Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers: A Complete Guide

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What the heck are marketing funnels for personal trainers?? Well, I can tell ya’ one thing, it’s not something you just throw your money at and hope for the best. That’s a good way to waste all of your money.

Instead, lets do the opposite. Let’s take a calculated approach and make some money, shall we?

Admittedly, there can be a learning curve. Not in learning what a marketing funnel is, but more so learning common methods and tools.

But, lucky for you, here I am writing this blog and simultaneously googling “marketing funnels”.

Just kidding, I’m not doing that. Everyone knows Bing is better.

Okay, enough with the jokes, lets take a deep dive down a funnel of our own. One made of knowledge. What say you?

First, What is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a method of defining a would-be customers journey in discovering your brand and eventually becoming a customer. This includes from the point they first discover your business to purchasing your product or service.

Marketing funnels are commonly broken down into 4 main phases:

  • Awareness: The prospective customer is aware they have a problem/need they want to solve. During this phase you goal is simply to get discovered as a brand.
  • Interest: Our prospective customer has stumbled upon some content which has tipped his/her attention towards your business and has converted into a lead. Now it’s time for you to develop a relationship with the customer.
  • Desire: Said imaginary customers mouth is now watering. However, they still have not purchased anything and are evaluating all options.
  • Action: They bite and purchase something from you! or not. Yes, sometimes work goes into leading a customer down a marketing funnel just so they can decide not to purchase your product. Fear not, there are other fish in the sea. However, this stage is critical and is where you want to make sure your site is designed perfectly. Your messaging is fine tuned. And everything is optimized towards guiding those strangers who have made the pilgrimage across the internet to your site to make a purchase.

Different Marketing Methods Used in Marketing Funnels

Often times marketing funnels are made up of different types of marketing strategies. The main ones you’ll see are:

  • Content Marketing: This consists of putting out content such as blogs, social media posts, videos, eBooks, guides, white papers, etc… in an attempt to solve problems for people and create awareness for your business. Content marketing is typically in the awareness phase of the marketing funnel.
  • Paid Ads: Paid ads can occupy many different phases of the marketing funnel. You can run ads to people who may not have ever heard of your business or you can run adds to people who have been to your website. Popular tools for running paid ads are Facebook ads and Google Ads.
  • Email Marketing: Email marketing is a great way to keep people up to speed with the products/services you offer, discounts you’re running, announcements, top blog articles, and much more.

Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers

In this section, we will outline what actions are typically taken in each phase of a marketing funnel.

Phase 1: Creating Awareness

When it comes to marketing funnels for personal trainers, creating awareness is often times the most underrated aspect. Creating awareness is considered a Top of the Funnel (ToFu) phase.

Without this phase, you don’t really have much of a funnel. This phase is where people identify they have a need they want a solution for and are actively searching for this solution.

The goal is for them to discover your brand while they are searching for a solution.

Social Media

A good place to start is social media. This is an obvious one but there are some nuances that often get ignored.

When it comes to leveraging social media as a branch of your content marketing strategy, it’s important to follow a couple practices:

  1. Do your best to post content that’s valuable. Content that’s valuable is usually informative, visually appealing, triggers emotions, is relevant, and is interactive. Interactive usually means running polls on your stories, creating regular opportunity for shout outs, and even just asking general questions to the community.
  2. Use hashtags. Hashtags can help your posts get discovered. You can create different combinations of hashtags for different types of content that you post. This helps you test which hashtags yield the best results just makes sure that it’s relevant to those who are discovering it.

Creating engaging content on social media is the most important part. It increases the likely hood of people liking, commenting, and eventually sharing your content.

Which makes it more likely that people who are searching for solutions to their needs will discover your social media profile and brand. This in turn makes it more likely that people visit your blog or site.

Blogging

Another fantastic content marketing strategy is starting a blog. Blogging is easily one of the most powerful marketing strategies out there.

However, much like social media, there are best practices to follow to ensure you get the best results:

  1. Post blogs with value. Do you see a trend here? When it comes to content marketing, providing relevant value to your audience is the most important aspect.
  2. Make sure you go into enough depth in the topic you’re posting about.
  3. A good blog solves problems for readers and search engines. Meaning, you should spend time on making sure your blog is search engine optimized (SEO). A good way to do this is using the Yoast SEO plugin for your blog. Yoast helps you optimize your blog while you are writing it.
  4. Posting a blog once a week is always a good place to start. Although, there are loads of studies that show posting more often is better.
  5. Never post the same blog twice. In-fact, this can have a negative impact on your SEO. Instead, regularly update old blogs. This has shown to have positive impacts on your SEO.
  6. In each blog, link to an external website and link to at least 2 other blogs of your own (internal links).

SEO is really important for blogging as many people turn to google when searching for solutions to their needs.

If your blogs aren’t optimized for search engines then that greatly reduces the chance of people finding your blog when doing research.

Inevitably, it’s important to make it easy for people to sign up for a newsletter which gives them access to your content. This also gives you a channel to nurture this lead into a customer in later phases of the funnel.

Sponsored Brand Awareness Ads

Here’s another reason to make sure you are posting content that’s valuable on your social media accounts.

You can run paid ads on Facebook and Instagram that drive traffic to your site, blog, and your social media profiles. When running these ads, you run them towards “audiences” you have created in your ad account.

These audiences are made up of people whom you think have a higher likelihood of taking interest in the services you offer. Through your ad platform you can simply create audiences who have an affinity towards athletic clothes, technology, or pretty much any common interest you can think of.

When running brand awareness ads, the goal in mind isn’t necessarily to drive sales immediately. The goal is to create engagement with people who see your ads.

Engagement can mean they click through to your site or they visit your social media profile from the ad. This is why it’s important to consistently post valuable content to your social media profiles as it increases the likely hood of them following you.

Often times, giving them a little bit of information about your business in the ad is enough to peak their interest and prompt the esteemed click/tap on that “learn more” button of your ad. Effectively driving them to your site and giving you “ammo” for the later stages of your marketing funnel(s).

Summing up phase 1

Phase 1 is all about creating awareness of your brand and showing site visitors that you are serious about helping them out.

When it comes to marketing funnels for personal trainers, phase 1 can really help build a good reputation as a knowledgeable resource.

If visitors to your blog are able to pull actionable information away from the content you publish, they will be more likely to subscribe to a newsletter or even schedule a consultation with you.

Phase 2: Interest

This phase is where customers provide contact information so they can continue to get an endless stream of your lovely content.

Prospective customers haven’t decided on a product yet, but your brand is on their radar of products/services they are comparing.

Call-to-Actions (CTA’s)

Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers: CTA example image.
Call to Action Examples: Can you identify all of the CTA’s on the FitSW homepage?

Calls to action are just as they sound. They are simple features on your site or app that drive customers to provide contact information in exchange for something that will benefit them.

