The Optimal Aging Podcast
Answering Questions from Fitness Pros in Over-50 Fitness: Emails, Facebook, and More, with Dan Ritchie of the Functional Aging Institute
On the last episode of Optimal Aging, I shared a recent presentation I gave to the Functional Aging Institute online. THIS episode features the Q&A session that followed, and it's full of smart questions and (I hope) useful replies.
Do you wonder about posting on a blog?
How often you should share on social media?
And what about emails?
Then, this is the session for you, as Dr. Dan Ritchie and I of FAI field questions from other fitness pros serving the over-50 market.
Online Resources
Functional Aging Summit
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
On the last episode of Optimal Aging, I shared a recent presentation I gave to the Functional Aging Institute online. THIS episode features the Q&A session that followed, and it's full of smart questions and (I hope) useful replies.
Do you wonder about posting on a blog?
How often you should share on social media?
And what about emails?
Then, this is the session for you, as Dr. Dan Ritchie and I of FAI field questions from other fitness pros serving the over-50 market.
Online Resources
Functional Aging Summit
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
Hey everybody, welcome to Optimal Aging. I'm your host, jay Croft from PrimeFit Content. On the last episode of the show, I shared my presentation with the Functional Aging Institute about how to use content marketing to reach more fitness clients over the age of 50. And at the end of that episode I promised that I would share the second half of the presentation, which was the Q&A that followed what I shared. So that's what this week's episode is.
Speaker 1:We're going to just dive right in with Dr Dan Ritchie of FAI, starting with the questions that were sent in to us during the webinar via the chat and email tools, and I hope you find this interesting. We're going to cover how to start an email list and how often should I be emailing people and posting on Facebook and all that kind of good basic information that a lot of you are wondering about in proceeding with content marketing. So also I want to remind you to check out the website for the functional aging summit, which is coming up this summer in Los Angeles. So also I want to remind you to check out the website for the Functional Aging Summit, which is coming up this summer in Los Angeles. That's functionalagingsummitcom. Dan and the folks at FAI are putting that on, and I'm going to be speaking there and I'm looking forward to it. I would love to see you there, and I know Dan would as well, so think about that. All right, here we go.
Speaker 2:So let's just let's talk about the blog first. A couple of people are asking about the blog. Where should the blog be? Maybe just talk a little bit about how some of your clients use their blog. Is it on their website?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think a blog should be on your website. So it's a very standard feature. It comes with all the website creation kits. Anyone who builds your website for you will know how to add that, and I think you should update it once a week. If you only want to do it every two weeks, that's fine, but don't do it just whenever, because if you do it just whenever, three years will go by and someone will come along your website and they'll wonder who is this business? What is this business? Do I want to go work out there?
Speaker 1:Let me look at their blog and the only blog post will be from three years ago, and that's a real turnoff. It's also just a missed opportunity. You can show who you are and what you believe in through your blog posts, just by showing that you care about helping older people, that you care about helping them travel and play with their grandchildren and avoid the common chronic diseases. When you talk about these really important emotional things that are relevant to people, you're making a connection with them, so you don't want to miss that opportunity. That's the value in a blog.
Speaker 2:So, jay, you said you recommend people email their list at least twice a week. I do. Do you have any reason for that, or metric behind that? Or you know why not once, why not five, why two?
Speaker 1:Well, I think the once a week is not enough. Once a week becomes lost. It gets lost in the storm of email communications that everybody gets and then once a week falls off to once a month, and once a month no one remembers your name. You're dealing with people who will forget you as soon as they click onto the next email. These people seven, eight, nine times you have to prove your value, prove your consistency, prove your worth to them over and over and over again. You can't just do it once here's an email, thanks Bye, and expect it to resonate with anybody. It just doesn't work that way. So you don't want them to forget who you are and you don't want them to think that you're just some kind of half-assed operation that sends out an email whenever you think about it. You're a business and your business is consistent and your business sends out emails. I'm going to say twice a week. If you want to do it more or less than that, of course, that's up to you, but I don't think twice is too often.
