First and foremost, congratulations on opening your gym. It’s not an easy process by any means, so the fact that you got this far says a lot about your business acumen. Now that you’ve got all your ducks in a row, it’s time to start filling your gym with members. This seems like it’s going to be the easiest part of running a gym, but in fact, it’s one of the hardest. Though there are some small business horror stories out there about using daily deals, there are also some great success stories. Though the majority of your daily deal folks won’t stick around in the long term, daily deal promotions are a great way to get people into a new business. Below you’ll find 4 ways to leverage Groupon type sites when you’re opening your gym.

Use Groupon to Generate Initial Facebook Fans

When you’re setting up your Groupon or other daily deal sites, make sure that you link to both your Facebook and your website. This way, when the thousands(or millions) of people in Groupon’s mailing list get your promotion, you’ll get a bunch of new visitors to your Facebook page. Convert some of those visitors into “Likes” and your page will start appearing like a legitimate business (no one trusts those “0 Like” businesses).

Fill Up Classes During the First Month

If you’re gym is focused on providing fitness classes, there’s a good chance that most of those classes during the open month(s) are going to be rather thinly populated. There’s nothing wrong with that, since you’re a new business and all. However, leverage those Groupon members and start topping off your classes so that your non-Groupon members don’t feel like they’re working out by themselves. If you have a class registration system in place, you can set a certain number of Grouponers per class, so that you can spread them out across various classes, helping fill them all up.

Help Build World of Mouth Advertising

The great thing about Groupon deals are that they generate a ton of word of mouth advertising. From my personal experience, when I was working at PaySimple back in 2013, I thoroughly remember my manager telling me every time she started doing a new Groupon workout. She’s actually tell EVERYONE at work about her new workout. Imagine this same effect happening at the offices of all your new Groupon members. Your gym’s name is going to start popping up in water cooler conversation and you’ll start getting some brand recognition in your city as a result. If you’re a bookwork and want to do some reading on effective word-of-mouth implementation, check out this top seller on Amazon.

Generate Some Necessary Web Traffic to Your Site

Last but not least, setting up a Groupon deal when you’re first opening your gym is a great to get traffic to your website. This traffic helps notify Google that your website is up and running. When a website doesn’t have any inbound links, it’s much harder for Google to “crawl” it, meaning that it takes a longer time to start turning up in search results. That said, besides the initial inbound link from the Groupon deal, get out there and start finding some relevant inbound links for your site to boost PageRank.