If you have been spending money on Facebook ads or Google Adwords but are not getting the number of leads you want, then I have some good news for you. I am going to provide you with over 100 free tricks and tips you can use, to drive traffic to your web site and give you extra leads for your fitness business.
I am not saying forget about Facebook ads, this should still be an important part of your social media marketing. But there is life outside of advertising. So if you are looking to attract more leads to your business without spending a small fortune on ads, then read on.
Use your Facebook business profile
Because of Facebook Zero, the value of “likes” has diminished due to Facebook reducing its organic and earned reach (as I mentioned in my previous blog on Facebook Zero) but it is still worthwhile growing your following on your Facebook business page to drive traffic from your Facebook page to your website or blog to capture lead details.
- Ensure your profile and “about” tab is clear and linked to your “owned” portal that displays your credibility and expert content
- Post updates regularly
- Post photos in comments
- Run regular competitions and polls – just for your fans and followers
- Take your fans behind the scenes – like you are sharing a secret
- Use fan content where relevant
- Make sure you have the Facebook call to action button
- Host a weekly Facebook live segment and end with a strong call to action
- When available, consider using Facebook stories – it takes prime position and helps stop the decline of your organic reach and give you a lot of creative options (and yes this will be available for businesses too)
- Improve Facebook Messenger – use the auto reply facility
- Create a Messenger Bot that answers common questions, shares useful information, and engages with your customers or prospects in numerous ways.
- Ask open questions in your Facebook updates to encourage interaction
- Include a Facebook widget on your website or blog in a prominent position that can be “liked” without visiting Facebook
- Add links to your Facebook page in your emails and newsletters
- Post visual content and videos – this always attracts more people than just copy
- Always respond to any comments or questions – keep the conversation going
- Turn text quotes into images and post them on your Facebook page
- Provide a prominent icon on your blog or website that links to Facebook
- Include your Facebook links on your e-books and all other online communications
- Create a special tab for people to enter their details for a special eBook or offer
- Respond to any complaints – this is a great way to turn a bad story into a potential new client
Think outside of your own Facebook page too:
- Look at using your own personal page to promote your business (though not all the time)
- Get involved with Facebook groups that share the same audience as you and like those pages as your page (as opposed to your personal profile). Make a daily habit of interacting with relevant posts. Then followers will be more aware of who you are, which will begin to develop the know, like and trust factor with them. This in turn makes it more likely they will check you out and if they need what you’re offering, they become a lead for your business.
- Be yourself and share your personal stories and experience; never outsource your voice – be real.
- Think about “liking” the comments of the people on their fan page. Every time someone “likes” your status or a comment you’ve made, that little notification box pops up in the bottom left corner of your computer screen, right? This simple action will allow them to get exposed to you, your website and what you have to offer.
- Put a human face on your brand. People hate pushy sales messaging and in-your-face advertising. Encourage real interactions and genuine brand relationships.
- Regularly share behind-the-scenes images of what’s going on inside your fitness business.
- Tell real stories about your members and clients and how you made a difference in their lives.
- Use relevant hashtags
- Run contests and tag a friend in comments
- Use your bio wisely – when setting up your Instagram profile there is a space in your bio to include a link (such as your web site or a free download)
- Instagram is the palace of the influencer – partnering up with an influencer who has a large following in your target market is a great way to share your brand new potential customers. Reach out to influencers so they can share their thoughts with their followers.
- Tag influential accounts in your photo – tagging big accounts in your Instagram posts (the photo itself, not just the caption) is an effective way to get your account noticed by others. Find high-profile accounts in fitness and tag them directly in your photos. This puts your photo on the feed of photos they’ve been tagged in, increasing the likelihood that someone who doesn’t currently follow you will stumble onto your account. Because you’re only tagging accounts related to yours, people who come across it will be more likely to be interested in your brand.
- Use Instagram stories – they help you get more visibility in the Instagram app and give people more of your content to consume. When people open the Instagram app, the first things they see above their news feed are the Instagram stories by accounts they follow. If you’ve recently created an Instagram story, you have a chance of your profile image appearing at the top of your followers’ news feeds.
