This week on BARBELL BUSINESS, you’ll hear an “encore broadcast” which means you may have actually heard this episode before. If you have, you should listen to it again because it’s awesome. If this is new for you, we’ll discuss:

• How Matt Sharp, owner of CrossFit Maximus built a charitable referral system for their gym
• How Facebook check-ins can be the most effective and most cost effective ways to get traffic to your website
• How cause marketing drives brand awareness and member engagement
• How you can use this system to grow your gym’s membership

ALSO, be sure to download an all new free eBook: “How to Grow Your Gym and Raise Money for Charity at the Same Time.”

Matt Sharp, owner of Crossfit Maximus and Sweat Angels, has a simple way to increase your number of gym members using Facebook. And no… it’s not what you’d think.

Sweat Angels started when Matt and his partner at Maximus were trying to open up their second location. “We were very frustrated with our options for marketing. The only things that worked really well for us were word of mouth and Facebook. When I say Facebook, it wasn’t paid; it was just people loving our brand and loving our gym.” “In my other life, we did a lot of work with a company called Sojo and we do a lot of work with nonprofits. We had a ton of really strong nonprofit relationships.”

“We thought the most valuable social media traffic was the check in. And, to encourage that, we had an idea: every time someone checks in at our new location or our current location, we would give away a meal to a child. That was the initial pitch. And we came up with the idea of calling it Sweat Angels, which is the best name in the whole world for this program.” “We told the members about it and we were like, ‘Hey, we have this new location. If you guys check in on Facebook, we’re going to donate a meal to a child,’ and we had no idea what would happen.”

“We had averaged 30 check-ins a month going in to that first month for the previous three years. The first month of Sweat Angels, we had over 1,600 check-ins. We generated almost half a million impressions on Facebook.”

Read more by downloading this free eBook: “How to Grow Your Gym and Raise Money for Charity at the Same Time.”