FitSW Blog - Personal Trainer Software & Fitness Business Blog

FitSW Updates From May.

May was yet another busy month for the FitSW team. We have added new features, made other featured better, made general usability improvements to our apps, and made a couple small changes to the FindTrainGain site. In this article we will go over all of the FitSW updates from May.

Improved Prospecting Through Trainer Pages and FindTrainGain.

We have given trainers the ability to separate their clients from prospective clients. Now, prospective clients reach you through either your trainer page or on FindTrainGain.

FitSW Updates From May - Image of new chat widget available on FitSW Trainers Pages. — Figure 1. New messenger button on trainer pages.

This is a demo trainer page (figure 1). Notice the chat bubble on the bottom right? Now prospective clients who are viewing your trainer page and click that and message your directly. No more filling out forms or having to scrape your page for contact info. It there, easy to access.

Besides that, messages sent this way will land in your FitSW account rather then going to your email, keeping everything as organized as possible.

FitSW Updates From May - Image of segmenting prospective clients from current clients in the FitSW messenger. — Figure 2. New and improved messenger.

Here is what the updated messenger looks like (figure 2). Notice the “Prospects” and “Clients” tabs at the top of the messenger window? Prospects are people who are not clients yet and have messaged you through the messenger on your trainer page OR through FindTrainGain. When a prospect messages you, their message will appear under the prospects tab in the messenger with their contact info and name as well. Here is what the chat option looks like on FindTrainGain:

Each trainer card has a “chat” button prospects can click. when clicked, a message window opens:

Oh ya, did we forget to mention we redesigned the cards that display trainer profiles in FindTrainGain? Oops. Well anyway, each card now comes with a “chat” option with it as well. Regardless of the source, whether prospective clients are messaging your through your trainer page on through FindTrainGain, they will all come through to the same place.

Added “Pan Through” Feature to Live Classes.

One thing we want all trainers to be able to do is see all of their clients perform exercises over live online classes. However, we really can only display up to six video feeds at a time because any more then that drastically degrades the video and quality and is hard on most computers.

As a result, we implemented a “pan through” feature. With this feature, you can set the number of video feeds you want to display and then click and drag on a little toggle icon to display the next set of video feeds.

For example, if you set the video feed to display 3 feeds and you have 30 class participants, you can click and drag to cycle through 3 video feeds at a time until you go through the entire class. This way, you cans see everyone.

The FindTrainGain Elite Trainer Badge.

We also implemented an “elite trainer” badge on FindTrainGain that helps trainers who have purchased the Elite Trainer page stick out on the FindTrainGain listings. While not a huge change, it can help you gain that extra edge over other trainers.

Multi-time Zone Support.

We have made many improvements to the time-zone settings in FitSW. Now clients can be in one timezone and trainers can be in a totally different timezone and the time will sync across all accounts to ensure seamless accuracy. When you login, we automatically detect the timezone you’re in and base messages and scheduling off of this.

New iOS Release.

Now, on our iOS apps, you can set times for task and nutrition plans and add them to your calendar. Making it easier for you as the trainer to keep client compliance at an all time high. Now you can add these events to your calendar on the fly from your iOS device.

New Android Sorting Improvements.

With a recent release, we have made improvements to our android apps. Now you can sort workout, task, and nutrition lists by date or alphabetically. Making it easier to find what you are looking for.

3 Additional Revenue Streams for Personal Trainers.

A lot of personal trainers stick to one of revenue stream. Typically, their main source of revenue is the revenue they make from training clients. But, when you look at the world of personal training, it turns out there are a lot more opportunities for extra revenue then some may realize. In this article, we will cover, in detail, 3 additional revenue streams for personal trainers.

1. Selling Digital Assets.

This one has been a trend in the fitness industry for the last couple years and has solidified it’s place as a permanent position in the fitness industry. Selling guides and eBooks can be an excellent method of adding additional revenue streams for personal trainers.

As a trainer, you are trained, through rigorous education and industry experience to become an expert in physical fitness, health, and nutrition. If you wanted to put together an eBook or guide to sell, you could probably do quite well if you approached it the right way.

Sell eBooks

Here are some eBook examples you may be interested in exploring:

An insiders guide to becoming a successful online personal trainer.
- If you have had success as an online personal trainer, this could be a great option for you. Detail your experience, and what you found to be key ingredients in success.
From Personal Trainer to Studio Gym Owner & Personal Trainer, a guide to opening your first studio gym.
- This is a great option if you’ve already had success opening a studio gym.
You’re a Personal Trainer Now What? A guide to launching a rewarding career as a Fitness Professional.
- Really, any experienced trainer can write an eBook like this. Help trainers figure out rewarding career paths as a fitness professional.
The definitive sales guide for Personal Trainers.
- Sales is an aspect a lot of trainers struggle with, namely, new trainers. If you have found a system or philosophy that has yielded results for you, this could be a good option for you.
Scaling your Personal Training Business 101.
- Another aspect trainers struggle with are things like sales, developing their own business model, marketing, and a variety of other business related topics. Writing a guide about this would be of great value to many.

Related Content: How to grow your fitness business with an eBook.

Sell Fitness and Nutrition Guides

This has been one of the main trends in selling digital assets in the fitness industry, mainly leveraged by social media influencers. However, if influencers with no certification can have success doing it, so can a personal trainer with a certification and industry experience.

Guides are typically different then eBooks. Most of the time guides are there to help people work their way through fitness programs or nutrition programs. As in, guides usually mean people take action while reading the guide.

