Steve Jack – International Sales and Communication Coach tells us how to become a Savvy Fitness Entrepreneur
We will explore 4 key steps you need to go through in order to successfully create product and develop your passive income and get yourself out of the fitness rat race and into being a fitness entrepreneur. You will need to focus on the following:
1. Passion and People - How to define your topic to connect with your audience
2. Product and Packaging – How to create a product ladder that will satisfy different budgets and different personality types
3. Positioning, Promoting and Partnering - How to leverage the use of technology and key relationships to get your message out to the audience
4. Purchasing – How to convert browsers into buyers
Your Passion and People
Paradoxically the new economy isn’t so much about technology, but more about people, it’s about engaging in conversation than pushing information, and creating connections rather than transactions. In order for you to connect with an audience and start a following you need to first of all need to define your passion, something that you care about and can be 100% authentic in delivering your message. Whether your already an expert or if you are beginning out on mastering a topic, you will need to choose something that you are going to be excited about for the next 5 years, then you need to learn, study and fast track your learning on this topic. What ever you choose you need to be deeply passionate about it this will shine through in all your communication with your audience.
You also need to ensure that there are adequate people interested in your topic, you can use google’s add words tool as an indicator on how many people are searching a certain topic or term: https://adwords.google.com this can be useful data for you when exploring a topic. But the key and most important component of all of this really targeting and niching your audience to a specific subset, so you can really tailor your message specifically to this audience so your message sticks out amongst the clutter.
One of the key ingredients that is over looked is the simple task of actually asking your followers what are their key challenges and problems that they need to over come, then very simply go and create a product that solves those challenges, it’s really so simple that most people miss it. You can use www.surveymonkey.com to poll your followers as to their challenges and needs and develop a product that solves it.
Your Product and Packaging
So once you have figured out your audience and topic, and have surveyed them to figure out their problems, challenges and what they feel they need to over come these, you need to develop product to help them over come these challenges. You need to develop a product funnel that will serve different personalities and different budgets so that you may reach more people and touch more lives and most importantly stabilize your cash flow. Essentially there are five key levels of product you need to develop your new economy business as well as the obvious of actually training people both one to one, and in groups, while most of the resources you read will no doubt be on how to grow your one to one business, your fitness camp or group program and I certainly have resources to help you with all those, I thought it would serve you better to take your mind to the big picture so you can live a lifestyle that gets you out of the long hours of PT and into the more lifestyle entrepreneurship that the new economy can provide. So lets look how you can skip out of the rat race and start bring in income when you sleep.
- Create a low end audio program $ £ € 47 – 197
This is a wallet type product, a one off purchase a customer makes to be able to solve many of the issues that you identified in the survey. Create a step by step formula to solve the key challenges your followers identified as needing to be solved. This might take the shape of anywhere between 3-5 CD’s nicely packaged together in DVD casing with your nice branding on it. This is part of the packaging process, making your product look world class, as my designer tells me good design is good business. You can get a fulfillment warehouse to stock these and ship them direct to your customers, you don’t even have to handle any stock these days. You can record the audio straight from your laptop using something like garage band or record pad on a mac, or audacity or www.cakewalk.com for PC.
- Create a low end subscription website $ £ € 47 – 97
A subscription website is a recurring billing website that takes people through step by step in overcoming a challenge and enhancing your client’s life in someway. Subscription sites are fantastic as they help to stabilize your income as you start to build more and more subscribers, and will typically start from $47 and go up to $97 a month depending upon the value given. Video recordings are easy to do these days and if you are funny about being in front of a camera yourself then you can do something called screen capture technology which basically records anything off the screen of your laptop including your voice. The technology is very easy to use and cheap to buy, if you are a Mac user you can get screen flow, or camtasia studio if you are on a PC.
You can get membership sites build custom and get quite sophisticated now with what you want them to do, or you can use something like a word press plug in called wish list, which comes at a minimal cost as a template to build yourself or get a web developer that you can easily find on www.elance.com to build it for you. www.elance.com is a fantastic place to build your online team of support.
- Create a mid tier product $ £ € 200 – 1000
The next level is a physical product that contains basically all your content you have produced, it would be a combination of audio, and educational video. The value placed upon the product is determined by the perception of the audience and you get to manage this by your sales process which we will cover shortly. You need to create the perception in the mind of your buyers that the content contained with in the program is highly valuable and of massive and immediate use to them.
- Develop a high end live event or program
Very often if you develop a great how to product, people will feel connected to you and your message and may want to go to the next step and enter into a live experience with you. This may take the form of a retreat or a multi day seminar program that really goes into the details of your process. A live event allows for personal contact, to be able to feel you and the way you engage with your audience and how you can create much a much bigger impact than a self study program.
- Develop a high end master mind coaching program.
