Techno Fit

It's exciting times right now if you are running your own fitness or personal training business. By harnessing all of the potential that new technologies have to offer you can be putting your fitness business right on the map, helping you to earn a higher salary and providing your clients and members with a top notch personalised service second to non and all of this and you could still be a one man band, and, you don't have to be computer savy or techno geek to do it.

For many Instructors teaching in the community or operating a personal training business the power and potential of the internet has enabled small one man operations to compete with the big corporations by giving you the ability to offer complete customer service and back up.

Website and Customer List

Develop your business online

More and more Independent Fitness Professionals need to be jumping into online marketing. I'm seeing it everywhere, with a little bit of knowledge and practice you can develop and sell to your client base, e-books, e-courses, DVDs and CDROMS and other information products. As a fitness professional you are an expert you have knowledge and expertise that your clients want and need and are prepared to pay for it. Several years ago it was difficult and took a lot of effort to get a book published by a publishing house. Well now, you can write your own book, convert it to an e-book and sell it online on your website or to your clients. All you need to do is invest some time into writing and researching a suitable book.

Tracy McClaclen wrote her first e-book on Fitness Pilates and sells it to her clients after classes and through her website [http://www.pink-pineapple.com] it supplements her income and is a product that will continue to sell year after year.

"So many of my clients always asked me for the Fitness Pilates exercises that they could do at home so I decided to turn it into a book and sell it. It has been one of the most profitable decisions I have made and it only took me time to write and produce"

If you are serious about growing your fitness business and don't want to spend all of your time and energy teaching 25 classes per week to make a living then you may need to diversify and offer multiple income streams. Your first port of call needs to be website think of your website as a virtual shop, your home page is like a shop window that needs to be changed and updated frequently.

If this is something you want to add to your business, here are some of my recommendations for getting off on the right foot.

1. Get a good web site and learn to update it yourself. You need to have the flexibility to make changes and add things on the fly. You need to be comfortable with the basic technical aspects of the web. And you need to have a site with good content. From there you can add pages for specific online products.

2. Build your email list. Perhaps nothing is more important than this one. You can't build a big, responsive list overnight, so start collecting email addresses now and input them into an excel spreadsheet. You need to collect everyone's email address that comes to you or give out your cards and ask your class members to sign up for free to your site.

3. Send out an ezine regularly. No, make that weekly. This isn't the only way to do it, but you will grow your client list much faster if you send out your ezine more often. The best subscribers actually come via word-of-mouth. And the more it gets out there, the more

it is passed along. Ezine drive online sales. Period. Without my weekly newsletter my local classes and the C2Go website would be nowhere.

Whilst I was planning my website http://www.choreographytogo.com and working on the technical aspects I began to email out a weekly Instructor newsletter containing news, views, reviews and business ideas. I collected everyone's email address I could from Instructors who attended my workshops and at conventions. My list started with 50 email addresses and now I have 15,000 subscribers in 3 years.

4. Develop an online product. What will your online product be? As you know C2Go is downloadable choreography, articles, a support system for Fitness professionals, back up for my courses and workshops. Could you develop an e-book, recipe book, low fat cooking, weight loss information, could you develop your own DVD or CDROM?

5. Commit to mastering the ideas and principles of online marketing. Read books, e-books and attend seminars.

This is my model and it works brilliantly. The only drawback is that I can't develop products fast enough to meet the demand and that I don't have enough time on my calendar to do more workshops and film more choreography, but I suppose those are good problems to have!

Conference calling and telephone seminars

Large corporations and business have long invested in the technology to provide multi conference calling, which basically is a seminar or lecture conducted by phone where all the attendees use there own phone and hook up to a bridging line to enter into the conference. No more travelling for hours in your car, business cuts down on travelling costs and you can host the call from your own office. I predict that this will have a massive impact on the fitness industry as more companies offer the technology and the costs come down on line rental. Just think you can host your own lecture on weight loss, motivation, exercise adherence or whatever your specialise in and charge your clients accordingly. Here at choreographytogo I have been experimenting on this method of virtual lecture helping Instructors stay focused and motivated as well as given lectures on business ideas and pr for their own business. You can even hook up a web cam and record the event live and steam it on your website.

Audio Lectures

Again audio lectures are gaining popularity on all kinds of websites and the fitness industry will yet again be profoundly impacted by these. By buying a relatively cheap recording device you can set it up to record a phone call thus enabling you to conduct an interview over the phone and record it, change it to a .windows audio file and stream it on your website. I envisage many presenters and fitness experts will be able to stream lectures and interviews in this way so we gain all the latest research and information via that expert's website.

Mobile Phones/Multimedia messages and Text messaging

Many fitness professionals and personal trainers are using text messaging as way to motivate clients, keep them on track, remind them of appointments and so but with the rise of 3G phones and video messaging the next logical step would be to send clients a mini video of an exercise or routine. For instructors I will be texting 1 minute choreography routines direct to your phone.

Its exciting times so don't get left behind and move your business onto the next multimedia age.

Rachel Holmes is the Director of http://www.choreographytogo.com a website dedicated to Fitness Instructors. The website offers choreography downloads audio lectures and virtual seminars and will be implementing broadband fitness TV in the near future. For more information email Rachel@choreographytogo.com