While eBooks are meant to be there to help people better understand more in depth concepts. Lets take a look at a couple examples of fitness and nutrition guides that are popular:

Kayla Istines Bikini body Guide – The guide operates as a nutrition and fitness program. It walks people who purchase it through a 12 week fitness and nutrition program. It includes in depth instructions on how to do each exercise and how to eat to accomplish you fitness goals.
Her Body by Gilles Souteyrand – This guide is strictly a 12 week fitness program. However, much like the previous guide mentioned, it gives in depth instruction on the entire program to help people who purchase it get maximum results. The guide can also be bundled with a nutrition guide as well.
Fresh Body fit Mind by Amanda Bisk – This is a 30 day yoga guide. However, instead of simply paying for access, she offers an in-app subscription to gain access to not only the guide but also to a variety of other yoga classes. So, instead of generating value by driving sales on the guide alone, she uses it to get people on her app on a very cheap subscription basis.
Premium Workouts by Tone it Up – Tone it up is a group of fitness professionals who sell a variety of programs in fitness and nutrition. However, just like the previous guide, in order to access it, you have to sign up for a subscription to their app where you can access other fitness and nutrition resources.

As you can see, although the terms “eBook” and “Guide” are somewhat interchangeable, guides and eBooks and typically different in the content they give to the reader.

2. Join an Affiliate Marketing Program.

As a personal trainer, your opinion on fitness, health, and nutrition products is likely to be trusted more then the average person. This means, if you announce support for certain products, people are more likely to trust your opinion on the matter. Affiliate marketing programs can be an excellent additional streams for personal trainers.

This is why joining an affiliate marketing program can add a decent amount of additional revenue streams to personal trainers.

But first, What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is the process of earning commission by promoting other peoples [or company’s] products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale you make.
Pat Flynn

The quote above by Pat Flynn is about as straight forward as a it gets. In affiliate marketing networks, there are typically a couple parties involved:

The Merchant: is the entity that created the product that you are promoting. It can be a big company like Cellucor or it can be small, local vendors.

The Affiliate: is the party that does the promoting. Affiliates can range from a single person who has their own website and store to large agencies that do massive promotion for certain products. The job of the affiliate is to not only convince people to use the product but also drive enough traffic to their site such that it becomes worth it for the merchant to have the affiliate on the marketing network.
The consumer: makes the whole system go’round. Without sales, there’s no commission.
The Network: is the structure to the whole system. In some cases the merchant will create their own network, however, in other cases, the merchant will join a third party network. Third party networks are created by companies that specialize in creating affiliate networks. Their product is providing a framework for merchants to sell their products on a network and for affiliates to join the network and pick what products/services they want to market.

This all sounds more complicate then it is. While there are a lot of moving parts here, as the affiliate, your job is simply to market the products in the affiliate network within the guidelines provided by the merchant and the network.

Let’s look at a couple examples of affiliate networks for fitness/nutrition professionals.

IdealFit – is one of the fastest growing fitness brands in North America. They sell sports nutrition products specifically for women. They also sell a variety of other athletic wear products for women. With their affiliate program, you get 8% commission for each sale you make on their behalf.
National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) – is one of the biggest certifications in the personal training industry. It’s a lot of trainers go-to certification (along with ACE). However, with this affiliate network, you are selling a course/certification instead of a physical product. This is a higher ticket item. For each sale you get on the behalf of NASM, they give you $25 in commission.
Horizon Fitness Affiliate Program – Horizon is a part of Johnson Health Tech, a company that designs and manufactures high quality exercise equipment. They are also a higher ticket item (expensive), but with that you get higher commission payouts. With each sale you make on their behalf, you get a commission rate of 8% with the average sale being at around the $800 mark.

The affiliate programs listed above are all “A-list” programs that are well worth it to join. They are reputable companies that sell great products and have fair commission rates for their affiliate partners.

Quality over Quantity

When choosing an affiliate marketing network to join and subsequent products/services to promote, don’t choose one over the other just because it is cheaper and you are more likely to sell more of them. The likelihood is people will affiliate your site with cheap products rather then quality products which is a recipe to scare people off. And especially stay away from MLM’s or other companies similar to them.

3. Sell White Label Products.

White label products aren’t branded and are available for people to brand with their own brand and sell as their brands products. A lot of influencers and big trainers will find white label products to sell under their brand.

Typically, all of the processing and shipping is done for you. Meaning you don’t have to purchase inventory, deal with shipping, or perform customer service.

How it Works

You set up your store and pick which products you want to offer.
Drive traffic to your store through ads or other marketing activities.
Make sure your stores design and user experience is professional and easy to navigate.
Set up automation software so when someone makes a purchase on your site, the white label can process the order efficiently.

There are a variety of white label products you can sell as a personal trainer such as, athletic apparel, supplements, and even equipment. Here some companies you can reach out to to sell their products:

Nutracap – provides white label supplements in which you can design a label for and sell as your own. Additionally, if you don’t want to design your own label, you can ask them to do it for you (add-on costs may be applied).
Flex-N-Flex Fitness Apparel – sells fitness clothing that you can brand as your own from t-shirts and tank tops to wrist wraps and weight lifting belts.
Elivate – provides white label fitness equipment you can purchase, slap your logo on and use in your gym or even sell on a website.

As you can see, in the world of white labeling, pretty much anything is possible. If you wanted to, you could furnish a gym with branded everything, even you equipment.

Recapping Additional Revenue Streams for Personal Trainers.

After going over everything in this blog alone, there are ample additional revenue streams for personal trainers. Whether it be joining an affiliate program, selling eBooks or Guides, or even selling your own branded products, the opportunities are endless. However, we really only touched on three examples. I encourage you to do your own research as you are more then likely to stumble upon other options that weren’t mentioned in this blog.

Before we finish up, lets go over a couple considerations for white labeling products or joining affiliate programs. When looking at the products that you want to sell or promote, do not go with the cheaper options. The likelihood is that the products will not perform as well as the flagship products in the same industry. This has potential to leave people upset, never to come back to your site again.

After all, the whole point to selling stuff to people is not to amass dollar signs. It’s really to start a relationship with the customer whose foundation is built on trust. In the end, it will save you headaches to just go with the better product, even if it is more expensive or harder to get into.

Have Feedback on 3 Additional Revenue Streams for Personal Trainers?

Feel free to reach out to us at support@fitsw.com or via our social channels. We welcome all feedback and questions, positive or negative!

Client Onboarding for Online Personal Trainers.

