Jennifer Kelly

Sep 15 2015

How To Get More Personal Training Clients

You’re a personal trainer. You’d like to have more clients. Clients need to know, like and trust you before they buy from you. Great news – Twitter can help you do exactly that.

Personal Training Clients On Twitter?

If you’re skeptical that Twitter can help you get more personal training clients, you’re not alone. Many feel this way. I’ve had clients in [insert industry here] raise an eyebrow when I mentioned Twitter. But don’t take my word for it; let’s see if anyone is talking about personal training on Twitter.

First we’ll see if anyone is having this conversation.

Go to https://twitter.com/search-home. A search bar will appear, much like when you go to Google. Type in your keyword (they are called hashtags; learn more about hashtags in this post) and press enter.
Looks like there are some conversations going on about personal training.
There is even someone asking for personal training recommendations.

There are conversations going on about personal training on Twitter. This is good news.

Personal Training Clients On Twitter In My Area

The search we did for personal training pulled in the latest from all tweets. Too broad?Perhaps. Most personal trainers work locally.

How do you search for local conversations about personal training? Add the hashtag to where your location is. Below we have some screen shots of the same personal trainer search with the location hashtag of #Toronto. Simply insert your location when you do your own search. You can even go as narrow as specific neighbourhoods.

Related Conversations

Some related hashtags to search on may be #fitness, #training, #PersonalTrainer, #gym. By having a look at what people are talking about and which hashtags they are using, you can get an idea of what to include in your tweets to show up in these conversations.

I’m Convinced, What Next?

Like any other social media platform, you’ll need three things:

Helpful and relevant content to share with your audience
An audience
The willingness to engage with your audience

Make sure the content you share is valuable and relevant to your audience and those you want to attract. Deciding what to share on Twitter can be daunting for some people.

Here are some ideas of what type of content to share as you get started:

Fitness tips
Your fitness routine (we all like to learn from others)
Your personal training times open for new clients
Fitness events going on in your city (5k runs, etc.)
Sales: fitness gear on sale (who doesn’t like $200 running shoes 75% off?!!)

You Gotta Start

Get going. The best way to have success with Twitter to get more personal training clients is to get out there and try it. Just like you’d tell that apprehensive client to get up off the couch and go for a walk. Start small – just start.

Nimble Quotes has a database stock full of inspirational quotes pertaining to the personal training and fitness coach industry. Why not try us out? If you sign up for our 30-day free trial, you’ll get 1-8 engaging quotes per day from our Fitness category (and 30+ other categories to choose from), plus the option of adding your own hashtags to each quote. Once your trial is over, it isabout $1/day or about $1/week to continue. Check out Nimble Quotes in action on @jenkellyjen or @newimarketing. Not ready for a trial just yet? Sign up for the Nimble Quotes newsletter instead.

Sep 13 2015

26 Inspirational Quotes for Students

Will quotes for students really inspire?

Click on this little gem of a post Ways to Inspire Students With Positive Quotes.

With back-to-school all the focus, I went searching to see how inspiring quotes could help and motivate students. I’m on a search to find the answer to the question why are inspirational quotes so popular? Why do we love them? What about them makes us feel good, inspired, motivated, comforted? Is it because of the author – the person who said or wrote the quote? Is it because it is such a well-crafted medley of words that some how shoots straight to the heart and connects with us emotionally? I’ll be on this quest for the answer, so do let me know if you have any thoughts on this topic…or answers.

I found this little gem over on the Connections Academy site.

Connections Academy is a tuition-free, fully accredited, online K-12 public school.

They’ve collected 26 inspiring quotes for students. After reading through them all, I’d say they are wonderful quotes for students of academia, and students of life! Enjoy!

If you’d like to have inspiring quotes like these in your Twitter feed automatically, as if you’ve tweeted them yourself, try Nimble Quotes. Sign up for the 30-day free trial, no credit card required.

Sep 11 2015

How To Use Twitter To Build Your Small Business

So you’ve heard of Twitter, but you’re not sure how this social networking site of tweets and follows can help you build your small business. How can you use Twitter to your advantage?

In a nutshell: follow people and build an audience, share relevant and helpful content (other people’s and yours), show up consistently, and above all, engage in the conversation with those following you and your followers.

