Permission-based email marketing is one of the most powerful online marketing tools available to health and fitness businesses. In fact, email marketing is considered an integral component to any successful internet marketing strategy. In addition, you can achieve substantial results through email marketing campaigns with minimal investment and up-front costs.

Why should your health or fitness business invest in an email marketing solution? First Page Fitness has broken down the top 5 benefits to email marketing campaigns, and how they can help you achieve greater success in your business:

1. It’s Inexpensive
   Far more cost effective than direct mail, email marketing is one of the most affordable ways to make your marketing budget work for you.
2. It’s Effective
   Email marketing allows you to engage your customers and prospects directly, rather than waiting for them to return to your Web site on a regular basis. In addition, email marketing can help fitness and health web sites increase sales, drive additional traffic to your web site, and help promote customer loyalty.
3. It’s Immediate
   Email marketing helps to generate an immediate response from your viewing audience. With a clear call to action, email marketing responses often occur within 2 days of sending out your email. Furthermore, with sophisticated tracking solutions, including email opens, pass-throughs, and click-throughs, you can evaulate the success of your email campaign to measure reader interest and ensure better results.
4. It’s Targeted
   Targeting your email campaigns to specific interest groups greatly improves your click-through rates and ensures that your offers are viewed by the customers and prospects that are most likely to respond.
5. It’s Easy
   With the professional email marketing assistance offered by First Page Fitness, email marketing becomes as easy as drafting a Word document and selecting a distribution group. We do the rest! In addition, we provide you with powerful, elegant reports and detailed analysis on every aspect of each campaign. Furthermore, we will help you make important decisions that will maximize your click-through rates and conversions.

Ready to put an email marketing campaign to work for your health and fitness business? If you’re ready to get started, contact First Page Fitness today!

Sophisticated tracking & reports for your email campaigns offered by First Page Fitness

The next time your Internet marketing efforts are not producing the best results, take a deep breath and learn from your mistakes. Success does not come overnight. Look at MySpace.com, for instance:

Here is what it was doing in 1996:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961221174030/http://www.myspace.com/

And in 2000 the site was selling storage space (I wonder what happened to everyone’s files…):
http://web.archive.org/web/20010205220624/www.myspace.com/nd_home.asp

2001? Same business, different design:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010921105232/http://www.myspace.com/

By 2002 the guy who made MySpace.com THE MySpace it is today had purchased the domain. Guess what he was using it for… Got scooters?
http://web.archive.org/web/20021207090534/www.electricscooterdepot.com/
(The domain looks like a different URL because he was using a redirect)

Finally, in 2004 this domain that had been passed around like a bad cold began to take shape as an online community:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040519192432/http://www.myspace.com/

And by 2005… Look familiar?
http://web.archive.org/web/20050123151743/http://myspace.com/

So next time you start to feel discouraged, just think about the little domain that could, and how it went from a terrible looking site-for-sale, to a data storage disaster, to a peddler of electric scooters, to competing with Yahoo for the most page views out of any website in the universe.

If you thought this was a fun little exercise, you will enjoy tinkering around with the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” at: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php .

First, let us define content: Whatever the visitor has come to your website to find.
Second, let us define the purpose of a search engine: To present the most appropriate content for a user’s search.
Third is found by adding First and Second (double entendre intended): Both the search engine and the visitor have the same goal in mind - to locate whatever it is the visitor is looking for, which happens to ALWAYS be content, whether in the form of products, news, video, audio, information about health club locations in Cincinnati, etcetera.

Of course, it isn’t really that simple. The search engines also take into account things like: how many links the site has linking into it, the quality of those links, the text displayed within those links, how many pages the website has on the topic, how long a visitor spends on that page and/or website, and on and on and on. The reason for all of these considerations has partly to do with unethical SEO practices. Every time an unethical search engine marketing firm (see our ethics policy here) finds a way to trick the search engines, the highly-paid, highly-trained, highly-intelligent ivy-league search engine algorithm engineer at Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, or any other major search engine is going to find a way to find the cheater and push their website back into the abyss. Therefore, unless your search engine optimizer has a PhD from MIT and full access to the algorithms used at all major search engines, success by shortcut is invariably temporary.

With that said, it is still important to build links from respected websites, preferably with appropriate keywords in the anchor text - This is Anchor Text. But here is the catch - other websites, especially “respected” ones, are most likely to link to sites with good content. To see a website like http://www.fda.gov/ link to a website with poor or sparse content is like seeing a supermodel kissing a short, fat, balding, rude middle-aged guy driving a beat-up station wagon - it rarely happens.

Relying on PPC advertising campaigns or press release distribution to drive traffic to a website with poor or sparse content is like seeing that supermodel with the same guy, but this time he’s driving a convertible Porsche. Sure, he was able to spend lots of money and get the girl in the car, maybe even into his bedroom, but this rarely results in a faithful, long-term relationship. OK… so that analogy was stretched a bit. But you get the point: The kind of customer base you want to develop is long-term and faithful, and nobody wants to return to a website that doesn’t have the content they were looking for.

Whether your search engine marketing strategy involves paying for traffic, building links, cleaning up your code, creating a beautifully designed website, or sending out hundreds of press releases, none of it is going to be of much benefit without first developing quality content.

And that is why the cliche lives: Content is Still King