If you are an online personal trainer, then client on boarding should be a core focus in terms of your business processes. In today’s day and age, if the digital experience is not as seamless as possible, it may cause havoc in the beginnings of the relationship you are developing between yourself and the client. In this article, we will go over client onboarding for online personal trainers.

What’s included in Client Onboarding for Online Personal Trainers?

When you think of client onboarding for online personal trainers, you want to put yourself in the clients shoes. What would you expect if you were a client? Additionally, ask yourself; what tools do you use and how do you manage the client relationship after the point of onboarding? Do you use an app like FitSW to deliver programs? How will you go about scheduling initial consultations with new clients?

I know, a lot of questions and so little answers.

An example onboarding process

Client onboarding typically happens after they have made a purchase. As a result, purchases are typically the trigger point for all onboarding materials sent to the client.

As the trainer, ask yourself what information you need from the client. This is where you can get started.

After a customer makes a purchase, its typical practice to use an email automation tool that sends a welcome email to them thanking them for becoming a client and providing information on next steps.

Tools to use for welcome emails

These are all great tools to use for email automation. With each tool, you can use forms on your website to trigger automated emails to get sent out. For example, as we spoke about above, when someone purchases something on your site, the purchase form they fill out can be used to trigger the welcome email.

Here’s an example welcome email:

” Hey {INSERT CLIENT NAME},

Thank you for choosing me as your personal trainer! I look forward to sitting down with you to learn more about what your goals and motivations are.

However, we have some paperwork we have to complete before we can get started. This is paperwork I have ALL clients complete before pushing forward with training. You should be receiving an email here shortly with the following attached:

Client-Trainer contract – This is put in place to ensure the best interests of all parties are preserved. Please sign this after reading it thoroughly.
Liability release waiver – This is a waiver that waves me as liable to any possible injuries you you might suffer from intense physical exercise. Although they are very rare, I still take this as a precautionary step. Please sign this after reading it thoroughly.
PAR-Q questionnaire – a PAR-Q form is a quick and simple form that gives me information on your things like medical history, day-to-day lifestyle, and a couple other key pieces of information that help me do a better job as a trainer. Please take the time to fill this out with up-to-date, accurate information.
links to scheduling our first phone call – Just simply click the link and select a time that works for you for us to have chat about what our next steps are.

If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me at:

{INSERT YOUR EMAIL}
{INSERT YOUR PHONE NUMBER}

I look forward to speaking with you!

Best Regards,

{INSERT YOUR NAME}”

About the email template

In the email template, each section where you see “{INSERT}” – these actually represent real variables you can insert into the body of your email. Essentially what happens is, the service you use (Mailchimp, Hubspot, etc…) collects the information of people who are submitting forms on your page and stores them in a data base.

Then, when an email gets sent, it replaces the variable for the information the customer provided OR information you have defined. For example, your name and contact information.

You may be asking; “Okay, but why can’t I just type that stuff out?”. Thats a great question. You can if that is your preference. However, many of these email automation services not only provide these variables, but also email templates already typed out.

This way, you can simply go create an audience and select an email automation template to customize to your messaging, business, and brand. It makes the whole process extremely east and fast to set up.

What comes after the welcome email?

After the welcome email, typically you send two different types of emails:

Informative emails – give your new clients a glance at your process. This should inform them of how you are building their program, how you deliver it, how you track their progress, and how they can provide feedback on workouts/exercises.
Administrative emails – These are emails as we have mentioned above in our example welcome email template. They include emails containing contracts, waivers, PAR-Q forms, and any additional forms you have clients fill out.

Usually, these emails are two separate emails. This is recommended to keep things organized and to help prevent overwhelming people with a lot of information. One email will contain links or attachments to contracts, waivers, and forms you are having people fill out. The other email should include a brief run down on how your deliver programs and other materials included in the session, package, or membership clients have purchased.

While you may cover this stuff in a phone call, it’s still nice to include it in an email. This way clients have a hard copy of everything as well, for their own record keeping.

Setting Expectations – Onboarding beyond formal business emails

Setting expectations for during client onboarding for online personal trainers is a must. While some of the stuff we talk about in this section could take the form of an email, really the goal here is to make sure you are setting the client expectations properly.

This stuff might have been briefly covered in a previous section, but you want to make sure no stone goes un-turned. Additionally, this type of onboarding is something you might want to consider holding out on until all paperwork is squared away. This way, there isn’t too much on the clients mind.

Here, you want to cover stuff like:

What are your expectations of the client? What if they miss a bunch of sessions with no notice? How do you hold them accountable beyond charging them for the session?
How do clients hold you accountable on the deliverables you owe them?
How do you reward hard work?

This is all stuff you can cover in an email or phone call – it’s up to your preference. However, the important thing is that:

It gets covered.
And it gets covered at the right time.

Generally speaking, if you covered everything we have mentioned so far, you have done an excellent job of onboarding clients.

Have Feedback on: Client Onboarding for Online Personal Trainers?

Let us know by reaching out to us at support@fitsw.com or shoot us a message on social media.

Live Virtual Personal Training Classes: Tips For Success

Live Virtual Personal Training Classes - Featured Image

In recent years, we have started to enter a new era of “digital everything”. More and more people are ordering their groceries online, shopping on Amazon, and taking advantage of new digital technologies that weren’t available just a couple years ago. Now, the personal training industry is starting to feel the impact of this new “digital everything” era. Trainers are turning to the online space to get clients, namely because its easier to scale and earn more money. An emerging trend recently, has been the rise of live virtual personal training classes.

1. Find a Good Software to Use.

If you’re a trainer looking to get into the live virtual personal training space, the first step is to find a good software. While there are many out there, you want to assess the software for things like:

Can you set a price for admission?
What are the costs for larger classes?
How easy is it to get clients set up on the software? Will it be free for your clients if you have a subscription?

Let’s take a look at popular software used for video conferencing to see if they have what it takes.

Zoom

Zoom has recently been put on the map due to do a rising demand for video conferencing software. In just a couple months they have more then tripled their user base. They are also a tool, if used right, can be used for live virtual personal training classes.

Can you set a price for admission in zoom?

