What separates you and your

bootcamp from the “5-dollar-an-

hour” gym instructors? Not a lot

it seems!

A Free

MyFitGeek

Report

Why Most Fitness Professional’s

Bootcamps Are Just one Step Up From A

“5-dollar-an-hour” Aerobics Instructors

Workout At The Local Gym... And How To

Make Sure Yours Is The EXACT Opposite

Hello Tim Goodwin here from MyFitGeek.com

I have spent the last 12 months or so looking at the

websites of fitness professionals and specifically at those

aimed at promoting bootcamps or other group training

programs such as Pilates, Yoga, Martial Arts.

Initially this was to do my homework, when planning to

create my own bootcamp style group training program, but

more recently to get an overview of how fitness

professionals are promoting their products and services!

Let me tell you I have uncovered a lot of evidence.

Evidence of how shockingly poor the majority of sites are,

and the way in which we are selling ourselves as so call

“professionals” is somewhat discouraging.

Without starting this report on too much of a negative note

let me tell you about all...

The Good Stuff...

Based on my surveys to over 250 fitness professionals, and

through discussions on the more reputable Personal Trainer

sites such as Personal Trainer U and the PTSA, 95% of us

actually have a web site.

This is a good thing, because if you don’t, you simply do not

exist in 2009!

Another strong indication is many PTs are diversifying their

offer to include a group training program as well as offering

the high end One-on-One coaching.

Given current financial fluctuations, having multiple sources

of revenue is certainly a wise business choice.

If you are a reader of Dan Kennedy’s excellent business and

marketing books you’ll understand what I am talking about

with the worst number in business!

Since you have also managed to download this report, I am

assuming you have some technical knowledge and I do not

need to patronise you with discussions about how to use

the internet.

We all understand that the internet is now the first place

our prospects will go to find information, and we appreciate

the need to capitalise on this fact.

However as you ARE an internet user you will be qualified

to understand some of the not so good stuff I am about to

present to you...

Bad Stuff #1—Being Bland Or The

Brochure Site!

“Hi, Welcome to the Stamford Bootcamp webpage

My name is Joe Muscle, and I am a 10 year qualified NCSA,

ACSM, PTN, LSU, Dip Hon Sport Sci, VHU Judo-Ninja

unarmed combat black belt and I am so fit you can see my

six pack! Look below for the gratuitous picture of me...

Grrr!”

Lets be honest here, no body gives a stuff about Joe, his

boy scout badges or his six pack! The fact his qualifications

mean absolutely nothing to most ordinary folk, and that

most people who visit a site like this will be bored before

they get to line three, and they’ll never even get to witness

Joe’s stunning six pack!

The back button has been clicked.

People go to the internet for information, most studies

demonstrate this fact, Britney and George Clooney come a

distant second, your qualifications don’t even register...

You’ll know from your own surfing, most of the time

internet users are asking WIIFM or “What’s In It For Me”

If they don’t get that basic need satisfied when they visit

your site, the back button is clicked so fast the web-stats

probably don’t even register the hit!

The worst part is they will NEVER COME BACK!

EVER.

The solution is really simple and very obvious. Provide your

visitor a reason to stay just for a little longer, providing

them with high quality, FREE information, in the form of a

free report (like the one you are reading right now), a video

presentation or an audio interview.

Bad Stuff #2—Confusing Your Visitor

Many of the sites I visited suffered from one major issue.

They confused me.

So many Personal Trainer websites, resembling the menu at

my local Chinese take away! Too many choices.

One-on-one personal training, semi-private training,

nutrition e-courses, weight management programs, get fit

for skiing e-book, post AND pre-natal fitness classes...

AS WELL AS their bootcamp!

I didn’t know where to click first, so I took the easiest

option...

The BACK button on my browser.

I have developed a mantra for all my website clients “One

site, One focus!”

This means for your bootcamp you MUST have a separate

site focussed on doing one thing really well...

Converting visitors to bootcamp members.

Bad Stuff #3 Once they’re gone, they’re

gone!

It is only a matter of time before your website visitor leaves

your site, depending on your ability to satisfy #1, it could

be seconds or if you’re lucky, minutes. They will not stay

indefinitely and they will not bookmark your site. Even if

they do bookmark your site they will still not come back.

The only way to counter this is to do one thing:

Get some CONTACT information

In September of 2008 I attended the Ryan Lee Bootcamp in

Stamford, probably the biggest and genuinely the best

Personal Trainer business seminar in existence. At one point

during the weekend, Ryan asked the 300 strong audience

for a show of hands, who had an email list of all their

prospects and clients.

I was stunned when less than a THIRD of the audience put

their hand up. Come on guys this is business 101!

At minimum we should be collecting the name and email

addresses from our website visitors.

To actually get this from them is not always easy, you do

need a pretty special ethical “bribe” as your free

information, in return for their email address.

