Club Industry’s Fitness Business Pro launched the Step by Step online how-to section in January 2006 to educate our readers on how they can improve their fitness facility’s profitability, boost their marketing efforts and strengthen their group exercise programming and spa offerings. Since the monthly print magazine focuses on industry news and trends rather than how-to articles, the Web site provides a way for the publication to offer more resources to our readers. The authors, who are all fitness professionals, draw from their years of experience in the industry to provide guidance on many important topics to club owners and managers.

Click on the topics below to read the columns from industry experts.

If you’d like to write for the section, e-mail Jennipher Shaver at jennipher.shaver@penton.com with the following three items.

Underneath your headline, please include a short bio. Your bio should be about 50 words long and include your current job title and company. You should also include your contact information such as your e-mail address, phone number and Web site URL. Please also briefly describe any relevant experience in the fitness industry.

Here is an example of an author bio:

Will Phillips, founder of REX Roundtables for Executives, manages 15 Club Roundtables for owners in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He has consulted to CEOs in 34 industries and nine countries in the last 30 years. You can reach him at Will@REXonline.org.

Underneath your author bio, please include your byline. For example: By Joe Smith

Capitalize the first word of your subhead, but leave the rest of the words in the subhead lower case. Place a period after the subhead and make it the first part of a paragraph. Also, make your subheads bold.

For example:

1. Make copies of the business checkup form for your management team. Encourage your managers to be 100 percent honest when filling out the form. If you don’t have a management team, have your spouse fill it out. As the leader of the club, you then fill out the form. The next step is to compile all the answers on to a copy of the checkup so that you can see everyone’s responses at once.

Each of your columns will include your mug shot. Please e-mail a high-resolution head-and-shoulders photo of yourself to Jennipher Shaver at jennipher.shaver@penton.com. Your photo will not only appear in the online version of the article, but it will also appear in our online table of contents in our monthly magazine, so it will need to be high resolution. Please save it in a JPEG format. Rather than copying and pasting your photo in your article, please send it as a separate e-mail attachment.

Please make your headline 16 point in the Arial font and your body text 10 point in the Times New Roman font. Save your article as a Microsoft Word document (.doc) and place a line of space between each of your paragraphs.

The article needs to be about 750 words long and have a how-to approach. Rather than being written as an opinionated column, a Step by Step article should instead be a guide on a particular subject.

The readers of Club Industry’s Fitness Business Pro are owners and managers of health clubs, nonprofit fitness facilities, university rec centers and military fitness facilities. As a result, the columns should be targeted toward fitness facility owners and managers rather than toward personal trainers, health club members or front-desk employees.

We post five columns on the 10th of every month to correspond with the mailing of our e-mail newsletter, Newsbeat. Please make sure you send your materials in by the 10th of the previous month you are writing for. For example, if you are writing a column for January, your content will be due December 10.

Step by Step has several different sections: Personal Training, Spas, Marketing, Sales, Clubs, Retention and Programming. When you suggest your topics, please state which section you will be writing for.

The articles must not mention any manufacturer or promote any specific product.

The Step by Step articles are not research papers, and therefore, they don’t need a bibliography or footnotes. Instead, please reference the source within the text of the article.

To be published in the Step by Step section, your article must be original and not published elsewhere. Before publishing your article we will send you a copyright agreement to sign.

Due to our limited freelance budget, we’re not able to compensate our Step by Step writers for their online columns. Writing a column, however, is a way to increase awareness of your business or service and increase your name recognition in the fitness industry.