Hello health and fitness world, my name is Mike Belasco and I will be the new Internet Marketing Director for First Page Fitness. I am very excited to become more involved in this industry, helping clients market their products and services online. First Page Fitness currently offers search engine optimization, link building, web design, pay per click, and other internet marketing services for the health and fitness industry.

I have been involved in internet marketing and web development for quite some time. Some of you may know me from my blog Mike, The Internet Guy which won the ‘Best Local Search Blog of 2006′ award from Search Engine Journal. I hope to bring some of that award winning material to the blog here at First Page Fitness. I am also a syndicated blogger for WebProNews.com and a Yahoo Search Ambassador.

I am also excited to announce that shortly, First Page Fitness will be adding a traditional or ‘offline’ marketing consultant to the mix. We will be able to offer traditional marketing plans and affordable marketing consulting services to our clients in the health and fitness industry. More details will be provided soon so stay tuned.

Thank you again for reading our blog at First Page Fitness. If there is anything we can do to help you please feel free to contact us at your convenience.

It took me a week to figure this one out, and I even had some help from the folks over at AMWSO. So I can imagine that there are plenty of others out there having the same problem. Well here’s the fix!

Gaiam and AMSWO have teamed up to introduce a new era in affiliate marketing by releasing a series of videos that allow you to embed your affiliate link. Not only do you get the commissions from your own page, but if someone “shares” or “emails” the video, your affiliate code stays with it. It is a brave new world! But first, there were some bugs to work out.

Word Press mucks up the javascript code used to place your affiliate ID in the video. Thus, the video will show, but when you click on the link it says something like “Missing affiliate ID” etcetera. We have found a plug-in to solve this issue at:

http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/TextControl

How to Use the Text Control Plug-In to Embed Affiliate Links Into Videos on a Word Press Blog:

1. Download the Text Control Plug-in. Unzip it, and upload contents to the plug-ins folder of Word Press.

2. Activate the plug-in. From now on, you will have the option to turn off formatting and character encoding on individual blog entries. This option will only appear AFTER you save the blog entry and go back in to edit it.

3. Be sure to create the blog post with visual editor turned off. You can check or uncheck this under your user profile tab.

4. Save your blog entry without the video and go back in to edit the post.

5. Under Text Control, choose “No Formatting” from the left drop-down and “No Character Encoding” from the right drop down.

6. Save the blog entry again and it “should” work.

Please feel free to comment below if you have any problems with this.

Click here for an example of the affiliate video in action!

Click Here to Get Your Own Gaiam Affiliate Video by AMWSO *Requires a Linkshare Affiliate Account

Are you looking for affordable television marketing for your health and fitness business? Did you know there is a company out there selling pre-made TV commercials, including air-time, customer support - the whole nine yards - for less than $1,500?

It’s called SpotRunner (winner of the 2006 Best Advertising Web Site award by the Web Marketing Association), and they have some extremely well-done, professional commercials made for topics like: Fitness, Exercise, Dentistry, Alternative Medicine, Nutrition, Physicians and Surgeons, Drug Stores and Pharmacies, Medical Services, Sports Therapy, Vitamins, Supplements and more….

Click Here for Professional TV Advertising Starting at Just $1500

Go Check ‘em out. If you want to break into TV commercial advertising with a low barrier to entry, you can’t beat these prices. I too was skeptical at first. Here are a few of the thoughts I had when a friend of mine first mentioned Spot Runner to me:

Their TV commercials probably suck.
No. In-fact, if you go look at their commercials, you will see that they are extremely well produced. They are NOTHING like those cheap-looking used car ads you see late at night.

I don’t want to have the same commercial as everyone else.
SpotRunner has an unbelievable variety and are producing more and more high-quality commercials every day. You can target only certain cities and the chances of someone else running the same ad in the same city is slim.

They probably air at three in the morning on public access.
No. You choose the spot. You choose the schedule. Your health and fitness ad can run on a variety of major network and cable television channels - the kind you watch!

It will seem strange because the commercial wasn’t made specifically for my product / service.
The best thing about Spot Runner is how easily their commercials can be customized to seem like they were made specifically for your health or fitness business. Television is all about imagery, and that is what SpotRunner does for you. Meanwhile, you choose what gets said in the voice-over, or what shows up in sub-title text, such as your website or phone number. It really does seem like you paid tens of thousands of dollars to produce a TV Ad campaign specifically for your health and fitness business.

Why am I raving on about SpotRunner?
To tell you the truth, I think it is the best thing to hit small-budget advertising since the Internet. If you are just opening a private gym, starting a new chiropractic office, expanding your physical therapy services, launching a new supplement shop or pharmacy online, this allows you to break into the business with a very low investment. I am buying a few spots myself for some of the websites I run on the side. I can’t wait to see my first-ever television commercial!

Click Here for Professional TV Advertising Starting at Just $1500

In a Press Release today, Microsoft announced plans to acquire Medstory, a start-up company that develops search engine technology specifically for health and healthcare information.

According to Microsoft, this move signifies “a strategic move for Microsoft in the consumer health search arena and signals a long-term commitment toward the development of a broader consumer health strategy.”

Employees from Medstory will become employees of the Health Solutions Group, a recently formed division at Microsoft.

Medstory’s mission is to enable users to search health and medicine efficiently and with confidence. Unlike results from general search engines, Medstory’s results are based on “intuitive search technology”, which provides prequalified information to consumers and health professionals conducting health-related research

“Instead of trying to force people to think in terms of the way a computer searches, we’re enabling computers to more intuitively conduct searches in the way that people think,” said Dr. Alain Rappaport, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and founder of Medstory.

For more information, visit medstory.com. The link will open in a new window.

The folks over at The Sedona Method have asked to sponsor today’s blog post. They wanted First Page Fitness to provide a little information about their product, and to let everyone know about their free DVD & CD offer. Having just blogged about a very similar program, the timing couldn’t be better.

What Is The Sedona Method
Taught by Hale Dwoskin, one of the teachers involved in The Secret (as seen on Oprah recently), The Sedona Method is a “simple, powerful, easy-to-learn and duplicate technique that shows you how to uncover your natural ability to let go of any painful or unwanted feeling in the moment”.

What, exactly, is a “duplicate technique”? Your guess is as good as mine, and I only wish they would explain this better.

Does it Work?
The Sedona Training Associates have a number of studies, including one collaborative study between Dr. Richard Davidson of the State University of New York and Dr. David McClelland of Harvard University. Hop on over to read the studies and you will soon see the very persuasive evidence including the following stress factors: