I wanted to take five minutes out of my holiday to talk to you guys about one of the vital ingredients that you must have on your fitness or personal trainer website.

Most personal trainers tend to miss this because they think that people are going to come onto the websites and become clients straightaway.

This is simply not the way it works

The truth is that, especially in fitness and personal training, people are generally unhappy and they want to change their bodies and their lives. When people they go on your website, they're not always ready to buy. They're just not emotionally ready. They might just be looking or browsing. They might be price shopping. So, it's vital that you guys have on your website above the fold some sort of lead capture device.

Now, what we would normally recommend is that you use some sort of a lead magnet on your personal trainer website. This is what we call an ethical bribe or lead magnet. It's something that you can give away in exchange for the contact details of your clients.

What can you do?

You can use a free e-book, or a giveaway, or a free trial, or you can do a low barrier to entry offer.  You should ask for their email address in order to get access to that.

This then allows you to do is to re-market to these people and you also get them on your email list.

After you can use this to tell them a little bit more about what it is you do, and you build up some trust.

It's really easy to do that. You should be using a piece of software we use called AWeber or Active Campain. That will allow you to plug into your website. We use different templates here at Internet Fitpro to build our client websites.

One of them is called “Five Things That Allows You To Build Very Visible Landing Pages That Look Great”.

By just using AWeber alone, what you'll find is that some of the templates don't look so professional, but they will still do a job if you wanted to do that.

So, the number one thing that you must have on your website is some sort of lead capture.

Above the fold

And, as I say, you want that on every page, especially your home page. You want it to appear above the fold. Then, the second place you want to have it is in the middle of your blog posts. If you have a look at internetfitpro.com and you go into any blog post, what you'll see is a lead capture on the sidebar on the right-hand side. You will also see a lead capture actually within the blog post. So, if you know the potential client who is reading one of your blog posts and what you'll find is that you know that they're interested. You know that they will want to potentially download whatever it is you're offering them.

Once you get someone on your email list and then you have that opportunity to re-market to them and get what we call top of mind of awareness. That means, even if they do look at a competitor's site, you're always going to be in contact with them.

You can send ads by uploading your email list onto Facebook using a Facebook Custom Audience.

This is the clever marketing stuff that other personal trainers in your town aren't doing.

We've got to be honest about this. People are not going to just land on your website and buy at the first attempt. You need to keep touching them. Email them. Send ads to them. That is the first thing you need to do on your website. If your website isn't converting and you don't have  lead capture on there, that's the first thing that I would fix.