It is not very often that someone can attend a talk, listen to a product, or be exposed to a message one time and expect to change their life. One of the best ways of developing this is a hybrid coaching – master mind program. This is a high end set journey where you take a group of people personally through your set of processes and systems that generate a result. You can facilitate this on a weekly or fortnightly basis where the group connects to you live, gets access to your resources, and most importantly gets access to each other to master mind together. In this process you would deliver high quality content with a chance for participants to answer questions and have access to your expertise, you would limit the numbers so to make it exclusive (for example 20 participants) and take the group on a journey. You could deliver the content in either teleseminar(www.gotomeeting.com) or more popular webinar where they can hear you and see your screen. (www.myvideotalk.com)
Your Positioning, Promoting and Partnering
Positioning
The internet isn’t so much about technology as about people, it just gives us a tool to reach people in a way that we never had before. While today it seems everything has changed, in reality the fundamental process is the same, people recommending people, engaging and connecting in community. The only difference is that now you just don’t get to do this in your geographical community to get to do this on a global stage.
To do this you need you need to show your face and personality to the world, people buy from people and not faceless brands, people want to feel you and get to know you and this is where your personal branding and positioning come in. This means giving away some of your best content for free. Pretty much anything you want over the internet is now available for free, they key point of difference if someone will pay extra for your content is your personal brand. It is for this reason that Jamie Oliver is able to charge money for recipes that you can get for free online.
The first question you need to ask is where do your potential clients and customer live. What blogs are they reading, what networks do they belong to, what forums are they engaged in, what conferences do they attend. You need to start getting active in these places and beginning dialogue, freely sharing information or content, and building your reputation which is far more effective than spending money on advertising.
Social media is obviously revolutionizing the way way we engage with people so a facebook fan page, a you tube channel, an active twitter account, a linked in account that give regular status updates, tips and techniques to improve the lives of your customers are a must. Type in social media revolution on you tube and check out what I mean.
Promoting and Partnering
Now that you have identified your niche, developed your product ladder and have begun to obtain great positioning in your target market it is time to start to promote your products and programs. You will want to set up either an email campaign using an auto responder (more on auto-responders in the purchasing section to follow) that builds momentum, trust and rapport with your audience before making an offer. Typically a video sequence that begins to dive into your content, then after a series of these you make a strong offer with great sales copy, social proof, bonuses, money back guarantees that solves their key area of pain.
One of the most powerful sales tools is a webinar which is basically a a live online presentation, you can script this so it it is a beautiful sale tool and high converting money machine, you can even automate your webinars so they run on auto pilot and these days even have them run automatically in face book for you. Go to my fan page on face book to see this in action www.facebook.com/stevejackfanpage check out my weight-loss-system-profits webinar, on how you can make money losing weight.
Partnering is when things can really start to pick up and gain momentum. A joint venture(JV) is where you agree to share the profits from any sales made through someone’s list. This is really where the magic begins to happen, you need to approach these people who already have established reputations and rather than ask them to promote your product, ask if you can promote theirs. This is the law or reciprocity at work it will help start a relationship and in turn they will help you promote your product and you both win.
Purchasing
Of course the final and most important stage is getting people back to your website and converting them to your list, after all the hard work done in building your reputation online, developing product that solves your audiences needs, participating in forums, communities and using social media to drive awareness of your personal brand, at some point people may wish to check out your website.
Scott Hodson of Optimum Fitness Software says that your landing page should cater for three key types of visitor, explorers, trackers, and hunters, you goal is not to sell your products and services in this day in age simply not enough people are ready to buy the first time they come to your website. Explorers want to educated, be informed and entertained, around 70% of your website visitors will fall into this category, so you better have highly educational and informative information on your site. If you want to build your website then Scott is the man to help you structure this right, he says that your website needs to have three key things in place:
1. A front end system to generate new contacts to build your list. You can use www.mailchimp.com for free up to 2000 subscribers to suck out your visitors contact details.
2. An entertainment system where by you are constantly updating new content and information though an integrated blog, this will aim to build trust with your customers.
3. A back end system that contains auto-responders to build relationships and sales, a shopping cart system to take money and payments.
So your flow goes something like this, you drive traffic by increasing your exposure online in communities, forums, partnerships, articles, networking events, conferences, speaking engagements and the like. Send them to your website which converts them to your subscriber list by providing highly valuable information and content in the form of an online course, special report. You then send your content out through an automated response email sequence that builds credibility and trust and moves them through your product matrix you set up at the beginning via your auto responder, blog and newsletter campaigns that tie into your calendar of events.
Summary
The internet in the last few years has changed the game of life, it is now possible to earn pounds, out source staff in rupee’s, live your life Euro’s, take your holidays and run events in dollars, all the while following the sun. I should know as it’s what I do, you can do it to by following the key principles of
1. Passion and People - Clearly defining a tight niche to work with
2. Product and Packaging – developing a clear product ladder that solves problems for people and allows different budgets and personalities to experience the right level of service for them.
3. Positioning, Promoting and Partnering - Use the internet to share your message and develop your reputation
4. Purchasing – Turn your website into a payment gateway that free’s up your lifestyle so you can escape the 9 – 5.
For education and support email me to get a free video on how to put your product and sales funnel together to get the ball rolling., ask for either weight loss systems profits, or group functional training systems, to help explode your business to the next level.