Examples include signing up for a newsletter, signing up for a free consultation, or providing an email address in exchange for downloading a guide.

When incorporating CTA’s in your site, it’s important to keep the CTA somewhere where it’s relevant.

For example, it doesn’t make sense to call site visitors to sign up for your newsletter on your contact or services page. However, a good call to action for your services page could be a “Get Your Free Consultation Today” CTA. For the contact page you can incorporate a “Have Questions? We are happy help” field people can fill out.

In this phase, the calls to action shouldn’t be too much of a commitment for prospective customers. You don’t want to come off as pushy with “BUY NOW!!!” calls to action everywhere, especially this early on in the funnel.

Re-targeting Social Media Ads

Re-targeting ads are where social media ads really flex their muscles. When you set up your ads account you will more then likely install a tracking code on your site.

A tracking code allows for you to do a variety of things, such as measure page views, how many page viewers click on a CTA, and a lot more.

However, one of the most powerful things it lets you do is create audiences based on what pages site visitors viewed and what pages they didn’t view.

For example, you can tell Facebook to create audiences for people who viewed the “Sign up for our Newsletter” page but didn’t view the “Thanks for signing up for our newsletter!” page.

This means they thought about signing up but didn’t.

Running a re-targeting ad based on the example audience above is a powerful way to draw those users back. Examples include:

  • Running an ad with a blog image and summing up what the blog is about with a “Read More” CTA on the ad. When users click through to the blog, they are eventually prompted to sign up for the newsletter.
  • Or you can run an ad with a creative image suggesting they should sign up for your newsletter and a caption with a message such as “Don’t miss out!” and a details about what’s included in the newsletter. Users who click through are sent directly to the newsletter sign up page.

Effectively running re-targeting ads means you can increase the leads you have, which gives you more leads to nurture later on down the road and provides you with more nurtured leads to convert into paying customers.

Phase 3: Desire

Alright, you have done a lot of work at this point. But, you can’t stop now, no one else is going to nurture those leads for you!

In phase 3, prospective customers have provided contact information. They are interested. It’s time to inform them about your service even more and prepare them for a purchase. This phase is all about developing a relationship with your customer.

Email Marketing

Since you have their email now, you can send marketing emails to them providing helpful information that both benefits them and helps them determine why your services are the option they need.

However, don’t come out to bat swinging with discounts and reasons why they should purchase your service outright.

It’s important to start off slow. Provide information to common problems they might be facing and how they can overcome them. Then include what your services and products do to help over come these issues as well.

Once you have sent a couple of these emails, then you can send an email targeted at getting them to purchase in phase 4 of the funnel.

Here are some email templates that can help you get started. In addition, you can use tools like Mailchimp to help you manage your email marketing campaigns.

Phase 4: Action

Phew! Hang with me here, we are almost there. This is the phase where you go for the purchase. At this point, you customer knows your brand, the services you have to offer, and has been nurtured with some extra content you have sent them.

But “how do you I actually get them to make a purchase?” you ask?

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a fantastic method of converting leads into paying customers.

After you have sent them a couple emails about your business with helpful information, you can send that coveted sales email.

Here, a common practice is to offer a discount code only good for a limited amount of time in the email. Talk about what the discount is good for and how long it is available.

Provide a handy CTA for them to click such as “Claim My Offer Now” or something along those lines where they are guided to your site with discount and a wallet in hand ready to purchase.

However, leads may not always bite the first offer you give them.

If they don’t go for the discount, it’s important to remember it isn’t necessarily so much about getting the purchase but rather developing a relationship with the customer.

That’s why it’s important to repeat the process of sending a couple helpful and informative emails before you go for another discount or product offer. Jumping the gun to early with a product offer immediately after you just sent one is often a red flag for most people.

Re-targeting Ads

Much like the re-targeting section earlier in the blog, this one is all about audiences. Here you can create audiences based on people who have not seen your “Thanks for Your Purchase” page.

What does this mean? It means they have not purchased anything from you yet.

For these types of ads, you can use an image of yourself training or a creative image with a fancy caption and a CTA that says something like “Sign Up” or “Choose My Package”.

Upon clicking the ad customers are brought to your checkout page where they can use a discount code you gave them or simply just check out.

Summing Up Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers

This was a long one, but it needed to be. This whole process sounds very involved. However, once you dive in you’ll realize most of the work goes into setting the whole process up.

Thanks to technology, once it’s set up, your job is to then optimize your ad campaigns for their best performance.

Once you have a marketing funnel built out, then it’s all about optimizing your ads to perform better. Using tools like Google Analytics can help you monitor your data and see how your marketing efforts are performing.

Have Feedback on Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers?

We take our feedback seriously. Feel free to send us an email as support@fitsw.com with any feedback you might have. Or you can reach to us on Instagram and Facebook.

Packages and Subscriptions for Personal Trainers

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Without further adieu, FitSW presents to you two new features: Packages and Subscriptions for personal trainers. With these two features, you can make your services more accessible for prospective and current clients. Don’t just make working out easier, make the checkout experience easy too. So, what’s with the hype you say? Feast your eyes.

Packages and Subscriptions for Personal Trainers (Screenshot)

First, Packages.

Personal Training Packages Screenshot.
Figure 1. Packages from the trainer’s view

With packages you can sell various offerings to your clients and would be clients. Discount sessions when bought in bulk, provide smaller packages to clients just getting started, or sell more involved packages for clients who are a little more serious.

Either way, this is guaranteed to create a more cohesive client experience from selling your packages to managing your client in the FitSW app.

Notice, you have the ability to activate and deactivate your packages. This is great for running temporary discounts, offering seasonal packages, or testing how different packages perform.

In addition, Packages will give you the ability to leverage sales strategies as trainer. Create custom packages based on the needs of individuals or create general pipelines for clients to follow.

From the client perspective (Figure 2), it’s a rather simple checkout experience. Enter number of packages. Pay. Workout. It’s that easy.

Packages and Subscriptions for Personal Trainers: Packages from the Clients View (Screenshot)
Figure 2. Packages from the clients view

Second, Subscriptions.

Have clients who are long term? Simplify your billing through setting them up with a subscription.

Much like packages, you can create different subscriptions for different needs from clients who are just getting started to more advanced clients.

The possibilities are endless. Want to host a group training class once a week? No Problem. Create a group training subscription, offer time slots on your schedule for people to book, and there you have it. A group training subscription. Viola!

Have feedback on Packages and Subscriptions for Personal Trainer?

We take our feedback seriously. Feel free to reach out to us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or email us at support@fitsw.com!

8 Challenges of Personal Training: A Micro-Guide

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With the rise of “Fit Culture” on social media, becoming a certified Personal Trainer has never been so popular. Now, more then ever, social media influencers brandish #PersonalTrainer in their social bios as an accolade. #PersonalTrainer is now one of the most used fitness hashtags and houses more than 28 million posts. As a result, this has influenced the masses to go get their certification. But, most post people only see the “social influencer” side of the job. Many don’t see the Challenges of Personal Training. So, we have put together the top 8 challenges and solutions to those challenges.

1. Getting your Personal Training Business Started

Getting started as a fitness professional can be one of the most taxing parts about the career. The main reason is you are literally starting up your own business. Typically, this means new Personal Trainers will be going a couple weeks, if not a month with low pay. Here, are tips on how to make getting started a little easier on your self:

  • Make sure you save up some extra cash for when start your personal training business.
  • Keep your social media channels updated. Let your close friends and family know you’ve just started a position as a Personal Trainer as this might get you your first client!
  • Do as much learning as you can before you start. Specifically on topics, such as, sales for personal trainers, and business management for personal trainers.
  • Set realistic goals and expectations. Starting off, you aren’t going to be training immediately. You’ll likely be shadowing another trainer or going through training yourself.
  • Practice cold calling. This is something you might have to do as a new trainer.

2. Keeping Your Fitness Business Steady

One of the major challenges of personal training, especially after getting started, is keeping business steady. Particularly during the holiday season. But even during the regular season, it is a constant battle for personal trainers to keep business at a steady flow. Here’s a quick list to make sure you are prepared for when business is slower or how to prevent:

  • Save up some cushion for the holiday season. Christmas will be a slower time of the year for Personal Trainers. Not for every trainer but for most.
  • Run a special deal during the holidays! Whether it’s a promoting a special deal your gym is running or creating one of your own, this is a great way to get clients during the holidays.
  • Enhance your service. Every now and then reward your clients with a personal gift for their hard work. It doesn’t have to be much, a free protein shake or a small gift card will do. Don’t do it for everyone, but for those who come in with a chip on their shoulder. This creates incentive for your other clients to really put in effort and will more likely increase client referrals.

“What do you think someone is more likely to remember? A free session or a well thought out gift for all their hard work? Don’t break your bank but a $15 gift card will go a long ways.”

Chelsea Carter – @trainwithcece
  • Social media marketing. This can be huge if done right. As a personal trainer, it can be hard to create awareness of your services. Running social media ads gives you a targetted method of reaching extra people. Running a simple ad that gives a brief overview of your service and client testimonials is guaranteed to get you some extra attention.
  • Content marketing. Content marketing involves pushing out blogs and valuable, entertaining content to you followers to create awareness of your brand and services on social media channels. This is a great way to solve problems for people searching the internet for solutions. While at the same time creating awareness of you brand and the services you offer.
  • Ask clients for referrals and reward them for any referrals that turn into clients. This is another great way to enhance your service and increase awareness for the services you offer.

Leveraging these strategies can help ensure a steady flow of business and being better prepared for when business isn’t steady.

3. Avoiding Burnout

It’s not uncommon for a personal trainer to work from 5am-8pm on the weekday and training on the weekends. All while doing their programming on the fly. Combine this with the constant need to continue education and less and less personal time, it’s easy to feel the burnout come on.

This is why it’s important to arm yourself with the tools necessary for success so you don’t get burned out. Here are some good practices and tools personal trainers can use to get the most out of their time, grow their business, and make time some personal time:

  • FitSW – Fitness software for personal trainers you say? Huh. Never heard of it… but I heard it allows for you to get rid of Excel, Word, and even paper forms for completely digital workflows. Create entire fitness programs, nutrition programs, track client progress, and much more all in an app.
  • A social media scheduler tool. There are many social media schedulers that help you plan posts ahead of time. This is great because all you need to do sit down for an hour or two, schedule your social media posts out a week or two and forget about. There are many social media schedulers out there that have a free version you can use forever that will more then accommodate your needs.
  • Do things outside of the gym! Go for a hike, get some coffee, and just enjoy some time away from your place of work.

4. Keeping Clients Motivated

Keeping clients motivated is one of the most underrated challenges of personal training. You can have all sorts of knowledge about training, but if clients aren’t motivated, good luck getting those results to show for it. Here are a couple good practices you can use to keep those clients eager to hit the gym:

  • Make your workouts fun. This is why it’s so important to get to know your clients and ask for feedback after workouts. It’s also important here to create an atmosphere where your client feels comfortable enough to provide their opinion. Are they going to love every workout? No. But getting to know what they do enjoy will help you create workouts they will love.
  • Track their progress. Tracking their progress helps you create programs and lets you provide encouragement. Maybe they hit a PR and you get them their favorite protein shake. I want a free shake don’t you? It almost like keeping track of their birthday. But, different. You wouldn’t forget their birthday would you?
  • Brag about them on your social feed. Oh, yeah. This is a great one. It’s a double whammy. They get a warm feeling in their stomach when they see your post about all their progress AND people see how great of a trainer you are.
  • Show empathy. Okay, everyone knows that training really isn’t just training. You’re a business owner, a counselor, a friend, and a trainer. A lot of people open up to their trainers about their issues in life. It’s important here that you show empathy. This communicates to them that you understand them and helps make them feel less alone.

At the end of the day, your clients shouldn’t be showing up simply because they have to. Although, that is a part of it, they should be showing up excited to hit it with their favorite trainer everyday.

5. Overcoming Stereotypes

Let’s face it, there are a lot of people that don’t know the first thing about fitness but pretend they do. As a result, loads of misinformation is spread about fitness due to people pretending to know things that they don’t.

Along similar lines, most people who are not personal trainers themselves, don’t know the first thing about personal trainers either, but, nonetheless pretend they do.

And poof, that’s how stereotypes of personal trainers are born. A couple misguided people and maybe even some trainers that cheated their way through their certification and now perpetuate those stereotypes. Sigh, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Bet you coulda guessed what was coming next? Here are some common stereotypes of personal trainers and how to avoid or get past them:

“All Personal Trainers Should be Fit”

This one is probably the most common. It comes from people having these misconceptions in their head about what fit people look like or should look like. Let me just say this; physical appearance doesn’t equate knowledge or fitness level.

This one is hard to avoid all together as there will always be those people spouting this type of stuff. But it’s important to either ignore them or be as professional as possible in correcting them. If you react negatively it gives them the chance to say more negative stuff.

Honestly, if you catch someone perpetuating this stereotype, tell them to go check out the highlights from the fight where Andy Ruiz Jr. put a beat down on Anthony Joshua. If you’re not familiar, here’s the jist. Anthony Joshua was the raining champ. He looks like he came down from Mt. Olympus.

Anthony was only knocked down once in his career and that knock down came from Wladimir Klitschko, who is a force of nature in the boxing world. Despite the knock down, Anthony Joshua emerged victorious.

When news broke of a hungry Andy Ruiz wanting to fight Anthony Joshua, people scoffed at Andy. Largely because he looked out of shape. But, boy, did they have it comin for ’em. In short, Andy put a beat down on Anthony. In fact, his performance told a very different story. Overall, he had more gas in the tank and outlasted Anthony Joshua until he was able to knock him down the final time.

“Anyone can be a Personal Trainer”

This one is easy. Just tell them 90% of first year trainers quit in their first/second year and switch careers. The main reason? Most of them couldn’t figure out how to build their business. They underestimated the amount of work and knowledge required to get a personal training business off the ground and profitable.

Sure you can go to the gym and get strong or really fit. But there is a massive difference in running a personal training business and working out. One is a hobby and the other is a full time job and then some.

“All Trainers Should be Young”

Some of the most inspirational fitness trainers of all time are over the age of 50. In fact, statistically speaking, the longer you are in the industry as a personal trainer, the more knowledgeable you become.

The National Federation of Personal Trainers reports 40% of their certified trainers are between 40 and 62 years old. Now there’s no doubt, especially with modern trends in youth, that the average trainer is becoming younger. However, that doesn’t discredit older generations from not only becoming a trainer but becoming a leader.

You ever heard of Chet Yorton? How about Robbie Robinson? Please, feast your eyes.

6. Difficult Clients

You will always have clients that complain. Whether it’s they are new to the gym or just not about the workout you’ve given them, you are bound to hear some interesting excuses from clients.

However, there are methods you can use to keep the complaining at a minimum or to address complaining on the spot as it’s happening. Here are a couple of our favorites:

  1. Set clear expectations with the clients. Sometimes complaining can be a result of not having expectations set. Before you dive into training them make sure they know what to expect and that they know your expectations of them. If they are new to fitness, you can even outright say some workouts are gonna hurt more then others and during those times, you aren’t setting out to hurt them. You are setting out to show them where they can push themselves. You wouldn’t give them a difficult workout if you didn’t believe in them.
  2. Use positive re-reinforcement. If you have already set expectation and you have a client that seems to complain more them others, try to really provide positive support. Sometimes all they need are some kind words.
  3. Make sure they aren’t actually hurt. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. But when someone complains of an ache or pain, make sure you help them recover from it.
  4. Tough love. Some people complain just for the sake of complaining. If you’ve identified a serial-complainer, sometimes it helps to tell them to suck it up or even to ignore it all together.
  5. Learn how to say “No”. Sometimes, certain personality types just don’t mesh. In this case it’s important to know the difference between actually figuring out how to make something work and forcing it. If you’ve tried everything to improve things and they just. aren’t. improving. Then it’s time to recommend that client elsewhere. It has nothing to do with your training and everything to do with the complexities of human nature.

In short, complaining can sometimes mean that you don’t have a sufficient line of communication set up with the client. Making sure your client is comfortable with communicating with you can also mean they trust you. Naturally, people don’t open up to things they don’t trust.

7. Legal Protection

One of the challenges of personal training that also often goes unsaid is protecting yourself legally. This really applies to the independent trainer that isn’t operating under the wing of a gym. Most gyms have insurance for accidents and liability waivers that help protect trainers from “general negligence”.

However, as an independent trainer, it might be a good idea to consider the following:

  1. Professional Liability Insurance. This typically protects you from “professional negligence”. This includes injuries sustained during exercise you assigned or an illness from a meal plan you prescribed.
  2. General Liability Insurance. If you train clients in your own personal studio or in an atmosphere you have personal control over, then it’d be a good idea to get General Liability Insurance. This type of insurance protects you from injuries or illness sustained from the condition of the premises, i.e. slipping on a wet floor, a machine malfunction, or any other situation similar to these.
  3. Liability Waivers. This form basically states that the client understands the risks of training and if signed, the client waves any liability from you for injuries sustained during the process of training. There are exceptions, such as, cases of extreme negligence and lack of consideration for the well being of another human.
  4. Document everything. Documentation complete with dates, times, and client progress. Aside from helping you more accurately create programs for clients, this also helps establish your professional demeanor. In the case anything was ever called into question, you’d have consistent documentation to back up anything you say.

8. Behavioral Change

Behavioral change is one of the more complex challenges of personal training. The reasoning is because it is a dynamic effort on the side of the trainer. A lot of your clients might have hard habits to break that are overall, negative. These habits often span a variety of areas such as psychology, diet, fitness, and many others.

Frequently, many of the challenges of personal training extend to the client as well. It’s two sided. However, most of the pressure lies on the shoulders of the trainer to communicate. Trainers are often facilitators of change. Just with an emphasis in fitness.

Here are some tips on establishing a good base for sustainable behavioral change:

Acknowledge Relapses

Whether it be smoking cigarettes, eating poorly, or relapsing into a negative mindset, relapses are going to happen.

As a trainer, you can help your clients avoid these things through:

  • Helping them find where their triggers are that lead to a relapse.
  • Developing a coping strategy.
  • Helping them find their way back on track when they stray off course.

Through this process, it’s imperative you acknowledge relapses and hold them accountable, but also, use positive language. Whether it be words of support or relating to them in some way that helps them feel a sense of belonging.

Use the Stages of Change Model

This model employs the idea that using a gradual approach to a larger goal is more effective then setting one massive goal without a plan to get there.

Stage 1: Precontemplation

In this stage, people don’t have an active intention of taking action driven towards change. They might not even know their actions aren’t sustainable. Most frequently, people in this stage don’t understand two things: the benefits of change and the consequence of not changing.

Stage 2: Contemplation

Here people will recognize their actions aren’t sustainable. They might even start to develop intention to change, but at this point no actual action has taken place. They will have more likely weighted the positives and negatives, but are still hesitant to actually take action.

Stage 3: Preparation

In this stage, they have bought into change and are actively looking at how they can change. They will more likely take a solid action towards making the necessary changes in the next 30 days.

Stage 4: Action

An individual in the stage has taken action to change their unhealthy behavior. They also intend to push forward with the change they have made.

Stage 5: Maintenance

In this stage, people have sustained the change they have made for a good bit of time (defined as 6 months or more). People in this stage make a proactive effort to prevent relapses and recognize a relapse in its early stages.

Stage 6: Termination

This stage is rare. People in this stage have completely eliminated their unhealthy habits and have no plans of going back. Since this stage it rare, most people will reach the maintenance stage and relapse into an unhealthy habit temporarily.

Having a good understanding of how to use the stages of change can help you identify where your client is at in their progression towards a healthier life. Subsequently, you can make adjustments to your training program and communication to the client.

Use Smart Goals

Smart goals are defined as:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

Every goal set by you or your client should meet the definition of a SMART goal. As clients progress and get more advanced, then you can start setting more ambitious goals to reach for.

Summing up the Challenges of Personal Training

This article outlines several challenges of personal training, but that doesn’t discount others that might go unspoken. When assessing the various challenges of personal training there’s one thing that becomes clear. That’s that personal trainers are just simply “gym coaches”. Personal trainers often times occupy many many roles in the day to day lives of their clients.

Understanding the challenges of personal training helps you understand the multi-faceted nature of the occupation and that mastery of personal training comes in the form of mastering many different fields of knowledge. The most successful trainers will take a dynamic, agile approach to each client as each client will be vastly different case by case.

FitSW Wants Your Feedback on 8 Challenges of Personal Training: A Micro-Guide

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

10 Tips for Online Personal Trainers on Fitness Website Design

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If you’ve got an online personal training business, your website will likely play a major role in your fitness marketing strategy. Unlike marketing a face-to-face training business, you’ll rely more heavily on how visitors think and feel on your site when it comes to getting leads. In this article, we’ll go over the top 10 fitness website design tips for online personal trainers to help you get more traffic and leads.

1. Tell Website Visitors They’re in the Right Place

The first question a website visitor will have when they land on your home page is whether or not they’re in the right place.

The easiest way to ensure them that they are in the right place is with a keyword specific headline positioned high up on the home page. Can you guess the keyword in the example below?

Mellisa Nicole Fitness - Online Personal Trainers Website Example

Use this space to describe exactly what you do and who you do it for. This will help the website visitor take their next steps on your site and it improves search engine rankings.

2. Don’t Make Offers Too Early

It’s tempting to have your free trial or eBook positioned front and center on the home page. After all, that’s the spot that gets the most website visits, right?

True, but gone are the days when people haphazardly gave up their email in exchange for an eBook, especially on the home page.

Instead, consider inviting the website visitor to take their next logical step. Why are they on the site? What are they looking for? Probably to learn about your services and pricing. So that’s what you offer them.

FitPound Personal Training - Online Personal Trainers Landing Page Example

Save your eBooks for the blog pages where your website visitors are there to learn.

3. Answer Your Visitors’ Questions

As a follow on from the previous tip, each page of your fitness website should answer the questions a website visitor has.

For example, the Home page is designed to introduce the sub pages of the site, so sections that introduce each sub page will enable the visitor to easily navigate your site and find what they’re looking for.

PersonalBest - Online Personal Trainers About Page Example

The About page should outline what you can do for your clients and introduce you and the members of your team.

Service pages are for prices and how the service works.

4. Online Personal Trainers Need to Stop Trying to be Special

One of the first things a personal trainer ask their fitness website designer for is something “unique” and “special”.

While your branding and message absolutely should be unique to your business, your design should not.

There’s something called Design Convention which is extremely important to the way someone uses your website.

Design convention is what a website visitor expects to see. For example, they expect a navigation to appear at the top of the site and they expect the footer to be at the bottom.

This is why most sites, no matter the industry, tend to look pretty similar on the face of it. Going against design convention would be like reading a book with the pages i the wrong order.

However, if you’d like to experiment with design without breaking conventional design protocol feel free, just make sure it doesn’t disrupt your messaging.

5. Use Images of People

Faces make a huge difference when it comes to connecting a website visitor with your company. That doesn’t mean the face has to be you. It just needs to be a face.

Using images of real people expressing authentic emotions appeal to our primal nature. Smiles make us feel at ease. Seeing a sad person make us feel empathy. Try your best not to use stock photos. If you have to, its worth paying for them.

Fit With Sally - Online Personal Trainers Home Page Example

A good website design makes use of this basic primal conditioning, not to manipulate a visitor, but to help them feel the way you want them to feel about your business.

6. Fix Your Navigation

Navigation is among the first things a website visitor sees. Good navigation describes exactly what they’ll find on the page without overwhelming them with too many options.

One of the biggest mistakes online personal trainers make when designing sites is to overload the website visitor with pages and pages of information.

Instead, take a step back and think about what a website visitor really need to become a lead. Is the About page absolutely essential to them making that decision? If not, link to it from the footer and save space in the main navigation menu.

7. Hold Back With Social Media

For online personal trainers, more fans and followers is perfectly respectable goal and you should try to obtain those things for your social media platform, but you don’t need to make a big deal of it on site and here’s why:

The goal of your website is to turn website visitors into leads, not send them away to another platform where they get distracted and don’t take any action with you.

Have a social media presence on site to show trust and authenticity for those who want to explore, but keep it discreet and in places where the visitor might expect to see it like the footer.

8. Use Descriptive Headlines

Website readers won’t typically read your web pages word for word. When was the last time you did that? Humans think they’re busy and they’re always in a rush, so they skip through the main headlines until they find what they’re looking for.

With that in mind, your page headers should describe exactly what the content underneath it is going to say.

Raising The Bar Fitness - descriptive headline example

For example, instead of “What We Do” use “Online Personal Training Services”.

9. Avoid Long Paragraphs

Nothing is more frustrating than landing on a website looking for information only to be met with a wall of text. It’s hard to find what you’re looking for and the task of finding the information seems never ending.

Notice how in this article each paragraph is broken down into smaller sections with spacing between each main point?

That break in the paragraph reduces cognitive load and gives the visitor small feelings of accomplishment after each paragraph. This encourages easy reading.

Where possible, use bullet points to explain points in a simpler and more concise way.

10. Online Personal Trainers Need to Display Competence

On the list of what’s important to a website visitor when choosing towers with you, competence is at the top of that list. As far as online personal training is concerned, display competence is imperative. This is where visitors will form the initial opinions.

Showing that you can do what you say you can do is absolutely paramount and you can show this with testimonials and before/after images.

The Body Transformation Academy - Testimonial example.

Competence is so important that if you can show it on every page, do. Use snippets of testimonials with head-shots, before/after galleries and client statistics to show potential clients that when they work with you, they’re in with a good chance of achieving the same thing.

FitSW Wants Your Feedback On 10 Tips for Personal Trainers on Fitness Website Design!

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article, update, or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

FitSW Android App For Fitness Trainers – New Features

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We are excited to announce that we have a big update for our Android app for fitness trainers! This update contains the ability to view exercise progress graphs and tables directly in the app! Better yet, this is available on both iOS and web as well. Thus, you can view your personal training client’s progress on any device! Additionally, you can still view your client’s assessment progress as well.

Secondly, this new update has another big feature! We have added the ability to delete supersets, instead of having to recreate the workout!

This new Android release also has multiple other usability improvements. If you are unfamiliar with what usability improvements are, let me clarify. Usability improvements mean that we have made the app have better flow functionality and a more polished feel! We’ve added usability improvements to our PAR-Q feature, as well as multiple other places throughout the app.

