Let's face it. It's hard work being in the fitness industry and trying to run a successful personal training business, however lots of Personal Trainers are not as successful as they could be.

Here are some of the top reasons why:

1. They try to sell personal training sessions or exercise classes rather that selling the result. Selling results based packages can make a huge difference to your fitness business.
2. Treating their fitness business like a hobby and not a real business.
3. They spend too much time hanging around on Facebook doing non productive stuff.
4. Don’t take enough action or take action fast enough on the things they learn that could drive their business forward.
5. Don’t consistently take the same action that gets results for them. Find something that works and do more of it and keep doing it until it stops working is the key to success.
6. Not taking the right actions at the right time and sometimes they just don’t take any action at all and jump from business coach to business coach.
7. They don’t learn enough about marketing, sales and how to build a solid fitness business.
8. They have clear and defined written goals for their clients but not for their fitness business.
9. Not enough focus on helping others achieve their goals. Helping others get their goals is the best way for you as a personal trainer to get your business goals.
10. They work “in” the business all the time training clients and rarely “on” the business. Building your fitness business and marketing should be a priority for most personal trainers. As a personal trainer you should have at least one day a week where you don’t train clients and you work on improving how your business operates and on client acquisition tasks like marketing.
11. Not willing to do whatever it takes to be successful in their fitness business. Want success? Then you have to do what it takes to get success.
12. They don’t have enough social skills or empathy. Empathy is hugely important as a personal trainer and if it comes across in your website (and in you) then you are on to a winner. This is one of the reasons that before we build a lead generating websites for personal trainers we ask them to create an empathy map based around their ideal client.
13. A lot of personal trainers spend their time taking fitness courses and try to impress people (especially other personal trainers) like their Facebook friends with their qualifications and use fitness speak words when talking with clients, rather than the language that their clients understand.
14. Trying to be too professional and not showing that they have a human side rather than a fitness industry robot. See the point I made earlier on empathy. Clients want to know that you are human and make mistakes as well instead of looking at you as a broccoli and chicken eating robot.
15. Not having a personality and being vanilla. Everyone likes vanilla and but rarely does anyone choose it. Don’t be vanilla, be chocolate chip or strawberry, you can even be coffee flavoured.
16. Not bringing enough energy to your training sessions. Clients are paying you to motivate them, so bringing energy to your sessions and lifting your clients up should be a prerequisite. A wise man once told me, I think it was Alwyn Cosgrove that you should aim to be the best part of your clients’ day.
17. Training too many 1-1 clients unless you have a niche that means you are charging high end, which mean you can work less and not have to train as many 1-1 clients.
18. Competing purely on price instead of offering a great service. You should always compete on service and results or even better forge out a niche for your fitness business which means you have no competition.
19. Believing that the people in their town can’t afford High end Personal Training. They can. Fact! Just look around you to see what people are driving for proof. Remember you only need 5 or 10 high playing clients in your fitness business to earn a good living. Can you find 5 or 10 people in your town or area that will pay you what you are worth?
    I bet you can easily.
20. Having a boring old brochure website with no sales copy or lead capture device to collect email addresses.
21. Being late and not practicing good time keeping, especially when it comes to training clients.
22. Not returning potential client emails and calls as soon as possible or at least on the same day. These are the people who are reaching out for your help and they are usually hot prospects. Not returning their calls on time is criminal.
23. Not collecting enough before and after pictures of people they have helped. Your best clients are only too happy to give you pictures and help you promote your fitness business.
24. Not being very good at what they do. You have got to get the results for people. Do this and they will shout about you from the rooftops and keep buying from you.
25. Working for someone else or working in a big box commercial gym. These trainers have a job, not a fitness business. In order to have a business you must be able to take time off and still get paid. Can you do that?
26. Thinking in terms of how much you charge “per hour” or “per package” or “per month” instead of the lifetime value of a client. Knowing the client lifetime value (CLV) can massively change the way you do business as a personal trainer and the way you think about attracting clients into your fitness business. How much would you spend on marketing you knew a client was worth $2500 (£1800)? Probably a lot more than you are right now I would guess?
27. Not having referral systems in place to ensure that the clients they are currently working with can easily refer their friends and relatives. Referrals are one of the best ways to get new clients into your fitness business
28. Not having a system in place to retain clients. It's usually cheaper to retain a current client than it is to get a new one. This means making sure that they are getting results they expect and that they can see continued progression.
29. Stressing about the small stuff. Don’t sweat the small stuff, look after the big stuff and the small stuff will look after itself.
30. Waiting for the right environment before taking action on things. There will never be a right time, you have to take action now! There is an old Chinese proverb that says “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second beat time is now.” If you're not taking action then now is the time.
31. Not investing in their business and marketing skills or investing at being better in business. Fitness businesses are just like all other businesses they are based on sales and if you can sell then you don’t have a business.
32. Building their own website or using a free website service. You can’t sell high end personal training if your website looks cheap or if it says it’s a free website.
33. Not reading the right books or blogs, listing to the right pod-casts or watching the right videos.
34. Branding themselves based on someone else's brand like Boxercise or Zumba or even the latest incarnation that is Insanity, or even worse labeling themselves as the kettle bell guy or battle rope girl. This is not cool because these are all fads and will probably die out.
35. Not differentiating their fitness business from other personal trainers. Why are you different and why should I care?
36. Blindly copying whatever other trainers are doing with no thought to whether it works or not. This includes the way they train and even the sales copy on their websites.
37. Making their websites all about them instead of the client and how they can help the client get the results they want.
38. Not having their town or area or even phone number clearly prominent on their website. Sounds like common sense but we see this all the time and it can have a huge impact on conversions from your site, not to mention how you show up on Google.
39. Not having more than one method of attracting new clients. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket because if that method no longer works, then you no longer have a business.

If you would like to find out more about what we do at Internet Fitpro and how we help Personal Trainer and Fitness Professionals build their business by building them kick ass websites that convert to clients then check out our SWAT Personal Trainer Website System here.