Do you want to establish yourself as a fitness expert online?
Do you want to reign in new clients with ease?
Do you want to share your fitness knowledge with the masses?
I’ve got the answer for you, wrapped up in one word: YouTube.
Folks, your job is always to climb up that ladder of authority, to be that celebrity in your niche. Today, I’m going to teach you how you’re going to do that.
You’re going to make knowledge and expertise videos.
If someone is searching how to get out of debt, how to lose belly fat, or how to overcome anxiety, the highest-ranking results are the ones that lock in on key phrases, not just keywords.
When someone searches up “How to sell personal training” on Google, what shows up? Links come up, but what else?
Video thumbnails.
On this search index, I’d rather take the second or third spot with a video thumbnail over holding the first spot with my blog.
Why?
Because people are lazy. They don’t read. People will click on a video thumbnail that’s much bigger than just a link.
Someone might say, “Ooh, what about search engine optimization?” I mean, I’m dominating the search engines for my niche, but my priority is for my video thumbnails to come up.
As soon as people come to my videos, I hit them with a three-pronged approach: who I am, what I do, and how I can help them. Write that down. Your videos should always start off with these three points.
Now, those of you that have seen my videos know that they all start off with, “Hey, I’m Bedros Keuilian, and I’m a fitness marketing expert, which pretty much means I help personal trainers get more clients, make more money, and win their freedom. Today, I’m going to teach you ___________”.
That blank could be Facebook marketing, YouTube marketing, five ways to get more leads, four ways to close people on personal training, etc. Maybe you’ll run with something like this: “Today, I’m going to teach you how to sell personal training.”
So now you need to find a keyword. How do you find these keywords?
You’re going to go to Google. In the Google search box, you’re going to type in “Google’s external keyword tool”, or you can just type in “Google keyword tool”.
All of you know at least one keyword for yourselves, right? For me, I know one thing trainers look for is fitness marketing. So, in that Google keyword tool, you just plug in your keyword or key phrase.
Then, Google tells you that the people who search “fitness marketing” also search “how to sell personal training”, “how to open up a personal training gym”, ‘how to start a boot camp”, “boot camp marketing”, “personal trainer marketing”, etc. It gives you this slew of keywords and phrases that are related.
If you keep scrolling down that list, phrases like “fat loss workouts at home” will start to pop up. That doesn’t really apply to personal trainers specifically. That might even be where you stop taking stock of that list. Yet, you’ll still say to yourself, “Man. I just discovered 15 key phrases here that people are searching for.”
So take any one of those key phrases, put it back in the keyword tool, and it goes oh, anyone searching for ‘how to sell personal training’ is also looking for ‘personal training sales tools’, ‘fitness sales program’. So by the time you’re done putting some of those keywords in there, you have around 50 exact key phrases that you know your avatar is searching for.
Remember: YouTube is owned by Google. It will literally just tell you what people type into the search bar.
What’s really neat about that is you can take all those keywords and phrases and make videos for each one. Each one starts off with who you are, what you do, and what you’re about to teach them. It’s that quick. You can’t hem and haw around.
Before we go further, if you’re thinking, “Man, I don’t have the quality that you do”, you’ll have to find another excuse. Look at the quality of my old videos. You can do better…
You know it’s more about delivering a powerful message that will make people rethink their health. Leave them dying to hear more.
Once you go through the three things you want to teach them, you end with, “Now if you like this video, do me a favor and like it, share it, subscribe to this channel, and click the link down below to go to my blog to get more free information like this.”
This is you giving a call to action. Why is that so valuable? Right now, you have a captive audience. YouTube will give them more options on the side related to your video. In my case, I have a lot more videos, so it shows them about 40-50% of my videos, and then some other people’s videos.
After you have your key phrase in mind and end your video, its time to focus your tags and content. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry. I’m here to go through it all with you.
I’ll get back to how to decide on the content of your videos. For now, let’s talk about tagging your video.
Put the link right there in the description box. It pulls up three still pictures in the corner. Choose only one to use as a still. Next, you name the video the key phrase. So if my one key phrase is “how to sell personal training”, the video should be named “How to Sell Personal Training”.
Your camera probably named that still whatever, something like “Samsung A2345”. Just right click and name it “How to Sell Personal Training”, or whatever your keyword is.
By the way, you name the file on your computer the same exact thing. That’s how your video makes it to the top of the clutter.
This video should also be named “How to Sell Personal Training”. Even the description and the headline should all read “How to Sell Personal Training”.
In the description, I put the URL to my blog. You never put the link to your sales page. No one’s going to go from a free video to buying what you’re selling. That’s like saying, “Hey. We just met. Let’s go home and get married.”
Instead, they’ll go from your free video to checking out your blog to see what else you have to offer, because you said you have some free stuff for them.
Once they’re on your blog, remember, your pop-up should come up. That should prompt them to opt-in. I’d also have opt-ins on the bottom and the side of the page.
If they don’t opt in, that’s okay. They can just go to my blog and peruse around for content.
