FitSW Blog

In such a competitive industry, it is important to use every resource you can to get more clients and grow your fitness business. Marketing on social media, getting referrals from current personal training clients, and using personal trainer software are good starts to growing your business, though there is more you could be doing. While it is not the easiest thing to do, blogging can give your fitness business a boost in multiple different ways. In this article, we will go over why starting a fitness blog is so important, how to create your own fitness blog, and what you should post on your blog.

Why Should I Make A Fitness Blog?

There are numerous reasons why you should create our own fitness blog. Whether you are a fitness coach that is just getting started, or a personal trainer that has been in the industry for years, creating a fitness blog is a great way to grow your fitness business. A well maintained blog can help you sell products/packages, attract new clients, grow your influence as a fitness expert, and grow your fitness business. Once your blog has gained some attention, it can also help you get noticed by the industry leaders and provide passive income through affiliate marketing.

Another large reason to start a fitness blog is because it helps your website with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is ” the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine”. Or in other words, it is your ranking on search engines. Regularly posting blog articles focused around your business will help you appear higher in search queries. This, along with numerous other reasons, is why blogging will help you grow your fitness business.

How To Create A Fitness Blog

There has never been a better time to start a fitness blog. The opportunities that successful blogs can generate are lucrative and can help any personal trainer grow their business. However, there are a lot of different aspects that go into creating a successful fitness blog. It may seem difficult at first, though it will get easier as time goes on and will be well worth it. From choosing your blog’s name, all the way to monetizing your blog, every step is important to creating a successful blog.

Picking A Name For Your Blog

Choosing your blogs name is very important. Though it may not seem that significant, this is the first thing that potential clients are going to see. A good blog name should be descriptive so new users know what exactly what your blog is about, simply by reading it. Changing your blog’s name later on can be a hassle and can severely hurt your organic traffic. This is why it is important to choose a good blog name from the start.

Do not rush this process as having a blog name you are happy with will save you a lot of time and effort down the road. Once you find a blogs name you are happy with, check if the domain is available. There are many software you can do to check the domain availability. Once this is done, your one step closer to publishing your blog and growing your fitness business!

Get Your Blog Online

After you finish choosing a name for your fitness blog, it’s time to get your blog online. This may seem confusing or technical, but it’s actually quite simple! There are two main aspects of getting your blog online. The first thing you need to do is choose the blogging software you want to use. After this, you must choose the blog hosting software. Once these items are completed, you are ready to start personalizing your blog (we’ll get to that later).

Step 1: Choose Blogging Software

FitSW offers personal trainers and fitness coaches the ability to publish posts, reply to comments, and manage fitness blogs within our software! In addition, your personal training clients can automatically view your blog from within the app. This makes it extremely easy to upload what you want your clients to see. We also give you the ability to share specific posts with client’s only or allow anyone to see it. For more information on our personal trainer blogging feature, check out our blog article on how to start blogging by using FitSW! Having said that, if you are looking for a blogging platform that has exclusive features, refer to the paragraph below.

WordPress is one of the best and easiest software’s to use for running a successful blog. It easy to use system and has numerous plugin’s you can apply. This is why it is FitSW’s recommendation for blogging software. Having said that, choose which ever blogging platform you prefer! There are hundreds of options out there for you to choose form. Choose the platform that offers you the features you want. If you are just starting out, you’ll want a blogging platform that’s easy to set up, has a low learning curve, and doesn’t require any coding skills.

Step 2: Choose Your Blog Host

A Blog host provides space on its servers and the equipment to store your blog and serve it up to visitors. This way, your blog can be reached by anyone online over the internet. There are a large amount of blog hosting software’s you can use, all with similar features. There are a few free blog hosting software’s out there. However, their resources can be quite limited.

We here at FitSW use DreamHost and would recommend it highly. Its very easy to use and they have excellent customer support. There are a few different options that we recommend based on your needs. The most budget friendly is Shared Hosting which starts at only a few dollars a month, includes a free domain name, SSL certificate and more. It allows you to run WordPress and includes several other features that a new website would need. Another option for a larger / higher traffic website is Managed WordPress Hosting. This offers optimized WordPress hosting for less than $20 / month. Its a little more expensive but its faster, has more features, and is optimized for WordPress. The great thing about WordPress is you can switch plans at any time depending upon your needs.

