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Train For Top Dollar is a website devoted to teaching personal trainers, triathlon coaches, nutritionists, gym owners and fitness professionals how to make money and enjoy a successful fitness career. We teach personal trainer salary tips, triathlon coaching career advice, nutrition consulting business structure strategies, gym business tips, and career advice for fitness professionals. Whether you want to make more money as a personal trainer or enhance your income as a coach or gym owner, this website, combined with Ben Greenfield's book "Personal Trainers' Guide to Earning Top Dollar" will give you everything you need for a successful fitness career.


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Monthly Archive for July, 2008

How to Launch Your Corporate Wellness Personal Training Program

As the business world becomes more aware of the significant positive correlation between employee health and employee productivity, corporate wellness programs will become a standard. Fortunately for you as a fitness professional, the human resources department of most corporations are ill-equipped to make educated decisions on fitness equipment, exercise classes, employee exercise tracking, and exercise program adherence. This is where you come in.

Your first task, before approaching a corporation to offer your services, is to gather data that provides convincing evidence for the efficacy of a corporate wellness program. This job is easy, because most CEO’s have read it in the paper, most HR directors have seen the research, and most employees know that basically, “exercise is good”. Nonetheless, you must come prepared.

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Podcast Episode #2: Online Personal Training Interview

This highly educational podcast interview with Gary Lavin answers the following questions:

1. How can an personal trainer have “More Power in Less Time” with online training?

2. What tips do you have for a trainer who has never trained online, but wants to get started immediately?

3. What resources or software are available for online trainers who don’t want to create their own website?

4. Can you charge the same for online training as face-to-face training?

5. Some trainers combine face-to-face and online training. What do you think of this model?

6. In addition to online training, what are some top ways a trainer can profit from having a web presence? Continue reading ‘Podcast Episode #2: Online Personal Training Interview’

Video Monetization

I’ve been to a fair share of clinics, conferences and presentations in the fitness industry, and am frankly surprised at the lack of monetization.

What do I mean by monetization?

Basically, this term refers to the ability to take a presentation, idea or skill, and profit from it. Repeatedly. Video monetization is one of the simplest ways to take a free or inexpensive conference, clinic or seminar and sell it to the public afterwards. It is a very simple concept – you simply record yourself presenting to a niche market on your chosen expert topic, then package and sell that recording to both the clinic attendees as well as future customers. All that is required is a video camera in the audience, either operated by an acquaintance or friend, or set firmly upon a tripod.

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Executive Health Programs

Executive health screenings have huge potential for increasing your bottom line as a gym or individual fitness professional. Corporations will pay top dollar to keep their valuable executives healthy, and you can be a key cog in that wheelset. In order to successfully integrate this tool in your business, you must have access to a team. I talk more about building your team/network in my book, but the basic idea is that within your community you must have an established relationship with nutritionists, physiologists, and physicians. This is crucial to your referral business and your ability to successfully implement an executive health screening program.

You can then approach your local corporations and offer to coordinate their executive health screening program, by directing the team that provides access to the necessary protocols. You’ll want to speak with the head of HR at the corporation. A sample executive health screening would consist of the following procedures:

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How to Be Successful at Health & Wellness Expos

What is it about fitness professionals and their lack of sales and marketing skills?

Case in point: I just returned from the National Strength & Conditioning Association expo. Although the booths, displays and content was fantastic, the actual sales and marketing skills were sadly subpar. Unless an attendee actually stopped at a vendor’s booth and specifically asked a question, they were allowed to pass by undisturbed. The first time I attended the expo, I literally cruised the entire room in 5 minutes flat.

In contrast, while in Las Vegas, I simultaneously attended the Freedom Fest, a gathering of completely different folk, devoted to finances, marketing, business, capitalism and economy. It took me nearly 30 minutes to traverse just a single aisle of this show! With each step, I was greeted on either side by vendors eager to show me the benefit of their product. They literally stepped in front of me, made eye contact, and asked as simple question, such as “Where are you from?” or “What do you do?”. Notice that these are open-ended questions and they take advantage of the fact that most people like to talk about themselves.

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Podcast Episode #1: 5 Killer Tips on How To Create Your Online Personal Training Website

5 Killer Tips on How To Create Your Online Personal Training Website

In the past, I’ve personally done full graphic design and coding for twelve of my own websites. I’ve also had local community graphic web designers create two additional websites. But now, I outsource all this time-consuming work to Pakistan, India, or some other very inexpensive technology sector based geographical area. I talk comprehensively about this type of outsourcing in Chapter 5 of Train For Top Dollar.

So what methods have I used to create my websites?

Whoever you use to host your website will typically come include free web templates. What this means is that you can download the template to your computer, or you can use an online editing program that is usually available on your web host, and most of the work is done for you. For multiple reasons included in my book, especially for utilizing one-click, simple blog creation, my favorite host is Bluehost.

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