Tips for your box
Take every opportunity to learn from the folks who walk through your doors and don’t be afraid to ask them for referrals despite the brief connection. In the following survey, we’ve put together some questions you should be asking your visitors & walk in traffic before they leave. Reword &/or pick any combination of questions that suit your need.
Have you suddenly noticed your box has a group of under-motivated boy athletes or testosterone drained adult men wuss’n thru your workouts. Shake ’em up with a Man Up Workshop, Testosterone Shot Seminar or Warrior Weekend. Call it whatever you want, but these groups seem like candidates for some gender specialized hard work (and extra income for your box). Give these underachievers a heavy does of competition style workouts, head to head WODs or if you are really feeling like kicking these guys in the humility testes, bring your best ladies in to shows these dudes the difference between compression pants and yoga pants. Want to make it real? Reach out to first responders or military folks in your community.
Bottom line: Great progress comes from competition, whether internal or external – if these guys can’t find the man juice to push themselves every time they workout they will never find the best versions of themselves. Train them hard, watch them grow.
You know who you are. You are the coach, the trainer, the owner, the too-busy person who doesn’t know where to start, what to write or when to stop perfecting and just publish that damn article. Let’s get some perspective here people – would you let one of your athletes not do a lift, move or WOD just because they haven’t perfected it yet? Need more perspective – would you not share a cue with your athletes & members just because you couldn’t say it perfectly. This is life people, aint no one or no thing perfect, so stop the excuses.
Just humbly admit you don’t know where to start and then …
Don’t let your personality stop you. It’s just writing, carve out some time and just get to it – and for heaven’s sake people you aren’t looking for a Pulitzer Prize here. Just share info with your folks that is genuinely going to help them out. When’s the best time to write? Well you need to figure that out. For some you need to block off time or stay up late or create some sort of routine that will be your designated time … for others, it will be more spontaneous. I’ll suggest that you need to accommodate both, and here’s why …
So if you are going to set a time for writing you can be pretty strategic about what you are going to write about ahead of time. Give yourself some categories of information as a guideline: Monday is Nutrition, This week is Olympic lifts, Every three months will be about Shoes… You see where I’m going with that, be realistic about the frequency (definitely don’t say every day right out of the gate) and make sure the categories are going to be of benefit to your community. But be spontaneous too – maybe you just heard a great podcast, summarize it, rant about it or call out something specific and then share a link to it. Maybe a member asked a question today that others could benefit from – write about that right after it happens. Accommodating planned times & spontaneous times allow you to both strategically build good content for your community and stay relevant to current topics & members needs.
Whether it’s a rant or helpful tip or something funny, you don’t have to become this strange version of yourself that suddenly needs to gramatically gifted, politically correct or strangely serious. Relax, just be you. Think about how you would speak about the content you picked in person – if you cuss, cuss, if have an accent, accentuate it (I mean Y’alls and You’s can be written out) if you are very technical then geek the hell out. C’mon man, just own it.
In summary, you can slowly work up to your Best Seller author skills if that’s your goal but in the meantime, if you wouldn’t expect your members to do a perfect OHS on day one, don’t expect yourself to be the perfect writer right out of the gate. And that being said, also keep in mind that the goal of your writing is to help your current community get better (an extension of your coaching) or to attract new folks that could become new members – don’t be tricky about it, just be genuine.
Edit & Sidenote: this is not SEO advice or any promise to be ranked on page one of Google because most SEO strategies can change at the drop of a Penguin, but in my 15+ years in the marketing business the best advice for writing is still to be genuine, find your voice and write like a human.