The short answer here is yes, you can. However, in order to figure out how to do it, I had to search on good and follow this lengthy articles on how to configure the settings correctly.

Here’s a briefing:

You must have a PayPal account prior to setting up to paid-for-access Zoom sessions (PayPal is the only payment method accepted).
- You need the “Zoom webinar add-on”. Starting at $40/month on top of your current subscription price.
- Go to account management in you Zoom account. Then click on Webinar Settings.
- Then click to edit on the “Registration settings”.
- Then click the check box to “allow option to charge registration fee”.
- Next, you have to click “connect PayPal” and then login to your PayPal account.
- Once you have this set up, you then have to schedule a webinar.
- In scheduling the webinar, you have to edit the invitation settings to set a price for admission.

Boy, that sounds like a pain in the butt. It’s a lot of steps and only accepts PayPal as a form of payment. Not to mention it’s expensive.

What are the costs for larger classes?

The first subscription tier for webinars in Zoom is an additional $40/month on top of your subscription plan. This plan covers you for 100 participants.

See below our dissection of what Zoom offers for webinars:

Tier one – $40/month for up to 100 participants.
Tier two – $140/month for up to 500 participants.
Tier three – $340/month for up to 1,000 participants.
Tier four – $990/month for up to 3,000 participants.

The thing I find really strange about they way they structure their pricing is, once you need to go over 100 participants, they don’t give an option for a plan lower then 500 participants.

If you have 101 participants, forget about it, you’re now paying 3.5x the initial price.

How easy is it to get clients set up on Zoom?

Here is where Zoom is rather simple (shocking). When you create a meeting or webinar – paid or free – all you have to do is send a meeting invite that it generates for you and that’s it. However, if you were wanting to store data on your clients in your Zoom account, that’s not an option.

They are a dedicated video conferencing tool.

Skype

Skype is one of the “OG” video conferencing software products on the market. While they don’t really have options dedicated to Webinars, their Microsoft 365 Business Standard plan includes meetings for up to 250 people and live online events for up to 10,000 people.

In doing research, it wasn’t really clear if you could set a price for admission with their product. However, even if they don’t have a feature that supports it, you could put together a “hacky” solution.

How to do paid classes with Skype.

Your best bet here is to go ahead and schedule the meeting/class in Skype. Then set up a landing page through a service like Mailchimp with a for or section where people can purchase access to you class.

Then you set up an email automation series that sends whoever bought access the link to the meeting/class.

However, there are some security issues with this. Once the link is sent out, theoretically, someone could just send that link out to everyone who wants to join the class for free. Or they could be profiting off of your class if they decide to sell the link once they have gotten it – not the best.

While it’s rare this will happen, it’s still a valid concern.

FitSW for Live Virtual Personal Training Classes

If you are unfamiliar with FitSW, we are a software dedicated to providing a suite of tools to personal trainers to help them scale and run their business. We recently just launched a feature that supports live virtual personal training classes.

Can you set a price for admission with FitSW?

Yes. You can create free or paid classes. Additionally, you can set the class to “public”. This will list your class on our sister site – www.findtraingain.com – to get more exposure for you business and your classes that you are offering.

What does the feature cost? Does it support larger classes?

The feature is a default feature available to all trainers on a premium subscription plan with FitSW. Our subscription prices are among the most competitive in the market, starting at just $8.33 / month for 15 clients and all access to the platform.

How easy is it to get clients set up on FitSW?

Well, our software is set up to do exactly this.

Live classes for personal trainers. Image of adding a new client portal in FitSW.

To do so, you simply go to your client list, select “Add new client” and then create an account for them where you can create and assign workouts, set goals, track nutrition and fitness progress, and much more. Clients can also access their account with the login credentials you have created for them.

Additional Features

With each FitSW live virtual personal training class, there are a variety other features in place to help trainers manage their classes:

Live chat with all participants.
You can switch between video feeds for those participating to better critique their form.
The ability to mute and boot participants if needed.

2. Get your planning ironed out.

With this one, it seems obvious but there are a couple things you want to do before each class. Prior to each class, try sending out an email to all participants detailing what the class will go over and what your expectations are for the class.

In doing this, you can create a smoother experience for those involved because people know what to expect when going into the class. Additionally, get all of your equipment set up prior to the class. This way you are ready to get after it right after the class starts. In the email you send out to participants, instruct them to do the same, this way everyone is on the same beat.

However, in preparing for you class, realize that no matter how hard you try, not everyone will be on time to your class. Sometimes life just happens. At the start of the class, give a 5 minute buffer to make sure everyone is ready before getting started.

3. Set up music prior to the class.

Depending on where you are hosting the class, you need to be careful with the music you stream. Facebook and a variety of other social media platforms have been known to take down videos with popular music in them.

The reason for this is they could be held liable for letting people stream music in commercial settings that they don’t have the correct licencing for.

One thing you can try to get around this is to set up a public Spotify playlist. This way everyone is using the same music from the same platform. This way, no one can argue you were using music without the right licensing.

Have Feedback on this article?

Let us know by reaching out to support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on our social media channels.

The Spanish Version of the FitSW iOS app is here.

You heard that right. Now the FitSW app suite (Android and iOS) comes in Spanish. We just released the Spanish version of the iOS app in this last week and we have plans to further translate our apps into other languages as well.

Want to help translate our app?

If you are fluent in another language besides Spanish and English and you want to help translate the apps please reach out to admin@fitsw.com or support@fitsw.com to get started.

Here’s a quick list of the languages we are looking for:

Spanish Version of the FitSW iOS app: Image of additional languages languages we are interested in.

While our primary languages we are interested in are listed, if you are able to help with other languages as well, that’d be great.

Have language suggestions or feedback?

Let us know by sending an email to support@fitsw.com!

3 Tips to Adding Value to Your Personal Training Business

Adding Value to Your Personal Training Business - Featured image.