- Create creative product videos demonstrating your services
LinkedIn may not be your major source of traffic but it has opened up its platform to content creators with its publishing platform. Plus if the corporate market is one of your audiences, then you should definitely look into using LinkedIn.
Some tips to grow your distribution network on LinkedIn and attract more traffic from this source:
- Make sure your profile is up to date and all the fields are filled in
- Don’t write your profile in the third person – instead identify whom you help (your target audience) and what benefit you offer your audience (I help females find the time to live a healthy and active lifestyle)
- Invite connections by email (or use connections through LinkedIn but always write a note – don’t just use the stock standard reply LinkedIn gives you)
- Update your status daily
- Participate in (or start) a LinkedIn group discussion
- Follow influencers and ask or answer questions on their posts
- Join and focus on relevant LinkedIn groups
- Send one new invite daily
- Prominently display your contact information
- Endorse people you know
- Promote your LinkedIn profile including card and email signature
- Include links to your website/blog and other key social networks such as Facebook. These can be used to send people to a landing page that you want to take them to
- Publish your best blog posts on LinkedIn’s publishing platform.
YouTube
Not sure how to acquire leads from YouTube? Here are some ideas:
- Post consistently – give new viewers an incentive to subscribe to your channel with the promise of a constant stream of high-value content.
- Add an intro and outro to your videos – adding an intro to your videos helps to immediately establish the name of your brand to new viewers who may not be familiar with your channel. Having an outro featuring your social handles and links to other videos helps to keep viewers watching through multiple pieces of content.
- Use videos to link to your content – at the end of your video, say “check out the link in the description for…” to direct viewers to your web site.
- How about some “How to” videos – always so popular – how to do a perfect pushup, squat plank and so forth. This helps generate more views which could lead to more traffic to your site.
- How about a special offer at the end of your videos? Drive traffic to a landing page, capture their details for them to receive a special deal.
Search Engine Optimisation
Organic search engine traffic can often provide over 50% of your traffic for free if you have a good SEO strategy. Personally, 9 times out of 10 when I ask leads how they found my business, they said using Google.
So start working on attracting traffic from search engines – make sure you optimise your website or blog for search engines.
Some other search engine tactics:
- Choose 25-50 keywords and phrases that prospects would be using to find your business (this can be as simple as starting to type into Google). Then create content around those phrases that you will include in your blog posts and website pages.
- Make sure you include your keyword or part of your keyword in the page title.
- Always include your keyword in the first or second paragraph.
- Include your keyword in at least one of your headings.
- If you use a WordPress SEO plugin such as All in one SEO or Yoast, you can fill out the title and description section. Make sure to include your keywords here as Google will use this to help identify what your page is about
- Your posts should include a number of images, but it’s important that you use these images correctly because Google cannot read an image like we can. Therefore we have to tell Google what the image is about. In the ALT text you should include your keyword and variations of your keyword. Make sure you do this with at least one image.
- Something you should be doing every time you publish a new post is to interlink between your blogs posts. Not only does the visitor then stay longer and becomes more involved in your website experience, it also makes it easier and quicker for Google to index your pages.
Some other SEO tips:
- Make sure that your website designer and developer includes those terms in the major headings in the site so that search engines can discover them
- Make sure your content is outstanding so people want to share it and link to it
- Promote your content on social networks so people discover it and link to it
- Allow other bloggers to syndicate or post your content on their websites that link back to your site or blog
- Offer to guest post for major and influential blogs
- Create valuable long form content that is 1,000 to 2,000 words or more that is such a great resource people and bloggers have to link to it.
- Write copy that gets the click.
- Put important keyword(s) first. Don’t keyword-stuff.
- Include your brand name (if applicable).
- Try to stand out in the search results (be different).
- Create a unique title for each page.
- Keep your titles under 65 characters in length.
- Make sure that your content is unique to your site when publishing
- Get more positive customer reviews (such as on Facebook and Google). If you do get a negative review, acknowledge the comment, apologise, and fix it if you can and do this in the most public way possible. That way prospective customers who are checking out your reviews will know you have a customer service mentality.