Just like the blogging platform, choose something that works with your budget and has the features you desire. After you choose a blog hosting software, they will provide you with the instructions to finalize the setup. It’s that easy! Once this is completed, you are on the path to growing your fitness business!

Personalizing Your Fitness Blog

Everyone has a different opinion on what their blog should look like and what features it should have. WordPress makes it easy to change the theme of your blog. Starting out, there will be a few default themes. You can either choose a default theme, or add one from another site. The blog hosting software that you choose will likely have themes for you to choose from. Additionally, there are numerous sites that offer free and premium designs.

By using WordPress, you can easily change the theme of your blog and filter for themes that have the features you want. For a full list of the features you can filter for, refer to the image above. Find the theme that works with your business.

Creating Your First Article

Blogging is a great way to grow your fitness business because it shows people that you are an expert in fitness. However, you need to write articles for your blog to gain traction. Publishing articles frequently is the key for blogging success. While every blog is different, you want to make sure you provide value for your readers. If you are trying to sell something in every post you do, most people will stop reading your blog. Make sure your posts have value, show why you are an expert, and offer insight that people cannot find anywhere else.

Promoting Your Blog

After you finish designing your blog and uploading articles, you can now begin promoting your blog. This is a crucial step to growing both your blog and business, especially if you are just starting out. While promoting your blog can sound costly or technical, it is actually quite easy! In addition, there are multiple ways you can promote your blog. While you should try many different promotion strategies, some may work better for your business. Test what produces the best results and optimize your promotion strategies for this.

Using Social Media

Posting your blog articles on social media is a great way to promote your blog and grow your fitness business. Social media can help you get new users to your blog, update existing users on your activity, and can be a powerful marketing tool. If you want your blog post to be seen by more users than the people that like your page, you can promote your post! While this requires payment, the cost is very low and can bring more users to your blog.

Email

After using social media and bringing new readers to your blog, you want to make sure that your readers come back. This is why using email marketing for your blog is a crucial promotion strategy. You can easily set up a pop up on your blog that encourages users to sign up for your emails. Additionally, you can put signups for your emails across your social media and on your website. Building your email list is important because it notifies users of your new blog posts. Furthermore, it can help you build closer relationships with your readers.

Email marketing can be complicated at times and I cannot cover all of the intricate details in this blog article. However, it is important to utilize all of the aspects of email marketing for the best chance of success. You can find more information about email marketing here.

Commenting On Other Blogs

Find similar blogs to you and commenting on them is a great way to build both back links and generate interest from other users. The process is simple, comment on other blogs and provide a link back to your blog. It is important to note that this should not be abused. If you are leaving poor quality, non relevant content on other fitness blogs, this will hurt your blog. Additionally, the blog owner will most likely delete these comments. Make sure you post relevant and helpful comments on other blogs and you’ll be sure to get relevant and engaged users. Not to mention it gives you a boost with SEO.

Monetizing Your Blog

Once your blog is has a good reader base, you can begin the process of monetizing your blog. Monetiziation is ” the action or process of earning revenue from an asset, business, etc”. Regardless of the success of your personal training business, earning extra revenue is never a bad thing. Additionally, if you blog has grown enough to get to this step, your fitness business will already be flourishing! So, how do you start the process of monetizing your blog?

There are many ways to make money off of your blog. First of all, you can use it as a platform to sell your services and products. If you have a brand new nutrition program, blogging about it can be a great way to sell more packages. Next, you can get paid to write reviews about different products. Successful fitness blogs can generate large amounts of income through this method. People will send you products or give you services for free, in exchange for your review.

The best way to monetize your blog is selling advertising space. Successful blogs garner large amounts of attention from advertisers. If you are interested in selling advertising space, visit Google AdSense! They make it simple to sell advertising space and do all of the hard work.