Speaker 1:I think traditionally we've been told that Mondays and Fridays are not great. I don't know if that's still the case, but it always was, up until a few years ago, at least before the pandemic. Now the pandemic changed everything and maybe that changed how and when we read emails. But typically people often take Mondays off from work and Fridays off from work and that disrupts their email reading. So I tend to send things on Tuesdays, wednesdays or Thursdays.
Speaker 1:The way I divvy it up is I give you five pieces of content a week. I think five is too many for you to send to your people in each email. Send two or three in each email. Use some of mine, use one of yours at least once every two or three weeks. You should have something that's from you about a new piece of equipment, a new trainer, an open house, something like that about your business. But I just think that that's a good. I don't think it's asking too much. It's not going to take over your operations and it's going to be just enough to keep you top of mind. You want to be top of mind for people so that when they finally say, hey, martha, it's time we go, it's time we do this, let's, let's start doing something. What's the name of that gym that always emails us? It's right there.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are fearful of emailing people too much, and I think they really should be fearful of not emailing people enough, because if email is a medium you're comfortable with, and if you're a decent writer and if you value your time, you'll invest in Jay's service to save you time. If you're emailing your list four or five times a week, that consistency will pay off over time. I heard a marketer say one time it's not your prospect's job to remember you, right, like they're not out in the world, getting one email a year from you going. Oh, I remember I need to go sign up at that gym. It's your job to continue to show up and remind them that you can solve one of many of their problems, right, whether it's their knee pain, their back pain, their health, their fitness, whatever you know their problem happens to be, and showing up consistently.
Speaker 2:Lm made a great comment. I only read emails I'm subscribed to every once in a while. Yet LM is here live in the webinar, because they got an email right, you know so, um. So the reality is you realize some emails get through, some emails people open. Um, and that's the other thing too. If you're emailing twice a week, at best they're opening half your emails, right? So they're only getting really receiving and reading one email a week. It's not like you're bombarding them, you know so you know, I gotta feel.
Speaker 1:I feel like like people get frightened if I tell them to do more than two, and I don't want to say it at all. Yeah right, Dan's right, and the more you send, the better. Frankly, just don't send crap. That's the only thing. Yeah right, Like one in five or six can be a hard sell.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you got to send something interesting. You know, I mean, look, if you send a recipe every Thursday, people will get into the rhythm of knowing oh yeah, you send a recipe every Thursday. If people don't have any interest in recipes, they won't open it. If they do, they will, and they'll they'll know, you know. So you can't, five days a week, ask people to marry you, right? That gets annoying, right. Hey, come train with me. Hey, come train with me. Hey, come train with me. Hey, you're still fat. Come train with me. I mean, like that obviously doesn't work. But if you send good content, good stories, recipes, tips, hey, I saw this in the New York times. I thought you might be interested. You know, um, you gotta have good subject lines so people open it. Jay, I'm just going to put you on the spot. If I sign up today for your service, what's it going to cost me on a typical month?
Speaker 1:$1 million. No, the first month is pretty much free. It's a dollar because you have to charge something to get it going. But I give you the first month, see if you like it or not, and then it's $77 a month. I also have a sliding scale for people who are just starting out or for whom that's a lot of money. Talk to me about it. We can come up with a lower rate, but $77 a month is the base rate and I think that's a really low price given what you're getting. I give you five pieces of material every week. That's $ 20 a month.
Speaker 2:Let me stop you there because, Linda Cord, right as we opened, said time is my biggest issue and I immediately thought well, I know your stuff, right, 20 pieces of content. So if I'm going to create two emails a week, which is oh my gosh, how am I going to do that? Right, I don't have the time. You're doing it for me every single week. I mean, at minimum, that's one hour a week. That's four hours worth of value. I'm getting from you for just $77. If I'm trying to do that myself, probably not good use of my time and it's going to become overwhelming. And oh my gosh said I have to do this every month. Jay said I got an email two times a week, every month, you know.
