Getting Raw Ep #23- Michael - Complete Online Marketing
In this episode of Getting Raw, host Richard Mark Toutounji interviews Michael McEwen, founder of Complete Online Marketing (COM), about the challenges fitness professionals face with their online presence and how COM addresses them. Michael highlights that 80‑90% of personal trainer and gym websites lack a clear purpose and a strong call‑to‑action, despite often having good content. He stresses the importance of a focused website strategy, a clear action plan, and a full‑service solution that covers domain registration, hosting, website design, SEO, Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and reporting. The conversation also covers the pitfalls of outsourcing—low‑cost providers with little expertise and the time burden on busy trainers. Michael explains COM’s end‑to‑end offering, from strategic sessions to implementation, and introduces CommTV, a series of educational videos on online marketing topics. The episode concludes with a promotional offer: a free website strategy session and three months of Australian‑based hosting for new clients.
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Welcome to Getting Raw. My name is Richard Mark Toutounji and I'm talking to Michael McEwen today. Very special guest, close to home because he's been on the other side of the camera a few Getting Raws, just sort of peeking his head in and seeing what's happening, seeing what's new in the industry. Michael is from Complete Online Marketing.
That's right.
An online marketing company, which I'm going to talk to you about very shortly. But before he's come to Complete Online Marketing, before he's got this company of his up, he had a very, I guess, close impact in the fitness industry, haven't you?
I did, yeah, you could say that.
Michael's an ex-Met Yore employee. He was our head of sales. And I guess the reason why I wanted to get Michael on the couch today is because I believe probably nobody, even including me, nobody's seen more personal training gym websites and Michael.
And Facebooks.
And Facebooks. You used to basically sit down all day on the phone and I guess helping trainers, helping gym owners, figuring out what the online marketing, what their issues were, how can we help them with Meet Your. And Michael just couldn't get off the phone sometimes. Most of the time he'd just say, we need to do this, you need to change that, you need to change this, you need to change that. I said, Michael, it's Meet Your memberships. But I guess in the whole online world, it's about He's about everything and that's why I bring him today because he's Generation Y. He keeps me in line when I get a little bit old and he can tell me what the new things are going. This is why we've got Michael here today. So welcome on board for your very first Getting Real on the couch on the other side of the camera. Thank you for having me. I want to talk about, I guess, you know, now focusing more on an online role with Complete Online Marketing.
Yeah.
What is your biggest concerns and problems you see in the industry after looking at these sites all day long every day? Certainly like when
With websites, the main thing is, I mean, having a purpose of your website. Like so many people, they get websites up and, you know, the websites will have a lot of content, a lot of stuff on it, but there's no real clear message for the website. It needs to really have a message and a purpose for people who are visiting it.
We all know this. I mean, I've been talking to trainers forever about this, but what percentage do you think this is happening? Like sites you're seeing every day, what percentage are the sites that are really bad?
I would say 80 to 90%.
80 to 90% of the websites? So most websites are absolute rubbish, should we say?
I don't want to go that far because some have some really great content on. Some people are really, you know, putting some amazing content on.
But not a call to action.
Not a call to action. So what I mean by saying that is, look, a lot of personal trainers have really great articles. They're putting up really great videos. That's all good. But it's that main thing on the homepage. The first 5 seconds of when someone goes onto a website is really— it needs to have a call to action.
And this is what, you know, when you're talking to meet your clients about, that's what you're always continually telling you to change this, change that, change this. And so tell me about now Complete Online Marketing. Now Complete Online Marketing is a company that's been, I guess, in the woodwork for the last couple of years. More than that. And Michael's sort of on Complete Online Marketing as the online marketing manager, so basically taking care of everybody's projects, everybody's systems, strategizing with clients that have got issues and that sort of stuff. You can tell the story, I guess, how Complete Online Marketing came about.
Yeah. Well, I suppose Complete Online Marketing came about where, you know, as Richard said, I was talking to a lot of personal trainers, a lot of people, and I've worked in online marketing since about 2009, so even before then. And basically everyone had the same problem. They didn't know what to do with their website, all these new things, Twitter, Facebook, how to use YouTube, that kind of thing. And basically we got together and I was saying, Richard, you know what, we need to offer this kind of thing. We need to do website design, you know, we really need to, we should And I always kept
saying no, no, I don't want
to do it.
Always. No, I don't want to do it. No, I don't want to do it. No, I don't want to do it. But eventually, you know, the online world is changing so much that we do need a lot of different other services and I guess, you know, clients who complain and say, well, I've tried to outsource and that's not working. Oh, please don't outsource, please don't outsource. Especially if you don't know what you're doing, outsourcing is a bad thing. Tell me about that, a little bit about outsourcing because a couple of clients called up and outsourced Tell me some situations there of what to avoid when you're outsourcing.
