I also had a personal blog with just my rants and raves about general topics and things that amuse me.

The golf blog, which I've long since abandoned, still receives good traffic especially during the larger tournaments because I have some databases, a bit of golf history and some various event results pages on there.

While I regret not starting my business is fitness sooner, over those three years I dabbled with many different ways of tweaking blogs and must have read hundreds if not thousands of different articles on social media marketing and promotion. I also like to think my writing abilities have improved over that time.

One of the first influences on my blogging experience was via Darren Rowse's site 'Problogger'.

Problogger is a blog about making money blogging. It's one of the most successful blogs in it's niche and has made Darren a veritable superstar in the blogging world. It's worthwhile noting that while Problogger.net is very successful in it's own right, Darren actually started writing it to teach bloggers how he makes money with his even more successful photography blog 'Digital Photography School'.

"You can give yourself no greater gift than knowledge"

When I saw Darren had collaborated with another very well respected blogger Chris Garrett to produce the book  'Problogger - Secrets To Blogging Your Way To A Six Figure Income', I had to have it!

I bought Problogger during a break in my day and decided to have some lunch and flick through it. 3 hours and 12 missed phone calls later I had almost finished it and had tabbed all the pages I wanted to reread and absorb better.

One of the things that impressed me about the book is it doesn't make any ridiculous get rich quick claims or try and sell you anything. The book is straight up nuts and bolts blogging which suits everyone from the complete novice right up to more experienced bloggers.

Why Should A Personal Trainer Read Problogger?

There are many reasons why a personal trainer should have a blog, here's one of my articles explaining why in more detail: Build Your Own Personal Training Business Blog

Problogger covers pretty much all aspects of blogging and social media:

• Blogging from A-Z: From hosting to which platform you use to creating great content and then how to market that content. I cannot stress enough how easy the guys make this sound and what 'jargon' is in there is clearly explained.

• How to use facebook and Twitter to build your business.

• How to use Youtube and sites like Digg to promote yourself and your material.

Although you can start a blog for free, it is very hard work, there are countless hours involved not only in creating your content, but the marketing and promotion that goes along with that. Not to mention, in the beginning, there will probably be months where no one will even read your articles.

A blog can be one of your most lucrative business tools if you work at it and follow basic principles. To make this whole process more enjoyable and see the benefits of all your hard work, you need to stay inspired and be consistent and Problogger is definitely one book I recommend to all personal trainers wanting to build their online presence.

You can borrow my bent up, twisted, scribbled on and ketchup stained copy of Problogger, or you can buy it below. If you've already read it, or can suggest another great resource, please feel free to post your feedback in the comments section below.

Ben

SEO For Personal Training Blogs And Websites

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a highly debated and often ‘best guess’ topic on how to rank your personal training blog or website higher and more precisely with popular search engines like Google and Yahoo, by using specific keywords.

There are many and varied opinions on what works and the best ways to structure your content to get the most value from your personal training businesses blog or site, however there are some strategies that appear to work more consistently and better than others.

What do you want to achieve with your blog or site?

To begin, your SEO strategy should reflect the outcome that you want to achieve and for what you want to rank for, which could be one of the following:

• Promotion of your personal training business by targeting a specific geographic community (what I am discussing today)
• Selling online personal training services
• Selling advertisement space on your site or blog
• Promotion of yourself and your personal training products, like ebooks or merchandise.

Once you’re clear on what your blog or site is about and the objective you wish to achieve, you need to begin researching keywords for your particular niche.

I recommend using Google Adwords Keyword Tool for this. You simply type in the keywords you have selected, fill in the CAPTCHA and hit ‘Get Keyword Ideas’.

The resulting information provides you with a specific breakdown of the amount of people searching for a particular keyword or keywords, both locally and globally. You can modify your search to show more specific results, including advertising rates etc., however for now lets just see what the search volume for your keywords are.

I just typed in ‘personal training’ and I can see that the global search volume for this keyword is 823,000, which indicates that a lot of people are searching the net for personal training; this is positive and negative.

The positive is that plenty of people are searching for that combination of keywords; however the shear volume suggests that you will probably never rank for those particular ones, in fact you may be lucky to make the top 100 pages as there is a lot of online competition.

Get specific!

So what you need to do is try new combinations and be more specific in your personal training keywords.

As I mentioned, promoting your personal training blog or site to a specific geographical community is probably the ‘easiest’ way to rank highly.

One way to come up with a keyword strategy is to think about what you would search for to hire a personal trainer in your local community. Let’s say ‘personal trainer Melbourne’.

Let’s go back to Adwords and try ‘personal trainer Melbourne’. You can obviously adjust your search terms to your specific city or town; however for the purposes of this article I’m just using my local region.

The result for this keyword search is 3,600, which is much more positive.

You will also notice that the keyword tool offers a variety of results and by changing the term to ‘personal trainers Melbourne’, the result is significantly different (1,600).