FitSW Wants To Help You Grow Your Fitness Business

We want to help you grow your personal training business and increase your revenue! From the day FitSW was founded, our goal has been to help personal trainers grow their client base. We offer a “Trainer of the Month” promotion in which we select one trainer a month and share their story with the world! All you need to do is email support@fitsw.com and answer the questions they provide you! It’s that simple! Once you are chosen, we will post all of your information to our blog and social media accounts. If you would like an example, please check out this featured personal trainer article!

FitSW wants you to write articles for us! If you have a interesting topic, or just want to get your blog out there, contact us! We would love to feature one of your blog articles and will give you full accreditation.

Additionally, if you have any other ideas on how we can help you grow, we would love to hear your thoughts! Reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or on our support page!

Motivation “is the reason for people’s actions, willingness and goals”. This is one of the many reasons why it is so important in the fitness industry. If you clients do not have motivation, there is a high probability that they will discontinue their training sessions with you. Clients hired you, the personal trainer, to help them stay motivated on their fitness journey. If you are able to successfully motivate your clients, they will be more engaged, stay on-track, and continue training with you. However, increasing client motivation is not the easiest thing to accomplish and requires coaches to do multiple different things. So, how do you increase client motivation?

Make Your Workouts Fun

Making your workouts fun is a great way to increase client motivation. If your clients are not enjoying their workouts, they will become unmotivated. A big part of workouts not becoming boring is mixing up your workout routines. If you give your clients the same workout and exercises week after week, your clients are going to get bored, fast. Talk with your clients and see which workout routines that they enjoyed the most. Then, build workouts based on what they have liked in the past, but with some variety. This will ensure that each workout they do is fresh and enjoyable. In addition to this, make sure you bring a positive attitude to each and every training session. If you are in a bad mood, it will put your clients in a bad mood as well.

Use Personal Training Software

Technology has changed the ways we function in our day to day lives. It has made our lives easier and the same can be said about personal training apps & software. Personal Trainer Software helps clients stay motivated and on-track because they can visually see their progress. For example, FitSW enables trainers to send messages directly through the app. This means that you can connect with your clients in seconds. You can also see their entire workout history, making is easier than ever to build workouts that have worked for your clients in the past.

Increase Client Motivation By Tracking Progress

Tracking your personal training clients progress is a great way to increase their motivation to continue their fitness journey. This is because they can see how much they have been improving by training with you. Personal Training Apps give trainers the ability to show their clients their progress by either showing them exercise progress graphs or progress photos. If your clients know that they are making great strides to achieving their short & long term goals, they will certainly have more motivation to continue training.

Connect With Your Clients

Building rapport and positive relationships with your clients are a great way to increase their motivation. You do not need to be best friends with every one of your clients, though having good relationships with them are important. Make sure they know what they are doing right, how much progress they’ve made, and what is going on in their life. For example, if they are having a bad day, find out why they are feeling that way. Additionally, make sure you show appreciation to your clients. Your clients chose you, out of hundreds of options, to train with. This is why it is important to show your appreciation.

Set Goals

You should set both long term and short term goals for your clients. Additionally, you should also speak with them to get a better understanding of what they want to achieve by training with you. If you only set long term goals, your clients will become unmotivated as they will not achieve these goals for a long time. Though your clients may want to lose 30 pounds, this will not happen for a good amount of time.

Setting short term goals, such as “run an extra mile” or “bench-press 5 extra lbs this week”, can have a tremendous impact on your clients motivation. These are merely examples and you should set goals that are specific to your clients long term goals. It is important to note, the goals should be attainable in specific time frame. Find out what your clients what to achieve and set goals that they can achieve while working towards their long term goal.

Offer Rewards / Incentives

Offering rewards and / or incentives can be a great way to increase client motivation. Everyone likes to be rewarded, regardless of the situation. This is exceedingly true for fitness industry. If your client reaches one of their short term goals, reward them with a free or discounted session, a social media shout out, or a free t-shirt. However, every client is different. This is why it is important to make rewards client specific. Find out what they value and give them rewards that they will like. Doing this will ensure that they feel appreciated and stay motivated throughout their fitness journey.

