I have a quick question for you today. When you think about getting a website built for your fitness business, what generally happens is you go to a web designer or if you want to save some money you will try doing it yourself?
Let me explain what I mean
So I'm just back from a conference in New York a few weeks ago. It was Ryan Lee's conference, it was called Freedom Fest. Really and it was a really good couple days. I met some really cool people. Met some copywriters, some internet marketers, some people who are doing some really cool stuff in lots of different niches. It's good to get outside your industry sometimes and see what other people are doing because it just opens your eyes a little bit.
One of the things that we found was that although we're building websites for personal trainers, the program that we run which is called the SWAT personal trainer website system, it can actually be used for any business because at the end of the day marketing is marketing and the processes of getting someone to become a customer is the same no matter what industry you're in.
One of the things that kept coming up was the fact that when people get a website done, they tend to go to a web designer. Now from experience what we're finding is that web designers they seem to be very similar to personal trainers and the personal training industry. What you find is that they are basically designers and they don't understand marketing so they struggle to get business for themselves.
What we see is that when people shop on price and they go to a web designer because they are the cheapest, this web designer doesn't understand how to market themselves any other way.
The only way he knows how to stand out from his competition is by lowering his prices. Straight away that should be making alarm bells ring. If your only toll in your arsenal is lowering your prices then at some point someone is going to come along and lower their prices, which means you no longer have that as a unique selling point.
We see this in personal training industry all the time. Personal trainers try and compete on price and all they do is they end up devaluing what they do. I used to work in Fitness First and we had a girl who just joined and she ended up lowering her prices to £10 ($22) per session and still couldn't sell them. It was nothing to do with price because people don't buy a price. It's a well known fact, if you lower your prices and you still can't sell then price is not the defining option.
How Many Marketing Tools?
When you go to a web designer and he's only got prices as his tool, his way of getting you as a client, how is that then going to transform into your business? What I'm saying is if they don't know how to market themselves and they have second jobs and they're just part time and they don't really understand how to go out and get clients and how to win business then how is that going to look when it comes to doing your website as a personal trainer?
What I'm basically saying is you should be looking at someone who knows how to market themselves when you choose whoever it is that you choose to build your website for you.
The best marketers will be the guys who will build the best sites for you and that is purely down to the fact that they know and they understand how people buy. Simple as that. If you can get someone to take action on an ugly website, which let's face it your site doesn't have to be pretty then that is going to be more important.
Web designers will build you a really pretty site and it might look great and at the end of the day it could be the best looking site in the world but if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do then it's not going help your business at all.
That's my piece of advice for today.
When you're choosing these things just make sure that the person that you go with knows exactly what they're doing in terms of a marketing point of view or you will be wasting a lot of heard earned cash.