To become even more specific, you may want to narrow down your search even further. I just tried ‘personal trainer Richmond’, which is a suburb just outside of Melbourne where my imaginary studio or gym is located and the result is much smaller.

On the surface this may seem like a bad result, however, the people who are searching for ‘personal trainer Richmond’ are a very specific and targeted audience that are more than likely genuine business prospects and you are in a very good position to rank well for this term if you follow a few simple SEO procedures when you’re writing your content.

What now?

There are many different reasons why websites and blogs rank in search engines the way they do, some of which contribute to:

• The volume and consistency of content
• The age of the blog or site
• Keyword usage throughout the blog or site

For the purpose of this article I’m not going to go into any details about different types of links or the ‘pagerank’ of a site, other to say that the previous 3 factors do contribute to it but I will cover this topic in more detail in future articles.

So using our keywords ‘personal trainer Richmond’, you need to start using them in every post and even in the name of your blog or site.

To rank for a blog post, there is some SEO etiquette that suggests that you should use your keywords in the title of your post, in the first paragraph of your post and then intermittently throughout your article.

We could write an imaginary article as follows:

[Post Title] Richmond Personal Trainer Now Available!

[First Paragraph] “Are you looking for a personal trainer in Richmond? Well look no further!”

And then using the terms a few more times throughout your article...

The SEO rules

Now, the trick with this is that you have to be careful with how you word and format your post.

If you use your keywords too often, it will become annoying to read for the consumer and there is also information to suggest that Google will recognise a heavily repeated keyword post as spam and you will get no rankings.

A rule of thumb is to read your article aloud to yourself and if it sounds corny, then it probably is.

With blogs, each post is its own SEO entity, so the above strategy is fantastic and while Google will establish a theme to your blog with consistent keyword usage, for the most part you will rank one post at a time.

Websites are different to blogs in that Google reads the entire website via ‘sitemaps’ and a few other things to ascertain what the site is about and where to put it in relation to search engines.

If you reread this article, you will notice that I have followed the principles that I discuss in this post using the keywords ‘personal training blog SEO’. I used the terms in my post title and flipped them around in my first paragraph to make it more pleasing to read.

I also used the terms several times throughout the article and sneakily added them again in the previous paragraph.

Depending on how you came across this article should also determine how well I have used the principles.

I hope this has given you an idea of how to re evaluate how you're writing your online content. Keep in mind though, the minute you start writing for the search engines and not your human audience, your content will not make any sense and be boring, so try and find a happy medium and then everyone wins.

Additional Reading: Building Your Own Personal Training Blog

I also read Court's Internet Marketing School, I find this a fantastic resource for well explained, easy to follow internet marketing ideas.

Build Your Own Personal Training Business Blog

There are literally thousands and thousands of personal trainers’ blogging away on the internet sharing their knowledge and experiences to help people lose weight or gain muscle.

You have probably read some and you may even be a subscriber to some. This post isn’t about you creating a blog to try and take over the world, but rather to produce an inexpensive business tool and resource for your existing clients and also to attract new clients.

A blog can be created in about ten minutes flat thanks to sites like Google Blogger. Although their base templates aren’t the most dazzling, they’re free, very easy to use and did I mention FREE. All you need is a gmail account, then come up with an original name and away you go.

Now that you have a blog, what are you going to put on it? Well that’s the fun part!

Here are some useful tools and information that you could have available:

• Your exercise questionnaire: Have this available for your clients to download whenever they want to review their goals and progress.

• Updates: What courses you are attending and why you’re attending them. You could even add a link to the site of the company that you are doing it with so your clients can see what you do.

• Tips and hints: Write generalised articles. You can remind your clients of things like summers coming and what they should be doing when they’re not training with you. You can also put lists of helpful nutritional advice.

• Motivational stories: Find some relevant stories on the internet to post about.

• General interest: Maybe you read an inspirational book recently. Give a brief rundown and reason why your clients may find it useful. Provide a link to Amazon.com for example so they can buy it.

• Video: Yes, you can publish videos of either yourself performing exercises or sharing information. Create a Youtube account, upload your videos then simply embed them onto your blog.

• Personal profile: This should give some information of your relevant background, education and experience.

That’s just a short list of some things you can write about, for those of you who are more creative, I’m sure you could have a field day coming up with fantastic posts.

The most important thing to remember is keep your blog on topic and professional.

Your blog should be treated as a business tool, so where you went clubbing on the weekend has no place, unless of course you can spin it into a useful health and fitness article.

Have the web address on your business cards and all of your other marketing materials so potential clients can see for themselves what kind of service you offer. Ask all of your clients to subscribe (you may need to show them how, or even subscribe on their behalf, then all they have to do is accept it in an email), so that whenever you update your blog they will automatically receive an email.

In the near future, I’ll follow up this post with more specific technical advice of how you can use your blog to rank well in search engines for potential clients searching the net for personal trainers near them.

Have fun and welcome to the blogosphere!

Ben