Here’s the passage I just read…

“The content you offer MUST have distinctive qualities, and your personality needs to show.  A well executed web site, like a quality television program or film is a combination of content and delivery.  But on the web, many organizations spend much more time and money on the design and delivery aspects than then do on the content itself.  Don’t fall into this trap.  Perfecting that critical mix of content, design, and technology is where the art comes in.”

You want your readers and followers to feel like you’re real and accessible.  And you HAVE to be unique.  Because if you’re not unique, you’re not interesting, you’re boring.  And nobody follows a bore.

be a fitness nomad…

Follow this link to Take Advantage of Your 2 Free Weeks of Content:

www.WriteLikeANomad.com

This morning I got another email from a vendor who has been trying to sell me something through their email funnel.  I opted-in a few weeks back and I get about 2-3 emails per week.  This is fine with me.  I understand exactly what they are trying to do, except for one very important point.  It is plainly obvious to me that these emails have not been given the attention they deserve.  They lack substance, passion, and anything of true value.

In my opinion, everything you send out should hold at least some value on its own for your clients, prospects, and others in your personal network.  I’ll admit  that I’ve been guilty of the same myself at times in the past – but no more!  I value your precious time as a reader and follower of my work too much to waste it.  And I am certainly not interested in wasting my own time dolling out pure drivel in a weak attempt to make a sale.  I want your trust and respect and I need to earn it.  I, like you, also have only a limited amount of time in this life, and I don’t plan on wasting any more of it.

This mission is important, as pointed out by marketing expert David Meerman Scott in his recent blog post.  He makes the point that we’ve moved beyond the age of email broadcasts to huge lists.  In fact, as he points out in his story.  When you do that, you hurt your business more than help it.  In his story he shares a marketing email he received from American Airlines that should have never been sent to him if they were paying more attention to what they were doing.  You should read it, it’s a good lesson in the important of list segmentation.

So, if you’re strapped for time and looking for a means of creating more remarkable content for your fitness blog, your newsletters, etc. I encourage you to stay tuned to this blog and the launch of my new membership site.  I just approved the final art today and in about two weeks I hope to go live.  This site, and my career as a fitness professional will continue to move in a more powerful direction of creation starting right now.  The creation of a mountain of content designed to make your life better and more productive as a fitness pro and beyond.

If you’d like a two week sample of the kind of content I’ll be creating for you, you can try it for FREE by going right now to WriteLikeANomad.com.  I’ve left some for you there.

Before you finish spending time on this blog post today, I also highly encourage you to check out the Khan Academy.  This guy is awesome, and a perfect example of what I’m talking about.  More about him later.  For now, I’ll save you some time so that you can go see what he’s doing.  It’s a great example of what just one person can do to change the world in today’s information age.

The really cool thing about what this guy is doing is that he’s doing it all for FREE because he can, and most likely in the end, he will be a very wealthy man.

WriteLikeANomad.com

Of course, any time something like this happens it’s an excellent opportunity to re-assess on many levels all of the systems that take care of staff management, etc.  These systems are NEVER perfect and ALWAYS need more work, especially in my case.

You may have already heard the expression that “People Respect What YOU Inspect.”  And if you’re a studio owner or manager of anyone, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.  For me, this part is difficult…there are so many other more interesting things I’d rather do than check-up to see if you washed the toilets last night.

Managing a lot of people is NOT what I do best and is NOT my preferred activity, EVER.  This might sound a little brash or insensitive.  Tough!  Over the last year I’ve worked very hard to contract my business model down to the point where it feels much more manageable, and where I can spend good productive time building my way into more and more information marketing.  From the day I started my first paper in graduate school, I have been madly in love with the work of researching, reading, and then writing about what I know.  This is what I like to do best.  I always will…

Still, I realize that I will always need a small number of staff members to help run my operation (which will always include the fitness part).  As such, like it or not, I’ve got to get better at managing my people.  But first, I need to make sure and hire the right ones.

Which brings me to my point…

Far too often in my own career I’ve experienced the job interview as a potential candidate and realized something very profound – most people doing interviews have absolutely no idea what they are doing.  Really, it’s true.  I learned early on that if I took advantage of my strong and intense personality, that I could easily take control of the interview and end up asking more questions than my potential employer.  Great for me, but not for the employer.

Remember, the person who is asking the most questions and talking the least is the person who is in control of the conversation.  So, as an interviewer, your first job is to Shut Up!

To keep you interested, I uncovered a list of really cool, fun and interesting questions that I encourage you to work in to your interviews.  It is just these types of questions that will tell you more about a candidate than any of the other basic ones.

In fact, my favorite question to ask, which tells the best story about a person is this one…

“What is your most powerful personal asset?”

You would be surprised at how this one weeds out the weanies.  I actually had one girl tell me that it was her “good looks.”  That experience told me that I needed to do better with my screening process but that’s a different blog post I’ll write another time.

In the mean time, be sure to check out these interview questions from Microsoft, Google, and IKEA.  They’re awesome!

Interview Questions from Microsoft, Google, and IKEA.

And here’s the one I promised that’s not written into that article…

“Why are man-hole covers round?”  I’ll look for your answers in the comments section of this post.

In the mean time, here’s a list of simple questions I use.  They get the conversation started and then I look for places where I can dig for gold…

“Tell me about yourself?”

“What are your strengths?”

“What are your weaknesses?”

“Have you worked with clients before. If so, What’s your favorite part of the work?”

“What do you like about working with people?”

“Why did you choose fitness as a career?”

“Why aren’t you in better shape than you are now?  And what do you plan to do about it?”  And how do you think this will affect your work with clients?”

“What is your most powerful personal asset?”

“Why should I hire you?”  (This one always tells me a lot about how good a salesman this person is and how well they can or cannot promote their personal brand)

OK, now go find some great people….ExerciseCareers.com is a great place to start

I discovered later that day that the email he was referring to had been sent at 9:30 PM the night before.  The email where he explained that he was quitting without any further notice.   It was only 9 AM in the morning the next day.

The truth is he needed to go anyway.  I was going to make sure of that once I had his replacement fully prepared.  He lacked the initiative I expect from the people who work for me.  Which is why I’m sharing the story with you here today.  This story provides a good example of why most people are not successful in their lives.  They expect the world to deliver them money, riches, opportunity, and anything else they deem important to them.  While at the same time not expecting to have to go out and get it – to make it happen.

Seth Godin, on his blog today hit it right on the head.  And his post was short and to the point, as any really good blog post almost always is.  So I have included the whole thing here to help make my point.

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The relentless search for “tell me what to do”