8 Tips for an Effective & Profitable Website

This presentation was originally created for an aSweatLife #TrainersConnect workshop where I presented alongside Kate Stengel. 

 

Use High Quality Photos

This piece is so important as it’s a large part of someone’s first impression of your site and you. Poor quality photos, meaning pixelated, poorly lit, or overly edited, are the quickest way to turn somebody away from your website and your brand. It shows you don’t take your business seriously and therefore other people won’t either.  

It’s a great idea to set up a brand photoshoot. But if that’s not in the cards right now, try to track down photos other professionals have taken of you. As fitness pros it’s likely that you’ve been part of a shoot or two for your gym or an event. BUT don’t just pull these photos off instagram, get the original photo from the photographer so that its size hasn’t been reduced and won’t be pixelated on your site.

 

Maintain Consistency With Your Brand

To create a professional and cohesive site, you need to stick to your brand. Whether that’s been established for you by a professional designer or not, you have a brand. A brand is about more than just a logo. It’s the voice you use to talk about your services. It’s your color palette. It’s your fonts. These all need to be consistent throughout your site and even through your other marketing efforts when possible. This consistency gives people clarity about your business, without wondering which version they’re going to get when they work with you.

 

Clearly List Everything You Offer

This seems so obvious, but I’ve seen many group fitness coaches who want more 1:1 clients, but I didn’t even know they offered that service. People won’t assume you offer anything that you don’t tell them about. Your website is the perfect place to make it very clear what you offer. Your services should be clearly listed on your services page as well as your contact page so potential clients are encouraged to reach out to you for something specific. You can’t expect people to just think of ways they’d want to work with you; you have to tell them.

 

Don’t Be Afraid Of White Space

It’s common for designers to hate tons of copy, but I say as long as it’s strategic, long form copy is fine. It just has to be laid out in a way that keeps the reader engaged. Large blocks of text on a page are going to overwhelm a viewer. To combat that you have to use white space to create smaller, more digestible chunks of copy that a viewer will want to keep moving through. The great thing about a website is that you have an infinite amount of vertical space. So spread out and give yourself and your audience some room to breathe. 

 

Encourage Continued Engagement

A top priority of web design is keeping viewers engaged and on your site until they feel compelled to buy what you’re selling. This can be done through your website layout and content. A viewer should never get to the bottom of a page and leave. You want to keep them moving through from one page to the next with a call to action. This way they keep learning more about you, what you offer, what you’ve done for others, and will be more likely to want to work with you. 

 

Place Testimonials Strategically

When used effectively testimonials can be the best way to obtain new clients or customers. Evident by the influencer industry, people buy based on word of mouth recommendations. But if these testimonials are only in one spot on your website, your potential client might not even read them. It’s much better to place testimonials throughout the site in key areas when they’re about to consider contacting you or buying your membership. Just as they’re reading the price of your membership, they see a testimonial saying it was absolutely worth the price and just like that you’ve addressed their fears of signing up before they could walk away. 

 

Make It Easy For People To Pay You

To be treated like the professional business that you are, you should be taking payment and booking clients with professional processes in place. You can do that with a website. Rather than sending zoom links through DM’s, taking money separately through venmo, and hoping the same people that got the link also paid, use your website as a hub to sign up and accept payment all in one. 

When booking 1:1 clients or group classes I recommend Acuity. You can set up both in the acuity app and link to it on your site so that in order to even sign up for a class they’ll have to pay. 

For selling on-demand workouts or products I recommend Shopify lite or Thrivecart. 

For creating memberships and sharing member-protected content on your site I recommend wordpress plugin, Memberpress.

 

Create A Landing Page For Instagram

I love a unique, strategic link-in-bio page. By creating an instagram landing page on your website you can create hierarchy as well as cohesion with your brand. A long list of buttons can be overwhelming and lack priority. I’d recommend using this page to share the most important links and call to actions. By doing this you can keep that workshop or 1:1 service as a top priority over an affiliate link that is nice to share, but maybe isn’t making you as much money.