Exercise Progress Graphs & Tables

FitSW Android App For Fitness Trainers - Exercise Progress Tracking Graphs

For each exercise, you can see how your clients performed during their assigned workouts. You can view this information in both graph and table format, whichever you prefer.

If you’re in graph format, you can see the Actual Reps that were assigned in orange, and the Actual reps that were completed in blue. This way you can see if your clients are underperforming or overperforming, you can adjust their workouts accordingly!

Ungrouping Supersets

You can now ungroup supersets directly in our Android app! This means if you accidentally add a wrong exercise to a superset, or want to add another, it’s much simpler and faster than before!

FitSW Wants Your Feedback On Updates To Our Android App For Fitness Trainers!

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article, update, or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

Online Personal Trainer App – New FitSW iOS Features

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With the new year, comes new features to our online personal trainer app! We know you’ve been working hard with all of your new year resolution clients, so we wanted to improve our app to make it even easier for you to train more clients! This most recent iOS update includes autosaving, the ability to update all events in a series, drafting your events, and many usability improvements.

Online Personal Trainer App - Updates & New Features

Autosaving

Our software will now automatically save your events, so you never lose any progress! If something happens to your internet, or your FitSW app closes for any reason, you do not have to worry! All of your data will be automatically saved as a draft and you can pick up where you left off. This autosaving feature applies to your workouts, meal plans, and tasks.

Saving as Drafts

You can now save all of your workouts, meal plans, and tasks as drafts! This way, if you’re working on perfecting that new workout or nutrition plan, you can save it as a draft and continue at a later time. Furthermore, if something happens and you exit the app, you’re event will automatically save as a draft.

Editing, Saving, Publishing To All Events In A Series

With the updates above, we also added the ability to edit all events in a series. Or, in other words, if you create a repeating event (workout/meal plan/task) you can edit, save them as a draft, or publish them all with the click of a button! This way, if you create a lot of drafts as you perfect your event, you can publish them all at once.

Apply Your Events To Additional Clients

Our iOS online personal trainer app now has a great new feature that allows you to apply your events to additional clients as well! You can apply all of your workouts, diets, and tasks to multiple clients with the click of a button. This will save you a lot of time if you have a program that applies to multiple clients.

FitSW Wants Your Feedback On Updates To Our Online Personal Trainer App!

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article, update, or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

Personal Trainer Alex Portee – FitSW’s Trainer Of The Month

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We are excited to announce that nutritionist and personal trainer Alex Portee is FitSW’s featured personal trainer of the month! Alexandar is a certified personal trainer and nutritionist. He started his company one year ago in the necessity of something different, so his main focus is his online personal training and mobile fitness.

“I bring the gym to you. My experience is in football strength and conditioning, muscle growth, HIIT, and cross-training. I’ve played football for almost my whole life. Additionally, I am a former semi-pro football player of the “ Florida Veterans” from Port Charlotte Florida.”

Featured Personal Trainer Alexander Portee

I got into this business because of all the questions people kept asking me in terms of getting in shape. People constantly asked me for help so I took it as a sign that this is something I should be doing so I saved up no less than half my paychecks while working for the USPS and took action the first chance I got and never looked back. My dream and mission with my company are to reach the people who have a hard time getting to the gym or just being pointed in the right direction with getting in shape. Everybody needs help in some form or fashion and I want to build a team that reaches the people who just need that little push to get started. I see my company in every state and city making a dramatic impact on the fitness industry 

What’s your favorite thing about being a trainer?

Hearing your clients say how much they hate you and love you once the workout is over. Seeing them get results faster than expected. Seeing clients have a bigger spark in life and want to do and create more value around them because they got in shape. 

What was the single most important thing you did in your first 6 months for your business and why?

Being in my business full time and not letting fear hold me back. Why? I’m the type to stress about not being able to save a lot. I’m really frugal but I understood if I wanted something different out of life I had to make different choices and actions in my life to be able to earn the value I seek in life. If I didn’t go full time I would have been forced to lose potential clients because I didn’t have the right amount of time required to give them my services and that defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to do with my company. Just taking that leap of faith made a huge impact on my life and my family’s life. 

What is your favorite activity with clients to break up the monotony?

Give them a workout that I’ll do with them that is pretty hard but makes me suffer in front of them so they have a reason to focus on how much I’m struggling and they can make jokes of me while not realizing how much better they are doing. Being creative to help them build confidence in themselves makes it fun for my clients and myself.

About Off The Grid Performance

Off The Grid Performance is a mobile fitness unit. OTGP is focused on giving people a unique experience with fitness. We provide the equipment, all you have to do is bring your commitment, water, and towel and we will have fun!

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OTGPerformance/

Website: https://www.offthegridtrainer.com/

About Personal Trainer of the Week

Once a month, FitSW highlights one Personal Trainer worldwide that stands out – someone who keeps their clients on track & motivated, and consistently gets results.  We let them share their story and hold a quick Q & A to understand what works for them and what has made them successful.  We feel this gives you a chance to see what is working for these personal trainers.  It also allows us to recognize the personal trainers who are getting real results.

If you would like to learn more about becoming FitSW’s Featured Personal Trainer, contact support@fitsw.com! Also, reach out to our featured personal trainer Alex Portee for some awesome training.

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

 

Continuing Education As A Personal Trainer

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Getting certified as a personal trainer requires countless hours of studying and effort. Once you become certified, you should feel accomplished, as you worked extremely hard for it. However, every 2 years you’ll need to renew your certification by taking a wide variety of courses (of your choosing). Getting recertified is a lot less intensive than your initial certification, though you’ll still need to put in around 20 hours of course work. Additionally, gaining new knowledge and continuing your education is important to growing as a fitness professional. Below, we’ll go over why continuing education as a personal trainer is important and how to do so.

Continuing Education As A Personal Trainer

How You Can Continue Your Education

There a few ways and reasons to continue your education as a personal trainer. For starters, you’ll need to become recertified every 2 years to remain certified with your institution. While the time frame is the same for each institution that provides personal trainer certifications, the requirements to maintain it varies from company to company.

Also, below we mention CEUs. CEUs (can also be called CECs). These are “Continuing Education Units” and each education program offered will give you a specific amount that you need to complete to maintain your certification.

Recertification Requirements For Popular Certification Institutions

  • NASM: Two years, 20 hours (2.0 CEUs)
  • ACE: Two years, 20 hours (2.0 CEUs)
  • ISSA: Two years, 20 hours (2.0 CEUs)

These are the most popular institutions that offer certifications for personal trainers, though if your institution is not there, do not worry! You can find all of the CEU courses they offer by going to their website!

Why You Should Continue Your Education

Aside from having to get recertified every 2 years, continuing education as a personal trainer can have a lot of positive effects. For instance, getting a specialization in a different area can help you stand out from the crowd. It also cannot hurt to have more knowledge about fitness and/or nutrition.

