Quick Question:
Are you a personal trainer or fitness professional who delivers services to your local city?
Are you an “online” exercise or nutrition consultant?
Are you a gym or studio owner?
Do you sell fitness e-books and information products?
Then I guarantee people are talking about you, your services, and your products. On the internet. With the advent of online social networking, it is now possible to have detailed conversations about fitness businesses, customer satisfaction, client results, gym cleanliness, exercise equipment maintenance, personal trainer capabalities and a host of other factors.
Rather than resorting to “Googling yourself” to find out what people are saying about you on the internet, why not use the following automated and easy-to-use tools? There are many similar tools out there, but these are the ones that I use on a daily basis in my own online and local fitness business.
Google Alerts is a free service from Google that will send an e-mail to your inbox whenever people are talking about a phrase for which you’ve set an alert. So you can add your name, the name of your business, the name of your product, etc., and then tell Google to send you an e-mail alert when people mention that phrase in A) blogs; B) forums; C) a regular internet page; D) all of the above.
Here’s an example: Just the other day, I noticed that a Google alert which I had set for “allergy nutrition exercise” revealed a blog conversation on a working mother’s network. I immediately joined the conversation, gave a few tips, and left, in my comment signature, a link to “Shape21”, my food-allergy-free nutrition and exercise plan. Google analytics later showed over a dozen hits and 2 sales from that single post, which took 2 minutes of my time!
2. TweetLater
Using the free service at TweetLater, you can also set “Twitter alerts”, in which you receive a heads-up whenever someone twitters about a phrase for which you’ve set an alert. It is literally identical to Google Alerts, except it is for Twitter (TweetLater has a host of other useful functions as well). You would be surprised at the number of people who leave a personal training session, gym workout, or e-book website, then tweet to their friends about it.
Utilize this one-two conversation monitoring combo and you’ll be significantly more clued-in as to exactly what people are saying about you on the internet. Chapter 4 of my book “Train For Top Dollar” goes into these type of social networking tools in greater detail. You can get more of these instant tips and order the book “Train For Top Dollar” by clicking here.
