LIVE WEB

The fitness industry is an expansive industry covering a wide range of “healthful” programs. Some of you whom I’ve been lucky enough to speak and consult with have businesses that range from studio ownership to tropical retreats to the sale of healthful chocolates.

All are excellent and serve their niche well.

While each is different they are still the same in that,

1. They are all in the realm of the health and fitness industry
2. They all require marketing efforts to provide their message to their respective prospects
3. All benefit from various degrees of internet presence and diversification

With the internet playing such a large role in EVERYONE’S lives these days, it’s fairly simple to see the benefit to the fitness industry professional in seeking out tools and resources to enhance their presence on-line…

Following are five suggestions to assist with your internet presence:

1. Establish Your Space – You can have a high end web site, a simple blog like this, or utilize only free social media site(s).  Having a specific location to be found, contacted, and learned about is a starting point. Ultimately you may realize the value of all of these types of online presences and will have one or more of each.
2. Get Social – Social networking sites, forums, blog commentary are all great ways to express your opinions, show your knowledge and generally add value to the internet. With each of these you also take a huge step forward in making excellent business contacts and bringing people back to you web site.
3. Learn Content Marketing – There are many tips and tricks that go into optimizing your returns of content marketing, but even done with little knowledge you will get great returns over the long term.  Content marketing for the fitness industry can be created in many forms including articles, pod casts, webinars, videos, recipes, words of inspiration, and where ever you mind wants to take it.
4. Joint Venture – Partnerships of many types can be very powerful on-line just like off-line. Joint venturing takes the partnership a step further where you now benefit through active promotions or combining knowledge, products or services. A JV relationship can be more complicated, but you will either find your offering having a great deal more value or your prospect reach being greatly extended.
5. Listen to others – If you feel a bit lost when considering your actions for your internet presence, take a look to others who have and are succeeding now. You should look to those within the fitness industry, but also to those outside of it.  With FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn giving you fairly direct access to many of the foremost experts, it has never been easier to learn from their actions by watching what they do and how they communicate. Go search out guys like Perry Belcher, Chris Knight, and Jeff Walker. All from outside the fitness industry, but all have a great deal you can learn from them in their areas of expertise.
   Check into any learning programs they or people like them offer. Ours is the Fitness Business “Insiders Club“. There are literally thousands out there, so chose wisely.

Follow the above and you will not only establish a presence, but will also have carved out your space that will have prospects seeking out your offers rather than feeling like you must pursue them with your sales offering. You will have established yourself as an authority in your area of specialty and may soon be positioned to establish new offerings such as upsell products or operate a membership site or paid newsletter.

As a matter of fact, if you go through the five points above I believe you will be in the top 2-3% of all fitness professionals in that I see so many missing the boat when it comes to creating a solid multi-platform internet presence.

Take a look at Fit Pro Biz to see just a few fitness professional programs and be sure to sign up for the Business of Fitness newsletter over on the right column.

Tags: Fitness Industry, Internet

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 5:58 am and is filed under Fitness Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.