Speaker 2:So, that's why hiring a pro like Jay, who's got all the done for you material, is so valuable.
Speaker 1:So yeah, just copy and paste Couldn't be easier no-transcript, because video is Debra's biggest fear.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Well, hi, debra, I might be with you on that. You know, I've been doing this for about I don't know five years or so, since I started Prime Fit Content, and before that I was a newspaper reporter, which meant that I like to hide behind the spotlight. I never, never, put myself into the action and just observed everything, and so when I started, when I went out on my own, I could stop feeling like I was boring people talking about myself, which is kind of like the fear of sending too many emails.
Speaker 1:If someone asks you onto a forum like this, or onto their podcast or under their video chat or what have you, then they want to talk to you and they want to hear what you have to say. They're asking you to share something valuable that you have, and so think of it that way. You're not going on there saying, look at me, look at me, I'm so special. You're saying, hey, we're talking about something that we're all interested in. I might have something interesting to add. We're talking thanks for having me, goodbye, and then the only kind of real practical advice I have is to slow down. When I was first doing video, I want to talk like this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah super fast, right. And then you watch it back and you're like who is that person? I can't understand a word he's saying. But if I will just tell myself to slow down, it's okay. Dan is a nice person. I'm speaking to Dan, everything's fine. That really helped me a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I put a comment in the chat there for you, debra Practice. I mean you just have to do it. I think part of why people are uncomfortable with video is because they just haven't done it a hundred times. It's sort of like a fitness skill. The first time you ever squatted probably didn't look very good and it probably took you hundreds of repetitions and weeks and weeks of practice before you got good at it. When I first started doing video, filming video content, I stared at the camera too much. My camera guy was like don't look at the camera. You know, I was like, oh, where am I supposed to look? I mean, it's just over time you get more comfortable with it and then you forget the camera's even there.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I would encourage all of you to do in terms of video is tell stories, share client success stories, because then you're talking less about yourself, about somebody else's story. That's easier to do. And if you can get clients to do that with you, right, interview a client for two or three minutes. Hey Bob, what was your knee pain like before you started training with me? Right? Just ask them two or three questions on video and just make it natural as if you were, you know, telling the story to friends, you know. So I think sometimes we overthink it. Our videos don't have to be that, in fact, the more professionally done they are. Sometimes people are like oh, that's a professional commercial, you know, so just make it look more natural. All right, we got a bunch more questions coming in here for you, jay. Which email app do you recommend and how often do you check analytics for?
Speaker 1:emails. I use MailChimp I also do for a little extra money every month. I'll do your email for you, and so I do that for some of my clients and they're on Constant Contact and on FitPro, so any of those will do. I'm not wild about FitPro. I think it's kind of ugly, but it gets the job done. If you're on it, that's fine. You can. It's very easy to use my stuff and drop it into FitPro. But I like MailChimp and I like Constant Contact.
Speaker 2:Is MailChimp still free up until 250?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's free up until you have a certain number of subscribers and I don't know what that number is and pretty affordable A lot of people.
Speaker 2:it's a great place to start because it doesn't cost you anything until you get your email list really built and established. So MailChimp is pretty user friendly.
Speaker 1:They're easy to use. It's basically it's all just click and drag and drop and you don't have to know how to really do anything on your computer. It's just like sending something on Facebook. It's really easy. So that's what I use. What was the other part of the question?
Speaker 2:Analytics and stats.
Speaker 1:You look at. I'm not obsessive but I'm always interested and my open rates for my subscribers are really high, as you might expect, because they're paying for it. But the most important analytic for me is how your emails go up, and that happened right away with Shelly in Saskatchewan. She told me that her email open rates went up from like 15% to 50 and 60% when she started using my stuff because people started realizing, oh, there's good stuff in this email, I want to open it up, and because the email subject line was something interesting to them. It wasn't just get off your fat butt and come into the gym, it was there's value in this email. So you know, whatever you can do to make sure that your emails are getting opened is great. I think it's up to everybody how much time and energy you want to put into that.
