WordPress Woocomerce Store – Products missing on category pages

Sometimes when you update your theme, your plugins, or even your WordPress version itself, conflicts will occur that can cause issues with the website and sometimes even result in a white screen. In this case, we had an issue where a Woocommerce store was no longer showing all of the products on the category pages so we had to trouble-shoot and figure out why it was occuring. here is how we fixed WordPress Woocomerce Store – Products missing on category pages for this particular website.

So, here is how we fixed WordPress Woocomerce Store – Products missing on category pages:

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How to Delete Multiple Videos in Youtube Studio Beta

How to Delete Multiple Videos in Youtube Studio Beta. Youtube Studio Beta only allows you to delete one video at a time which can be very time consuming if you need to delete several videos at once. Here is a workaround hack that we use in the office to delete multiple videos in Youtube Studio Beta at one time.

 
 
 
So, here is how Delete Multiple Videos in Youtube Studio Beta at one time:

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How to Delete Multiple Videos in Youtube Studio Beta

Youtube Studio Beta only allows you to delete one video at a time which can be very time consuming if you need to delete several videos at once. Here is a workaround hack that we use in the office to delete multiple videos in Youtube Studio Beta at one time.

Many people get involved in this business because they enjoy fitness and have a perception that owning a health club will be fun and allow them to make a living doing something that they love. There is nothing wrong with this as long as they realize that this is a business that takes a lot of work and ongoing education to become successful. Get out of the office once in a while, get to know the members again, regain that feeling that you had the day the doors opened for business. Member service begins and ends with you, your front desk staff, entry-level trainers and floor staff. They must have more interaction with your members than anyone else.

Staffing will be the most difficult issue you’ll have to face in the fitness business. Standing for long hours, getting minimum wage and doing repetitive tasks does not motivate employees to become high achievers. When you stray from your basic role of being a leader, your business and staff suffer. To achieve maximum success, you must find, educate and motivate your staff to work at their highest potential.

Create the environment that will attract people to you and the club by starting with three basic staffing rules:

1. Spend an hour per week recruiting staff. Aggressively go out and pursue them. Find them malls, restaurants, corner stores and continue to do it even if you don’t need any staff. It gets you out of the club and you never know when you may stumble upon the one jewel that will help you drive the business to the next level.

2. Interview someone in the club every two weeks. Many staff become complacent in their positions because they know that you can’t find good staff so there is no repercussion to their mediocrity in the workplace. Interviewing someone every week keeps them on their toes and it also proves that you are always striving for excellence.

3. Spend two hours per week with all full-time employees teaching new concepts and role-playing existing concepts regardless of their experience. This keeps skills sharp, keeps you in-touch with the staff, and sets the example for the entry-level staff that they will have the ability to move up in the company.

If you invest in your staff and they will invest in you. Set the example, spend some time with them, and work the business rather than have the business work you.

Whether or not a health club will survive in today’s market will depend on one factor, the person in charge. In order for someone to become a leader, it requires more than a title and the sensation of power. The person in charge must set the example each and every day, they must act the best, dress the best, and they must have the most positive attitude. Some may feel that this is a difficult task to accomplish on a daily basis. Some may feel that some days they feel better than others and therefore, some days the club’s revenue is better than others.

Some may say that they couldn’t be “on” all the time. I disagree. It may be difficult, it may take a lot of work and practice but not only should it occur, it must occur. Not being “on” is not an option. Now there are some days where one may be more motivated than others and if the manager has done his or her job, the staff will follow the same mantra. The staff then has the ability to jack each other up to perform. An effective manager strives and studies on a daily basis to be a more effective manager.

Every time I hear a club owner/manager tell me that business is slow, revenue is down, and/or their staff is not performing, the first question I have to ask is, “what did you study today, this week, and this month to create the skill sets necessary to improve the club’s performance.” It’s not that you’re in a bad market, it’s not that time of year where business is slow, and your members are not cheap – most often than not, it’s the environment.

Are you jacked up and do you set the example? Can you find revenue where it has never existed before? Ask yourself the following questions to analyze the environment that you create everyday. Very few people have the ability to dig down deep inside themselves and answer the following questions honestly.

• Am I the happiest person I know? Am I a role model and do the people around me look up to me and want to emulate me? Do I set the example for the staff?
• Do I expect more from myself than anyone else could ever imagine expecting of me?
• Do I create a positive environment within the business that others are attracted to and want to be a part of?
• Do I have the skill sets and business background to manage and operate a business effectively?
• Do I constantly stress increasing my skill sets and education by continuing to learn from any and every source available?
• Do I have the ability to create a systems-based structure that will enable me to work on the business rather than in the business?
• Can I create an effective staffing structure to find, develop, and motivate staff to bring out the best in people and elicit even greater results than I could do on my own?
• Do I have the ability to analyze myself unemotionally and without ego to determine if my actions and reactions are the reason for the club’s successes and failures?