When it comes to personal training businesses, there are a lot of people who are running their businesses very similarly. It’s not a bad thing, the same thing is true for a lot different business types. But one thing you learn in looking at a lot of different business types is the ones that add value to their customers lives beyond the main product or service they sell stick out in the industry. You too, as a personal trainer, can differentiate yourself from your competitors through adding value to your personal training business beyond the primary services you are providing.

Tip 1: Send regular emails with Health, Fitness, Wellness, and Lifestyle Tips.

When it comes to adding value to your personal training business, this can be one of the most powerful methods. When someone hires a personal trainer, the experience is more likely going to be a major learning experience for them. Even if they were knowledgeable in fitness/nutrition prior to working with a personal trainer.

Just in their experience in working with a trainer during workouts, clients will learn more about fitness and nutrition. However, sending them emails full links to articles you have written or tips can be very helpful for their learning and for your business for a variety of reasons:

Sending emails full of helpful facts to your clients regularly shows you truly care for your clients.
It also creates more engaged clients because they care constantly reading and digesting the material you are sending them.
It can increase referrals if clients share the information they learn from you with their social circles.

However, when doing this, it can be hard to make sure you are constantly sending new information to them.

Create a schedule in which you send different types of content each day of the week.

Monday – Send out an inspirational story of someone who made an amazing transition in fitness. The story can be about anyone, it doesn’t matter if they were or weren’t a client of yours. The main focus should
Tuesday – Send quick circuit workouts everyone can fit into their schedule (even busy moms with full time jobs).
Wednesday – Send something informational about how the body works. For example, sending an email on the mind-body connection and a high level overview of what it is and how it works.
Thursday – Send information about supplements. You can include information on where they come from, if its produced in the body naturally, who can benefit from them the most, and different use cases of different supplements. For example, Creatine is often times thought of in terms of an exercise supplement. However, did you know Creatine has a number cognitive benefits and can be used to improve short term memory/logical reasoning?
Friday – Practical things you can do to keep your goals on track over the weekend.
Saturday – Fun exercises to keep you active on rest days.
Sunday – Send a recipe or multiple recipes to different types of fun foods. Sending recipes on Sunday can be really helpful because a lot of people do their main grocery shopping runs on Sunday.

While putting together a content plan, there are a variety of software you can use to help ease the workload off of you. For example, you can use Mailchimp to send emails in bulk and even schedule emails to send based on timezone for each of your clients.

In addition, if sending out something every day seems like to much, try consolidating your email marketing schedule into maybe 3 or 5 days a week. Then as you become accustomed to it, you can up the frequency in which you send out your emails.

If you are still struggling to find new content, trying running a poll with your clients to find what they want to hear more of.

Your clients may have a preference in terms of what type of stuff they want to learn about more frequently. Using a service like SurveryMonkey can help you run polls over email while using Mailchimp. This can be a great way to gain insight into what your clients care about.

Try subscribing to health and fitness blogs yourself to gain inspiration for your content.

The best way to consistently produce good content is to consume good content. Here’s a list of some health and fitness blogs you can subscribe to for inspiration:

MindBodyGreen – Fitness, Health, and Lifestyle
ACE – Health, Fitness, and Tips for personal trainers
The Jessie Kneeland Blog – Body image positivity

The blogs above provide a lot of thought leadership and resources to their readers and can be a great source of inspiration.

Tip 2: Invest in your own learning

One of the biggest decisions personal trainers face in their careers are figuring out where they are going to specialize. There are tons of specializations a trainer can get in their career, some are very similar to each other while other specializations are very different.

However, another area where personal trainers can really learn a lot is simply through experience. As a personal trainer, you will learn new things from each client you work with.

As you progress through your career, it’s highly recommended to continue to do your best in learning as much as you can. Because, inevitably, you will gather more knowledge and tools to be a better trainer for you client and all around, a better business owner.

The learning that you do doesn’t have to be isolated to learning about fitness and nutrition. Learning more about owning a business can help you be a better business owner. In turn, not only are your offering better services to your clients but also you will be able to run a smoother business.

Tip 3: Start an Exclusive Facebook Group

If you are a frequent reader of blogs published by FitSW then you probably hear us talk about starting an exclusive Facebook group quite often.

Exclusive Facebook groups help bring your clients together and it gives them a place to get to know each other, learn, feel inspired, and provide/receive constructive feedback.

A Facebook group for your clients can really help with client engagement. When paired with the email marketing, your clients will have a lot of places to go to learn and find inspiration. Additionally, beyond adding value to your clients you are literally adding value to your personal training business.

If you write blogs often then you can post them to the group regularly which implies a couple things. Namely, clients in your group will more likely share their favorite articles with their followers, bringing more attention to your business.

Additionally, anytime you post a blog to Facebook and it gets shared, it counts as a back link which can improve the reach of your blog articles on Google.

Have Feedback on 3 Tips to Adding Value to Your Personal Training Business?

If you have any feedback or questions please feel free to reach out to support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on social media!

How to find your Target Market for Personal Training.

Picking a target market is one of the most definitive decisions you can make in building your personal training business. It helps you better define a lot of aspects of your business. But a lot of trainers go back and forth on choosing a target market. Should you? Do you have to? Why should you? In this article we will go over choosing a target market for personal training, why it’s important, and some considerations.

But first, the difference in Target Market vs Niche

Is a square a rectangle, is a rectangle a square? Tomato, tomahto, potato, potahto – am I right? No, no, I’m actually wrong, very wrong. A niche and a target market are actually two different things – although they are related.

Niche

A niche is what you specialize in doing. It’s the service or product that you offer. Naturally, as a personal trainer, you already have a niche which is personal training services. However, nested inside of the broad niche of personal training services are more specialized niches.

For example, if you specialize in weight loss then your niche changes slightly towards what you are specialized in.

Target Market

Your target market is the group of people you serve. While some of your target market is defined by your niche, some of it is up to you to decide.

For example, if you are a weight loss specialist then your target market is automatically those who want to lose weight. However, you can further specialize if you want. You can become a women’s or men’s weight loss specialist and that further narrows your target market.

Target Markets vs Demographics

These are two terms that often get mixed up and confused. While they are very similar and related in some areas, they are two different concepts.

