Let me explain why I got my ass off the fitness floor & headed to my PC… I simply was building resentment . Let me teach you to understand the opportunity in social media for fitness marketing puposes. Help your clients of course, guide them, you still need to be marketing yourself? Will you continue to pound on that gym floor for leads cuz you have that sales quota? Or  join every waking meet up group, networking til your hearts content… to attract your clientelle (hopeful you look like a leader, an example of your product & services!?)  let’s look at your action steps needed to really promote yourself and your personal training business.

1) Start a Fitness Facebook Page 

Set yourself up a local personal training, fitness leader, nutritionist, health coach page. Start searching local people who have similar interests and ask them to be friends. Offer them free fitness advice or post fitness videos and workout tips daily on your page. Your list of friends will grow rapidly and you can set yourself apart very quickly as an expert in your local community. Remember…What’s in it for them? Not you. Yours will come in time. Help first, reap later. I will now quote the bible. ‘She who refreshes others will herself be refreshed.’  Proverbs 11:25 noticed I referenced She. lol just a silly side!?

2) Create a Fitness Gravatar

When you leave a comment on my blog, you leave a little footprint with your name on it. This fitness marketing technique can drive a boatload of people toward your site because they want to see what you are all about. I have driven TONS of traffic back to my site by commenting on other personal training and fitness blogs. The only reason it works is because people want to know who or are curious about your personal gravatar, after all we all want to be animated!

I have actually converted sales from my gravatar image many times. Look at all the successful fitness pros out there. They ALL have gravatars and they all leave comments. How many of you have one?

Your homework…get a gravatar and leave a comment on this post. I want to see 50 gravatars on this post alone. I bet I wont because most people are lazy. Prove me wrong! I dare you…

Remember to choose or create an image or photo that SCREAMS your core identity. This is important.

3) Create A Fitness Twitter Page

This is like getting 100 free leads per day. If you looked at my twitter page I have over 2000 leads and I dont ever do anything but text from my phone between training sessions. It takes 30 seconds for potentially 100’s to 1000’s of people to visit your site. Twitter is the new Facebook & vise versa, and plays a big role in fitness marketing.

If you do just 6 twitter posts a day you can increase traffic to your website by over 100 hits. Imagine if you started twittering with potential customers answering their fitness questions and inviting them to meet you for a free consult.

You have no idea how powerful this tool is in marketing your personal training business. Create a Twitter page today and start twittering your way to personal training success.

Dont be a lazy bones. The recession is in your head. Money is everywhere but you actually have to work for it…

4) Submit a Fitness Press Release

It is so easy to get insane public recognition when you are recognized as an expert by the local media. It is so simple to get picked up by your local news paper.

Find out who to contact for health press releases. Submit at least one per week for a few weeks via email with a friendly follow up email asking if there is anything they need help with as far as expert advice or information is concerned. Its cheap exposure and a trusted, reliable way to market your personal training business.

Tell them you are more than happy to contribute and are available anytime for interviews as well. Just plant the seed. Don’t be a pest, but be consistent. Dont take rejection as a final answer.

Try another paper. Try another TV station. Make a list of 10 media contacts in your city and start making regular email communication and phone calls to these organizations.

Sooner than later you WILL be a local celebrity.

The key to success is to be known, to be regarded and to be available.

If you offer these 3 components to your local social environment you will be flooded with personal training business while others are packing up shop and changing careers.

Fitness marketing is critical for Fitness Professional’s  success!

I hope to see your new gravatar on this post in the next few days. If I dont you are just one more person who will probably be sitting at the bottom of the pile.

Success takes effort.

‘Ford’  has hopped onto the mustang of internet marketing and has realized that “culture has changed and they need to adapt to this ongoing way of communications.”  This new approach that Ford has taken launched their new car, Fiesta, onto the homes of their consumers, all by word of mouth, or should I say all by word of blog.

 Apart from the big corporate giants IMAGE what the right social media voice can do for your talent, from a ‘personal branding’ point with your client. Project runway needs to look at the social platform too to be on top of the movement.

We are doing business in a society who has “grown up digital”, who’s means of socializing and connecting to others has become social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and any other chatter sites.  Leading the way in social networking is Facebook.  Facebook has “up to 250 million members, 50 million of whom joined in the past three months”.   “Twitter has about 40 million users” that “spend nearly 300 million minutes on the site in April alone. 

