Beth Sabol | Fit Moms Flagstaff

I started my journey as a fitness professional after the birth of my first daughter when I started a Stroller Strides franchise in Flagstaff, AZ. Since then, my business, Fit Moms Flagstaff, LLC,  has grown to include prenatal fitness (Fit4Baby), bootcamp-style classes (Body Back), small-group personal training and a moms-only running club (Moms on the Run Flagstaff).

Being part of a franchise gives you access to some amazing tools- at the time (almost 4 years ago), publishing your own blog on the Stroller Strides network wasn’t an option, so I started my own.

I had a fairly strong ‘tech’ background, but was pretty new to blogging, so I started out with the user-friendly blogger.com platform. I created and religiously updated my blog a few months before I opened my business and it was key in attracting local mothers to my first class and was key in retaining my Stroller Strides members.

Every week I updated the blog with a few health-related posts, some mom-related posts and one or two posts about local events. Eventually the Stroller Strides Flagstaff blog became known as one of the ‘places to go’ in Flagstaff for health, motherhood and local information. Not only did my blog help grow my business by increasing my online visibility and my SEO ranking- it also became an added revenue source. By tracking unique visitors to the blog with google analytics I brought data to the table when approaching local businesses to sell ad space.

Recently, I’ve noticed that “my moms” focus more on places like facebook- they like the simplicity of only having one place to visit for all their online information. For me, the easiest way to do this is to link my blog posts to my facebook page using a service like HootSuite. Linking your blog to facebook helps reduce the number of things you have to update every day and helps increase traffic to your blog. However it really only reaches the people that are already fans of your page, so I started a twitter account.

Twitter has been an extremely effective way for me to network with local businesses, local media and national groups. Connections made through twitter have led to sponsors for my running team, parties for my Mom’s Club and outreach to new clients that I never would have achieved through more traditional means. The majority of my most recent Body Back clients were women that heard about the program either directly or indirectly from twitter. Linking your facebook page to twitter (and vice versa) is also a great way to decrease your daily workload and increase your businesses presences on both social media platforms.