T
he next phase of search engine optimization requires the help of other people and is a little more time consuming. It’s the process of Link-Building; having im- portant sites linking to yours. Although a little tedious, it’s not very difficult and well worth it.Links are the most important thing Google looks at and are essentially they’re claim to fame. When they analyze your site, they pay attention to who and how many other sites are linking to you. It’s just common sense that any site that’s important and relevant will have many other sites linking to it. If you can build a large number of inbound links to your site, you’ll see your search engine ranking growing as well.
Your link building strategy is something that will require work on a weekly basis and may take time to bear fruit. Fist, you need to identify all the other pos- sible relevant sites in your industry. This could be sites from people such as mas- seuses, physical therapists, small health food stores, and of course other trainers. Google pays attention to the type of person linking to you; for example, as a Per- sonal Trainer, if you have a bowling alley linking to your site, Google won’t care. In fact, if you have too many of these unrelated links you may eventually be pe- nalized and see your rank drop.
Once you’ve made this list of potential related areas, you want to find the top-sites in these sectors. These are the sites showing up highest in Google rank- ings for their search terms. Don’t be shy - make a very long list of potential link- ing partners, both of people in your area and also across the country and even around the world; the only rule needs to be that they’re relevant. It’s even a good idea to form link partnerships with other non-competing Personal Trainers; you
can’t get a higher level of correlation than that!
Now here’s the last part - send an email to each of these link-partners that you’ve included describing who you are, and what you do. Let them know that you’re creating a highly competitive site and your page-rank is rapidly climbing. Finally ask for a link-exchange with them, informing them that you’ve already put their link on your link page (which you should do beforehand) and request that they do the same. Many of them will do it, but for those that don’t, don’t take it hard. Just remove them from your links page, and if you think it’s worthwhile, you can try contacting them again in the future.
You’ve got to realize that for a site just starting out like yours, there’s very little benefit for a stronger site to link to you. They might not want to dilute their link pool by doing something like this. As your page-rank grows however, you’ll be surprised how much email you get asking for reciprocal links. You’ll then real- ize how it feels to be in the position where you have to chose who you link to carefully. In general however, if you sound credible in your email, and your site is clean, serious, and professional, many people won’t have a problem exchanging links with you.
As you can imagine, this process is time consuming and can take time to show results. That’s okay because you won’t have all your eggs in one online basket; this is only one part of your total web strategy; so you can afford to wait it out. Just spend a little time every week looking for new partners, getting them added to your links page, and sending out emails. Then wait to see what happens, and wash, rinse and repeat. Although the process takes time, in today’s age hav- ing a high page-rank is very important. It’s basically thousands of dollars of free advertising that you can turn into tens of thousands of dollars of new business.
Craigslist
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nother absolute gold-mine for getting new clients is Craigslist. Craigslist is one of the most visited sites in the world, with a current Alexa (measure of most- visited sites) ranking of #11 in the US. Yes, that’s right, it’s the 11th most visiteda way of life; they use it to buy and sell things all through the year. When it comes to searching for a trainer, it’s a place they’ll turn to out of habit. In spite of the fact that Google is the best way to search for anything on the net, for services many people will use CraigsList. In addition, they feel that an ad on CraigsList will be placed by someone actively seeking new business right now.
Whatever the case, you can be assured that ads appearing on Craigslist will reach a huge audience. We’re going to spend a lot of time right now going into the details of how to launch an effective ad campaign on CL. Posting here isn’t something that’s usually part of most business’s marketing plans, but for an inde- pendent Personal Trainer, it’s one of the smartest things you can do.
If you thought Craigslist was just a seedy site that you’d use just to sell your old ping-pong table, you’re wrong. It’s true that you may get a few strange responses to some of your ads, but that’ll result from no-matter what ad campaign you run. For every inquiry you get that’s out of left field, you’ll also get a strong, high quality lead.
Not only that, but Google loves Craigslist; when you place your ad on Craigslist, as long it’s full of keywords, it will also rank high on Google as well. In my neighborhood of Queens, New York, my ads always appear on the first page of Google. Your Craigslist ads may even get a higher ranking than your ac- tual website! I’ve had situations where I consistently occupied three of the top- ten search results in my area, one of them with my website and another two with my Craigslist ads. That’s just more exposure that works to our benefit.
On top of all of this, placing ads on Craigslist is free. Once you learn how to do it and get good at it, you can place your ads in about a minute. If you have a few different ads tailoring to different client sectors and needs, you can expect a steady flow of inquiries. When I’ve launched aggressive Craigslist ad campaigns I would receive an average of 2 calls or inquiries per day. After sifting through all the leads to find the best clients, I still had so many potential leads that I had to pull my ads because I couldn’t handle all the new business. Depending on the size of your market, this is a situation you may find yourself in too.