Fitness Boot Camps: Can They Help Your Business?

The fastest way to attract new clients and collect plenty of profits for your fitness business is with a new program. But what? You don't want to put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into a fast-dying fad or a program that attracts a limited target market because your profits will dry up quickly. Your solution: Fitness boot camps. Click here for full article...

How To Prevent Personal Trainer Burn Out

Why did you decide to become a personal trainer? Was it your love of exercise? The rush you felt when you lifted a new max weight or beat your best time on the track? Maybe it was the thrill of being able to do what you love each day and help others to follow suite. Most likely it was your passion for fitness, and your passion for helping others, combined. Click here for full article...

Web Technology in Marketing: Friend or Foe?

Every independent professional should have a web site, an ezine, and an email marketing strategy, right? If you're not taking maximum advantage of web technology to market your professional services, you are behind the times, and missing out on huge opportunities. At least that's what most marketing experts would have you believe. But how valid is this advice? And is it for everyone? Click here for full article...

Five Myths of Internet Marketing

There's more marketing hype published on the Internet in one day than P.T. Barnum generated in his lifetime. Like a worm swallowing its tail, the Internet marketing beast feeds mostly on itself. The vast majority of what appears on the Internet about marketing is designed to help you market products and services sold and delivered exclusively on the Internet. Click here for full article...

What If No One Signs Up?

It's the nightmare of every professional who offers group programs. You design a powerful workshop, schedule a date, broadcast your marketing message... and no one registers. Then what? Click here for full article...

Top 10 Mistakes Personal Trainers Should Avoid

Whether you work as a personal trainer in a health club or own your own private training studio, finding and maintaining clients can be a big challenge. Find out if you’re inadvertently making these top 10 mistakes and how to correct them. Click here for full article...

What Every Manager Ought To Know - About How To Increase Personal Trainer Sales

Without a team of individuals who can effectively chase leads, nurture customer relationships, and close a sale, most fitness businesses would fail to survive for the long term. Therefore, there is no question that developing a high performance sales oriented personal training team that will support your growth should be at the top of your list. As a manager or club owner, there are several steps you can take to develop such a team. Click here for full article...

Find Out How Much You Need To Spend To Acquire A Client

To determine how much you can spend to acquire each customer, you need to calculate the Lifetime Profit (LTP) you receive from an average client. To do this, multiply your average profit per sale by the estimated number of times your client will renew their membership. Click here for full article...

Here's A Quick Way To Find Out How Much A Client Is Worth To You

Do you know how much a client is worth to you? Do you know how to calculate their Lifetime Value (LV)? If you don’t know then you need to find out. Why? As marketing wizard Jay Abraham explains in his book, Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got:, "Until you identify and understand exactly how much combined profit a client represents to your business for the life of that relationship, you can't begin to know how much time, effort, and, most importantly, expense you can afford to invest to acquire that client in the first place." Click here for full article...

Being Unique is a Good Thing... Isn't It?

New entrepreneurs frequently hear the advice to "be unique" in their marketing. The basic idea is a valuable one -- to get attention in a crowded marketplace, you must stand out in some way. Distinguishing your product or service from the competition can make your marketing more effective. Crafting a novel marketing message can attract the notice of more potential customers. Click here for full article...

Where the Clients Are

A friend of mine is an IT consultant. He's been an independent contractor for the 20-plus years I have known him, and gets all his consulting contracts through agencies. Even when he works a year or two for the same client, the agency takes 15-20% of what the client is paying for his services. I once asked him why he didn't find his own clients, and he said he didn't know where to look. Click here for full article...

Selling to the Bottom Line

If you've ever wondered why more people don't respond to your sales attempts and marketing messages, here's the first place to look -- are you selling something that people are willing to spend money on? Click here for full article...

Learn How to Create Marketing Opportunities From Health Fairs and Trade Shows

No one will argue that building your client base is an easy thing to accomplish. According to statistics provided by the National Sales Executive Association, 80% of sales are not closed until between the 5th and 12th contact with a potential client. This means that you need to be seen, heard, and read about on numerous occasions before someone will commit to using your services. Click here for full article...

The Employer’s Role in Verifying Employment

Paperwork. Nobody likes it, but everyone has to do it. Documentation on a new hire can be the most cumbersome, but is an absolute must. Detailed paperwork not only allows the new employee to collect a paycheck and be eligible for fringe benefits, it protects you, the employer. Click here for full article...

Narrow Your Focus to Expand Your Business

You’ve made countless cold-calls, posted flyers in every health food store, on bulletin boards, gyms around town, and passed out business cards to every person you’ve met. You’ve signed a few new clients, some who train hard and some who hardly train. You spend morning, noon, and night in the gym putting everything you’ve got into becoming a great personal trainer. Click here for full article...

How To Choose The Proper Business Entity?

