Because I’m in the fitness marketing world, a lot of times people think that I have lighting bolts shooting out of my ass, or that they can’t sell as hard as me, as much as me, and don’t have the ability to hit my income level.

If that’s what you think, you’re so mistaken.  In reality, when you’re in the business of creating high end programs for fitness professionals, you’re actually dealing with a tiny, tiny market of people.  The truth is that by focusing on your fitness services, your prospects are much, much greater.

I got good at marketing and publishing by first by doing an outstanding job selling fitness services to the general public.  That’s where I got my marketing skills, and then translated them into the much smaller and much more competitive market I’m in now.

Truth be told, now that my training has merged with that of a well known celebrity trainer, I’m just biding my time ’til I get back in the offline world of training.

And just so you know, the next time you see me offline it’s going to be viscious, so just hope I don’t hit a town near you!

But in the meantime, you’re gong to get to benefit from a level of down and dirty insider knowledge that I promise you can’t find anywhere.  If you own one of my programs, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

If you’re in the fitness business now and for some reason are looking for greener pastures to make your fortune, you are a fool. The three big markets that I think you can pretty much guarantee are always going to make money regardless, are personal health and wellness/ beauty, make more money, and attracting the opposite sex (sex or relationships). It’s not a question of “is there a shortage of money”. There’s absolutely no shortage of money when it comes to these three areas.

To see a “fitness” pitch that’s focused on physical improvement, but also touches on money, and relationships as part of it’s sales pitch, watch the following video:

[youtube WYZDwD5f0vg nolink]

Although the product and promises in that spot were a joke, the ad itself was brilliant there in combining the weight loss sell with a wealth and relationships sell.  Notice their talk about work and income, and healthy dose of showing-off young girls and spouses.  You need to think aggressively of how you can mix the same element into selling your services too. Those TV spots have been running for months now, so that means they’re working.  And if products like that are selling but you’re having a hard time selling your fitness services, I feel sorry for you.

Although we can’t promise “instant”, bogus results like those tight undershirts, you can make it easy and effortless for people to start with you by making strong offers.  That can be done through tremendous risk-free promotions.  You can also make aggressive use of testimonials and before and after pictures, and the other tactics in the ad that pointed out that make it a winner.

Now let’s get into what I wanted to talk to you about today – advertising:

 

There are three things in this world I don’t want to be: fat, broke and stupid. So if you don’t want to be fat, broke and stupid, you simply don’t do what fat, broke and stupid people do.

When it comes to people in the fitness industry, they spend all their money on shiny objects instead of investing on their business. They spend their money on the next greatest thing instead of creating a specialized service, finding a market to serve, buying advertising, measuring results of that advertising, and proceeding forward based on that result.

A smart trainer says, “OK, I ran an ad, I got 20 leads and I made one sale and I lost $20 on that.” A stupid person says, “This doesn’t work, let me buy the next $3000 magic bullet.” The intelligent person says, “Wow! I got leads and sold something; I’m off to a hell of a start. The hardest part is out of the way. Now all I have to do is build on this foundation I’ve just created. I’m already 99% ahead of most of the people in my market place.”

A lot of trainers that try to build their businesses are mainly doing stuff online. A lot of their thoughts are that they need to do to get a bunch of traffic from SEO or how am I going to get a bunch of traffic from Facebook?

But these things take more time for money to come in. SEO works and it can bring you a lot of traffic and sales but it takes a lot of time.  What people need to think about is “If I have one thousand dollars to spend to advertise my business where will I spend it?” “If I had five thousand that I could spend to advertise and where should I spend it?”

Most people don’t think about spending money; they get suckered into the thought of all these leads can be gotten for free on the internet.  The bottom line is that the smart folks that make millions of dollars a year OFF LINE all have one thing in common; they’re really good about buying advertising in different places.

But so many trainers that I come across somehow have fallen out of that thinking.  They don’t think about just paying money to advertise. Its mind boggling that they don’t think of writing a check to get a bunch of sales, and then writing more checks.

Those are smart activities that people need to keep in mind. Ideally create a fitness service that people want, find a way to effectively advertise it, and buy more and more advertising that results in net profits of what you’re selling and just repeat the process.

