When You Should Wait to Create a Fitness Offer or Affiliate
There’s one piece of advice when you’re ready to create a fitness offer that you don’t want to ignore.
If you haven’t done it, gotten results from it, yourself, you should not be teaching it.
Similarly, if you want to make affiliate offers – either to sell other’s products, or to ask others to share your products and services, you want to have proof they work.
What's an Affiliate?
Let me back up and define affiliates if you’re new to them.
An affiliate relationship means you’re set up in a way that you can invite others to share your products and services with a special code or URL that tracks sales they earn and pays them a percentage of the sale.
If you are being an affiliate for someone else, likewise, you have the opportunity to earn a commission for sending traffic and creating sales for them.
How Much Can You Make (or will you pay)
Generally, commissions for online or digital products are 40-50%. If you are doing live coaching or purely coaching, or selling hard products, percentages are much lower. That makes them less attractive for affiliates. So, if you don’t have a digital product yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t create a fitness offer affiliate, it just means you can keep them small.
You Can Keep It Small
Go to your local business friends for instance, give them services or money back. When you know your customer lifetime value it’s easy to reward for referrals with a monetary gift. If you know that anyone who experiences your massage therapist will be a return customer, you might want to give a massage for a referral to a membership or certain size training package.
Know your customers, and your business partners and you’ll create a fitness offer that will appeal to them.
When You’re Ready to Go Big
You’ll need to know your numbers. Affiliates who do this as their business model want to know what your conversion rate is and how much they can expect to make per lead. If you’re not yet tracking your numbers, you need to start.
Other things too are things you’ll need to consider. You’ll want to know 6 months to a year in advance when you’re launching programs, when the promotional period is, and you want to provide materials for your affiliates to use.
You can expect and ask for all of those things for anyone you want to support in their affiliate too.
Do You Love It?
I have a policy of only sharing things I know, love, and trust. That means I’ve literally used anything I promote or put in my resources list. (A resources list on your website is a very passive way to promote products).
But if you’re still in the middle of fixing your own problem and you haven’t done something with good results – ideally haven’t gotten predictable results for at least a high percentage of clients you’ve used it for, you’re not really an expert anyone would want to follow. Wait on that fitness offer.
Wanting to teach how to write a book for example isn’t something you should do if you haven’t written a book. But should you teach how to exercise for menopause if you haven’t been there yet? Or teach how to exercise for osteoporosis or Parkinson’s? Of course, that is different. But.. you do want to have something that establishes you as an expert.
How to Establish Expertise
Have you written articles published in scientific journals? Have you gotten results for a large number of clients? Have you served on an advisory board? Have you got anything that makes you the expert? If not, and this is something you really want to do, focus on getting some of those things under your belt.
Try interviewing 100 experts in the area you want to be an expert in. Try offering a group training for the market you want so you can gather data on your system and document it.
To be an expert, you have to be able to show a system or method that gets repeatable, reliable results. You’ve got to have more experience than only yourself – a study of 1.
Having less than 5-years experience as a full time trainer (at least 32 hours a week) really isn’t enough. You’re on your way. The more you serve only a niche and not a wide variety of clients the faster you’ll get there.
A Wise Fitness Offer
I caution you not to become an expert in a mode of exercise. Be the expert in a problem a customer wants solved. Use the mode to serve them and justify why you think it’s best.
There you have it, how to create a fitness offer or affiliate, and when you’re ready and when to wait. But it won’t be long until you have an offer that will convert.
Resources:
Flipping 50 Fitness Specialist
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