Email is certainly not new and may not be as exciting as social media but building an email list is critical for your fitness business. So here are some tips to gain more leads using emails:
- Keep the emails short, concise and to the point, include images and a strong call to action, use engaging content and have a valuable offer.
- Add a subscription box at the end of all your blogs
- Give people a great incentive to submit their details. Submit your details and receive a free eBook on the top 10 guaranteed ways to lose weight or some topic which addresses your client’s main pain points
- Use incentives and compelling subject lines to increase your open rate.
- Instead of just sending one email, send subsequent emails depending on the response of the customer such as those who opened and replied to the email, those who opened the email but didn’t respond and so forth.
- Include a link and a call to action to your squeeze page (which is just a landing page designed to capture opt-in email addresses from potential subscribers) in your email signature.
Web site
Your business web site is an ideal way to capture leads for your business – some ideas:
- Turn your web home page into a subscription form – have a pop over box asking people to submit their name and email to subscribe to your newsletter
- Use a pop up box which appears after 30 seconds after someone is reading one of your blogs
- Make sure your web site loads up within 2 seconds, has a great design and an easy navigation
- Have a lead magnet – a “bribe” you offer to a prospect in exchange for their contact information. It doesn’t have to be lengthy or complex but make sure it solves a specific problem with a specific solution for your ideal target visitor.
- Don’t forget Meta Descriptions – they appear underneath the blue clickable links in search result pages and provides provide a summary of that web page. Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor in Google but they are an important element as they impact on whether the user clicks on a result or not.
Partnerships, Collaborations and Influencers
Attracting traffic to your website on your own is a challenge but if you collaborate and partner you can obtain even more traffic. What is important to realise is that the social web allows you to work with other bloggers and businesses to reach each other’s customers. These partnerships, joint venture or “collaborative” relationships will amplify and multiply the number of leads coming your way.
Some ways you can do this:
- Be a guest blogger – identify a blogger and offer to write an article for their blog. You will gain attention and access to their audience and this is a great way for new people to discover you.
- Identify and build relationships with micro influencers (those people who have between 1,000 and 100,000 followers) – use sponsored posts, ask them to review your business, use gifts, competitions or use affiliate programs.
- Look at other web sites you can join for free such as directories including Google Places for Business
- Write for online publications – great exposure and helping you become an authority
Great content
Ultimately there is no substitution for unique, interesting and timely content. Some tips to get free leads though content:
- Create tempting headlines that drive “clicks”
- Focus on getting your followers off of social media and onto a dedicated landing page with a high-value lead magnet.
- Make sure you have social sharing buttons that are visible at the top, or a floating bar on the side.
- After publishing, share your content in as many social networks as possible.
- Write long form content. Google is rewarding long form content (some say 1,500 words or more) by ranking it higher in search engines.
- Create evergreen content – this is content that is always relevant and interesting and does not go out of date. This allows you to keep tweeting and posting it on a recurring basis over time to social networks and hence builds more traffic from one piece of content.
- Turn one piece of content into multiple formats. A written blog post can be turned into a podcast, a Slideshare presentation, video or even an infographic.
- Make sure you promote your content everywhere – your email list, share on social media, mention an influencer, submit to a content community
- Make it easy for your readers to share your content
- Be controversial!
- Research the keywords you want to target (use Google Trends or Google Keyword tool) and use them within your articles
Mobile
Most people are now reading, buying and sharing on mobiles. Many people have large mobile phones (often called “phablets” because they sit in size between phones and tablets) and they can read while travelling on the train bus or even on the beach. So how can you get some free leads using mobile devices?
- Make it easy for people to share your articles when reading on a mobile.
- Create a mobile “app” for your site
- Make sure your web site and blogs are mobile friendly
- Make your phone number clickable so they just click the link and it will automatically dial your number
- Try a simple text message campaign – people may not open emails but they usually open a text
- Mobile users often look for local information. If you want to deliver, you need to get your business on the local map. Google makes this simple with Google My Business which also makes it easy for both mobile and desktop users to find you.
So there you have it, over 100 tips and tricks to get you more traffic and leads without depending on Facebook ads. If there any you use successfully that I didn’t include, just let me know.
