Cutting-edge business advice for fitness professionals. Learn how to maximize your income as a personal trainer, gym owner, or nutritional consultant. Host and money-making expert Ben presents high salary tips and tricks each week, from the website www.trainfortopdollar.com.
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.
In this week’s Train For Top Dollar Podcast Episode #6: how to use an online print-on-demand to service to save time and inexpensively produce your books and DVD’s.
Remember, the entire eighth chapter of Train For Top Dollar is devoted to teaching fitness professionals a step-by-step process for designing and producing information products! Check it out today at http://www.trainfortopdollar.com.
Links:
http://www.createspace.com
http://www.lulu.com
http://www.booksurge.com
In this interview, Ben Greenfield talks with Training Peaks Chief Marketing Officer Dirk Friel about what features are available in online software programs, how many clients a trainer can work with, what type of legal considerations exist in the virtual training environment, and the practical aspects of how technology can significantly enhance a coach or trainer’s income.
People judge a book by it’s cover. Design your information product accordingly. Appearance is everything. Your e-book, audio product, or video must be properly packaged or people will not buy it. It doesn’t matter that they’re not receiving a “paper book” or “physical product”. In the digital information age, electronic information is just as valuable as traditional information, if not more convenient, especially if your fitness or nutrition information product contains printable forms or logs. A client will have absolutely no problem opening their computer, scrolling to page 13, printing the page to take to the gym, and leaving the other 148 pages at home!
Have you ever seen a website or online advertisement that features e-books, audio CD’s or video DVD’s that look like the real thing but are actually only available in digital format? This is accomplished via a clever technique using simple software. You can take a raw graphic file of your e-book or audio information “cover logo”, and easily tweak it into an impressive three-dimensional design that looks like a real book or DVD.
Continue reading ‘How To Design a Cover for your Fitness E-Book’
In this week’s podcast, Ben Greenfield interviews an SEO and SEM expert Crystal Wallace, who has a degree in statistical modeling and works to enhance search engine ranking and website visibility. Topics include enhancing the search engine friendliness of your website, understanding meta-tags and meta-keywords, “white hat” vs. “black hat” marketing efforts, and creating a Google AdWords campaign.
In this podcast, Ben Greenfield interviews Brad Cooper of US Corporate Wellness (http://www.uscorporatewellness.com). During the interview, Brad introduces the topic of individualized coaching for corporate wellness programs, and explains how personal trainers can become involved in one of the fastest growing trends among America’s businesses. You’ll learn one very powerful way to leverage your time and resources in your corporate personal training.
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.
Continue reading ‘How to Launch Your Corporate Wellness Personal Training Program’
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’
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.
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:
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.
Continue reading ‘How to Be Successful at Health & Wellness Expos’
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.
5 Killer Tips on How To Create Your Online Personal Training Website [ 9:31 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadSo you want to automatically have the Train for Top Dollar tips and tricks blog delivered automatically to your computer?
Here’s a step-by-step process that I highly recommend you try now:
1. Download a feed reader to your computer. Popular feed readers include http://www.newsgator.com, which can automatically feed subscriptions into your e-mail box, but there are a ton of different options for RSS readers, including Microsoft Outlook plug-ins or plug-ins for browsers like Firefox Apple’s newest Safari browser also has an RSS reader. But the NewsGator is a good free reader that is easy to use and allows you to track your feeds anytime, anywhere, from any browser, by just logging into your free NewsGator account online. Just go to their website, click on products, then choose a feed reader that is compatible with your system.
Continue reading ‘How to Subscribe For Free to Train for Top Dollar Feed’
|
Are you tired of showing up to your routine personal training job each day to train a handful of clients and receive an hourly session fee? Do you have a personal training studio that struggles each month to meet the bottom line? Are you ready to command an exorbitant salary as a respected fitness or nutrition expert?
|
|
|
Ben Greenfield, the author of this blog, is the 2008 NSCA Personal Trainer of the Year, a worldwide expert on triathlon coaching, a published sports nutritionist, and a fitness business guru. To find out more about Ben's book "Train For Top Dollar", and how you can make more money as a fitness professional, just click here.