Choosing your business structure is just as important - if not more important - than marketing. You should consult with your accountant or your attorney in forming your business. The process in setting up your company is as follows; these are just the key points that need to be done, but not necessarily in the exact order listed. Click here for full article...

10 Ways to Retain Quality Employees

There is no question that employee turnover has a significant impact on the financial performance of an organization. It is estimated that, on average, a company will spend up to one-third of a new employee’s salary to replace a departing employee. Click here for full article...

If You Want to Get Clients, You'll Have to Talk to Them

"I've done everything I can think of to get clients," a desperate self-employed professional writes. "I printed a brochure, I have a web site, and I've placed ads. But no one is hiring me. What am I doing wrong?" This unhappy business owner has made a common mistake. Click here for full article...

From Prospect to Client in Thirty Seconds

The process of converting a prospect to a client can seem like it takes forever. You meet a prospective client, follow up with him or her over time, and hopefully have a chance to make a sales presentation or schedule an initial consultation at no charge. Then you follow up some more, trying to close the sale. Months can pass, or even years, between your first encounter and getting the prospect to sign on the bottom line. Click here for full article...

Boost Your Marketing with the Buddy System

Remember back in grade school when the teacher asked you to hold hands with a friend on field trips? The idea behind the buddy system is that it's much harder to get lost if there are two of you traveling together. When you get into trouble, your buddy can help you out, or find someone else who can. Maybe you could use a buddy in your marketing. Click here for full article...

What's Your Business Model?

If you have enough clients to keep you busy, you must be making a good living, right? Well, not necessarily. Some of the busiest professionals around aren't earning enough to pay their bills. On the other hand, there are some consultants, coaches and other service providers who have plenty of time on their hands but also earn quite a bit of money. Click here for full article...

To Attract Attention, You Have to Show Off

Recently, a client of mine complained, "I'm really good at what I do. I shouldn't have to market myself." In fact, he is quite good at his profession, but the problem is that not enough prospective clients know about him. Like many professionals, he is reluctant to talk about his accomplishments. "It feels like bragging," he says. "Doesn't it make me seem unprofessional?" Click here for full article...

What You Are Marketing Is Yourself

"Call us today and change your life," proclaimed the hot pink flyer on the bulletin board. It was signed "Sunrise Hypnotherapy" with a phone number and a blind email address. No practitioner's name appeared anywhere on the flyer. Posted near it were numerous other leaflets, advertising everything from life coaching to bookkeeping. Fully two-thirds of the flyers I spotted were similarly anonymous. Some displayed a business name; others simply described the service, e.g. "acupuncture." But the names of the people offering many of these services were curiously absent. Click here for full article...

If You Can’t Make a Living, How Can You Make a Difference?

What made you decide to go into business for yourself? Did you want to make more money, gain more freedom, enjoy yourself more, or make more of an impact on the world? For many independent professionals, the desire to help others as well as themselves plays a significant role in their decision. Helping people may even have been your primary motivation for choosing the type of work you do. Click here for full article...

Wanted: 100 Referral Partners

If you've been in business for more than five minutes, you already know that the best way for any self-employed professional to get clients is by referral. But the process of building sufficient word of mouth to produce the number of clients you need can seem daunting. You can count on some referrals from your existing clients and people who already know you, but that's a fairly limited number. How can you start getting referrals from people outside your circle? Click here for full article...

Making Time For Marketing

"I don't have time to market." It's a common complaint from self-employed professionals. When you are the only one who can serve the clients, manage the business, and perform all the sales and marketing functions, time becomes the most precious commodity you have. How can you find time for marketing with so many other important priorities? Click here for full article...

Have You Created an Impossible Business?

It's easy to think that any business can be successful if you work hard enough, but there are many situations where this just isn't so. Consultants, coaches, and other service professionals often start a business believing that all they need to do is charge a "reasonable" fee and sell "enough" of their time. But unless you do the math to prove or disprove your assumptions, you may be creating a business that can never succeed. Click here for full article...

To Make More Sales, Try Making More Friends

In 1936, Dale Carnegie published "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Since then, his book has sold more than 15 million copies and is widely credited as being the first book in the modern self-help genre. The core of Carnegie's simple philosophy is that one of the greatest human needs is to feel important. If you want to win people over to your way of thinking, they need to like you. And the way to get them to do that is to take an interest in them. Click here for full article...

Turning Your Services Into a Product

One of the biggest challenges in selling professional services is that what you are offering is intangible. Your product can't be seen, touched, or tasted. Until your prospective clients experience what you do, they have no way of knowing if it will turn out, whether they will like it, and how well it will work in their situation. To make a buying decision, the client must first trust that your work will produce the result that they need. Click here for full article...

Publish or Perish

When you place a call to a prospective client, does the person you are calling already know your name, even if you have never met? When new clients are referred to you, do they often say that they've heard of you from several different sources? Are you frequently contacted by people who are ready to work with you and don't question your qualifications? These are just some of the results you can expect when you make publishing part of your marketing plan. Click here for full article...