Build Relationships On Twitter

Twitter is the perfect way to start connecting and building relationships with potential clients, suppliers and partners. Once you’ve started following people, you’ll begin to see the things they’re interested in, have questions about and learn a little more about them.

Responding to questions and comments, and helping out with sharing information useful to those following you and those you follow shows you have an active interest in them.

Also, once people have started following you, they’ll get to see the person behind your business – you! Tweet updates that let your personality shine through. Tweet informative tips, news about the industry or links to helpful articles. Doing this will build your relationship with your followers, and will help build their trust with you and your trust with them.

Engage With Your Followers

How can you cultivate the relationships you start to form on Twitter? Start conversations with your followers. When someone follows you, send them a message thanking them and introducing yourself.

You can also introduce yourself to those you’re following. Did you like someone’s recent tweet? By all means let them know by retweeting it, giving them a favorite or by direct messaging them.Have a conversation with them, just as if you were speaking with them in person. For a step-by-step example on how to do this, check out how to tweet a specific person.

Use Hashtags To Build Awareness For Your Business

Twitter is a great tool for building awareness for your business. By using hashtags included with each tweet, you can increase your visibility on Twitter. Hashtags let you get in front of a wide audience who may not yet know of you. Hashtags also let you get in front of an audience talking about a specific topic, industry, service or product. Learn more about how hashtags can help you on Twitter.

What Do I Tweet?

Please remember the 80/20 rule. 80% of the content you share on Twitter should be from other people; third-party sources. These can include blogs, articles, industry information, whitepapers, infographics and yes, famous quotes.

20% of your content shared on Twitter can be promotional. You can promote – you just need to earn the right to do so.

If you need any help with suggestions of what to tweet, write to me at jen[at]nimblequotes[dot]com, tell me about your company and audience and I’ll do my best to help you out.

So you’d like to build your small business and tweet interesting, thought-provoking things, but you’re not sure what to say? Let Nimble Quotes help. Our databases include hundreds of quotes on work, business and going after your goals. Sign up for our 30-day free trial, and you’ll get 1-8 engaging quotes per day, tweeted automatically from your account. You’ll also get the option of adding your own hashtags to each quote. Once your trial is over, it costs only about $1/day or $1/week to continue. Check out Nimble Quotes in action on @jenkellyjen or @newimarketing. Not quite ready for a trial? Sign up for the Nimble Quotes newsletter instead.

Sep 11 2015

I’ve Hit My Twitter Follower Limit! Now What?

So you’ve been on Twitter a lot, and been following a whole bunch of interesting people. That’s great! What’s not great is if you follow so many people that you hit the dreaded “Twitter Follower Limit!”

What is the “Twitter Follower Limit”?

This limit is also known as the follower ceiling. Once you follow 2,000 other Twitter accounts, Twitter’s system blocks you from following any more until you increase your own followers to an acceptable ratio (here’s the official Twitter Support Page entry). It’s primarily meant to prevent spammers and unscrupulous users from flooding the system with unwanted follows, although regular people have regularly been caught in the cross-fire.

Twitter doesn’t give any details about the ratio calculation, and so nobody seems to know what the right follower/following ratio is. There are plenty of guesses, but the actual number appears to vary per person.

Wonderful. What do I do about it?

Don’t worry, all is not lost! Even if you hit the Twitter follower limit, there are still ways for you to follow new people. Here are what I’ve found to be the most effective methods:

Audit your followers. Not everyone you follow is following you back. That probably means they’re not interested in what you have to say. So therefore they won’t mind at all if you go ahead and unfollow them! Clear out some space for people who want to connect with you.

Also, weed out your followers who only tweet once in a while (like maybe once every few months). These some-time users aren’t online often enough for you to interact with on a meaningful basis, and probably will miss most of your big announcements, so go ahead and unfollow them, too!

Build a list and follow that. Twitter allows you to build lists of people that you want to follow, without you having to follow their individual accounts. You can stay up to date with their news and information without having them count towards your Twitter follower limit.

Who should you put on these lists? Celebrities or prominent figures would be my first suggestion. You still want to see anything they tweet, but they’re highly unlikely to follow you back or send you a DM. So off to the list they go! The same goes for companies or business accounts, as well as Twitter news accounts like TechCrunch or CNN.