Speaker 1:In addition to my subscribers, I have a prospect email list that I email frequently and those typically get about 40% open rate, which isn't bad. It could be better, but you got to remember a lot of those people never probably haven't looked at their email since they signed up for my, for my lead magnet. You know a lot of people go on email and sign up for something and then kind of vanish. Their email address is hotjoe123ataolcom. They're not legitimate, you know, so I don't worry about it too much. As long as it's 30, 40%, I feel good, all right.
Speaker 2:We've got a question from UK. Michelle. I'm guessing you're in the UK since you're asking. Michelle says great info clearly presented. Thank you, do you have any experience dealing with the UK market, looking for guidance, as I feel that the schedules you suggest for social media may be heavy for Brits and may turn them off if emailed twice a week, for example?
Speaker 1:Okay, hi Michelle, thanks for asking that. It's a great question. This goes to a few things. First of all, yeah, I have a lot of people in UK. Well, I shouldn't say a lot. I have some in UK, I have some in Canada and other European countries and some down under. So pretty much anywhere where they speak English is pretty good. I don't write it in another language, so I'm limited as far as that goes. But yeah, I write for people in UK.
Speaker 1:In other countries you might need to change things from dollars to euros or from pounds to kilos or things like that, but I I learned really early from friends and subscribers in canada and england to try to limit that stuff, like so if I don't have to say dollars, I don't say dollars. If I don't have to use a united states source, I don't, and you know, try to keep it as applicable across the board for everybody. Sometimes I'll use a British source or Canadian source just to get around that, so to speak. But you can go in and edit the material. Any subscriber can make any change they want to my content. If you just don't like a word I used, you can delete it. If you think it's too long, cut it in half. If you want to use it next month, hold on to it and use it next month. It's yours. Once you get it, you can do anything you want.
Speaker 1:As far as my guidance being too aggressive for Brits, you're the expert on that. I don't know your audience. That's what I was saying earlier in the presentation is nobody knows your audience better than you, so it would be kind of presumptuous. So if you don't want to send posts on Facebook every day and you don't want to send twice a week, that's fine. Just do it at a pace that feels right to you. But do it regularly. Don't let it slide, because then you won't do it, and it's my belief that this is as important as accounting or anything else that you're doing in your business. So the main thing is to be consistent about it, the intensity of it. I think that's up to all of you to know your audience.
Speaker 2:Social media and email are very different. Facebook, for example, if you're posting on Facebook five days a week, you have to remember that only about 10% of your audience are seeing your posts. So you could post on Facebook five days a week and half of your audience doesn't see any of them. So to think that that is going to be a turnoff to them, because they're seeing you post on Facebook so much, might not be the case, because they're simply not seeing it. Now, that's if you're posting on a business page. If you're posting on your own personal page to just your hundred friends. That's a little bit different in terms of how often they see it. But social media is different from email. If you send out an email, everyone on your email list gets it. So obviously, if you email five days a week, that's pretty aggressive. You're going to have a higher unsubscribe rate. But the people that love your stuff and stay on your list I know Matt Benvey in Nova Scotia emails five days a week and his email list is very responsive and has a high open rate. But he also sends out really good stuff, you know. So I think the more often you email, the better your stuff has to be. At FAI. We have tried everything from once a week newsletters on Wednesday to five days a week and, honestly, the more often we email, the more activity and response we tend to see. I think people just have to be constantly reminded of what you can do for them.