What to avoid? So if you're looking to outsource, I suppose, your online marketing, definitely people who they offer the world for literally like $50 or $100 a day— a month, they're going to get you, you know, number 1 on Google, 1,000 people a week. There are a lot of companies out there that they say they see the internet as a place where there's a lot of money to be made for people who don't know a lot about it and they don't have the real experience in it. And there's just a lot of people like that. It's easy for them to be like, yeah, we'll do this for you, we'll do that, but there's no real experience there and they don't actually know how to provide results for people.
And I think the biggest thing is time. If one thing I'm sure you've learned is personal trainers, gym owners, time poor. It's a service-based industry, so there's a lot of time we spend with the client. The last thing you want to do is then go home, get on your Skype headset up, and try to communicate with somebody, not in the greatest languages, having language difficulties, maybe not having a microphone and camera. And that's the biggest complaint that I always heard saying it's hard to outsource, it's cheap but it's hard. And at the end of the day, it's like you want a product that works the first time around without the complications.
That's right, yeah.
So this is where KOM came about. And so Complete Online Marketing, Michael's basically knocked down on my door every day and said, Richard, we need to offer a more complete service to fitness studios and personal trainers. And so then Michael went ahead and basically So we basically set up Complete Online Marketing, did all the groundwork, did everything that we need to do and we've created this company, Complete Online Marketing, where Michael basically— well, you basically help trainers and help business owners get online in a fast and easy and cost-effective way.
That's right.
Looking professional.
Looking extremely professional.
Yeah. So this is what Complete Online Marketing is about and I remember the names we were going through, some of the names and Complete Online Marketing and then we were trying to shorten it and it came to Amazing coincidence. Amazing coincidence. So it wasn't planned, by the way, so it's com. So tell me a bit more about Compliant Marketing because I know that Michael's headspace has been here for the last 4 or 5 months setting the company up, making sure that everything is in place. And I already agreed to say, right, Michael, go ahead and set it up, but it's got to be right, it's got to be good, and it's got to offer a full complete service. So tell me a bit more about it, what it does.
As the name would suggest, it goes basically Basically what we do is we offer strategy, starting off with strategy. It's so important. I mean, you can't just get a website up there without really looking at strategy.
Strategy, and that's where you dragged me into it. You said, Richard, I'm setting this up, you're going to be a part of it but you're going to be the head strategist. So basically with the strategy sessions, it's either myself or Michael will sit down and get a strategy sorted, whole online marketing.
What are you looking for? Who's your target market? Are you looking to sell something online? Are you just looking to get leads through for your business. Strategy, it's so important to do that.
First step, first step.
First step every time.
Okay, and then what's the next thing, Comzus? What's the second step that generally anybody needs once they've got a strategy in place? Yes, I want to get a lead, I want to get a website, I want to do something like that. What do they actually need to do then?
Second step from that is a plan of action. So you need to actually say, all right, so what's the best strategy for you? Are you a social person? Are you going to focus on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter? Or do you want to set up an awesome website? So after the strategy, you know, work on a plan of action and then say, okay, next step, let's do a website. So let's get a proper website set up. The website will attract leads and basically help grow your business. You know, once we've worked out what, you know, what the best course of action for your business is.
Yep. And that's the website, so setting up websites, setting up also domain names, hosting, the whole nine yards, yep?
Everything online, our aim is to basically handle that. And this was my condition when
Michael When someone else came to me and said, Richard, I really want to set this up, you know, we want to do this together. I said, well, whatever it does, it's got to do the whole thing. It's got to do from A to Z.
Everything.
Because what you don't want to do is then send someone else to do something and outsource it and it doesn't come back complete. It's got to come back completely good. And then the next part of it which is really close to me is the online marketing side of it. Tell me more about online marketing.
Online marketing, it changes so much all the time. Google is changing, you know, what it ranks highest when you put in a search term. Google's changing how it works that out. You know, Facebook, the Facebook page has recently changed the timeline, which was huge for a lot of businesses. And now you can put little landing pages in your Facebook. Things like that, you know, Twitter and using YouTube the right way, using blogs the right way, and, you know, what the actual purpose of that is. It's always changing.
And I think the thing I love about com— I like to use the word com instead of complete marketing. Cool.
It's very—
We tried the URL com.com.au, that was taken.
It was taken.
But we're working on it. So whoever's got it out there, we're willing to take it, but I'm sure it's going to be for big dollars out there. So anyway, Complete Online Marketing focuses on the online marketing side of it, and it was really important to make sure that whole thing is covered from the online marketing to the presence. So basically a client then can come to COM and go, right, I want to do this, go do it, give me the reporting and that sort of stuff. Down to the reporting. And this is what my What Michael's done with Meet Your Real Estate Agent over the last year and a half, 2 years, is pretty much every week gives me the reports, what's happening, how much traffic we're getting, how many leads we're getting in.
