Fitness Information Marketing Tips From Pat Rigsby
I have some pretty strong opinions about infomarketing. I believe that if you’ve never actually done something, you probably shouldn’t be creating a product talking about how to be successful doing it. If you haven’t run a bootcamp – no products on bootcamps. If you haven’t trained or coached people – you probably shouldn’t be offering training programs for people online.
Again – this is my opinion. Disagree if you like. Some people will tell you to simply find a hot market and go after it. Doesn’t matter if you’re a subject matter expert there or not. The market offers some opportunity so go get it.
But that’s just not the way that we prefer to do things.
In the past I haven’t written much about this topic because I felt that there were more important topics to cover for the fitness pros that we serve. But knowing that there is a lot of mixed information out there on the topic, I figured that if I had some insight to share that has helped us build a consistent 7 figure information marketing business and I wasn’t sharing it – I was adding to the problem, not providing a solution.
So here’s the first post on a topic that I’ll write about from time to time.
The Basis Of A Fitness Information Marketing Business
The whole point of info marketing is to leverage your expertise and multiply the money you can make without multiplying the manual labor. Don’t miss the part about ‘expertise’ – if you don’t have expertise in a particular topic, you shouldn’t be creating a product about it.
Factors When Choosing A Market
Here are the things I’d consider:
- What clients have you consistently helped get incredible results?
- Are you/were you one of them? Do you have a story to tell that they’ll be interested in?
- Size. Is it big enough to be worthwhile, but not big enough to lose specificity and the average prospect becomes fuzzy. You should be able to market to a specific demographic.
- Do you LOVE this market and want to commit a significant amount of time to it?
- Competition. Lots of good competition should make you hesitate and ask yourself: “Can I bring anything new or unique to the table?”
I know that for my wife’s business – Fit Yummy Mummy – those were answered like this:
What clients have you consistently helped get incredible results?
She had a very sizable following of clients in our training business who she worked with that were moms. She had great success with this group and eventually had a waiting list of moms wanting to join her programs.
Are you/were you one of them? Do you have a story to tell that they’ll be interested in?
She’s a mom and that’s her real edge in her market. There are plenty of fat loss products – but she’s the only mom out there really speaking their language.
Size. Is it big enough to be worthwhile, but not big enough to lose specificity and the average prospect becomes fuzzy. You should be able to market to a specific demographic.
There are lots of moms 
Do you LOVE this market and want to commit a significant amount of time to it?
I’m sure Holly would be good at any number of careers – but she loves what she does and the people she works with in this one.
Competition. Lots of good competition should make you hesitate and ask yourself: “Can I bring anything new or unique to the table?”
Most of the fat loss people in the information marketing world are men. This pretty much excludes them from being moms. That allowed her to offer something unique and attract a specific segment of the market.
What You Need To Know About The Market
Here are some questions you should know the answers to before you enter a specific market”
- What keeps them awake at night?
- What are they scared of?
- What are they mad about or at?
- What are their top 3 daily frustrations?
- You need to know what their normal daily experience is like, a day in their life.
- What trends are occurring?
- What do they secretly desire most?
- Do you know their ‘language?’
- Who else is selling something similar to them and how?
- What’s your advantage? What justifies you being there? What gives you the edge? You need a compelling reason.
Developing Fitness Information Marketing Products
Basically there are what I consider front end products and back end products. Front end products should address the big problem that your target market faces. Using Holly’s business as an example – her initial ebook provided a 16 week fat loss program specifically for moms.
By attacking the most common problem your target market faces or biggest goal they have you can reach the broadest segment of that market.
Typical front end products are:
- Ebooks
- DVDs
- Digital packages – written and video
Most of the consumer based front end products that I’ve seen enjoy success cost between $27-97. The exceptions are when the market is more specialized (you can charge more) or when the product creator is aggressive about getting buyers so they can segment their list and focus more on back end sales to that group (they will often sell lower cost items.)
Our rule of thumb is this: whatever we sell should provide 10X the value of the purchase price. If we sell a product for $97 – it better be worth at least $970 to that fitness pros business – if not much more.
In my mind, the real opportunity in fitness information marketing lies in the back end.
The back end is where you can sell higher priced products, continuity programs, complimentary solutions and live events.
Basically, my way of looking at the back end is this: back end offerings solve all the products the front end product doesn’t.
I’ll use Holly’s business as an example:
- Holly’s front end product doesn’t offer the social support on programs beyond that initial 16 weeks. It doesn’t offer any real personal coaching or interaction with her. Because of that she has a Membership site called Club FYM where members get the social support they are looking for. They get new workouts each month and they get some personal interaction with Holly to answer their questions.
- Many moms want follow along DVDs so they can see Holly perform the workouts in action, learn the proper technique and the pace of the workout – so she created follow along monthly DVDs and DVD bundles.
- While Holly’s ebook addresses supportive nutrition, it doesn’t actually provide recipes for supportive foods so she created and began offering a cookbook.
She has a variety of other back end offerings – but they all follow that same format. They provide more of what the customers of the front end product want.
There is still plenty of ground to cover – copywriting, lead generation, affiliate marketing and about a dozen other things. I’ll share some thoughts on them in future posts.
But basically, our approach is pretty simple and could be boiled down to these components:
1. Focus on value creation rather than value extraction.
2. Identify where we can provide real value to a market.
3. Begin by offering value at no cost (newsletter / blogs).
4. Deliver so much value for free that people are compelled to invest in our front end products.
5. Deliver so much value in that front end product that the customer is compelled to invest in our back end offerings.
6. Provide the most complete set of solutions possible to that respective market – which results in multiple streams of income.
There isn’t anything tricky or ninja about it – but it works for us and it works pretty well. I’ll look forward to sharing more insight on fitness information marketing in the near future. If you have anything specific you want me to cover – let me know below.
Also – along with Pat Beith (one of the most successful sports / fitness industry information marketers on the planet) I’ll be hosting a One Day Intensive Workshop addressing how to build your own successful infomarketing business the right way on Thursday, March 29th here in Louisville (the day before the IYCA Summit). If you’ve ever wanted to create your own successful info product or complete infobusiness – here’s your chance to learn everything you need to know. Go here for details:
http://iycasummit.com/product-creation
Dedicated to Your Success,
Pat