The Eight Biggest Mistakes Gym Owners Make – Part 4

7. Tracking Numbers
Daily reporting and the numbers that keep everyone in the club on track to drive your revenue. What gets focused on, gets done. Monthly, weekly, and daily goal-setting should be the foundation of the club’s revenue stream. The club should keep a running total every day to see where they are in relation to their goals and have industry bench marks as to where they should be in relation to other clubs of the same size and in similar markets.

The club should have goal boards on a wall in the club where all staff can see them that show daily projection for income, memberships, and profit centers. Daily Prospects, sales, appointment ratio, closing ratio, referrals, and renewals should also be tracked.

Goal boards and tracking create urgency and everyone in the club should know where the club stands every day in relation to the monthly goals. If the numbers are not made a priority and if management doesn’t make it a priority for the staff, It’s too easy to lose sight on production because we are too busy getting “work” done every day.

Learn how to drive production rather than riding the wave of the revenue flow. Looking at the P & L at the end of the month to see where the revenue ended up at is not only a bad business plan but it is also the most stressful way to run a business.

8. Member Retention
How many members signed up this same month last year and how many are still with you? It’s tough to get new members and it’s just as tough to keep them. Motivation, time, energy and money are just few of the reasons members drop out.

Renewals should not be passive. Your programming, your interaction with current members, your events to keep members engaged, your follow-up process and your membership pricing will all factor in to give you a drastically higher renewal rate.

The gym must implement a formal renewal plan with the staff in order to keep the member engaged and we must continue to reach out to the members outside the gym no matter when they signed up. Avoiding this interaction because you fear a cancellation if you reach out to them because it reminds them that they haven’t been coming is a pretty scary plan. Start with the new members you signed up last month and going forward work like crazy to get and keep them involved.

The Eight Biggest Mistakes Gym Owners Make – Part 3

5. Marketing
How to get an a number of qualified leads through the door. Marketing is hit or miss in every industry. The difference in ours is that we usually don’t have an enormous budget like others. If we market, we must get a response. You need to develop a 12-month marketing campaign that is based on tracking response rates and the marketing mediums that are getting a response today. Right now, social media has been giving us the largest response that we’ve had in years. However, the new algorythm changes that Facebook has been making has been making it harder to reach our target markets and the cost is going up. There will be a point where the return on investment from social media marketing will drop low enough where it will not be getting enough response for the money. So, what then and what next? And, if you are believing the ads posted by a guy with no gym business background and appears to be 15 years old pitching you the “perfect funnel to fill your gym” then you have missed the boat already.

It never was about the Perfect Funnel. It was about the crazy response rate that we were getting from social media in general and hitting the right audience with the right budget. What do you think is going to happen to all these guys, when Facebook marketing goes down hill?

Your 12-month marketing campaign must be planned in advance with a variety of prongs of attack. Some will cost money and some will be more guerilla in-house and it must rotate. You have to spend enough money to make it worthwhile and it must be calculated based on the overall ROI. Sure, take advantage of what is hot at the moment but don’t neglect the other stuff either.

6. Profit Centers
You must get a higher return-per-member. My town is different, my members are cheap, that doesn’t work here… we’ve heard them all. You need to start making money from other areas besides memberships and training. Juice bar and supplements are the two keys. Maybe some small aparrel but unless you have a traditional gym with a large amount of traffic, you don’t see much here. Planning ahead and adding some square footage or utilizing dead space to charge rent is another long-term plan.

The general response that I get here is the cost to get started. It is a valid concern however, the key here is in the financial planning. The cost of starting these endeavors wouldn’t be from your cash flow and wouldn’t be added into your profit and loss statement. You would carry some short-term debt to get started and then the monthly payment on that debt would be worked into you monthly P & L.

Then your ROI would be (Monthly Income – Cost of Goods Sold) divided by your New Monthly Payment. The ROI on this is substantial. Massively bigger than putting that money in any other investment.

The Eight Biggest Mistakes Gym Owners Make – Part 2

3. Sales
95% of what we do in the fitness business is to sell something to somebody everyday. Most clubs do not have a complete selling system that can be taught and duplicated. Many staff show the club as a museum (“Here’s our weight room, here’s our cardio…”) and don’t do much actual selling and many don’t even ask for the sale. What happens from the moment someone inquires and on? You might be surprised. You must create an education-based selling system that will assist your staff to close more sales and generate more profit center revenue.

We start out with an assessment with our best trainer. He will go through a question and answer process with the prospect to learn about the fitness career and pitfalls they have faced in their life. The tour will be based on selling stations that overcome objections before they occur and in many cases, depending on they type of gym, some type of trial membership will be offered. This doesn’t mean that the club doesn’t need to sell, it just means that, again depending on the gym, that the closing ratio will go up if the prospects have the ability to try to club, experience the staff, and feel the support system that the gym’s culture provides.

