Ask your marketing & online business questions here.

[TheProgressiveOne]

Lead gen
Sales Pages
Online Marketing

Ask away and i will answer.

[TXJ]

Do you use LinkedIn for marketing and if so, how?

A few of my clients have suggested getting on there but I really haven't looked into it too much.

[Finnegan Bell]

If I am intending to setup a Vbulletin forum, should I still use Aweber newsletter or only VB newsletter would suffice (like BB.com) ? VB newsletter can't integrate with aweber ,only with verticalresponse.

What's the point of making your services page a (contact form) and not a direct sales page (with prices and buy buttons included).

[TheProgressiveOne]

Do you use LinkedIn for marketing and if so, how?

A few of my clients have suggested getting on there but I really haven't looked into it too much.

Sorry Mate, I was caught up.

[TheProgressiveOne]

If I am intending to setup a Vbulletin forum, should I still use Aweber newsletter or only VB newsletter would suffice (like BB.com) ? VB newsletter can't integrate with aweber ,only with verticalresponse.

What's the point of making your services page a (contact form) and not a direct sales page (with prices and buy buttons included).

Unfortunately I don't have a huge amount of experience with Vbulletin. But i would be using either aWeber or active campaign to send my emails.

Contact form - develop trust and no stress way of getting into contact with you
Direct sales page - get paid

Depending on what you're selling will be different situations for both.

[moose45]

My personal training business is not online and is a local one. Any marketing tips for me? www.taraytraining.com
Any ideas on how to improve conversions from online ad campaigns?

[CNoteLA]

Definitely yes! I've given a series of seminars for clients on B2B marketing using LinkedIn. (even tho I'm a gym nut, my real job is Dir of Online Marketing)

Here are some tips:

1. Make sure your profile is 100% complete. The LinkedIn search algorithms favor complete profiles.
2. Build your network of friends up. LinkedIn displays 500 connections, so whether you have 501 or 50K it looks the same to anyone viewing your profile.
3. When writing your work history, background and job description remember that EVERY word you type is a potential keyword that someone may search for. So if you're a Personal Trainer use that keyword as well as others that you would want your profile to appear for in the search results.
4. ******** is for sharing personal pics of you and your friends, LinkedIn is a professional network. Use it to share posts to articles you've written or maybe just share some training tips etc., Basically, treat it as a business tool not a social tool.
5. Connect with everyone you would get an email / business card from. When my clients would go to mixers or industry conventions and collect biz cards, I'd get them in the habit of sitting down and connecting with each person they met. This also makes it a great tool to organize your professional contacts etc.,
6. While we all do it (or try) most companies frown upon their employees logging into FB or Social sites throughout the day, but they usually allow LinkedIn. Again, because it's a professional networking site.
7. Make you profile PUBLIC. This is the #1 mistake people make with LinkedIn. They set their privacy settings to not display their background and / or contact information. This is a business networking site... that's the whole point!

Most people are on LinkedIn. In the beginning they just used it as a "virtual resume" of sorts, but it is a massively powerful network that can be optimized if you know how to use it. While FB and twit get all the attention, few people realize that LinkedIn was the first major social networking company to "go public."

Do you use LinkedIn for marketing and if so, how?

A few of my clients have suggested getting on there but I really haven't looked into it too much.

[CNoteLA]

Your conversion percentage is the amount of people who click on your ad (and go to your website) and subsequently buy or give you information (whatever you're going for). So clicks divided by action.

If you want to increase conversions, that begins with examining your website. CTR (click thru rate) is how effective your ads are and conversion rate is how effective your site is.

Looking at your site, I would try to improve your SEO (search engine optimization) with more specific keywords and page descriptions. This will help you in two ways:

1. You'll have a better chance of appearing in the SERP (search engine results pages) for your keywords. In your case your main meta description for the site could be "Duluth Personal Trainers" because that's what your potential clients would be searching for. Right now it's "Taray Training - Personal Training" and that's too generic. The more long tail (meaning specific) you can go with keywords the better.

2. By optimizing your site a bit more, you'll actually pay less per click with your PPC campaigns. In Google, this is reflected as the "Quality Score" that you'll see in your campaign manager, 10 being the best. Google cares about the user experience after someone clicks your ads. This is why the metric is there. The higher your quality score, the less you'll have to pay per click. So if you're bidding on keywords like "duluth personal trainer" then the page the user ends on after clicking should be optimized for these keywords.

My personal training business is not online and is a local one. Any marketing tips for me?
Any ideas on how to improve conversions from online ad campaigns?

[Mediterranea]

My personal training business is not online and is a local one. Any marketing tips for me? www.taraytraining.com
Any ideas on how to improve conversions from online ad campaigns?

I like your website and the few articles you wrote man!