Start building your list today, it really is that IMPORTANT.

Bad Stuff #4—Pitching Your Offer Too Low

You’re a Personal Trainer right?

You have probably spent thousands of dollars on your

education, if not 10s of thousands of dollars up to this

point?

Many of us have spent literally years in formal education to

give us the best possible “foot-up” to get ahead in our

industry.

Why is it so many bootcamp trainers are willing to

exchange this hard earned knowledge for pennies for

people to join our bootcamps.

Why are so many of us pitching ourselves directly against

the “5-dollar-an-hour” gym instructors! Hell you might as

well be working in the local burger joint for the kinda

money some of you are pulling in!

One bizarre website I came across was offering a 100 dollar

an hour personal training service on one side of the page

and then a 50 dollars for discounted 10 sessions bootcamp.

Talk about creating a disconnect in your prospects minds!

If you entered the conversation in the minds of the website

visitor… “Either this guy is over-charging for his personal

training or under-valuing his abilities at the bootcamp…

Hmmm… I don’t want to risk finding out which one it is?”

In this financially tough time, there are still plenty of people

with money to spend on their health and fitness. They don’t

waste dollars in the bargain buckets, they still want results

and are stilling willing to pay for results.

Let the cheap and cheerful gym’s in your area deal with the

bargain hunters.

To give you an example close to my home. There is a

special group offering free workouts in the city parks,

anyone can join in.

My bootcamp, operating up in the forests just 5 minutes

drive from these parks costing 220 dollars and more a

month is still over-subscribed!

Price is not the barrier many of us perceive it to be. In fact

there is a large sub-section of the community who will go

out of their way to find the most expensive product or

service, just because it is the most expensive!

Stop trying to compete on price, you will never win.

Bad Stuff #5—No Online Payment and

Registration.

These days you can book anything from cinema tickets to

steaks online. Many restaurants are moving to being able to

book a table online too! Why should you not allow your

bootcamp members to register and pay online?

As a business owner I appreciate there are benefits with

dealing with cash.

However, I think nothing looks worse than collecting cash at

the back of your car on session one of your bootcamp.

Once again I believe you are lowering the image of our

profession to that of a something not to dissimilar to a

market stall owner on a Saturday morning.

Getting A Paypal account takes minutes to set up. Sorting

out a “buy-now” button for your web page will take just a

few more.

One person in a hundred will insist on paying you in cash,

everyone else will appreciate the ease and practicality of

paying online.

Yes Paypal does have fees, but factoring this in to your

newly elevated prices will mean it is not the issue you

perceive it to be.

Bad Stuff #6—No Community

I once witnessed an ugly situation at one of the gyms I run

my PT business from. A spinning class was about to start,

and I saw a lady walk in with an Ipod strapped to her arm

with the ear plugs stuffed in her ear.

When the trainer approached her to ask why she felt it

necessary to have the Ipod, she claimed she didn’t like the

instructors music and also didn’t want to talk to anybody.

The spinning instructor, must have been really DULL!

Running a bunch of workouts where people just turn up,

work out , then leave, you might as well just get paid by

the gym to run your classes!

Making your bootcamp a thriving community will sky-rocket

retention and bring in referrals like crazy.

People want to “belong” to a community.

Create something worth “belonging” too!

Bad Stuff #7—No Instant Cash Flow

This is pointed at the ALL the bootcamp owners out there

who do NOT capture contact information from as many of

their website visitors as possible!

Imagine this.

You have two weeks before you leave on vacation, your last

bootcamp finished last week and you have a “dead” period

where nothing much is happening.

You suddenly have a great idea to run a special two week

only bootcamp aimed specifically at “HARD-CORE”

exercisers wanting some brutal fat burning workouts before

their own holidays. The problem is the bootcamp needs to

start in 4 days time to be worthwhile…

No contact list, no hard-core sessions, no instant cash flow!

I have a list of just over 450 local leads, all interested in our

bootcamp. I sent out ONE email, and filled the special “hard

-core” group in less than 24 hours, and at an increased fee.

It paid for my holiday :o)

Like I said earlier, start building your list today!

Bad Stuff #8—Not Treating Your

Bootcamp As A Business

Whilst all this bootcamp stuff started off as a “bit of fun”,

bringing in a bit of extra cash on the side, it has now

become big business. Just think about the explosion of

CrossFit in the last 12 months.

Some of you will be turning your noses up at the indignity

of being compared to CrossFit, but I can assure you ANY

group training program has the potential to go the same

way.

With the right community, marketing and expansion plan,

your own spin on bootcamp training can easily become the

next CrossFit.

I was determined not to create just another “bootcamp”

here in my city. I spent a lot of time working to create my

own “brand” and “identity” that fitted in with my own values

and passions surrounding fitness. And so ForestFit was

created.