4. Staff Management
Driving revenue with daily meetings, goal-setting and setting production action plans. Staffing is one of the most difficult aspects of the gym business. How do you find good staff, develop them, pay them and maintain them for years to come? The successful small businessman must master staffing to generate the big numbers. The staff must know every day where the club is in all departments according to their monthly goals. Goal-setting creates an urgency that increases performance. Some people may call it pressure and not everyone is cut out for that pressure and while I understand this, it may mean that they may not be cut out for the job either. A well-run gym should have training manuals written with all aspects of each position. Scripts should be provided that tackle every aspect of the gym environment and not just sales. How to handle a cancellation request, a supplement question, a referral conversation, a problem with the toilet, a sales objection are some examples. The staff should have some type of training every day, a more in-depth training once a week, and a formal training meeting once a month. Staff should be required to practice and role-play every day.

When was the last time you individually worked with a staff person? When was the last time you role-played? Get on the horse yourself first and once you feel comfortable start engaging with your staff and you will see how much of a change this will make in your bottom line.

The Eight Biggest Mistakes Gym Owners Make – Part 1

The fitness business can be one of the most demanding of all small businesses. We have the long hours of the restaurant business, the constant intense customer service of a large retail store, and perhaps the most unique staffing issues of any small business. Every gym has to develop the right mix of sales people, trainers, business managers, weight management people and the random support people we need, but who really make us crazy, such as child care, group exercise instructors and massage therapists.

In the middle of all these issues we have to cover shifts, sell a few memberships, keep from getting divorced because of the hours, or find a life if we are single, and still manage to make enough money to keep the thing going one more month. As owners and managers we put so much time working in the business that we rarely get a chance to work ON the business because we are spending every waking moment working IN the business.

An interesting trend that we have found is that the owners who aren’t making the kind of money they should be are regularly breaking one or more of the eight essential rules for making money continuously for the life of their business. These are my eight biggest mistakes gym owners typically make in the day-to-day operations of their businesses.

1. Positioning
You must position the club to beat the competition and attract more clients. In today’s market you can’t be everything to everybody. Most people build a gym and then try to sell as many memberships as possible to anyone that will take them. A 45-yr-old businessman will not feel comfortable beside a 20-yr old kid with saggy pants and a backwards hat. You have to fine-tune your target market and look at your demographics, average income level, population and competition to help you create a niche in your market and position your gym to capitalize on it.

2. Pricing
You can’t overcome a bad pricing strategy. Pricing dictates two things; 1. Your long-term bottom line and 2. The type of member you attract. Most gyms base their pricing on the competition or some fictitious number that looked good when they planned their project and thought this is how much they thought the people they know would pay. You must price your memberships based on your demographics, your niche and your budget. Maybe the club you built or the expenses you have don’t fit in the building or location you chose. We have to find out.

Does the Facebook Pixel Track all Website Traffic?

When you embed the facebook retargeting pixel on your website, does it track traffic from all sources or just the traffic that comes from people that click a button from Facebook itself?

This video answers the question.

So, here is the answer to Does the Facebook Pixel Track all Website Traffic?

The Top Three Fears of the Deconditioned Person

The deconditioned person has a lot of preconceived notions as to what goes on in a gym, most of them bad, but they really don’t know for sure.

So, here are The Top Three Fears of the Deconditioned Person:

Can Your Staff Relate to Your Sales Prospect?

When it comes to building rapport, the more interested that the staff is in the prospect, the prospect’s life, and the prospect’s fears, the greater chance of success in the sales process. A friendly, caring, and compassionate person will move the sales process forward a lot easier.

Now, I am not completely naïve to think that all of our staff will be caring and compassionate and while I do believe that a person working in a gym should be this way, It really doesn’t matter at the end of the day if your staff really is, as long as they appear to be. This is a requirement of the job and as they say, fake it ’til you make it.”

In the gym business, we have to hire staff that can relate to the demographic that the club wants to capture. Not the current members’ demographic or the prospects that you are currently capturing, but the prospect that you WANT to capture. If the staff can’t relate, understand, and bond with the prospects then you will not have the best success. If the staff can’t relate, understand, and bond with the members, then the renewal rate will not be as good.

We, as owners, have a tendency to hire people that we like and that we would like to hang out with. However, the goal should be to find staff that relates to and inspires the prospect with stories to share, obstacles to overcome, and be works in progress.

Your Sales Prospect May be Looking for a Way Out

Your sales program should be designed to increase the staff’s ability to sell a membership to someone that maybe is looking for a way out. If you direct your sales and marketing programs to solve this problem for these people, everybody else coming in should be a lay-down.

The conditioned person and the deconditioned person look at health clubs completely different. A conditioned person is used to what goes on in a health club, the atmosphere, the clothing, and the personalities. They feel comfortable with the equipment, developing their own work out, know the lingo and they also, most importantly, know what will happen to them when they enter a gym for the first time.

The deconditioned person has a lot of preconceived notions as to what goes on in a gym, most of them bad, but they really don’t know for sure. What they don’t know scares them even more than the bad stuff that they are sure of.