Speaker 2:Positive stories you've had upcoming events. I mean, it's always amazing to me when people are like surprised that the Functional Aging Summit is happening Right. It's like we've sent you 27 emails on that and I even noticed you've opened nine of them. You know how is this a surprise, that you surprise that the event is sold out and you didn't buy your ticket? Deb asked a good question, jay. You mentioned it just quickly. But what are your thoughts on repurposing, reusing content across different platforms? How long do we need to wait before we reuse it? Are people going to be like, hey, wait a minute. I just saw that in an email. Now it's on a Facebook post. You copied your own Facebook post into an email. What are your rules on that?
Speaker 1:My rules are use it, use it, use it, use it everywhere, use it often, use it over and over and over again. No one will notice. If they do notice, so what? No one's going to not go to your gym because you posted something on Facebook that you also put in an email and they probably won't even notice. A core principle of my content is that you should be using it all everywhere and then every few months, use it again.
Speaker 1:If you go give a speech at the local Rotary Club, I probably have sent you something that's going to be useful for your presentation. If you have a team meeting once a week, share something that I send you once a week. In there. It's all good everywhere and it's a business asset. You're buying something, you're buying a thing and you want to get the most bang for your buck out of that thing that you're buying. So use it over and over again. I don't think anyone will notice, I don't think anyone would care and I think it's just makes sense to get it out there, because an email will not reach everyone, a Facebook post will not reach everyone, your blog post will not reach everyone. It just won't. It's just the way we live now. So you've got to use it everywhere.
Speaker 2:We have turned so many YouTube videos into you know short quotes, blog posts, articles, email blasts. I mean I don't take a 60 minute video and transcribe it and send that out as an email, that wouldn't work. But I can take a quote or a snippet or a paragraph. You can reuse and repurpose stuff over and over and over again, in some cases for years. If it resonates with people and people really like it, keep using it. Nobody's going to come at you and go hey, I think I saw this six months ago. Didn't you post this six months? I mean, like they're not the.
Speaker 2:Facebook police are not out there wondering if you repost. So repurpose everything, right.
Speaker 1:Or just relink to it like the blog post. Let's say that I sent you a. You know, every November in the United States is Diabetes Awareness Month, and so I tend to do something on that, because what you all do can help people with type 2 diabetes, of course. So I'll do something every November on Diabetes Awareness Month. Well, you can then. You know, every November you can post to last year's or the year before that or the year before that. There's still good stuff. I've got one that I'm still using that I wrote about Paulo and his client, alan. Not because I wrote it, but because it is what it is, because of what Paulo did for this man and you know, link back to that. Put two paragraphs on Facebook and say read the rest of this amazing story on our blog and people will go to it. And now they're on your website and they're going to look at your website some more. So, yeah, use it over and over again.
Speaker 2:Last, question from Debbie. What about reposting other stuff? Right Like, I find an interesting article on the web or you know, I see stuff all the time. Just, I think yesterday or today the New York times or the wall street journal put out an article on how strength training strengthens your brain. Right Like, I don't really think of the brain as a muscle, but apparently strength training strengthens your brain, so the New York times put that out. So well, that sounds like a good resource. Is that something that I repurpose? Talk about. How do I do that?
Speaker 1:Well, you know it's on the Times. Just share it on Facebook or whatever you're on, and or put it in your email newsletter. I do this all the time. I often send out an email to my list. That's links to mainstream media sources or to scientific research journals about exercise studies or what have you, and I don't say I learned this or I'm saying this or I think this because I'm so smart. I say, hey, the New York Times had an article about strength training being good for brain health. Here's a link to the story in the New York Times and you click it and it takes you right there.
Speaker 1:And I do that for the New England Journal of Medicine and cnncom and whatever the source is. That's fine. Just say where you're getting it from and link to it. That's what they want, because you're sending people to their website. You're helping them. That's what they want to do. And that's part of the power of social media is people share information on it, so they like it. When you share their information on social media, it gets more people to their material.
Speaker 2:So lastly, I can't remember who it was asked this in the chat. How do I start an email list? I've got a couple of tips, jay. What are your thoughts? So I have no email list, how do I start?