It would be helpful for you if you join ptprophet.com , Hayden Wilson will help you to boost your influence as a trainer.

you deserve it,I really liked your article:

http://www.taraytraining.com/article...g-backgrounds/

[moose45]

I like your website and the few articles you wrote man!

It would be helpful for you if you join ptprophet.com , Hayden Wilson will help you to boost your influence as a trainer.

you deserve it,I really liked your article:

http://www.taraytraining.com/article...g-backgrounds/

Thank you. I will check out the website!

[moose45]

Your conversion percentage is the amount of people who click on your ad (and go to your website) and subsequently buy or give you information (whatever you're going for). So clicks divided by action.

If you want to increase conversions, that begins with examining your website. CTR (click thru rate) is how effective your ads are and conversion rate is how effective your site is.

Looking at your site, I would try to improve your SEO (search engine optimization) with more specific keywords and page descriptions. This will help you in two ways:

1. You'll have a better chance of appearing in the SERP (search engine results pages) for your keywords. In your case your main meta description for the site could be "Duluth Personal Trainers" because that's what your potential clients would be searching for. Right now it's "Taray Training - Personal Training" and that's too generic. The more long tail (meaning specific) you can go with keywords the better.

2. By optimizing your site a bit more, you'll actually pay less per click with your PPC campaigns. In Google, this is reflected as the "Quality Score" that you'll see in your campaign manager, 10 being the best. Google cares about the user experience after someone clicks your ads. This is why the metric is there. The higher your quality score, the less you'll have to pay per click. So if you're bidding on keywords like "duluth personal trainer" then the page the user ends on after clicking should be optimized for these keywords.

Thank you. I am not great with backlinking but try my best with on-page seo. Thanks for the tips.

[CNoteLA]

For sure! Don't worry about back links so much. If your website itself isn't optimized properly, no amount of back links are going to help. A couple of years ago Google made huge changes (called Penguin / Panda updates) that basically disavowed millions of back links, and they changed their algorithms as well. These modifications / updates have happened regularly since then.

It used to be that website owners could "pay" to have people create a ton of back links. This told the search engines "this site is popular, rank it higher." Google and the search engines changed the criteria so that high quality and content relevant sites benefited the rankings. So 10 back links from a related site (in your case a fitness site) carry far more weight than 1,000 links from random sites that have nothing to do with fitness.

The goal for any website owner is to get as much organic traffic as possible (that's the "free traffic.") That starts with first making sure the structure of the site is optimized, and then the content of the site. The more content you can put on your site the better. It has to be originally written content that hasn't been published anywhere else online.

Thank you. I am not great with backlinking but try my best with on-page seo. Thanks for the tips.

[moose45]

Your conversion percentage is the amount of people who click on your ad (and go to your website) and subsequently buy or give you information (whatever you're going for). So clicks divided by action.

If you want to increase conversions, that begins with examining your website. CTR (click thru rate) is how effective your ads are and conversion rate is how effective your site is.

Looking at your site, I would try to improve your SEO (search engine optimization) with more specific keywords and page descriptions. This will help you in two ways:

1. You'll have a better chance of appearing in the SERP (search engine results pages) for your keywords. In your case your main meta description for the site could be "Duluth Personal Trainers" because that's what your potential clients would be searching for. Right now it's "Taray Training - Personal Training" and that's too generic. The more long tail (meaning specific) you can go with keywords the better.

2. By optimizing your site a bit more, you'll actually pay less per click with your PPC campaigns. In Google, this is reflected as the "Quality Score" that you'll see in your campaign manager, 10 being the best. Google cares about the user experience after someone clicks your ads. This is why the metric is there. The higher your quality score, the less you'll have to pay per click. So if you're bidding on keywords like "duluth personal trainer" then the page the user ends on after clicking should be optimized for these keywords.

Also, I use wordpress. How to I change my main meta description?

[CNoteLA]

Depends what version you're running and what SEO plugins you have set up. But login to your site, go to your backend dashboard. On left hand side you should see "Settings." Select "General" and there should be an option to set your main site meta title description.

You might already have an SEO plugin installed... that will be in the same place in the left hand menu. If you do you can check for a "settings" option there as well.

Also, I use wordpress. How to I change my main meta description?

[TheProgressiveOne]

Also, I use wordpress. How to I change my main meta description?

Download "all in one SEO" or "yoast SEO" plugins man...can be highly customised

[CNoteLA]

Def agree. Yoast is my favorite SEO plugin for WP (and probably one of the most popular.)

Your orig question was trying to increase conversions. Optimizing your site SEO will help of course, but organic traffic is going to take time. You also can't expect to update your site once or twice a month and expect results. It has to be a regular thing.

For local trainers you're going to get the most bang for your buck running some promo's on sites like Merchant Circle (which is free). Also try to get your clients to leave you Google Reviews, Yelp, FB etc., All those sites have high PR (page rank) so they count as quality links to your site. The more times you can get someone to visit your site via one of these the better!

