A fitness blog is a way to share information in a non-intimidating way with an audience looking for solutions to a problem. In other words, they’re perfect for reaching your ideal customer.
It’s an opportunity you don’t want to blow. You’re using real estate on your website that either hurts or helps you attract customers with content they find valuable and make them want to take the next step with you.
It’s one of the best opportunities for content marketing – giving information in a way that doesn’t shout, “hey, see how smart I am” but does say “I see you’re struggling, here’s a quick solution, and I have more where that came from.”
I see you’re struggling, here’s a quick solution, I have more where that came from.
That brings us to social media. How, you say? Social media is the vehicle you use to share content from a blog. Content is the best reason to be posting. Give content freely in articles, posts, and free resources and you’ll attract the strangers that dwell on social media that may never otherwise see you. Social media is usually the place fitness businesses seek support and make a cheap band-aid solution that becomes an expensive wound.
Sometimes your social media needs surgery. You don’t need weeks and months of creating more content, you just need to optimize what you have. I go in and optimize blogs and articles or videos that already exist on client’s sites and grow their reach and monetize that existing content to give them more traction. This next three months, the end of the year, is crucial for instance for early launch list building for January to be strong-er. That is, strong by purpose not by accident.
That said if you’re reading this at any other time of the year? It’s still and always important that you are not just posting, pinning, and tweeting from scratch. This is a time-suck (pardon my language…but the right words at the right time!) and never connects the dots!
The dots = your customer, your website, your specific-to-them answer to problems
Connect them.
I want to emphasize that most often my customers don’t need more content. They need to use what they have better, and in most cases, at all. In fact, this is such a hot topic, I’m presenting at Athletic Business Conference in November on it, twice. Are you going? If you know this describes you, you’ve got content but you don’t know how to make it work for you, you’re not alone.
Usually it’s a quick fix. It takes going through a system of simple steps and getting organized but once you’re done it’s there for a long time to help you.
Here’s where I have run into problems helping someone who already has an exiting blog posts and articles.
There is a definite problem if there’s not tweet-worthy content within the post.
Better Fitness Blog Tips
Better fitness blog gems.
Part of the solution to a better fitness blog, not the entire solution, is using Click-to-Tweet. When you can pull out nuggets of genius, quips, and quotes that are “grabbers” then you’ve got it. “It” is what would make someone want to open that and read more. Using Click-to-Tweet can be a way to see for yourself that you need help. If there is nothing tweet-worthy, it’s time to make a change. You use the same kind of content in 4-5 other ways. You need to be conscious when you write, or interview for your podcast, or are interviewed, that you’re giving these little sound bytes of thought that grab attention. They aren’t called attention grabbers for nothing.
Better fitness blog length.
Your blog needs to have about 300 words minimum to help you get found. If you aren’t blogging with at least 300-750 (usually the word count requested by companies who might ask you to guest blog) you probably haven’t developed a concept, given an adequate depth presentation and take-aways to a reader. If someone gives you a few minutes of time, you want to reward them with a laugh, a new thought, or a new action (can they improve their workout today because they read what you wrote).
Better fitness blog brand connection.
In those 300 words your “brand” should clearly come out! Are you the science guy or girl? Include either resources with your science links (not someone else’s posts- primary research if you’re the science guy!) or links to pubmed journals right in your text. Interview someone and include that quote. Use your own quote, provided it’s juicy and controversial enough to disrupt thinking.
Better fitness blog findability.
Before you just vomit a headline, title, or topic for that matter, wouldn’t it make sense to find out what people are actually searching for? If this is the first time you’ve thought of it that way, this alone could increase your organic traffic 10x. Go to Google Adwords and type in phrases that fit your topic, or the one you thought you wanted to write. You want high popularity and low competition. Then you want to go and type it into the Google search bar and see how many hits come up for it. You’ll get a good idea whether you need to tweak a title or you need to change it altogether.
You want to both choose a headline that features words that customers search for (a headline you would choose for an email is not the same as you would choose for a blog). Then you want to sprinkle those words throughout the blog in order to increase your SEO. There are tools to use on your blog that are free or a small one time plug in fee that help you optimize for key phrases.
Then follow through. Tag, use categories, that use those words too. While the world is using “fitness” this is not a good choice. If you cater to different niches, use words that are specific to them. “Fitness nutrition” or “women’s weight loss” or “exercise for weight loss” get much more specific. Do you offer an exercise program to boost bone density? or is that a concern for customers? “Bone density exercises” or “Osteoporosis prevention” would be phrases to check in your Google Adwords and your search.