Target Market

When compared to demographics, your target market is more broad. This is because for a lot of people, their products and services appeal to a wide variety of people, all with different demographics.

Demographics

However, when you look at demographics, they typically considered as small groups within a target market that share common attributes. For example, segmenting audiences by age is common for a lot of marketers and marketing agencies.

Identifying your Target Market for Personal Training

Now that we know a little bit about the distinction between target markets and it’s constituents, lets take a look at identifying your target market.

Your Existing Customer Base

Your existing customer base is guaranteed to have common character traits that can help you get a feel for your target market. Even if they feel like a pretty diverse group of people, the chances are they share at least a couple small commonalities whether it’s character traits or interests.

Lets take a look at an example: The Dollar Shave Club

How to find your Target Market for Personal Training - an example image of a website.

When you take a look at the Dollar Shave Club’s website, one thing becomes apparent; they are targeting men. However, it’s not that simple. They really hammered down on their target market during a critical time period.

That is, they are targeting a specific market segment of men that are looking for an inclusive, simple, and convenient service for their grooming needs.

Not only that, but it’s not like they don’t sell women’s grooming products – because they do. However, based on the companies branding and marketing messaging, women are not their primary target market.

In fact their primary target market are probably men between the ages of 18 to 45 that are busy. Some may be business professionals that want to look clean cut but don’t want to, nor do they have the time to think about staying stocked on razors. That’s why a subscription grooming service makes sense for them.

Lets dissect their marketing messaging and see how that could impact their targeting. Their brands messaging is “easy, convenient, affordable, and inclusive grooming products for men”.

Easy

Here, you are more likely to find men from a variety of walks of life that care about one thing: convenience. They could be busy or they just don’t care to go shopping for razors all the time.

Affordable / Convenient

The prices of razors have been on the rise. Gillette has been the main company men have gone to for their grooming products. However, $20+ for a pack of razors is a little steep.

In this market segment, you are more likely to find men with a variety of backgrounds but one that may stick out with this messaging is the income level. Their product is more affordable, giving men whose income is less then $50,000 per year more options for their grooming products.

Inclusive

Their branding tells you a little bit about their core values. The company stands for creating an inclusive experience for men from all backgrounds and needs.

Which couldn’t be more critical as modern society is constantly analyzing aspects of our daily lives in order to create a more inclusive experience for everyone.

This appeals to men across many different backgrounds, regardless of income levels.

What does all of this mean?

While we don’t have access to the data that the Dollar Shave Club may have, you start to get a feel for what their target market looks like.

Understanding this helps you better cater your marketing and branding to the different segments of your target market and can lead to more effective marketing initiatives.

Discovering your Target Market for Personal Training

That was a lot of information. Lets take a look at what you can do to get a better grasp of your target market.

1. Make sure you have the right analytics in place.

If there’s one thing that’s a must, that’s having the data. But lets not get confused here. We aren’t talking about compiling a bunch of 1’s and 0’s into some deeply meaningful analysis. We aren’t data scientists here.

But, what you can do are a couple things:

If you have a blog or website, make sure you create a Google Analytics account and install the tracking snippet. Google Analytics will compile the data for you, such as, the common interests of those who are visiting your site, their behavior, the devices they are using, and more.
Make sure your social media accounts are business accounts. This way you get access to things like Instagram insights and other pieces of data. Besides this, explore the profiles of those who interact with your brand regularly and determine common character traits.

2. Have the data now? Compile it and looks for trends and commonalities.

As you start to figure out what type of person is more likely to interact with your brand, it’s important to ensure you have the right pieces of data in place.

Here are couple for consideration:

Age – This doesn’t have to be an exact average or anything like that. But if you were able to figure what age ranges dominate your consumer base, then you are on your way to understanding you audience better.
Spending habits – Again, this does have to be exact but getting a feel for what income level your audience is at helps you understand how they are spending. Specifically for personal training, this can be valuable as personal training is considered a deluxe services. As such, understanding you base audiences spending habits and income can help.
Interests – What is your target market interested in besides your products or services? What do they do when they are interacting with you and your brand? Understanding this can come in big when trying to figure out the best messaging for your brand.
Life – Where is your target audience in life? Are they more likely to be single? Married? Married with kids in their teens? Are they retired?

3. Clarifying your value proposition

A lot of people get caught up here. Your services and/or products are going to have associated value beyond features and benefits.

Listing all of the benefits of your service is attractive because, essentially that is what you are selling. However, if your only value proposition is listing the benefits of your service, then you might have a hard time getting people to make a purchase.

This is because of a common method used in sales is called “putting the customer in the product“. This is where you pin point the reason behind why the consumer is chasing a product like yours. Here, you want to figure out their “why” and then create a value proposition that fits with their need.

This isn’t a singular event either and is something you should be doing from the first time someone interacts with your brand – starting at the value prop.

Putting the Customer in the Product

For example, when you go car shopping, it wouldn’t be very helpful if when looking the details of a car with a sales rep their pitch was:

“Oh yeah, you’ll love your jeep wrangler JK unlimited 4WD 4 inch lift kit w/ vertex reservoir shocks! This bad boy also comes with a top feed 1050x fuel injector guaranteed to get you to at least 300 NM’s of torque…”

Especially if you were looking to save money on gas. Your value prop needs to be functional right off the bat. Tell your customer exactly what problems you can solve through putting the solution in context. Here’s an example but geared towards personal training:

“Together, we will work to get rid of that back pain so that you can set an example for your kids on how to live a healthy life, throw them around when its play time, and live confident life like your deserve.”

That sounds much better then:

“Through progressive loading and myofascial release, we will lift the tension in your lower lumbar that should pull the pressure off the L5 vertebrae giving you approximately 15 degrees of more rotational freedom without pain!”.

While that sounds fancy, it doesn’t resonate on a human level.

4. Constantly Adjust Your Research and Testing

As you start to better figure out your target audience, keep in mind that your business may change other variable might cause slight adjustments to your target audience.

Consider how external variables control your target audience such as time of year and holidays.