Give this project to each of your staff members:

Put up a picture of a person in your target demographic and write your sales protocol to this person specifically and address every objection and fear that this person may have.

Make a bullet-point list:

1. Each objection that you may get after presenting prices
2. Each fear that a deconditioned consumer may have
3. Each “unknown” that a deconditioned person may have
4. Each goofy infomercial pill, product, diet, program that they may have tried.

Get together as a group and write your sales protocol and tour around the answers to these questions.

Don’t Make a Sale, Make a Connection.

Building Rapport is the art of making a connection with someone, making a friend. This is extremely important during the sales process and it is even more important when the prospect is leery of the product/service that is being pitched to them.

Have you ever met someone for the first time and for some reason you just felt like you have known them your whole life? You just clicked. You seem so alike and never run out of things to talk about. This is the purest example of making a connection. Take note that this doesn’t happen very often but there must be a massive attempt to move away from no connection, no caring, and complete disinterest by the salesperson that will, ultimately, lead to the foreseeable “No Thank You.”

Not everybody has the natural ability to make connections with people. Some are born with it, some have learned it. My wife, my mother, my mother-in-law, my kids… all born with the gift. I’m surrounded by people who just looooooove to talk, lol. Me, not so much. I can do it and I do it every day but it’s not naturally in my nature. My nature is the guy who stands at the back of the room leaning back against the wall perfectly happy to observe other people having conversations. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make you any money.

The first mistake we as owners/managers make in staffing is that we hire a warm body because we need someone to fill a spot and as the saying goes, “I can’t find any good people.” So, we hire someone that may not be the best person for the job. It’s hard to find good staff… I understand… believe me when I say It’s hard to find good staff. I go through the same pains as you do. However, an outgoing, friendly, caring person will always have more success. This is a people business. If they don’t have the ability to communicate or are not aggressively learning how, then I don’t want them interacting with a prospect.

It is just too important.

I am not saying that a person has to change who they are in order to do sales but if they can’t do the job the way we NEED it done, then they can’t continue to do the job. What I am saying is that if they aren’t innately that person then they do have to change who they are at least while they are at work.

The most important technique you can apply to your sales process

The prospect’s first impression of the gym is not how you look or how the gym looks, but how you sound over the phone or how you interact with them immediately upon walking through the front door. You will have only one chance to make a good first impression. Following the previous thought process that many inquiries are just looking for a way out in the first place and are hoping that you do something that they don’t like, this becomes even more imperative.

The most important technique you can apply to your sales process is the ability to focus on the prospect and give them your full 100% attention.

You must focus 100% on them and be in the moment despite any other distraction that might be going on around you at the time. Your day, your mood, your feelings, the phone, the other staff members around you, the random member conversation… everything becomes second to the prospect. This concentration, coupled with spending enough quality time, giving a thorough tour and fully answering all of the prospect’s questions, goes a long way toward building the trust it takes for the sale to happen.

Its generally human nature to migrate towards things that make people feel good rather than bad. This makes fitness a hard sell for the deconditioned consumer. This concept is completely foreign to a purist who is addicted to the euphoria that they feel exercising. This euphoria doesn’t exist for the deconditioned consumer.

Almost everyone has experienced or known someone who has experienced these things and it’s created a barrier between their need to exercise and actually doing it. Checking out a gym for the first time is not an enjoyable experience for most deconditioned people. In fact, most deconditioned consumers will look first for the weight-loss options that are the least painful ala pills, supplements, goofy infomercial machines, easy(or so they are pitched) diets, etc.

Many feel a lot of anxiety and most often they ask the staff random questions because they really don’t know what to ask. “Do you have a pool, do you have group power, and the ultimate, what are your prices?”

Maybe they were in line at the grocery store and saw a tabloid magazine on the shelf with a celebrity on the cover who said she lost her weight by doing XYZ Program and in their mind That is the only thing that will get them into shape, so that is what they ask for.

Or maybe, one of their friends a lost weight swimming laps and told her that that is the only way she’ll get results, so she asks for a pool. Or maybe they ask for prices because they don’t really know what else to ask and since they see commercials on TV all the time for the low-dollar chain club for $9 a month, they have a reference point to compare you to.

Should price be the main point of making a decision for a deconditioned consumer who might have a weight-loss career the length of Tony Soprano’s rap sheet?

Many times a prospect is on a tour or perhaps calls the club and asks the obvious question about prices and the staff member just answers the question.

That prospect just became a dead lead!

Most of my clients are priced higher than a traditional gym. They focus on personal training and group and team training. The deconditioned consumer can’t compare us to the competitors in town based on price because, of course, we are priced higher. The consumer is not yet aware of the culture that has been created in the gym, the quality and education of the staff or the camaraderie and support they will receive from the other members.

Many times the club’s staff is not trained well enough to adjust their conversation based on the prospect’s questions, body language, tone of voice and tells. Yes, “tells” like poker. The prospect will give you subconscious cues as to what they are thinking as you are interacting with them.

