5 Money-Losing Website Mistakes Fitness Professionals Make

Copyright 2006 strength-training-woman.com
The fitness industry is buzzing with new marketing techniques. Big shot marketing experts are popping up, joint ventures are being formed and buzz words such as "passive income" are all the rave. Many personal trainers want nothing more than a simple and efficient lead generating machine that involves little time and little cost. These trainers are turning to the Internet for help.
I have been part of the fitness industry for over 5 years. One thing that I have noticed over these years is the lack of business skills personal trainers have. Let me drill down and be more specific. Personal trainers lack successful business skills. They may know how to work the biceps, but most do not know how to leverage their business online.
This particular article focuses on successful websites for personal trainers. This is an absolute must have. It builds credibility, draws leads, provides information to prospective clients, and earns passive income. A successful website should do all of these things. It should not take up time, cause frustrate, cost more money that it's worth or simply be an online brochure.
Here are the 5 biggest money-losing website mistakes fitness professionals make, and ways to avoid them!
1) Personal trainers choose a hosting company that does nothing for them. Hosting companies are well-known to lure fitness professionals into their business with the promise of cheap, easy and low-maintenance. Most personal trainers love the idea of low cost and low hassle. However, working with these low cost hosting companies can be a nightmare. Each additional tool, such as lead generation box, newsletter or traffic statistics, will cost additional money. Most websites will cost too much in hosting fees to be successful.
2) Fitness professionals use a fitness website template that they can customize. These templates sound great on the outside. Trainers can add photos and text. The problem is that these websites are never found on the search engines. They look clean and provide some information, but no one will ever find these websites unless they already know about it. This means that the website is not bringing in new, fresh, hot targeted leads. No traffic also means no passive income.
3) Personal trainers want to earn passive income, but they join up with affiliates that pay low commissions. I have personally made this mistake. I built a tremendous website with thousands of visitors each and every month. I was sending my visitors to a few companies that sold equipment or a nutrition program. If these customers bought from the website I referred them to I would earn a commission. They rarely bought, and when they did I earned less than $5. The lesson here is to have an excellent website coupled with an excellent affiliate program. Personal trainers need to find affiliate programs that pay larger commissions and have excellent ROI's (return on investments).
4) Fitness professionals never optimize their websites. Some trainers actually have nice websites, but as I mentioned above their site is never found in the search engine rankings. Most personal trainer sites are a total of 5 webpages. Those pages typically consist of the following: Home page, About Us, Services, Links, and Contact Us.
These pages will not rank at engines. The trick to ranking well at search engines is keywords. Successful personal trainer websites will have more than 20 pages of fitness and health related information. These pages will be optimized for one single keyword. Picking what keywords are good and easy to rank well for is the hard part. The hosting company should provide a keyword analyzer tool in the initial price if they are a good hosting company.
5) Personal trainers will pay a website designer thousands of dollars for a basic site or they let their friend do it for free. Big mistake on both ends. Personal trainers that give up control of their website to a distant designer or a trusted friend will soon grow tired of waiting for their changes to be implemented. Each time something needs to be added or changed it will take days if not weeks before it gets done. This is bad business. What happens when the trainer wants to run a two-day sale?
One more point about having a designer or friend doing the site, they do not know how to write sales copy. They do not know the fitness industry. They do not know marketing tactics to gain hot targeted leads from the search engines. They mean well and will provide you with an online brochure, but personal trainers that want to be successful know they must pull in lots of traffic each and every month. This traffic is the lifeline of passive income success and in-person training programs.
Personal trainers love to train people. They would rather change someone's life than spend days and days building a site or paying someone for a site that does not work. Gym owners, studio managers and entrepreneurial fitness professionals should take the first step towards a successful website. The investment is one they can and should be willing to make, but be sure the investment pulls in hot leads, pulls in passive income, and does not cause frustration.
Most websites are nothing more than an online brochure. They are never found on the search engines and it draws little to no traffic. Without traffic there is no one to sell back end products to. Without traffic there is no lead generating system. A successful website will provide a fitness professional with income. Without traffic there is no income.

About the Author
Lynn VanDyke develops successful fitness professional websites. She provides several options for personal trainers and other business owners. Visit http://www.LynnVanDyke.com to learn more about her and her services. Lynn's fitness website is ranked in all 3 major search engines and is in the top 1% of all websites worldwide according to Alexa.