You will never know everything about fitness or nutrition, as new studies and research come out frequently. Staying up to date on the latest trends, fads, myths, and all things fitness is a great way to prove yourself as the fitness authority. Your personal training clients come to you for your fitness expertise, so make sure you know what you’re talking about.

FitSW Wants Your Feedback On Continuing Education As A Personal Trainer!

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

Why the Internet Growth is Good for the Fitness Industry

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The Growth of the Fitness Industry

The internet was created in Los Angeles, California, in 1983. Shortly after its public debut in 1991, it mounted an aggressive expansion on the world. Every minute of 2019, Americans alone generated 4.4 billion GB’s of internet data. This isn’t surprising given roughly 90% of all internet data has been produced in the past 2 years. There’s no surprise in saying this has massive implications for the global economy. The internet increasingly empowers communities and industries, giving way to new business models never seen before. Of all the industries that have benefited from the internet, the fitness industry is one that has benefited and continues to benefit every year. The growth of the internet seems to be synonymous with the growth of the fitness industry.

The Growth of the Fitness Industry

Global Expansion of the Internet

At its current rate, the fitness business is growing at 8% annually. 2020 is projected to hit $109 billion dollars globally. This is an 11% increase from 2019. That’s excluding other industries that complement fitness, such as, the rise of athletic clothing and wearable tech.

Before the internet, the fitness industry saw a boom in the 70s and 80s with growing popularity in yoga, jazzercise classes, and jogging. This was mainly due to the development of modern-day gym memberships. People had more access to more gyms that aren’t scary to go into and don’t come with a side of tetanus. That aside, exercising regularly provides other benefits, namely, a healthier lifestyle, and personal therapy. This all gave way to a larger market for a fitness professional to grow their businesses.

With the rise of the internet, now over half of the world has immediate access to the web. The same variables remain the same, they have just transcended to new levels never seen before. Now, fitness professionals can gain access to free and paid resources offering rewarding career paths. In 8-10 weeks, would-be fitness professionals can get certification online and start training clients. In addition to this, existing fitness professionals can continue their education while training clients. Specialization is no longer a matter of going to college and taking time off work. Now, you can take classes online and continue to build your client portfolio.

For those that aren’t fitness professionals, finding information on fitness is now easier than ever. With a couple of google searches, you can now transform your lifestyle for the better. This is just the first of many reasons on why the internet is good for the growth of the fitness industry.

The Birth and Growth of Digital Communities

Since the dawn of modern humans, we have organized and formed societies. In essence, human beings are extraordinarily social creatures and have used this to advance society. As we enter the modern digital age, humans continue to form new innovative social experiences. Thus, continuing to empower communities and individuals in these communities. 

If there’s one thing that remains consistent between human beings and the fitness industry, that’s the desire to be social. With increased advancements in digital technologies, people are flocking to the web to form new communities dedicated to fitness.

Now, you don’t have to go to the library and rent a book(s) to find more information on a yoga pose you’re interested in. Just go find a social media page on the topic you’re interested in, write a comment and get your answer quickly, sometimes in minutes.

Advancements in Apps and Mobile Technology

What if I told you that I could give you a mini super-computer that was capable of getting mankind to the moon? Many people wouldn’t bat an eyelash at this deal. Honestly, it sounds too good to be true! Here’s where it gets interesting. Now, what if I told you, you’d be taking a downgrade from the phone in your pocket every day? You heard that right, the average modern smartphone has 1 million times the RAM of the computer system for the Apollo programs and 7 million times the standard memory.

Since the first iPhone, the possibilities for smartphone capabilities have only continued to rise. Now, there’s a popular saying that has gone around: “there’s an app for that”. Which is completely true, especially for fitness professionals. Now, through apps like FitSW, you can virtually run your business from your smartphone (no pun intended). Features like custom in-app branding and managing payments are care aspects of running a business. That isn’t getting anyone to the moon, but it might seem like your bank account is heading there.

All jokes aside, there has never been a better time to be a fitness professional. The only real overhead for getting started is getting certified. Just skip your Starbucks frappe for three morning’s and you’re halfway there! Seriously, those things are starting to get ridiculous. Anyway, many programs offering accredited personal training certification also offer extra options that guarantee you employment within 90 days of finishing or you get your money back. The only caveat to that is this feature costs a little bit extra and you have to pass the program (duh). 

Free-to-use Platforms and Social Media

One of the greatest gifts the web has given the fitness industry is social media and other platforms that are free to use. While these platforms are a great place for people to learn, it’s also a great place to advertise your services for free. Some of the most common fitness household names got huge because they continued to use social media to their benefit. 

The idea of content marketing can be daunting. In-fact, a lot of people will say it’s “dead” because now social media is saturated with a bunch of “influencers”. 

Two things, the first, content marketing is not “dead”. The people who say so probably posted a bunch of selfies, poor quality posts, or irrelevant content on Instagram. Then they quit and complained about how it wasn’t working. What’s that saying about repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results? Eh, beats me. This leads me to the second point, you may have realized this – social media has evolved. Now, you have to push out content regularly, that’s consistent and up to par with your audience’s standards. In short, you need to be providing value to their lives. 

This takes time, which is why it’s important to research your posts ahead of time and develop a long term content framework. Once you’ve done the research, you can use one of many free social media scheduling tools.

In addition to social media, you can start blogging/vlogging about your business. In short, there are loads of strategies for gaining more followers and eventual customers by organically growing your social media following and learning the skills you need to know through the free resources and communities on the internet. That’s how I got this job, shhh don’t tell my boss.

Conclusion:

The internet is big and the internet is confusing. But, if you’re a fitness professional it doesn’t have to be. In fact, you can use it to scale your business like never before. 

This article should come as good news, there’s no better time to take advantage of the growth of the fitness industry and leverage digital strategies to grow your business, learn, and better yourself. There are loads of tools out there and if you use them right, you can pretty much run your business from your phone (with the help of FitSW of course).

FitSW Wants Your Feedback!

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on how the internet is good for the growth of the fitness industry or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

How to Launch a Successful Fitness Membership Site

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Fitness Membership Site

It’s 2020 and it’s time to turn your business into a more lucrative and well-oiled machine. How? With a fitness membership site.

Before you dismiss the idea, because it seems “too big and demanding”, think again. 

Today, the technology you need to build a site, launch your own mobile app, take payments and market your brand is more accessible and user-friendly than ever before. And the demand for quality online fitness education has been growing steadily since 2004.

fitness education image

So, if you’re serious about making 2020 the year you level-up, keep reading. You’ll learn how to pick your niche, plan your course, create your site, and market it effectively.

Why You Should Start an Online Fitness Membership Site

Over the last 15 years, the web has become a busy and lucrative place. It has opened more doors for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses faster. 