2009 will see the expansion of ForestFit to multiple

locations in my own area, and then to sell the systems,

workouts and marketing to other coaches in other cities

around Europe and further afield!

Setting up replicable systems in my business allows my

concept to be multiplied.

This is where you can transform your bootcamp from side

earner to big business.

Isn’t it time you started treating your bootcamp as a

business and not a hobby?

The System

Now I am getting way ahead of myself… but you get the

idea of where you need to be focused in 2009!

If you are not implementing these and many other smaller

but equally important aspects in to your bootcamp

business, then I truly believe you are wasting money. Lots

of it!

Your website is actually an expense to you, instead of being

a cash generation tool.

Your marketing dollars are being wasted on bring hot

prospects to your door and then being turned icy cold by

your unprofessional looking site and business.

And right now your bootcamp NEEDS to stand out from the

“Me-Too” crowd, especially in the current economy, if

everyone looks the same, then your prospects WILL shop

on price, and you really do not have the option to compete

on price!

So in a nutshell here is the SYSTEM:

1. Find and send local leads to your website.

2. Leads know “What’s In It For Them”

3. They take the bait of your ethical bribe and give you

their name and email address.

4. You follow up with your prospects on auto-pilot (this is

really easy to implement)

5. They visit your “professional” looking site and buy a

place on your next bootcamp.

6. They come and join your community, love your

workouts and create some buzz around the bootcamp in

order to refer like crazy

7. Your bootcamp continues to expand super quick

8. You hire additional coaches who follow your EXACT

system of training.

9. Multiply and replicate…

Why I Know What I Am Talking About…

I hope this little report has woken you up to the fact you

MUST move your bootcamp from a little extra cash to

serious business?

2009 is going to be tough for a lot of trainers. Those that sit

back and wait for the impending doom to hit them will be

out of business very soon.

Those that take ACTION now, by making their business

stand out by doing something very different, will weather

the storm much better.

All these changes to your current operations can cost you a

small fortune.

If you are not so tech savvy then the cost of web

developers alone can cost thousands of dollars if you go

about finding them the wrong way.

The cost of traditional mass media marketing is so

astronomical, it is out the question for the lowly fitness

professional.

We cannot afford to make mistakes, your systems have to

be cast iron and capture as many new leads and as many

new clients as possible. One mistake can cost hundreds or

even thousands of dollars of lost revenue.

In 2008 as I was creating ForestFit, I did make mistakes, in

fact one mistake literally cost me at least 50% of my profits

early on! I am still kicking myself for that error of

judgment.

The system I have now created is filling my bootcamps in

record time. So much so that it attracted the attention of

one of my coaches from my Personal Training business. She

ran a intermittently successful boxing fitness group class.

We implemented the same model to her group and has

since filled every group she runs at a 50% price increase.

She even sold out during the typically dead month of

December!

Just to prove to myself that this stuff is applicable in any

town or city I spent some time with an already successful

bootcamp owner in the UK, implemented some off the

missing aspects of my system in to his business.

In two weeks we added 150 new ready and hot leads to his

mailing list.

Tell me the last time you added that many new leads to

your list?

Now Before I Go On…

I should point out that my system has been on the market

before for some BETA testing. With the minor issues tidied

up, I am planning on a full scale release to a much larger

audience, but with restrictions on how many people get ac-

cess to the whole package!

I should warn you also that this is not your usual bootcamp

“manual”. For example you will not find a single exercise

description or exercise image in the package.

If this is what you are looking for I can suggest some fan-

tastic alternatives.

My belief is if you already have a passion for your “style” of

training, you will already know all the exercises you ever

need to run your bootcamp.

Tell me you know this is true?

What I can say is that every single page, every video and

every template included is raw un-moderated, step by step

business building advice you can implement straight away.

But before we get too carried away, I need to ask a favor of

you.

First of all thank you for reading through this entire report,

I do hope it has been both a revelation and a help for your

bootcamp business.

What I need is a little bit of feedback from you, and it’ll only

take 5 minutes of your time to help me out.

Just drop in to the MyFitGeek BLOG and tell me your two

most pressing questions relating to your own bootcamp

business and about your bootcamp website.

You see, I want to be sure I have covered all the bases in

my system, I want to answer all your primary questions.

So go to the following web page and leave a comment on

one of the BLOG posts:

http://www.MyFitGeek.com/blog

Finally thanks for reading this report, and I wish you suc-

cess in 2009 with transforming your bootcamp business.

Tim Goodwin

This FREE report is brought to you by Tim Goodwin. Tim is

a fitness professional from Luxembourg who’s former life as

an IT professional has come back to haunt him. Rather than

ignore his techy tendencies he has put them to good use to

create a range of educational tools aimed squarely at fit-

ness pros who need help with all this business and geek

stuff. Find out more at www.MyFitGeek.com

Feel free is distribute this report as long as it stays in its

original and un-edited form