Why Can’t I Get A Free Personal Trainer Website?
If you’re looking for a cost-effective way to market your personal training business having a personal training website can expand the reach of your advertising dramatically.
Free websites or the free space provided to you by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), may seem like a good, cheap option when starting out but I want to warn you about the hours of frustration and aggravation I have had with both.
You see free websites lack 2 very important things: Control and credibility.
With free websites you have limited control over your site design and this will impact your business on many levels.
Firstly, your personal training websites design is the first thing your prospective customers sees and thus plays an important role in influencing that persons decision making. The look and feel of your website is your very first opportunity to start your branding message. Branding is about your individuality and your unique offer or unique service. It includes your company colors, the words you use and your pictures, the overall ‘feel’ of your website and the way this all combines to influence the way customers think of you.
If your website looks similar to the cookie cutter websites that the free personal training website services produce, or if it lacks any creative design or individuality, how do you think that will impact on your prospective client? Its going to look bad.
At one end of the spectrum your website could potentially look very unprofessional and unorganized. While you may have had the best intentions in mind when you posted a stock photo of some people working out and a bunch of links to all your personal training services on your site, the reality is someone else may mistake your site for a spammy website with a stereotypical photo of models working out and a bunch of links that they are never going to click because they don’t really understand if you are a personal trainer, a gym, a phys ed teacher or just a re-hashed article site. This is an example of a website a friend of mine owned a while ago. He was very surprised when I showed him how easy it was to turn this around.
On the other hand free personal training website designer software typically produces websites that are built from a template. There may be many templates to choose from but once you count the ones that would be applicable for personal training there is usually not much difference between the options. What will inspire your potential client to contact you if you look like every other run-of-the-mill personal trainers out there. You’re missing out on a big opportunity to stand out from the crowd by addressing this small factor.
Lack of control over your site design also limits the functionality of your website and its applicability to your expertise and market. For example say you train a group of people or are involved in a sporting club, how powerful would it be for those people to interact on your site to either post up coming events on a notice board or to ask if anyone can give them a lift to training… with a free site you just cant have those sort of things and it is these things that make a successful and fully functioning website as apposed to a glorified online business card.
Free sites also limit your control over how your site is named. They typically place the ISP or company name in the URL before the name of your business. How does that look to prospective clients? Unprofessional!
Let me show you an example of this,
What looks better…?
www.domains-for-free.com/~runnersworld.php?=342
or
www.runnersworld.com
The first one looks very unprofessional…
The first one is going to cause apprehension with dealing with your company while the second one is going to boost your credibility to a potential customer and help convince them that you are the best option to turn to. It looks more ‘real’ and just stands head and shoulders above the free domain.
I highly advise you to invest in your own domain name and hosting. Here is some information on the best way to build a website for a personal trainer.