Make sure you are always testing and analyzing your audience data to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Have Feedback on How to find your Target Market for Personal Training?

Let us know by commenting on this post or shooting us a message at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on our social media channels!

Join our Pilot Program for Live Classes.

Are you a trainer interested in our live virtual classes? Get a jump start on everyone else by joining our pilot program for live classes.

We have just recently launched live virtual training classes as a new feature on FitSW. However, when considering our sister site, FindTrainGain, we have big plans for how we want to integrate the two features together.

How it Works

First, some background. Prior to launching live virtual training classes, we launched FindTrainGain (FTG). We launched FTG as a part of an effort to help any and all trainers who use FitSW get discovered by more clients.

The deal is, if you have an active trainer account through FitSW then you get listed on the FTG site, a site in which we are actively driving traffic too.

With the live training classes being released, we are working on giving trainers the ability to list their classes on FTG, open to the public.

The Pilot Program

We are looking for trainers who want to host a couple classes through FTG and work with us throughout the process to provide insight and feedback.

Really, our goal is gain a more holistic point of view and gather feedback on live class streaming through FitSW and FTG.

How to Join the Pilot Program for Live Classes

If you are a trainer interested in testing this new feature and working with us, shoot an email to either admin@fitsw.com or support@fitsw.com.

We will get back to you and actively work with you to schedule a class and test it. Any feedback you provide will be collected and used to better the feature for all trainers and clients.

If you are able to workout with us, we will announce your class on social media as well. We want to test the feature in the most realistic setting possible and have fun while doing it.

Why You Should Offer Health Coaching with Personal Training.

Health Coaching with Personal Training: Image displays common overlap in the services provided in Personal Training and Health Coaching.

Personal trainers often times operate on a boundary between many other coaching disciplines. By definition, personal trainers are professionals who’s focus areas are purely in personalized fitness programming and nutrition counseling. However, we all know most personal trainers don’t offer just their fitness services. Many will act as a health coach as well. Why not just dive in and offer health coaching with personal training?

In this article we will go over what distinguishes health coaching and personal training and how you can offer it to your clients.

Health Coaching vs Personal Training

While there are some parallels in the two, lets create a clear distinction. Health coaches primary focus lies in developing a well rounded lifestyle that promotes health. While their primary focus isn’t on fitness, they do promote increasing activity.

Health Coach Primary Focus Areas

Changing behavior
Increasing activity
Developing healthy lifestyle practices

Health coaches, like personal trainers, connect the dots between the current habits of their clients and the habits that will help their clients get to their goals. A health coach is not necessarily a personal trainer by trade. These are different disciplines with different certifications and licencing.

For example, ACE offers an accredited personal training certification program while they also offer an accredited health coaching certification as well.

Personal Trainer Core Focus Areas

While these (mentioned above) are the focus areas of a health coach, some of them may sound familiar to personal trainers. The core focus areas of personal trainers are:

Assessing and creating a baseline health and fitness level for clients (taking into account medical history, lifestyle, and habits).
Understanding how their clients lifestyles/habits impact their health and fitness.
Creating fitness programs that best suite their clients health and fitness goals while taking into account their health/fitness levels.
Consistently tracking client progress and making adjustments to fitness programs as needed.
Giving and receiving feedback from the client.
Additional specializations allowing trainers to expand scope of services or to narrow down their services into a niche.

While these are some of the core focus areas of personal trainers, many personal trainers will go on to get additional specializations and certifications in other areas that help them enhance the depth of their services.

Examples of popular specializations may include:

In assessing the core focus areas of personal trainers, their primary expertise lies in fitness training and basic nutrition advice (excluding additional specializations). However, they can expand the scope of their services into areas that relate to health coaching through specializations.

The same goes for health coaches. Their core expertise lies in helping people develop healthy habits in their life to promote a healthier lifestyle. However, they can expand the scope of their services as well through getting additional certifications/specializations in fitness.

Behavioral Change in Personal Training

One of the core challenges in personal training is helping clients shift their mindset. Some clients may be killing it in the gym but their lifestyles don’t support their goals in the gym.

A common route a lot of personal trainers take is studying behavioral change or getting a specialization related to behavioral change.

The reason why this is an excellent path to take is because it helps trainers better understand the psychology of behavior and what it takes to create sustainable change.

Many successful trainers will take into account current lifestyle habits of their clients and their goals to create a realistic, digestible game plan for success that extends outside of the gym.

The Value of Behavioral Change in Personal Training

Now, many trainers will suggest better habits for clients outside of the gym when they are given the opportunity. However, where a behavioral change specialization helps out is giving trainers the tools to identify parts of their clients personality, what they struggle with and why, and gives trainers the ability to better suggest small change in their clients lives that culminate into major change over time.

For example, lets say your client takes a cynical, negative mentality towards themselves and their potential. One thing a trainer can do immediately is continuously remind them of how good they are doing by just taking the initiative to get into a gym.

Additionally, some trainers will take it a step further and create a Facebook/social media group that is exclusive to their clients. This is great for a couple reasons:

It gives clients a platform to go for positive support.
Trainers have the opportunity to spotlight clients in a semi-public atmosphere that promotes positive reinforcement.
Clients have a sense of belonging to a group.
The group introduces incentive to do better because now they are a part of a group that is collectively striving to live a health lifestyle.

Furthermore, many trainers will introduce a make-shift rewards program that introduces rewards for positive behaviors or less rewards for negative behaviors. Rewards can be in the form of compliments, shout outs, or even small gift cards to Starbucks or stores of the clients interests.

The example above is only a singular example. As a trainer focusing on behavioral change, the initiatives you take to support positive change for you clients may change and take different forms.

Really, what behavior change teaches you is to assess the needs of the client and find what works for them. Going off of this, this may come in the form of introducing positive habit tracking.

Related content: 8 Challenges of Personal Training

Offering Health Coaching with Personal Training

After dissecting the health coaching and personal training disciplines, it becomes clear the service that both of the coaching disciplines offer services that overlap.