Take the average Uscreen fitness membership site. It uses over-the-top applications that deliver video content and has around 343 monthly subscribers and earns an average of $7,503 per month. 

Beyond online search demand, there’s more evidence to support the creation of your very own fitness membership site. Here are three good reasons: 

More Reach and Income Opportunity

Creating an online fitness program places your business on a global stage. You’re able to reach more eager customers with content to help achieve their fitness goals. And because it’s all online, you effectively scale your business without putting in any additional man-hours.

People are Consuming More Content Today

Content has taken on a new life. Today, people are consuming more video at a rapid rate. For example, Facebook gets over 8 billion video views per day and around 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute.

And it makes sense. Video is easier to digest and just as accessible as text-based content. 

What’s more, people use their mobile devices to view content on the go. This means more opportunity to reach an audience hungry for your content.

People will pay for premium content

Will people really pay for your content? 

It’s a common question, especially because there’s a lot of free content on almost every topic online. 

It all comes down to convenience. People want quality, ease-of-access, and structure. Creating a fitness membership site that meets this criterion is no different than paying for a monthly subscription to the New York Times.

Creating Your Fitness Membership Site

Building a fitness membership website is less complex than you think. It takes planning and execution, much like researching and committing to a workout routine. And as you’ve seen, it is possible to generate results in build healthy online business.

Here’s how:

Pick Your Niche

To get started, you’ll need to identify your niche. A niche is a product, service, or interest that appeals to a small, specialized group of people. 

For example, Naturally Sassy is a fitness membership site with a twist. Founder Saskia Gregson-Williams is a professionally trained ballerina and qualified personal trainer. She developed her programs by combining classical ballet with strength and cardio.

Fitness Membership Site

How do you find yours?

Here are four questions to help you establish your niche:

What Are Your Interests?

As a fitness professional, this a good chance you zeroed in on a particular interest you have. It could be helping people lose weight and build more muscle. Or you may have an affinity for bodybuilding or strength training.

Identify exactly what you most interested in. If you have more and more interest, list them on a piece of paper and then prioritize them in order.

The idea is to establish what resonates most with you.

How Much Knowledge Do You Have?

Creating your fitness membership site means producing content the positions you as an authority. You need to have a fair amount of knowledge about fitness education you’ll share.

As you move down your list of interests, indicate which you know most about. It’s also a good idea to identify knowledge gaps should you wish to learn more before establishing your fitness membership site.

How Large is Your Audience?

Audience size is just as important as the quality content. You need to know that people are looking for a site like yours to increase the probability of launching and running a successful membership site.

How do you establish your audience size?

Keyword research.

Go to Ubersuggest and run a search for terms related to the niche ideas you’re considering. For example, if one of your interests is strength training, you’ll see that the search term “strength training exercises” gets approximately 2900 searches per month on Google.

strength training exercises

This means that people are looking for education on strength training. To get a better picture of how large the market is, run additional searches for other related terms.

Who is Your Ideal Customer?

Knowing what people are searching for, it’s time to establish who your ideal customer is.

Creating a persona is a critical aspect of building your site. The content you produce and the marketing material you promote will target a specific customer. Knowing what their fitness goals are and challenges experience on their journey towards achieving the goals is, therefore, important.

If you’ve never created a persona before, use this template from DigitalMarketer. It will help you identify basic demographic information along with other important details you can use to get a clear picture of who your ideal customers and how you can help them.

customer avatar worksheet

Plan Your Course

Once you’ve established your niche, it’s time to plan your course. Planning a course involves arranging ideas in an orderly fashion. But to arrange ideas, you need to know the scope of your content.

Get Ideas Onto Paper

The best way to determine the scope of your content is to get all of your ideas onto paper. Brainstorm all of the topics you’d like to cover and within order them.

At this stage, you should also start thinking about the format of your content. Will you use text, video, or both?

While the choice is yours, we’ve seen fitness brands thrive by creating video websites. As a medium of instruction, video is easier for members to follow along and repeat exercises they can see. It also helps members practice the right techniques and develop confidence because it’s a more engaging medium than text.

Structure Your Lessons

Next, break those ideas into chapters or lessons. Each lesson should also be broken down into subtopics or ideas you’d like to include or cover. 

Supporting Content

With an idea of the structure of course and lessons, start to identify and collect supporting documentation. These can be worksheets, fitness tips, planners or guides members can use as part of your course.

Remember Your Welcome Message

While we’ve covered the meat of your course, it’s essential to kick things off the right way. Include a welcome message for your members. Make it one that reaffirms the value will receive by being a member and also motivational to inspire them to do the work to get the results they want.

Create Your Site

Building a website today is far from the technical challenge it was five years ago. In fact, much of the functionality previously out of reach for online entrepreneurs is now easily accessible. 

Today, you can build your membership website using an all-in-one platform like Uscreen, along with all the features and functionality you need to give your members a world-class experience.

Fitness Membership Site

While the list of features can be much longer, here are important features to consider adding to your site:

User Profiles

Membership sites all about personal experience. Give your members the opportunity to create profiles and customize them with avatars and information like bios to make them feel for.

Forums and Commenting

No community would be complete without the ability to engage. Ensure that your membership site offers your community the chance to start conversations around topics, ask questions, and share feedback and results.

A Smooth Video Player

There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting for a video to buffer. If you plan to produce video content, ensure your video is distributed across a reliable content delivery network.

Process Payments

This is non-negotiable. If you plan to grow your business online, you need to be able to efficiently and securely process payments from members. You’ll need to build to do this on a recurring basis and have control of the process (manually cancel memberships or process refunds). Personal trainer software gives you the ability to process payments from the palm of your hand.

Promote

Having created your course and build your website, It’s time to get the word out about your site. When promoting your business, think of it as a long-term commitment. You’ve done the research and know there is a demand for what you’re offering, all you need to is to position your service in front of your audience.

Get started by identifying the places where your audience is. These can include YouTube, social media websites and niche fitness sites.

You want to produce content that grabs your ideal customer’s attention and drives traffic to your membership site to sell your fitness program(s).

Your content can be in the form of:

  • video ads for social media
  • blog posts (including guest posting)
  • social media posts
  • free downloadable guides and content to help build an email list

In addition to using content to drive traffic to your site, you can also run promotions, competitions and create challenges.

Take yoga with Adriene. Adriene offers a free 30-day yoga challenge on YouTube. It’s a smart way to introduce new people to her brand. 

Wrapping This up

Fitness is a high-growth industry and you can make more money in fitness in 2020. Getting started is also easier than you think. Identify your niche, produce quality course content, build a site and promote your content to reach your audience. 

PJ headshot

Author: PJ Taei

Bio: PJ is the founder and president of Uscreen, an all-in-one video monetization and OTT platform that empowers video entrepreneurs and creators to monetize their content and build thriving businesses around their videos.

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