Certainly there are ways to get leads for free, but ultimately there is no such thing as free leads because anything that gets you leads at least takes your time and your time is worth money.  Smart people reinvest in their business and buy more advertising.

 

For example Ted Turner, one of the things he’s famous for saying that I can agree with is “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise”. Rich people, smart people, successful people don’t screw around and bitch about stuff. They get that poisonous bullshit out of their lives and they get to work. Working like hell and loving every minute of it.

And that’s the psychology that it’s going to take now more than ever. Because now more than ever we’re bombarded with “authority figures” telling us that the world is coming to an end. All these news figures that we’re listening to on television, your local news caster, the radio DJ’s, talk show hosts; the vast majority of those people broke.

So we’re getting financial advice from people who have no money.  The vast majority of these people work for a pay check. They’re slaves to other men; they are not in control of their own lives. They’re punching a time clock, reading a script. Why in the world would we ever let someone like that dictate our own behavior?  It’s absolutely stupid and shouldn’t be done in any situation.

The time to take control is now more than ever. Everyone should let this whole “economic crisis” be a big wake up call. The time for screwing around is over. The people you’re reading about who have been facing these economic hardships, a lot of it is their own fault as result to screwing around. That’s the result of making bad decisions, the result of listening to people who have no business dispensing advice.

If you want to survive and thrive in these times, you do what smart people do. And that’s get up, get to work, and take the right actions.

No matter where you currently are, if you’re at the bottom with nothing or in a lot of debt, or you’re already successful, there’s still tremendous growth on the road ahead. There’s still millions of dollars to be made whether you already making millions and you want to make more or whether you’re making nothing and you want to make something for the first time. Even if you have nothing there is still tremendous opportunity ahead and you can turn things around in a very short amount of time and start doing really well.

The bottom line is that if you want to make a bunch of money, everyone is capable of it; all you have to do is roll up your sleeves and go to work. It’s not surfing online, and it’s not chatting on forums. There’s a time and place for that, and you can certainly spend a few minutes a day doing that, on twitter and the Facebook or whatever.

I do it as well but I don’t spend all day doing it. And the days that I spend more time on it and I get sucked into it, I’m just losing money.

What are some things that you think that people need to be doing with their time that actually makes money?

Selling. Here are the two simple steps to make money: find out what people want and give it to them.

There’s none of this “I’m going to create a better mouse trap and then go sell my mouse trap”. It’s more like saying, “hey what do you want? Okay, we’ll go over here and go get it.” Find out what people want and give it to them.

Selling in today’s fitness environment can be defined as influencing someone else to take an action. At all times you need to be influencing other people, working on a system that will continually generate more and more people into you funnel that you can influence. If you’re a position of beginning and just want to make as much money as you possibly can right now, then everything else besides influencing people is a complete waste of time.

If you have a successful business then everything else is not a complete waste of time. For example in my training business, I got so many customers so fast at times, I had to stop all advertising until I adjusted my infrastructure to handle getting more. You can run into that problem if you influenced people “too much”, but it’s a very good problem to have.

In terms in making as much as money as fast as possible, the only way we can do that is to influence other people to take an action, and in most cases that action is going to be a purchase.

Here’s something that people seem to overlook or not comprehend, and it’s that your income is directly proportional to the amount of offers that you place in the marketplace.

A trainer might tell me “I really need to makes some money”, but then you ask how many offers have you put out?  They might say “Oh, I sent an email to my prospect list three weeks ago”.  Well what happened to the other twenty days? “I was on online looking for stuff…”

No. You make offers, offers, offers, offers.  If the offers are structured the right way then the offer seems like something cool.

If you’re offering people stuff that they want you’re not going to be an annoying pest. Make offers, sell stuff, become a master of influence. I’ve started over in completely new markets, and in completely different business; the way I got back and exceeded my previous income in a short amount of time was because I became good at influencing people to take action.

When I’m saying make offers, make offers, make offers, that’s the majority that you should be doing with your time because that’s what brings in the money. You’re talking about your own services, reminding people, following up by pushing those services to those who haven’t already bought, and them putting them in front of the right people for the first time to get more leads into the funnel.