As a personal trainer, you may get naturally get sucked into coaching services that more so encompass that of a health coach. While trainers do have the skills to do so, it may help to study and understand common methodology in health coaching to get better feel.

This can be beneficial to you as it allows you to advance the scope of your services and ensure better results to your clients.

Feedback on Why You Should Offer Health Coaching with Personal Training?

If you have feedback on this blog or others, feel free to send your feedback to us at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on social media.

How to Improve your Fitness with Cross-Training.

A lot of people typically find one training type they like to stick with. As in, some people like to lift weights and stick to that while others may prefer yoga. Whatever it may be, a lot of people normally choose a single training type and stick to it as a part of their fitness regiment. However, have you ever considered cross-training?

Cross-training is, simply put, training within multiple different disciplines of exercise. That means, even if your main exercise type is weight lifting, you might throw in a good swimming or cycling workout. Cross-training can be a great way to diversify your workouts or even your clients workouts and keep motivation high.

What is Cross-Training?

Cross-training is a training method used to prevent injury from repetitive movement, improve performance, and keep motivation high. The concept is rather simple. Let’s say you are a runner. Most runners will stick to primarily running as their main source of exercise.

The reason being is running is a great way to get better at… you guessed it, running. Just like weight lifting is great if you want to get better at weight lifting.

With each training type comes its main goal. To get stronger, to get better cardio, and so forth. Based on this, many people take their fitness goal – to get stronger for example – and pick the training type that best suites them for that goal.

However, going back to the runner example, there are many ways you can improve your cardio or even get better at running, while not running. For example, swimming can be a fantastic way to supplement a run as a good cardio exercise.

This is the essence of cross training. Taking a diverse approach to training.

What are the benefits of Cross-Training?

A major reason why cross-training is great is because it can help work other muscle groups your traditional training doesn’t hit. For example, as a runner sticking to the same type of running workouts, will work the same muscle groups the same way.

However, introducing swimming as a cardio exercise can be beneficial because it can still be a hard cardio workout but it also works your muscles in different ways.

In doing so, you are working different muscles in different ways while still achieving the overall goal of working your cardio. Additionally, you can reduce the risk of injury from the repetitive use of muscles when training within the same discipline.

Aside from this, cross-training also helps you in many other ways:

Reduces the likelihood of you getting bored of your training.
Gives some muscle a break while others are still training.
Improves your all around conditioning level.
Can improve your skill and mind-body connection as you are focusing on other exercises and muscle groups.

How to diversify your workouts.

If you want to diversify your workouts into a multi-disciplinary approach, then there are countless possibilities. There are many different ways to approach it and different goals your can accommodate.

Your reason doesn’t have to be anything super specific to want to take a multi-disciplinary approach to your training. Your reason could be you are getting bored of your current workouts or you want more well rounded conditioning.

First start off with why you train the way you do to begin with. Many athletes have an overall goal, as we have discussed earlier. This is their primary reason for training. Whether it be get better cardio, get stronger, to be more athletic, or any other reason, make sure you have yours identified. This way you can train within other disciplines but still be working towards your overall goal.

Here are a couple cross training ideas by training type:

Cardio

If you’re primary focus is cardio training, here are a couple ways to train cardio while mixing it up:

Running
Swimming
Cycling
Rowing
Jump Rope
Basketball

Strength

The main goal of strength training is to strengthen muscle and bones. Strength training also includes improvements in balance and coordination. Here are some additional options:

Calisthenics – Push ups, crunches, pull ups…
Free weights
Weight Machines
Using bands for resistance exercise
Olympic Lifting

Using Cross-training in Active Recovery.

Active recovery is essentially where you give your body time to recover through low-intensity exercise. When we think of recovery, many people think of taking time off from exercise all together. However, according to sports medicine experts, this might not be the best case.

Many people distinguish recovery and exercise as two different things. But the more and more we learn about how our body responds to stimulus, we are learning that active recovery may be the better option (in most cases).

Active recovery should come in the form of an active cool down post-workout or as an active recovery day.

Benefits

Studies show there are many benefits to active recovery including increased endurance and faster recovery times. Here are a couple benefits:

Helps reduce lactic acid build up.
Reduces inflammation due to increase blood flow.
Can help reduce soreness.
Betting condition level then passive recovery.

Related content: Blood lactate clearance after active recovery.

How to integrate Cross-training as an active recovery routine.

There are three primary types of active recovery. Here are their differences:

As a Cool down

Lets face it, after a tough workout, we all want to lay down and watch the sky spin. While this is an entertaining option, wouldn’t you rather recover better? After a hard workout, try hopping on a cycle or treadmill and go at a light to medium pace for anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes. The goal here is to keep your heart rate up just above your resting heart rate.

Where cross-training comes in is dependent on the type of training you are using as your cool down activity. If you are strength training, try hopping on the treadmill for a light jog or even hop in the pool for some light water jogging or go for a couple laps.

This is great because you will still recover but while still training.

Interval Training

The idea here is to implement active recovery in between bouts of intense activity during a workout. For example, as a runner, your workout might be to do 12 x 200m sprints with 30-45 seconds break in between each sprint.

Try jogging in between sprints at a very light pace. If you are on a track, job back to the start line before starting another sprint.

As a weight lifter, try doing some light jump roping in between sets or low weight repetitions of exercises of your choice.

Active recovery during a rest day

The day or two following a hard workout or competition, try going for a long walk, light jog, or an easy bike ride. This will help get the blood flowing and your muscles will recover faster.

Using Cross-Training as a Personal Trainer

As a personal trainer, cross-training can be a great tool to use to help clients recover faster and stay motivated from workout-to-workout.

If you are able to mix up their recovery days with fun exercises that still target their goals, they may be more excited about each workout.

Additionally, as a trainer, you want to maximize the recovery your clients are seeing because this means they can adapt faster and increase the intensity of their workouts.

Related content: 10 tips for increasing client motivation

Feedback on How to Improve your Fitness with Cross-Training?

Do you have any pieces of feedback about this article or just in general? Let us know by sending an email to support@fitsw.com or reaching out to us on social media.