“Social-networking-savvy businesses” such as Ford have realized the need of online social media and have “appointed social-media directors to help.”  These experts are helping in the promotion of the business by using these social tools to “add customers quickly”, take advantage of “word-of-mouth marketing”, “enhancing customer service”, and CEOs having direct connection to their customers.

But marking using social media is not all green pastures.  There are reasonable expectations that need to be understood.   “With reward come risks”, Social Media Networking requires a lot of time, and know how. 

Social Media Networking is one of the greatest tools for promoting your product, website or service, only if it is done correctly.  Social Media Consultant such as myself & other professionals help clients to navigate thru the turbulence of social media marketing a well define social media campaign. 

So to sum it all up in once comment; a well developed social media campaign can mean the difference between viral explosion or PR nightmare.

We talk about eating a Big Mac, wearing Manolos, checking our BlackBerry, listening to our iPod. There’s no need to explain what they are; their brand names speak volumes. The same applies to people – Branson, Madonna, Angelina – we know immediately who they are and what they stand for.

Your brand is your personal x-factor.

Whether you’re a chief executive, a teacher, a student at a college interview or a graduate in your first job, a strong ‘brand’ is what makes the people you want to influence (colleagues, friends, potential employers, dates, etc) choose you over someone else. Simon Cowell often rejects X Factor contestants for being ‘forgettable’ – he understands that the audience needs someone magnetic. It isn’t about reinventing yourself – it’s about finding out what is already compelling about you and putting that across to the right people.

Your brand speaks for you when you are not there!

Some of the most important career decisions are made when you are not present – hirings, firings, promotions. Many people I meet are frustrated that less qualified colleagues are promoted ahead of them. But chances are they have a stronger personal brand; their reputations are working for them, creating those opportunities.

At the heart of any brand is a compelling idea…

Brainstorm with your friends and colleagues. Find out what it is about you people want more of – and find ways to get the message across to those who might influence your success. But this message needs to be authentic (ie, you need to be yourself) or you will not be believable or trustworthy.

Often we sell ourselves short.

Rather than saying simply, ‘I’m a nutritionist’, when someone asks you what you do, also say, ‘I help people have more energy’. Think about how to describe yourself in a way that puts you into context and conveys that you are good at what you do. People are far more likely to remember you.

Avoid being a ‘vanilla’ person:

We often feel a need to hide our beliefs and personalities at work. But people buy into brands on an emotional level, so we can’t afford to be bland. To make ourselves memorable we need to give others something to relate to.

Many people say that losing weight is just a health matter. I am a professional for the past decade in the health & fitness business, and let me tell you personal looks are everything to my clients these days in the society that is fixated on social cultural creative’s. In a world of self-promotion and egos, yes your image is a lot of the attraction to your brand. Now of course my priority with any of my clients, is health & wellness but I will confess that most of my clients come to me for a response in how they want to look, the feel is potentially an ego driven motivator.

So I was asked not that long ago; do looks matter when it comes to self promotion. My study, and most of my clients yes; a change in appearance is the prime motivator.

Not always, but most of the time. We know that competence was the only factor that most people were able to perceive from a photograph. Honesty and likeability were less clear from quick photo impressions. That is a real trivia in online perception that I came across long ago, and will confess the reason why I put more emphasis on my business for online clients, as most came to me for personal self image, perhaps my own marketing prose attracted that kind of client market. So really we all want to ‘BE’ our own voice;  CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.

Typical scene of today’s urban corporate entrepreneur on the net…”You’re hired, you report to work, you join a team — and you immediately start figuring out how to deliver value to the customer. Along the way, you learn stuff, develop your skills, hone your abilities, and move from project to project. And if you’re really smart, you figure out how to distinguish yourself from all the other very smart people walking around with $1,500 suits, high-powered laptops, and well-polished resumes. Along the way, if you’re really smart, you figure out what it takes to create a distinctive role for yourself — you create a message and a strategy to promote the brand called You.”

Would you agree, looks do matter when it comes to self-promotion we are all seeking human connection, attraction and learning new strategies to market ourselves in today’s economy!