Call your club right now and ask a question about something that you don’t offer and see how they handle that call. Have one of your friends or family members take a tour and throw some of those questions at them and see how they handle it.

I can’t even count how many times I’ve shopped clubs over the years and asked one question, a question like, “Do you have a pool?” or “Do you have Zumba?” and the staff person responded with “No, we don’t have that” and I said, “OK” and then we said goodbye and that was the end of the conversation.

The main purpose of our marketing campaigns is to get people into the gym… not to get a prospect. Contrary to what most people think, more people will call the club or, if our social media campaign is running and our website is set up correctly, will inquire online rather than just show up unannounced.

The reason this is contrary is because most clubs do not track their inquiries well enough to actually know this. The Inquiry is our lifeline to success. Think of it as a life preserver for a drowning business.

When handling an inquiry we need to make two assumptions.

1. The prospect has to be considered as a potential new member no matter what. In fact, we have to assume that they have already decided that they want and need what we offer because they expelled enough energy to inquire in the first place.

2. The prospect is not just shopping around. They will give money to someone today if the club takes the time necessary to get them in.

This doesn’t mean however, that it’s true. We just have to assume this to create a certain mentality to approach the sale.

The more marketing that you are doing, the more inquisitive people you will have “just checking the club out”. The more marketing money you spend, the lower your closing ratio will also be because you will receive inquiries from people who have no intention of joining.

There is a certain demographic who has the great intention of getting involved in a fitness program. They see an ad and they make the phone call hoping that somebody will do something to offend them or hoping that the club does not offer what they’re interested in just so they don’t HAVE to join.

In their mind, at least, they made the attempt and that attempt helps rid themselves of their guilt, their depression or whatever is causing them to feel bad about their fitness level or appearance.

Unfortunately, the club didn’t have what they wanted, it wasn’t convenient, the price was too high, they didn’t have a pool… whatever.

There are a lot of people who have good intentions but that doesn’t always equate to taking action.

A typical gym employee has a variety of duties that he or she must complete every day as part of the job. The core of every job in our business, however, can be condensed into three distinct functions that everyone on the staff needs to understand and be competent in doing on a daily basis.

These three functions are:

1. Selling memberships/training, or supporting those who do by understanding the sales process and system.

2. Providing member service that leads to higher member retention.

3. Learning to sell other services and products to people who are already members.

You may have noticed that servicing current members/personal training clients is not on this top three. That doesn’t mean that it is not important. In order to maintain the current client base, excellent training and service must be provided(see #2).

However, if prospects are not acquired and then sold, there will be no one to service. If current members/clients are not up-sold, income becomes stagnant. Every job somehow leads back to some form of sales. Thoughts?

Why are my customer’s reviews not showing up on the Google Maps listing?

Why are my customer’s reviews not showing up on the Google Maps listing?

Why are my customer’s reviews not showing up on the Google Maps listing? Your business is doing an exceptional job and your customers are leaving great 5-star reviews but for some reason those reviews are not showing up on the Google Map listing.

There are several reasons why this might be happening but the number one reason is that someone is trying to circumvent the Google Review system. Sometimes Google filters or removes reviews if they feel that the person violated the Google’s review policies.

Based on cases I’ve looked at, here is what I’ve come up with for reasons why my customer’s reviews not showing up on the Google Maps listing:

• URLs in reviews
• The same review appears elsewhere online (Yelp, a testimonials page on your website etc)
• The person who wrote the review is a manager of your G+ Page
• The person who wrote the review works for you
• The person wrote the review from the same computer/IP Address that you sign into to manage your local listing
• The person wrote the review from the same IP address as other users who left you reviews
• The person tried to post a review for you several times on different dates (Ex: they wrote one August 5 and it got filtered so they tried again on October 10)
• You’ve been collecting reviews in mass within a short time frame
• The person reviewing you has also reviewed multiple other businesses with the same name (if you have several locations and they reviewed all of them)
• The person reviewing you has a completely blank G+ profile and has never had any activity on that Google profile before or after they left you that review.
• You have an onsite review station (Ipad, Computer etc) at your location
• You are offering incentives for people who write you reviews.
• Your # of reviews is abnormally higher than most businesses in your industry.

For a complete list of the Google Review Policies, click here: https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114

Google looks at the patterns that are normal for both your business, and similar for other businesses in your category. If a business normally get few reviews, then suddenly gets a a lot reviews, that can flag those reviews for the Google Web Spam team.

The Google Review Policy system is completely automated and many times it flags a review that is completely legitimate. If this is the case, you could try a support associate through Google My Business. Log into your dashboard, by clicking here: https://business.google.com/ and go to the section for Reviews, click on the home menu and choose Support, then select a method of contact (Phone or Email) and provide details.

To flag an inappropriate review, click here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4596773?hl=en.

If you would like to see how to get your customers to leave legitimate 5-star reviews that will not be flagged or deleted, click here.

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Why are my customer’s reviews not showing up on the Google Maps listing?

Customers Not Finding Your Business?

Customers Not Finding Your Business?

