Picking Up The Pace Of Fitness Business Marketing

Having a website is pretty much a fundamental part of marketing for any business these days. In the gym business there are numerous ways that having a digital home helps you communicate and connect. But there are different levels of presence of effort that are completely disconnected from one another.

First, it’s now a standard that your website has to be equally readable from computer screens and mobile devices, so anything you publish must be readily accessible to each. Second, like anything else in business, you get a return out of it based on what you put in. Unfortunately, the bar is set pretty high these days. It can cost thousands of dollars to get set up, with content that ranks highly in search, has a professional appearance and actually gets responses from the right audiences.

Choosing The Easy Bake Low Cost Solution

Perhaps the easiest solution for an Internet presence is just setting up a Facebook business page and relying on that as your main online point of contact. This is becoming an accepted practice as more businesses are getting results with Facebook. It is limited in how you can configure it to the basic format plus a header image and only a few predefined pages for information. Still, it is an easy way to have a point of contact that you can publish to and provide information.

Choosing a hosted service that takes control of your content is always a reasonable option. If your small gym business gets enough business elsewhere you still need to have a basic presence in the form of a mobile friendly website and services such as WordPress.com, Weebly.com and Squarespace.com work great. This is an inexpensive way to get up and running if you are willing to do some basic layout work yourself. What you save in fees you are likely to more than make up in time and effort learning to design for the Internet.

All of that is fine if you are already getting enough business from other channels. The secret to getting attention on the Internet is posting original writing that interests your readers, and also promoting your content through search and advertising. This can start to get expensive, not so much because of the basic price of advertising but the cost of either hiring web design professionals or learning how to do it the hard way yourself.

If It Is More Fun To Compute Try Self Hosted Website

The most popular self-hosting websites use the code provided by WordPress.org. It’s popular, respected and flexible, and has many functions you can add as free plugins created by members of the community. Still, if this appeals to you, first consider that you will need to understand what terms such as HTML, PHP, CSS and MySQL stand for and how WordPress.org ties them all together.

Self-hosting is the most independent way to go and it does take a little bit of sophistication to handle. You will need to work with files, applications and also have access to space on a fileserver that has continuous connection to the Internet. As far as training goes a quick search will show that there is plenty of free information available on how to design websites, rank for search and manage social media pages.

Do Not Be Afraid To Ask Questions

As for advice and opinions there are always the experts of the Internet to consult. There are forums associated with most applications and systems. Sites like Reddit.com are loaded with experts who happily give free advice that can often be as helpful as company support lines; questions are only silly if you never bother to ask them.

There are also too many paid courses on how to learn exactly the same. It can get as expensive as you like and, if you are going to put stacks of cash into that sort of training you might want to consider employing a proper web development service instead. I am not recommending one approach over another here, however if you haven’t yet started using the Internet in one way or another, there’s no time like the present to start doing so. Start at the simplest level that supports your marketing needs and budget.

Bibliography

Fagan, Lawrence. “Unboxing the Gym Experience.” Gym Insight Blog. October 29, 2014. https://blog.gyminsight.com/2955-unboxing-the-gym-experience/ (accessed April 3, 2015).

Montgomery, Tyler. Inside the Club: Are You Mobile Friendly? April 21, 2015. https://www.gyminsight.com/index.html (accessed May 29, 2015).