When a new athletic club or fitness center is looking to construct a website, they have a number of questions to ask themselves, and choices to make. Unfortunately, they often ask the wrong questions and make the wrong choices.
One of the first bad questions is "Do we need a website?". Of course, I'm biased in this matter, but with reason. I have the facts on my side. Yes you need a website. Over 90% of your potential customers look for goods and services online as their primary method. To not have a website, and expect to get customers is a bit of a stretch these days. It was different 10 years ago, but today? Things have changed. Even if you hope for drive-by's to see your gym, one of the first things those people will do is look for your website. If you don't have a website you'll be seen as illegitimate. What sort of company doesn't have a website? If someone asked you to consider their product or service, and you asked them what their web address was, and they said they don't have one, and they were using a yahoo.com email address, would you give them the time of day?
Yes, you need a website. Yes, you need a domain of your own. Yes, you need an email with that domain name on the end of your email.
After that comes another bad question: "Why do we have to spend any money? Get a $5 site from Godaddy." Again, I'm biased by the facts, but think about it yourself. Someone is looking for a new athletic club, they have a website address and everything. They look at it and it's a plain page, with a phone number on it. Maybe a home page on a generic template, no logo, no real content, an about us page, and a contact page. Maybe a poorly placed photograph that's completely unrelated to what you thought the business was, or some stock photo of an elliptical machine....Are you going to join it? Most people won't. They'll bounce, ie they'll leave your site as soon as they got there.
A website has purpose, or at least it should. A website without purpose, will sit there and do nothing. A website needs purpose in order to accomplish anything. One mistake many people make when putting together a website for their fitness or athletic club, is to ignore these purposes. They focus on looking good, or on showing off some credential, which are not un-important, but they're not purposes. Having people call you. That's a purpose. Having people sign up for a free trial of the g ym; That's another purpose. It's what you want to do on the website.
Do you want to get people to sign up for your spin classes? That's a purpose. Do you want to get more new free trials of memberships out there? That's a purpose.
Without a purpose there is no way to gauge how successfull your website is at doing what you want it to do, because you're not asking it to do anything.
To get people to do anything you have to present them with something called a 'Call to Action'. This can be as simple as a link saying contact oFitnessclub to get started or a graphic, a banner ad, a form, lots of things. They're ways to get people to DO something. They are a call to action. It's a way for the site to say "Do you want to do X? Here's how." One of the tricks of good website usability is in presenting effective calls to action. If people can't figure out what they want to do, or how to do it, they'll leave your site. If they want to be a member, but they see no way to sign up, they might just leave, and you've lost a new member signup. You've lost a sale.
Do you have a Facebook page for your fitness center? You should. It's a great way to get new members to find you and direct them to your website. It's also a great way to inform your current members about your additional services and events, and keeping them in the loop. You need a Facebook page for your business, and you need to leverage it, and oFitnessclub can show you how, and help you do it.
If your not putting videos on your gym website, why not? Keep your videos short peoples attention span is not long. Think of the possibilities for video, its endless and helpful to your club members and potential gym members. Here is a good first video idea. Put up a very short video of your newest equipment, use one of your personal trainers to demonstrate the equipment. The video helps in many ways:
if a fitness center owner new to the internet and using it for their gym, asks us what kinds of things they can do, one of the things we tell them to do is to post on twitter, and to use it regularly. Twitter if you don't really get it, is a place where anyone can sign up and get an account. You can post a short message or status of 140 characters (ie 140 letters, numbers, spaces, etc). Anyone can see these, anyone can search for them. They're a great way to do a number of things for your club, from informational, to customer service.
We're rebooting the OrcaPack newsletter so it's time to get on board. Our newsletter will contain a number of things that might interest you, whether you're a current customer of an OrcaPack product like oFitnessclub, or whether you're thinking about it, or even if you're just interested in industry news and opinion.
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How have you gone about making you gym or fitness centers website in the past? Well we have a new way, a product that specifically meets the needs of gyms and fitness centers.