What are you ranking for?
What are we ranking, all those sort of things. My nice report I get, I love pieces of paper. Michael's more on the computer sort of, the iPad sticking around everywhere, but I like my physical piece of paper.
It's always within arm's reach.
It's always within arm's reach. I love my piece of paper with my reports and this is what's happening. And this is what Michael basically was delivering me over the year and a half through a lot of different industries that we have and I thought, well, you know, he's the man for the job to actually go out because at the end of the day, a client doesn't want to speak technical language, it doesn't want all that jargon, it doesn't want PHP, CSS, yada, yada, yada. It just wants the results and it wants to know what's happening. And this is why I guess KOM was set up. Tell me about your story, Michael. Before you were working here, you had a lot to do with the online marketing world. Tell me
about that. Yeah, basically I mean I've been working in online marketing for about 3, 3 and a half years now. So I suppose I came into it with— it was an AdWords company. So they basically focused on Google AdWords, which you will know is the advertisements on Google. It's how they make their money. So a client would come to us and basically they would say, okay, I'm a lawyer or I'm a gym owner or whatever, you know, and then we would provide them advertisements on Google. We would manage that for them. Now the problem with that is it only focuses on Google AdWords. There's so much other things that you need to focus on as a business. So I really, I realized like I loved working in online marketing, I liked exploring this whole world of it, but this company that like I actually worked for, you know, they did a great job of Google AdWords, but you know, what happens when a client goes, okay, people are coming to my site but no one's actually inquiring? I realized, well, it's not really, you know, it doesn't kind of capture it all. It doesn't go from A to Z. It just
Yeah, you need— and then you've got this supplier, that supplier, this supplier, so you pretty much want everything. That's what Comm's for. It's pretty much everything. So tell me, we're filming this today. What else is Comm offering in regards to education? I know there's some— you're working on some— you've got the camera here. What are you working on? Some scripts and that? What are you doing today in regards to that?
I'm going to be filming a few Comm TV episodes.
So what are we going to see? What's happening in the shows here?
A lot of informative stuff, hopefully not too geeky. It's going to be a lot about— So we're not going to
Are you going to bring the website team in? Not too geeky or what we're going to have next night?
No, but yeah, basically just talking about websites, Facebook, social media, that kind of thing.
Okay, cool. And so they can basically go on and just check out the CommTV and that sort of stuff. So I'm pretty excited because it's the first time that I've been part of setting up this company along with Michael to actually offer a complete service. So we've got a Meet Your Service, but now actually we can offer and deliver more than just a director. a Facebook page. We know everybody has a Facebook page, but we want to make sure that, I guess, you're on every platform and you're doing it exceptionally well to make sure you get the most amount of leads. Yeah. And that's what I'm really excited about, being able to now offer not just a directory listing to personal trainers on Meet Your Personal Trainer or Meet Your Gym, but actually offer the complete solution from domain name hosting to websites to a listing on Meet Your to website design to SEO to AdWords to Google to Facebook to social media, yada yada. And then the best part about it is someone to actually
That's right.
So you don't actually have to do all the updates yourself, which is very good. Which is— because that's the biggest thing, how do you keep up with all these social media and what's going on?
It's time, it's so much time to actually look at your whole business online and say, where do I start here, what am I going to do?
Yeah, awesome. All right, well that sort of I think wraps it up. It gives an overview of what Completo Marketing is, what Michael is, and I'm pretty excited. It was sort of like a, I guess, a plug for Comm as well. I mean, a plug for what we do here, why not? Because I think it's helping out the fitness community as a whole, getting the right structure for them and getting it moving and getting going. What I'll do, I think we need some sort of offer. I'm going to put some sort of offer here. I think something free. Let's give some free stuff away, like some free hosting probably. Let's do some— let's do like a free hosting for 3 months.
Free website strategy.
Free website strategy. Let's do 3 months of free hosting. Can we handle that?
Sure, well, let's do it.
3 months free hosting when you come across to Kong for hosting. So just cheap Good prices of hosting, makes your sites up. It's Australian-based host, not American stuff, so it's real-time. It's better for SEO that way as well. So let's do that. Free website strategy session and— is that it? Is that what you're offering? Free website strategy session and a free 3 months free hosting. I'll put that in place, okay? Thank you very much, Michael. Thanks for coming in.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks for sharing and I'm looking forward to your CommTV. I want to see if you can actually get a few episodes out of that. Share the information then. So we should— thanks a lot, guys.
Thank you.
