| Focus August 1, 2007
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When
SeriousAboutFitness.com began in 2002, we catered exclusively to fitness competitors.
Since then, we've expanded and grown. However, we'll still be covering competitive fitness
from time to time. Shown above is Jaclyn Troup, the 2007 OPA Ontario Fitness Champion.
(Photos June 2007 by Doug Schneider) |
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Diversity
When we started SeriousAboutFitness.com in 2002, our goal
was to produce an online publication that would appeal to competitive fitness enthusiasts.
Competitive fitness is the sport that combines physique competition with an entertaining,
athletic routine. Therefore, it requires a high degree of skill coupled with great
physical development. At the time, it was the right thing to do – competitive fitness
was popular with women and no other publication was catering exclusively to this market.
However, we also knew that focusing on competitive fitness
would limit our appeal. Furthermore, we realized that the content we were producing could
be altered just a bit to be more valuable to other women who weren’t competitors at
all – women who simply wanted to get into great shape.
So, over time, we broadened our scope and changed our motto
from being a "Complete Competitor Resource" to being a "Complete Resource
for Active Women." Our articles went from being mostly about competitive fitness to
covering all aspects of women’s weight training, nutrition, and general health. The
transition was a success, but one thing never changed – right from the beginning we
had an agenda to provide honest, informative, interesting articles, not the fluff and
nonsense that you read in so many of the exercise-based magazines today. Therefore, even
though we were diversifying, we made sure we stuck to our mandate of being serious
about fitness even if we weren’t focusing exclusively on competitive fitness
anymore.
This change broadened our appeal – so much so that we
grew and by 2006 we added three more sites under the SeriousAboutFitness.com umbrella.
These are: SAFGirlTalk.com, SAFCoverGirls.com, and GirlsofSAF.com. All these sites are,
of course, free of charge.
In 2007, though, we knew it was time for yet another change
that would help us grow, but instead of adding any new sites, we knew we wanted to do
something "outside" the Internet. The result was the SAF Model Search that was
held on June 15 in Toronto, Canada. The event was a huge success that saw dozens of
competitors from across Canada compete and two champions emerge – Aleisha Hart and
Maya Avelino won the Figure Model and Fitness Model categories respectively. The June 15
event was the first of many and brought SeriousAboutFitness.com from being Internet-only
to being out in the real world too – a place where we’re going to stay. The next
SAF Model Search will be held on November 10 in Ottawa, Canada, and there will be more
events in 2008. (SAFModelSearch.com,
another one of our SeriousAboutFitness.com-related sites, has all the details as well as
photos from the June 15 show.)
Obviously, diversity has been a key factor to
SeriousAboutFitness.com’s success. Therefore, you’ll be seeing us continuously
improving and expanding even more. But, even though we’re diversifying, we’re
not forgetting our roots. We’ll continue to provide articles like the ones we have
published in the past and, of course, we’ll continue to write about competitive
fitness and the women involved in it from time to time. And, obviously, our content will
remain as informative and relevant as ever. Our goal, though, isn’t just to bring our
message of women’s health and fitness to a small, niche audience. Instead, the
healthy and positive image we project has global appeal, and we want the women of the
world to know that we’re serious about fitness and they should be too!
...Doug Schneider
das@seriousaboutfitness.com |