One side note: www and non www sites are NOT the same. The search engines treat them almost as two different domains even tho they direct to the same place. Your site was set up using WWW (taraytraining) but on google places you have it listed without the WWW and you want them to be the same everywhere.

[DanParryFitness]

check my website out would like feedback?

[CNoteLA]

This is a great site man. Good color scheme and layout. It's a WIX site which is pretty easy to do cuz it's all drop and drag. The only drawback is you're really limited to how much you can optimize for SEO. My only suggestion is instead of offering a "chance to win" a free consult.. you should just offer a free consult to anyone... because you're probably pretty good at closing the deal when you have a chance to talk one on one to a potential client.

The other thing.. for anyone with a website... embedding a video doesn't really count as "content" The search engines can't see the content of the video itself, so they rely on the content provided on the page on which the video is embedded in order to index it and determine what your site is about.

For example your vid post "Sitting Wrecks your Hip Action" you could easily turn that into a post about Stretches you can do to increase range of motion etc., This is actually a great SEO and Content tip... when you use other people's YT content.. you can turn it into original content for your site by simply writing a blog post, even if it's just paraphrasing what's covered in the video.

Good job tho! The site looks really slick.

check my website out would like feedback?

[manic_mauri]

Hi all, i have been an Online Personal Trainer for just on a year and im finding it tough in the social media industry as i have no degree in marketing just pt.

So as follows i have Instagram : mauridp , youtube channel :MDP Fitness website called www.mdpfitness.com.au twitter @mdpfitness FB: MDP Fitness LinkedIn cant remember the actual account name i hardly use it.

I use Youtube and twitter mostly as my social media outlet.

My question is im not receiving in ROI regarding to social media.

what am i doing wrong ?

[TheProgressiveOne]

Hi all, i have been an Online Personal Trainer for just on a year and im finding it tough in the social media industry as i have no degree in marketing just pt.

So as follows i have Instagram : mauridp , youtube channel :MDP Fitness website called www.mdpfitness.com.au twitter @mdpfitness FB: MDP Fitness LinkedIn cant remember the actual account name i hardly use it.

I use Youtube and twitter mostly as my social media outlet.

My question is im not receiving in ROI regarding to social media.

what am i doing wrong ?

What kind of content have you tried posting?

Do you give value?

Who Is your ideal customer?

[mpjennings25]

If you're looking for another way to market your PT business, I helped create a site called coachseeker.com where athletes can search for personal trainers and contact them. You can post your website and social media links to your profile as well. Let me know what you think!

[CNoteLA]

This is a good thread to make light of this point. For newbies, "SEO" means search engine optimization. EVERYTHING online that has a search bar is a search engine. The big daddy is google of course. When google updates it's algorithms, some websites will see an increase in organic traffic and others a decrease. This includes the traffic you may or may not get to your social media posts as well. If you're chugging along sharing relevant content and all of the sudden you see things dip off, take a look at your websites Google Analtyics and read the Organic Traffic reports... its likely you're being effected by the latest update.

I have a Google Cert agency, as well as my own fitness Brand. So as I manage my own and other brands online, so I'm fortunate to see how one "small" update may have a huge impact on some Brands, and little on others. The #1 main strategy ANYONE should have when it comes to their online marketing is that you're sharing ORIGINAL content regularly.. several times a week if possible.

The search engines want to display those websites that have the freshest content that is the most relevant to that particular keyword search. You want a fighting change every shot you can get!

[manic_mauri]

What kind of content have you tried posting?

Do you give value?

Who Is your ideal customer?

Yes i give value, i have a blog on my website with free videos and blog reports monthly

Ideal customer.. tough question , someone looking at building muscle and someone that enjoys / strives to lift heavy.

[penafitness]

A good idea is to Like pages on major sites. That sites visitors can see your profile and can lead to people visiting your page as a result. Could lead to new business and increase your page Likes.

[CNoteLA]

Consistency is key. Just like working out, if you don't work it consistently, it doesn't develop. If you're serious about building an online presence you have to learn a little bit more about it other than just how to post to FB or Instagram. You need to understand the user behavior of each platform in order to optimize it.

For example, Instagram sucks for SEO (search engine optimization) and site traffic. None of your posts link to a site. The only way a fan can find you and visit your site is to go to your profile and click the link. They probably won't. Pinterest on the other hand links directly to your site. If you're intent is to monetize your website you need to think of things like this.

The other common mistake people make is sharing their content on Social sites before or instead of on their own website. Example.. if you made a healthy dinner and wanted to share it with your fans, write a quick blog post and share that link on you social sites. This way the search engines are indexing it as original content on your website AND your fans are getting the info from you.