Have you ever asked yourself any of the following questions?

1. How visible is my business online?
2. How Can I get more customers to find me?
3. Why doesn’t my business show up on Google Maps
4. Why doesn’t my business show up on the first page of search engines?

Well, you’re not alone. This is very common among small business owners because there is so much information out there and not only is it generally very complicated but the way search engines, websites, and social media constantly changes, it’s very hard to keep up. There are a lot of lists like these that you will come across all over the place and all are good information but I like to start with information that you can use today and that will make an immediate difference.

So, I put together a shortlist of things that you can take a look at right now and change right now to help you solve some of these issues that most small businesses are facing.

Here are 10 Website Stats That May Change That.

1. Websites that have a strong keyword in the header that matches the website address, the page name, an image name, and a link rank higher than websites that just have a keyword alone.
2. Websites with 10 or more backlinks from other websites rank 34% higher.
3. 68% of organic searches went straight to the Google Maps section before clicking any links.
4. 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles.
5. Social media sites(facebook, etc) accounted for only 2.8% of website visits in 2017.
6. Facebook produced 61% of all website visits generated on social media sites in 2017.
7. Google accounts for over 76% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 8%, Baidu at 7.5% and Yahoo at 7%.
8. 78% of search traffic came from a mobile device in 2017.
9. By 2019, 85% of US internet traffic will be video.
10. Google “near me” searches have doubled over the past year.

Google is constantly changing their ranking process and their search algorithm so it’s important to review these 10 SEO Statistics for success. Understanding this information can shape your website that engages and converts visitors and will help you SEO marketing strategy.

I would use these stats as a punch list as to what you have to get done on your website in order to move you up the list. For example, 78% of search traffic came from a mobile device in 2017.
Google ranks a site based on well it conforms to Google’s requirements for a responsive mobile-friendly website. If yours doesn’t conform right now, building a responsive mobile-friendly website should be on your list.
or

68% of organic searches went straight to the Google Maps section before clicking any links so if you aren’t on the first three of the Google Maps 3-pack than you should make sure you get on there as fast as possible.

Go through the list and start working on the areas that are hurting you the most and then work backwards.

As you work through the list and stay diligent to getting things done, you will find that your traffic will increase and your phone calls will go up.

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SSL Certificate Error on your Website

Sometimes after you’ve installed an SSL certificate on your website and even verified it, your browser still might show a an open padlock with an error on it and will say that this website is not secure. Here is a quick easy fix for that.

Here is the link to the first video on the SSL Certificate if you missed it.
 

SSL Certificate Error on your Website

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1-Star Review Left on Google Because the Service Was No Longer in her budget!

1-Star Review Left on Google Because the Service Was No Longer in her budget!

This new Algorithm for the Google Maps section for businesses is starting to get a little scary. I can understand that you can’t make everyone happy but some people just don’t always think through the process as to how badly it can affect someone’s business. Plus, whether it’s Google, Yelp, or even Ebay, there are many people out there who don’t even know how the rating system works or what would constitute leaving a bad review.

Case in point, this morning our ReviewLeads program caught a potentially-devastating 1-star review because she analyzed her budget and realized that the service was no longer in her budget. Did the business do anything wrong, was the owner at fault, was the customer upset with the business in any way? Nope, on the contrary the customer had been using the service for many years and loved it. She loved the owner and her staff. So why did she leave the 1-star review then? She just didn’t know any better.

Luckily, the business is one of our clients and our system intercepted the review before it went live. The owner contacted her customer to make sure she wasn’t upset and then educated her on what the review rating is and how badly it could impact her business. The customer was shocked and very apologetic and went back and revised her review. That’s the beauty of our program put in action in real time.

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3 Easy Ways to Focus More Time on Generating Revenue in Your Business

3 Easy Ways to Focus More Time on Generating Revenue in Your Business

It is always a challenge in a service-based business to balance the amount of time you are spending servicing your existing clients with prospecting for new business. Here are 3 Easy Ways to Focus More Time on Generating Revenue in Your Business.

1. Hire a helper. Give every trainable task to them that you do in your day no matter how small. The biggest challenge in this thought process is that we all have many tasks in our day that “only take a minute.” First, everything takes longer than we think it will. Second, all those small tasks that only take a minute will add up to a lot of minutes at the end of the day. No money is generated when you are doing labor. Other people do labor, you work on sales and marketing. If you don’t starting changing this mindset, you will be in this bind forever.

2. Set up blocks in your calendar for specific tasks and don’t deviate from it. If you set aside 10-1 to make sales calls, then stick to that. If you are doing a lot of your own servicing right now, this may be difficult to stick to your guns on this. If you own a Heating & Cooling Business, a customer may call for a service call where you need to go to their house or if you are a personal trainer, a client may call for a training session at a particular time or if you are a Real Estate Agent, a client may call to have you show them a house. You have to avoid the temptation of scheduling during your blocked-out times. This is about creating a habit and you will not be able to make up the money that you are losing by continuing to miss your valuable sales time.

