You have the gym, you have the website, add video to the mix

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:

• The video informs your current members about the equipment
• introduce the new equipment to your audience
• have one of your personal trainers demonstrate and explain how to use equiptment  
• potential gym members see you keep equipment up to date 
• your trainers become more approachable leading to more PT sales
• the video answers the question of how do I use this new piece of equipment and why

Here is a quick guide to the technical aspects, the why and the what? 

Give them a quick taste and stop.   Put your video on Youtube, Picasa or Flickr.  Once its uploaded embed the video in a blog entry or a page on your site.

Technically not to difficult:

• Video from your phone is high enough quality, or your camera, or your handheld video camera
• Taking video off these devices is generally one step to youtube, flickr or picasa (google), if not they have easy upload options available.
• embedding from youtube is not complex, copy the code and paste it into your page
• keep it short 30 seconds to 1 minute

What videos should I shoot?

• show snippets from a personal training session (potential PT clients would love to know what goes on in a PT session)
• short videos of your new equipment, classes or architecture changes
• video of your community involvement work
• a walking tour is nice - with minimal sound generally people know what they are looking at inside of a gym
• which equipment do people ask how to use the most.  make a demonstration video of this equipment (for everyone who asks there are two who will not ask but still want to know how to use the machine)
• make a video of your fitness classes and spinning (these things are scary to new members de-mystify them)
• take video of athletics (basketball, racquetball, swimming, etc)
• member testimonials
• or a video member survey

Why?

• show members and potential member what your classes are like
• show off your trainers and staff
• use for future event sales (tournament rentals)
• people are unsure about asking questions, videos can answer many questions about your gym
• get new clients, it may not get them but they will be more likely to sign up for a free trial
• show up in different search results
• become an expert, someone in the community who can be asked questions about fitness.

The more video you shoot the better you will get.  Don't get discouraged, my first video was awful, but people say they still find it useful.  If you keep your videos short just do a second or third take to get it right.  My first video took 10 takes.  

Note: If you want to edit your video Windows Movie Maker (included with windows) and iMovie (included on Apple computers) should give you the functionality you need.  You can also cut down your videos with the new YouTube editor.

Continue reading about video for websites:

• Video Killed the Radio Star
• Check Out This Video