But I can already hear it now “Kaiser, I don’t have any leads – I don’t have a list?” Okay great, you don’t have a list. Guess who does? Your local coupon circulars, your local newspapers, your local Parent Teacher Association publication, Google!  All together, they have a list of about two hundred gazillion people who are exactly in the target demographic for general fitness services, so buy some ads and make some freaking killer offers to the people reading them.

As you saw in the video above, there is tons of money to be made in fitness, even with scam products – products like this one:

[youtube HALK9mRhJ2I nolink]

These are mutli-million dollar products, not to mention weight lost pills and all kinds of scam stuff out there. Now I wouldn’t advise you to go into those businesses in a million years.  My point is that they are proof that fitness products and services are the hottest and most in demand products out there.  You’re in this business, you see them, and you know what I’m talking about.  So I’m just saying jump in and get your piece.

If the public is so hungry for fitness services, and there’s for all intents and purposes, an unlimited number of prospects out there, why do so many trainers suffer? Because it takes work. It’s a pretty simple formula, Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.

There was no bitching and moaning in that formula; there’s no watch the news, freak out, bitch, and moan, complain, worry, “think” about advertising, then go to bed. That’s not the formula. Stick offers in front of people or leverage other people’s lead sources to market your services. It amazes me that we even have to talk about the possibility of this not being a prosperous time.

It is easier to sell something to someone now than it has ever been because our reach is so great.  For pretty much for free, you can communicate with your email list, and can work your customer list for more referrals through social media. We can reach more people, more frequently, now more than ever. In my opinion this is the most prosperous time we’ve ever had.

If companies have to lay off their employees because they didn’t focus on selling and they focused on dumb stuff like branding, that’s their problem not mine.  But the rewards and the assets that exist out there are ours for the taking right now, not tomorrow, not when things get better, now.

There are so many opportunities around right now; the market is up and down, the economy is kind of freaky, there’s weird things going on, some things are down but there’s always opportunity in any circumstance.  No matter how bad it gets there will some industries and markets that will be having growth like the health and fitness market.

It doesn’t matter how much money people have; if you have health problems, you’re going to have to find a solution for it or you’re going to be dead or incredibly unhealthy.

Let’s talk about why people don’t buy things.  In my opinion the reason people don’t buy stuff is they don’t want it, they don’t have the money, or they don’t believe you

If you’re trying to sell sports conditioning to housewives, you’re in a situation where they just don’t want it; it doesn’t matter if your sessions cost 10 cents. The housewife isn’t buying your football training. Now if it’s something they want like “your lose your booty bootcamp” or whatever, you know they want it.  And if they don’t buy for a certain amount of time, but they are on your email list, get back to them with an even better offer.  Or if your services aren’t right for them, find out if they know someone that would be interested.

 

Say you’re at the dealership looking at a BMW M5. For some reason you go in there , you just don’t feel like buying it that day. It’s not that you don’t have the money. It’s not that you don’t want the car. It’s just like your wife called and said you need to come home, little Johnny got in trouble at school. That’s what happens a lot of times when people become one of your leads. They kind of want what you have but for whatever reason, they just don’t get started right then. We usually just abandon these kinds of people.

If you just consistently entice them to come back and buy, you’re going to make a lot more money. Metaphorically, it’s like the BMW dealer calls you and says, “Hey, you know what, thanks for coming down and looking at this BMW. By the way, we got a new Sales Manager. And the guy’s kind of crazy. He wants me to make a good first impression for the boss. Because he said that if you come and pick up that BMW today, he’s going to throw in a Porsche. So, we close at 6. I think he’ll probably sober up by 7. So you might as well get down here, pick that up today during office hours.” Even though that was overboard, don’t you think that would sell a lot of cars?

Another reason that people won’t buy is that they’re afraid. And if they’re afraid, you simply need to reverse the risk. If your product is good and you can really help people, then there’s no reason why you wouldn’t benefit from saying, “You want to get started and that’s good. I really think this will help you and I’m willing to let you try us out for 30 days for nothing at all.”  Lots of businesses are based on that very same principle.  If you trust your customers and trust your work, then there’s absolutely no reason why it won’t work.