3. Outsource everything that you can outsource. Things like Bookkeeping, billing, external marketing like direct mail, website changes, and payroll. Yes, it will cost money but if you implement Point #2, you will have ample time to work on your sales and marketing and that will generate more money. You don’t have to hire another staff person so you will have less to manage plus these people only work when you give them work so your payroll will be less than if you had an employee doing it.

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SSL Certificate on your website to Satisfy Google’s New Requirements. Soon Google will start flagging websites that don’t have an SSL certificate installed. Is your website going to make the cut?

This video covers the concept of What Is A Facebook Pixel and how does it work?

This is an instructional video that explains What are natural boundaries in relation to carrier route reports and demographics when determining your target market for your business.\

What is a carrier route report and why do you need one?

Before you start doing any marketing you need to look at your demographics and determine your target market. The carrier route report is an inexpensive way to find out who is in your area. It will show you elements such as population, houses vs apartments, average income, median house value and break down zip codes closest to you.
This is an instruction video called “What is a carrier route report and why do you need one?”

This is an instructional video on how to upload/embed a video to your website

This is just a quick snippet of Terry VanDerMark teaching the Facebook Pixel at the NFBA Social Media Workshop in Providence, RI.

Survey Yelp is #1 for Finding Local Services

by Morgan Remmers
According to three independent studies conducted by Software Advice, a software insights resource for business owners, Yelp is the most popular choice for people who use review sites to find Survey Yelp is #1 for Finding Local Services, a doctor, attorney or home service provider.

Most people already think of Yelp when searching for their next great meal, but every kind of local business can be reviewed on Yelp, and it’s great to hear that consumers are turning to us to inform their spending decisions on all kinds of purchases. Some highlights from the studies:

• Yelp is ranked as the #1 most popular and most trusted website for attorney reviews
• 74% of people who used a review site to search for home service providers used Yelp
• Yelp is used more often than Healthgrades, RateMDs, Vitals and ZocDoc to find a doctor

Hungry for more?

Read the full research findings of the studies, which were not commissioned by Yelp, and check out the graphics below for more insight into consumer preferences when researching online.
Study: Use of Online Reviews to Select Residential Service Providers

Study: How Clients Use Online Legal Reviews

Study: Patient Use of Online Reviews

Stop Related Videos From Showing on YouTube Embedded Videos

If you’ve now been following my advice, you have been creating new articles on your website and embedding your YouTube videos in them. One of the things that has always aggravated me is that by default when the video is finished playing, YouTube automatically shows a bunch of related videos that they can now click on and play.

This has posed quite a problem for some of my clients because some of those related videos are from competitors in their area. The last thing that you need is your website showing content from your competitors.

Here is what it generally looks like:

Four different videos appeared in my
YouTube video frame but I’ve seen as many as Eight!

What most people don’t realize is that they have the ability to stop this from happening. Here’s what you have to do:

Modify the Default Embed Code that YouTube Provides You

After you record and upload a video on YouTube, you click the Embed link to embed the video. To get the embed code you just need to click on the “share” link and then on the “embed” link.

Copy the iframe embed code and then paste it on your website page.

This is what the code looks like normally:

All you have to do is add a small bit of text to the end of the video name: (?rel=0) as shown below:

This easy trick will Stop Related Videos From Showing on YouTube Embedded Videos when your video is finished playing.

Public vs. Private vs. Unlisted on YouTube

When uploading a video to YouTube, you have the ability to change the privacy settings for that video to Public vs. Private vs. Unlisted on YouTube.

Public

Public is the default setting and that means anybody can see your video. If you don’t mind your video to come up in Google search results and you don’t mind if anyone can see it, then set your settings to Public.

Private

Private means only those you invite to view the video can view it (they must have their own Youtube accounts). Your video will not come up under any search results or your channel list. If you try to share it with someone who wasn’t invited, they will not be able to connect to it. So, if you only want your friends to see the link and no one else, then set your settings to private.

Unlisted

Unlisted means your video will not come up in search results or on your channel either. Only those who know the link can view it, and you can share the link with anyone, even those who do not have a YouTube account. This means that this video could still be seen by anyone, but only if they guess the link! If you only want certain people to see it by sending them a link to it directly, then set it to Unlisted.

If your video is already uploaded, go to your video manager under the drop down menu and you can change the privacy settings for each video as well as DELETE your videos permanently.

Make sure that you know the audience that you are going after when you choose your settings between the options of Public vs. Private vs. Unlisted on YouTube

How to Link Facebook Page to Twitter

This Tutorial covers how to Link Your Facebook Page to Twitter account so your posts will automatically post to your twitter feed without you having to manually go and do
it.

If your company has fans on twitter who aren’t Facebook users, you can post your facebook posts on Twitter for your fans to see. After you do this, every public post you put
on your facebook wall shows up on your Twitter Feed.