Build up your followers. Lastly, you should increase the number of your own followers. You’re trying to build your audience anyway, right? So keep building those relationships and reaching out to new people. You might not know the ratio of follower/follows, but if you can replace most of your one-way follows with genuine Twitter relationships, then you’re doing great!

Add inspirational and industry-related quotes to your Twitter feed as if you’ve tweeted them yourself. Try out Nimble Quotes for 30-days free, no credit card required. Check out @jenkellyjen, @newimarketing or any of the users on the testimonials page to see how Nimble Quotes show up in a Twitter feed.

Sep 04 2015

5 Essential Strategies for Authors on Twitter

In the old days, authors had to peddle their books by hand to their personal networks (and whichever bookstores were willing to carry them). But the rise of the Internet and social media has drastically changed things. Authors on Twitter can now reach people from all over the globe. Think about it! An author in Arkansas can have a lively discussion with a fan in Singapore, or anywhere else in the world!

Nothing ever comes easily, though. You need to know how to use Twitter properly to get the proper results. Here are some essential strategies you’ll need to adopt:

1. Know yourself and your audience

Before authors on Twitter can grow their audience, they need to establish who they are and who they want to talk to. Ask yourself these questions:

What is my book about?
Who is going to read my book?

These two questions will determine your target audience. These are the people you should be focusing on.

Build a Twitter profile that emphasizes your expertise (it should be related to your book). This is important, because people may check out your Twitter profile before deciding to follow you, and you want them to see that you know your stuff.

Next, search out the people likely to read your book and follow them. Not all of them will follow you back, but if they see from your profile and tweets that you’re interested in the same things, then there’s a higher chance they will.

2. Know your tools and when to use them

The first tool you should absolutely be using is Twitter’s Advanced Search tool. This is how you find people who share your interests and would make good contacts.

The next essential tool should be the venerable #hashtag. A tweet with a specific hashtag is more easily seen by people who follow / search for that hashtag. Master the hashtag, and you’ll be able to expand the reach of your tweets and jump into relevant conversations. But don’t overload your tweets with hashtags, though! A tweet with more than one or two hashtags can be very annoying and is actually counter-productive!

You can also take advantage of some very helpful software tools. Hootsuite is an excellent way for authors on Twitter to manage their feeds, schedule their posts, and build their audiences. Tools like SocialOomph automate your Direct Messages so you can automatically thank people who follow you. But don’t rely on automation too heavily. People don’t want to talk to a robot!

3. Reach out, but know the etiquette

Twitter is an engagement tool, and that means you have to get out of your shell and interact with people. Search out people who are talking about your areas of interest (whether it’s in a hashtag or just a few people tweeting each other) and jump in with helpful tips, resources or opinions.

But do not sell! Authors on Twitter must connect with people and engage, not push their book! It may sound backwards, but people will be more interested in looking at your book if they see you as a person, and see that you share their interests. If you want to promote your book in another way, quote some great passages from it instead (be sure to follow the and 20% promotional content).

4. Stay Focused

If you’ve ever spent more than ten minutes on the Internet, you know it’s really hard to keep your mind on what you’re doing. You could be looking through a list of hashtags for one you could jump into, and then see a tweeted link that’s totally unrelated but totally interesting! One thing leads to another, and two hours later you still haven’t connected with anyone!

Keep a tight rein on yourself and focus on the important tasks first: responding to your followers, engaging new ones, and setting up a tweet schedule. But hey, if it so happens that those interests converge—like your follower tweeting something interesting—then start a conversation about it!

5. Be Patient

Authors on Twitter simply must be patient. There are no shortcuts to getting genuine followers. The most successful Twitter personalities built up their audience over months and years of engaging with people.

The best things you can do are to stay true to your objective, be as genuine as possible, and have as much fun as you can!

If you are an author, and parsing your book into tweetable quotes doesn’t seem like fun, have us do it for you. Nimble Quotes offers a custom content subscription. We’ll load up your quotes and have them tweet out from your account on any frequency you wish. Too, you can have your book quotes available to other users thereby building awareness of your work. A few authors have done so already. Try out the Nimble Quotes . No credit card required.