Let’s backtrack for a second. Why do we want them to subscribe? So that when you put out another video, they get an email notification from Google that says, “Hey man, the dude’s channel that you subscribed to just put up another video.”
If they haven’t gotten onto your email list but are at least subscribed, they took one of your four actions. Cool. Through enough videos, you can hopefully convince them that you are a fitness authority with plenty to offer.
In your description, you’ll also want to add keywords like “selling fitness” and variations of that, like your name, “personal training”, the industry that you’re in, “exercise”, “weight loss”, “fitness training”, “fitness marketing”, “how to sell fitness programs”, etc.
Why do you add these keywords to your description? Google doesn’t know what you’re saying in your videos. What Google does know is how to read tags.
Say you just put this video up with the title and file name being “How to Sell Personal Training”. The keywords include “How to Sell Personal Training”, and the same thing is in the description. The people who are watching this video are personal trainers.
That means you’re going to start ranking this YouTube video high up on Google when someone searches “How to Sell Personal Training”. You see how you organically grow your traffic?
I get people who tell me, “Hey man, I don’t have the money to buy traffic like you do.” Great. Start making one YouTube video a week. Make one video per keyword, and then upload it.
Remember, you always start it off with who you are, what you do, and what you’re about to teach them. That gives you authority.
Teach them what you’re going to teach them, and then give them a call to action: like, share, subscribe, and, oh by the way, click the link down below in my description box. You always want to make sure you put your link first, because if you write a huge description and then put the link in, it gets buried.
That one thing will give you a nice big bump on conversions for you.
How long should a YouTube video be? Two minutes is the sweet spot. You want to get to the point, teach them what they want, give them a call to action, and that’s it.
Four or five minutes is pushing it. You really have to be entertaining to go into the four or five range.
Some of my videos are two minutes long. Others, like the GSD video, are almost nine minutes long. I have an 11-minute video with 53,000 views, but that only happens once you establish yourself or are confident enough.
The last thing you want to do is say, “Hi. My name is Bob, and I’m going to teach you how to lose belly fat. Not like back fat, but I’m going to teach you how to burn belly fat, like right from this area. See, I’ve been a personal trainer for like 16 years. I’m certified through NASM and NSCA. So I’m going to teach you four exercises.”
See how they just took up a ton of time? You ever read in the comment section where someone says, “Hey, he actually gets to the point at minute number three and a half”? You never want to be that guy or gal to get that comment down there.
That means a lot of people bounce off that video because he or she takes forever to get to the point. You don’t want that. You want to be concise.
If you’re talking about getting out of debt, here’s your opening script: “Hi, my name is Peter, and I’m a debt management expert. Today I’m going to teach you the number one thing you need to know to get out of debt and live a happy life.”
You turn to your marker board and start your lesson right away, and by the end of your two minutes, you give your call to action. Boom, bank, pow.
You might still be wondering how you would keep a YouTube video to under two minutes if you want to teach something that takes longer to teach? That’s when you break it up into a part one, part two, and part three.
If it’s going to be 15 minutes, and if the views are horrible because your YouTube dashboard shows viewers tuning out before the video is halfway finished, that’s when you ask, “Where did I lose them?” If you make a video that long, be confident.
A good tip for everybody that someone mentioned at a past FBS is to associate your website with your YouTube channel.
Another great tip that same person mentioned is to use annotations. Annotations are the little links that pop up in the middle of a video that people can click on. Of course, you can use cards — the mobile-friendly version of annotations — to drive traffic to whatever site you choose.
One other thing: what do you do with that video that you shot on Facebook? Well, you put it up on Facebook.
There used to be a time where you could just put your YouTube link on Facebook and you’d be golden. Now Facebook is like, “Ah, you put a link that goes to YouTube? That’s bad. I’m only going to show it to three percent of your fans.”
So, if you have 10,000 fans, they’ll only show it to three percent of your fans. If you upload the video directly to your fan page, they’ll show it to up to 50 percent of your fans. Depending on the number of clicks, likes, and comments you get, the video will go even more viral to your fans.
By the way, why do we want to get engagement on YouTube videos? Well, like I said, Google doesn’t know whether people are excited about your video or not without action being taken.
So what if someone gets more dislikes than likes on his or her video? Then Google thinks, “Ooh, I’m not going to show this to personal trainers.
If someone hits likes the video, watches the entire video, shares the video, or subscribes to your channel, that’s engagement. So you want to encourage engagement on both YouTube and Facebook.
Remember, you can take that same video and repurpose it on Facebook. If you have a market space that is Instagram friendly, quick recipes or workouts are perfect to post there. Just have your editor shave a video of yours down to the meat and potatoes (15 seconds) and you’re set.
All of these video tips will help make your YouTube channel, Facebook fan page, and blog authority channels.
That way, you’ll get the most mileage out of every video you shoot. You’ll be on your way to gaining clients AND credibility in the fitness space.
Committed to your success,
Bedros