Now let’s get to the whole perfectionism syndrome of not wanting to put things out until they’re perfect.  Say you’re working on a new ad but you don’t want to release it yet because you don’t feel good about it.  Like we already said, putting out new offers is one of the fastest ways to earn money, so just make more offers. When you put your services out there, it’s not a matter of if it will sell; it’s a matter of how much it will sell. The longer you delay in getting new offers out there, it’s just you killing your income.

I actually hate hard selling. That’s why in my programs, even though I teach selling and in many cases give you more than a dozen, word for word sales dialogues for every possible scenario, my purpose is to make selling inevitable.  I’m all about being really cool to people, giving them really good value and as a result, making selling unneccesary.  Kind of like “you had me at hello”.

So my purpose here hasn’t been to inspire a bunch of trainers to go out there and be obnoxious door-to-door telemarketer type sales people. But if you have a service that’s really valuable, that’s really going to benefit people, then you should have no emotional or mental blockage about trying to sell it at all.

It’s important that you believe your services work.  That you have that passion inside you. You have to believe that much in what you can do.

So when I say selling and getting over selling, I didn’t mean to turn it in to into a hard-sale salesman where you annoy a lot of people. I’m just saying, don’t feel guilty about asking people for money, if what you have to exchange for their money is something of tremendous value worth far more than what you’re charging for it. There’s nothing to feel guilty about at all.

Because they’re already interested in your services if you’ve chosen your market correctly.  People don’t want to be sold to, they just want to have things that present a good value proposition, that provide tremendous good value, or some kind of solution towards whatever is troubling them.

So to kind of wrap things up:

We talked about not getting caught up in the negativity.  Don’t get caught taking advice especially from people that are just working a job and reading a script that are broke. Don’t get caught in the negativity from the news. There’s a ton of money that’s going to be made even in this troubled time. The bottom line is either it’s going to be you or someone else that’s going to get the money. And that’s your choice.

There are a few markets that will present some unique opportunities like the fitness market that you’re already in right now.

You’ve got to put offers in front of people. You got to take the opportunity to take action in some way that will make you money. Whether its advertising circulars,  online ads (pay per click or facebook ads), postcards, or joint ventures with other business.

In my programs I teach this all to you through a coaching program style.  You see I don’t sell my time for money in this business.  When I was an employee, I trained clients for as little as $15 an hour.  When I went independent, I had the dream of making $50 an hour, which is what you need to make six figures.  Soon I realized my time was best spent as a business owner geting new business, or converting leads into clients.  From that point, when I did do training, it was never for less than $200 for a private sessions, and group hours that would pay me a minimum of $250 an hour.  I even went as high as $500 a few times for an hour in my business.  At that point, I figured out the real money was in running and marketing a business, and not doing the training anymore.

It’s like I teach trainers all the time, just cause you wore diapers when you were a baby, doesn’t mean you have to wear them as an adult.  And just because I made a lot of money being self-employed, doesn’t mean I have to keep doing that.

That’s the difference between my programs and what all other business coaches sell.  You’ll often see business coaches go to every possible measure to try to sell their coaching time.  But this is not better than what a trainer does, although it’s at a higher price.  Like I said in the beginning of this article. you are much smarter going into the fitness business than going into the make money business and trying to teach it as a coach.

My programs will show you how to turn this into a true business.  To eventually extract yourself so you never trade your time for money again.  Although I give you the programs, I can’t really be there for you to give you private coaching.  That’s why at special times, I try to give away my time in the form of speed coaching sessions, either through a fast action bonus to the course or as a bonus at a later time, just so I can apply the info a little more to your situation.  Just to do that little bit and bridge the gap between the program and where you are right now.

My programs like the current ones that are out, the SIX-FIGURE TRAINER PROGRAM and THE STUDIO START-UP PROGRAM,  are the antithesis of hard charging death grip sales. Instead, we focus on what is cool, what makes your prospects happy, we enhance that positivity and the end result is often massive sales of your services.

So that’s what I’m about.  And that’s your little wake up call to start advertising and selling.  Eventually, when your business is mature, and you’re running it from an arm chair like the Godfather, you’ll find that advertising will be the primary way you deal with the outside world.  And putting in the systems for retention and referrals will be how you run it from the inside.  If that’s what you’re building towards, I hope I was able to just give you a massive head start.  Now go run with it.

Good luck and I’ll talk to you soon.