I believe that the Affiliate community is under threat from forces both internal and external.

We compete with each other on price while large corporate entities (with superior economics, derived from scale) prepare to drastically undercut us with one-size-fits-all group classes.

We are complicit in a rapid race to the financial bottom, accelerated by our own strategic and tactical ignorance…

There is a firm and immediate relationship between risk and reward: If you don’t take a risk, there will be no reward.

This lesson is easy in the abstract, and incredibly difficult when it’s your (whatever) on the line. As we accumulate rewards, in the form of jobs, cars, spouses, and real estate, we forget the dynamic that got us there, protecting, hedging, and refusing further risk. In doing so, it’s no longer rewards on the line. It’s progress.

I started by giving it away — a free four-hour business Seminar. And by loading it with way more info than might be considered prudent by the paywall crowd, I was rewarded with approximately 1/10th of participants taking me up on the AF Project 2.0 (a $399 nine-hour Seminar that covered my bills for a full year).

Now, I'm going to begin the process of giving that away, publishing the AF Project on this blog.

It would be easy to dismiss turnover as an unassailable inconvenience, the price of doing business.  In reality, membership loss follows a consistent pattern, one the smart gym owner can effectively counteract.  In this post, I'm going to teach you how.  

In every one of my seminars and consulting engagements, I preach the value of blogging and inbound marketing.  The reason:  It's an amazing tool for growing revenue.

You choose a tangible goal, write a compelling blog entry, send people to the blog, serve a call-to-action, capture their information, and poof: you're well on you way to new clients, growing your client base and succeeding as a gym owner.   

If you can master the inbound cycle, you'll spend a lot less time wondering why you're not growing and a lot more time wondering how to handle scores of trial clients.  Therefore, I harp on it like crazy.

Still, no matter how much I preach, the advice to engage in inbound is useless unless you're actually able to create content.  It's the lynchpin of the effort, and two critical parts of the inbound marketing cycle depend on it: creating blog posts and writing newsletters.  In this step-by-step guide, we'll concentrate on the first, and I'll show you how to use your blog output to create the second.