Blogging To Build Your Personal Training Business – Part 3

So far in our “Blogging To Build Your Personal Training Business” series, we have covered why including a blog to your business website is such great idea and how to structure it to give you maximum impact. Today, we are going to get stuck into the less-glamorous side of blogging…..how to actually sit down and writing awesome content that your clients will love and want to share (or subscribe to).

Lots of trainers that I speak to about blogging love the idea, they know that it is going to do great things for their business but they are scared wit-less about actually writing.  I was the same when I first started but after a bunch or trial and error and a little research, blogging is now really fun and something that I look forward to every week. Let me explain how…

Step 1. Know Your Audience (yawn).

Now I know that I belt on about this all the time but there is no use writing a blog every week that no-one is interested in. So you must understanding the needs, pains and struggles of your target audience. In one of the recent FBOMB audio files, I was chatting to Victoria Judge about this and she suggested that creating a target audience avatar is a great place to start.

What is an avatar? No it is not a movie with blue people, V explained it as a detailed dot point description of what makes up your target audience. Their physical description, age, sex, income level, education but more importantly you want to list their major pains, struggles and roadblocks. Once you have a list of 50 or 60 points, you are now starting to get a good handle on your target audience. Identify the 5 or 10 biggest issues and base the majority of your blogging content around these issues.

Step 2: Plan Your Blogging Strategy

Ok, so you have done your audience avatar and you have a good feel of what your target audience would see as valuable content. Now you must think about delivery. Are you going to write daily, weekly, monthly and what topics are you going to write about?

Obviously you want to choose a writing schedule that you are comfortable with and one that you can easily commit to. Once a week is a nice place to start but is you are really time poor, even starting to post once every two weeks is good. I wouldn’t start posting any more than once a week until you get your game on (I am now just increasing my post frequency to twice a week now I have my head around everything).

Then comes content. In your strategy, you done need to identify specific blog post ideas but rather setting a plan of what broad topics you are going to cover. For example, if you are posting weekly your month’s strategy might include a training post, a nutrition post, a motivational post and an keyword optimized post to help your Google ranking (if they were the things that your avatar said where important). Once you have your over-arching topics, you can then move to planning and writing the specific posts.

Step 3: Thinking About The End Before You Start

Before you sit down and write your blog post, it is reeaaaalllly important that you think about what you are trying to achieve. Because blogging can be used for a number of different reasons,many of your posts will have different conversion goals. For example:

• Looking to build relationships: goal would be to generate lots of comments.
• Looking to build your database: goal would be to have your readers opt into your list.
• Looking to build your ranking: goal would be to get your audience to share your content (using social media).
• Looking to sell your service: goal would be contact you (preferably by a certain time).

As you can see, all of these goals are achieved by giving a clear call to action within and most importantly at the end of all your posts. When you have a clear picture of the goal, it will be much easier to write your post knowing where you will end up (ie: it’s very easy to get lost in your writing if you don’t do this first).

Step 4: Sitting Down And Writing Your Posts

Now that you know what your target audience wants, you know your overall strategy and you have your end point all sorted – it is time to sit down and punch out your first post.  I have a few main rules that I follow when I write a blog post:

• I always start with my headline as this is crucially important. By writing a compelling or curiosity-raising headline, you are encouraging your readers to want to read through your post.
• In your first paragraph, explain what you are covering and what the end result will be. This gives your readers clear expectations.
• Use sub-headings (or steps like in this post) to create a clear path for your readers to follow.
• Conclude the post re-iterating what you covered in your intro and give a clear call to action.

These are just a few of my favorite ways to write lots of content at a consistent level. When it comes to the actual writing I think one of the most important things is to not try too hard to be someone your not. When I first started blogging, I tried to write in a certain structure and it took me forever to get a post out.  Luckily I learnt reasonably quickly that writing in your own voice is really important (and much easier to do).

So my number one tip when sitting down to write content for your blog is to be yourself. Write with the same passion that you run your personal training business with and remember to get excited. Every personal trainer knows a bunch of great info that is valuable to so many people. So be yourself and use your own voice; others will appreciate it.

My question to you today is a simple one.

What’s stopping you from blogging to build your personal training business?

I look forward to your answer…

Cheers

Rick :-)

P.S: Stay tuned because the final installment in my blogging series is how to effectively network your blog posts using social media. Subscribe here to make sure you don’t miss out and have it delivered straight to your inbox instead.

About the author: Rick Watson is the surfing, swearing personal training business guy who tells it like it is. He blogs, coaches, writes books, runs an online community and holds live workshops for personal trainers but most of all he is a father and husband (with a healthy respect for road trips). If you like what you read, subscribe to blog here and get your weekly dose of goodness delivered straight to your Inbox.

Tagged as: Age Sex, Avatar, Blog, Blogging, Business Series, Business Website, Dot Point, Glamorous Side, Level Education, Love, Maximum Impact, Personal Training, Physical Description, Point Description, Roadblocks, Step 2, Target Audience, Trial And Error, Victoria, Wit, Yawn