How to Link Facebook Page to Twitter:

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com/twitter

2. Click Link to Twitter.

3. Enter your Twitter username and password and Click Authorize App.

4. Choose what you would like to share and click the blue Save Changes button

5. That’s it, you’re done!

Link Twitter Account to Your Facebook Page

This Tutorial covers how to Link Twitter Account to Your Facebook Page so your tweets will automatically post to your facebook wall without you having to manually go and do it.

If your company has fans on Facebook who aren’t Twitter users, you can post your tweets on your Facebook Wall for your fans to see. After you do this, every public tweet you send on Twitter shows up on your Facebook Wall.

How to Link Twitter Account to Your Facebook Page:

1. Log into your twitter account and click the logo icon at the top of the screen

2.  Click the Settings and privacy tab in the drop-down menu

3. Click on the Apps tab on the left hand side

4. Click the Connect to Facebook Button on the right side

5. Enter your Facebook login info into the fields and click the blue Log In button

6. Click the blue Continue as … Button

7. Choose to have your twitter posts show up on your facebook page and click OK button.

8. That’s it, you’re done!

The question of the week this week is, “What is a Focus Keyword?” The question of the week this week comes from Mika out in Arizona.

Terry answers her question in this quick video.

Chit Chat Media Group is first and foremost an education company.

We work hard to provide as much free education and content as we have time for. Each week we pick a common question that we get from our clients on a range of topics such as Website Design, Reputation Management, Social Media Management, Google Pay Per Click, SEO, Facebook, etc.

In this video Terry answers the question, “What is a Focus Keyword.”

If you have a question that you would like us to answer, shoot us a quick email to hello@chitchatmediagroup.com.

Your Health Club’s receivables base is the most important asset that you have. This video explains the value of the receivables-based membership structure in developing long-term financial success in the fitness business.

Frustrated With Your LeadPages/Wufoo Integration???

You are aggressively Facebook marketing and your ads and posts are leading to your LeadPages Ad that is embedded on your website.

Then the signup buttons are taking the prospect to a Wufoo form to sign up and then payment is made through your Stripe Account.

BUT…

Since you first set it up you’ve changed the price of your Trial/Challenge and created a new Stripe Transaction Page but FOR SOME REASON, when you fill out the new form it still takes you to the original Stripe Transaction Page with the old price!!!!!

What the HECK is going on?

Well, as long as you know that you for certain have the correct form embedded most likely the issue is that the original Stripe Transaction Page is in your browser cache and the page is not loading the new one.

SOLUTION:

The quick method is to hold down your f5 key while refreshing the page. You might have to do this two or three times for the new Stripe Transaction Page to come up.

If that doesn’t work, you will have to go into your browser settings and empty your cache.

Thanks to Dan Kleckner at Kutting Edge Fitness for helping me trouble-shoot this one.

I started writing an article this morning on the importance of having a 5-Star Rating on Google and that it may be the most important aspect to your Digital Marketing platform. Then I got on a coaching call with one of my clients and he says, “we don’t even show up on the Google Maps Listing, how do we do that?”

Ok, so I digress… Showing up on the Google Maps listing is the most important aspect.

Ok, so I digress again… Showing up on the TOP THREE listings on Google Maps is the most important aspect.

Presenting membership options can be confusing and we want to make the process as simple as possible. This video clarifies the term “membership” in relation to presenting prices and reducing the options on the presentation sheet so that the prospect can follow easily.

It’s a lazy assumption to say that the problem with my business is that I need more customers. However, without a tracking system that tracks the primary benchmark numbers in the sales system, it’s difficult to determine where the weak points are.

Check out this video that outlines and evaluates the primary numbers in the sales process.  This particular video was directed specifically to health club owners but the thought-process applies to all businesses.

Something has been puzzling me in the last couple of weeks. I’ve taken phone calls recently from three different club owners who haven’t been happy with the number of sales that their staff has been doing lately. After lengthy discussions and doing some troubleshooting, it became apparent that none of them had been tracking any numbers in the club. They thought they had a good closing ratio, they thought they had a lot more prospects coming in they did, and they thought they had a retention rate. The fact of the matter is that none of them knew for sure. How can someone really know what’s going on in the club without finding out where the problem lies? “Oh, we sign up almost everyone that comes through the door.” I hear this all the time. “Almost everyone” is not a number. I need an accurate exact number to evaluate systems, that’s the bottom line.

Prospect Tracking

Retail companies spend millions of dollars each year on marketing to get their message out there and are even doing target marketing to people who have been in their stores.

What happens in your club after a prospect has been toured and decides that this may not be the right time for them to become a member?

Training

A step-by-step manual must be in place and guidelines must be created for the staff. This guide must lay out every detail of the sales and follow-up process. For example, It must include a script of the tour, the intricacies of the sales process, how to handle paper work, when to call, why to call, what to say on the call, etc., etc., etc. An on-going training and testing process must be in place to increase their skills. This is the only way to grow a business.

Follow-up Skills

Once we have the procedures in place and everyone is doing their jobs, the next step is to become more effective.