Speaker 1:one. Oh, this will sound kind of stupid. I don't mean to be a smart aleck, but you start by starting. Just do it, because if you wait until you know enough people, or you wait until you have enough names, or you wait until the next solar eclipse or whatever, you're going to be waiting forever. Just start. It's amazing how many people you know who want you to be on your email list. You would be shocked. You will be shocked when you start to do it. So you start with any current clients, any past clients, any past associates I don't mean just somebody you've met someday, I mean. But you know people you have encountered in life, in previous jobs, in previous situations that would be of interest, that what you're doing would be of interest to them. And you write them and you say, hey, I'm starting this new business or I'm starting this new list. I'd like to put you on it. Tell me if it's not okay with you yeah, so I would.
Speaker 2:Lm said but how exactly? Um one lm email us. Uh, contact at functional aging. I'll send you a webinar on email list building, but usually what I tell people is you got to pick a platform because you don't have an email list. If you're using your Gmail or Google Sheets or something like you know, people are like oh. I've got it in a spreadsheet. No, that's not an email list. You can email, so sign up for.
Speaker 2:MailChimp, that's free. Sign up for Constant Contact, sign up for FitPro Newsletter, pick one. You don't need three. But go take a look at MailChimp for a few minutes. Go take a look at Constant Contact and then pick one, sign up for it. Mailchimp is one I tend to recommend because it's free. It doesn't cost you anything, I think until 250 contacts.
Speaker 2:And then I just tell people, start putting people on. Your current clients, go on your email list, your past clients, go on your email list, people you've talked to recently about fitness, maybe five or 10 contacts you have in physical therapy or massage therapy. I mean, these people go on your email list, right, and then you start emailing them. And then you can even ask them hey, who do you know that might be interested in getting my fitness newsletter? And if you hire a guy like Jay and you've got professional articles to send every week, people want to get your stuff and they want to send it to their friend and you just get started one. In my email list building presentation it is exactly what Jay said. You just start one contact at a time, right, and you just start adding them to your email list and by the end of a month you should have a hundred people on your email list if you're really working the system. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh my goodness, I want to go speak at the Kiwanis Club and I'm going to hand out a clipboard where people can get on my fitness newsletter and pretty soon, 10 people sign up for your email list in person and you're off and rolling.
Speaker 2:And when I ran Miracles Fitness, we grew our email list to 4,000 people, but I started with like 10, you know, and then we quickly grew that to 100 and then we quickly grew that to 500 and we just kept going from there and so you just got to get started. So MailChimp, I think, is probably the easiest low cost. If you want one that has a few more built-in features Constant Contact and FitPro Newsletter have those, but they're going to cost you like 50, in about an hour. Several people asked for that. Are you willing to provide your slideshow for a handful of folks? Okay, yeah, absolutely. Several people asked about that as well. If you could send me over the PDF version and then remember everyone.
Speaker 2:You know, showing up to live events is pretty valuable. You get to meet people like Jay Croft and bounce ideas off of him, ask him questions, attend his session and, of course, we got about 30 other sessions to choose from as well. So July 12th and 13th, functional Aging Summit in Los Angeles. It's going to be a great time and if you're not a Prime Fit content subscriber, I mean for trying it out for a dollar you'll see, I think, quickly how easy it is to get to emailing your list twice a week, facebook posting three to five times a week because Jay's giving you all this stuff. Now all you got to do is just go plug it in. So thanks again for your time today, jay, and thanks for everyone being on live with us.
Speaker 1:Thank you, dan. My pleasure and thanks for everyone and love to hear from you, so be in touch. All right, see you all Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to Optimal Aging. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you'll subscribe, tell a friend and write a review. All of that helps me grow my audience. You can learn more about me and my content business at primefitcontentcom. You can send me an email at jay at primefitcontentcom. That's jay J-A-Y at primefitcontentcom. I'm also on Facebook, linkedin and Instagram, so you can find me anywhere you like and be in touch. No-transcript.