Other Ways To Increase Client Motivation

Social media is a fantastic way to increase client motivation. It gives you a platform which you can connect with your clients (see section Connect With Your Clients for more information). Share motivational messages, post the accomplishments of your clients (with permission of course), and create communities for your clients. For more on connecting with your clients, check out the section above! If you want personal trainer marketing tips, you can find all of the information you need by reading our marketing tips for personal trainer blog article!

FitSW Wants To Help You Increase Client Motivation!

We want to help you grow your personal training business and increase client motivation! From the day FitSW was founded, our goal has been to help personal trainers grow their client base. We offer a “Trainer of the Month” promotion in which we select one trainer a month and share their story with the world! All you need to do is email support@fitsw.com and answer the questions they provide you! It’s that simple! Once you are chosen, we will post all of your information to our blog and social media accounts. If you would like an example, please check out this featured personal trainer article! Additionally, if you have any other ideas on how we can help you grow, we would love to hear your thoughts! Reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or on our support page!

Social media marketing has emerged as one of the best ways to engage with users, grow your brand, and increase your revenues. This is due to the rise of multiple social media platforms over the past few years. But, what is social media marketing? Social media marketing (SMM) utilizes social networking websites, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, as a marketing tool.  It has been proven to help businesses grow, though you need to approach it the correct way for it to work for your business. In this article, we will go over how to use personal trainer marketing on social media effectively.

Start With A Plan

Like most things, you cannot simply jump right into it. You need to have a personal trainer marketing plan before you can start growing your business. To start off, you need to ask yourself a few important questions. This includes:

1. What goal are you trying to achieve by using social media?
2. Who is the target audience you are trying to reach?
3. What message are you trying to send to your target audience?

By asking yourself these questions, you will immediately have a better understanding of what content you should be posting. The goals, target audience, and messaging of your social media marketing are important to have a vision for.

Goals

There are many goals that you can have for your business. Increasing traffic to your website, increasing conversions or growing your client base, building your brand awareness, or simply increasing engagement with your audience are all great goals to have. Choose which goal(s) you want to go after and build your content around this.

Audience

After you find the goal(s) you want to pursue, find the audience you want to reach. For personal trainers, this will most likely be potential clients. However, do some research on the specific clients you wish to attract. Facebook for example, has an incredible audience tool that can help you find the perfect audience for your personal training business.

Content/Messaging

Once you have both your goal and target audience, you can start to focus on the content you want to publish. Make sure it is visually appealing and speaks directly to your audience. Additionally, having a consistent message is vital to your content strategy. There are many layers to the consistency of your content, which we will go into more detail later in the article.

Doing these three things before starting your personal trainer marketing strategy is a great way to get a head start. However, there are countless other aspects of social media marketing that you should be doing.

Platforms For Personal Trainer Marketing

Facebook

Facebook is a fantastic platform to utilize your personal trainer marketing strategy. This is due to the fact that it has over 2 billion users who log in every month! After you create your Facebook Business Page (should be the first thing you do), you can begin to employ your content strategy. However, Facebook is a place for users to chat with friends and unwind, so make sure your voice compliments this culture. While your organic reach will be low starting off, there are many ways to garner some paid traffic to your page.

Instagram

Instagram is another great social media to utilize for your personal training business. It has over 1 billion monthly users and 90% of users are under the age of 35. While not all of your personal training clients will be this young, there will be many who are. It is also a great place to find people interested in fitness, or your specific niche.

Twitter

Twitter does not have the massive monthly user base that Facebook and Instagram has, totaling just over 300 millions users. Nonetheless, it is still a powerful social media platform that you should be utilizing.

YouTube

YouTube has emerged as one of the best social media sites. It has over a billion users. In addition, almost 5 billion, yes billion, YouTube videos are watched every single day. YouTube can be a great place it upload workout demo videos, personal training tips, and anything else that you can film centered around your fitness business.

Best Personal Trainer Marketing Strategies

Be Consistent

One of the biggest aspects of personal trainer marketing on social media is consistency. This not only has to do with the amount of times you post, but with your overall voice, content, and aesthetics. Know the people you want to engage with and develop content targeted at these individuals. Make sure that your content is visually appealing. Humans are naturally driven to aesthetically appealing visuals, so making your content look professional will help you with engagement. However, arguably the most important part of growing your social media platform is posting consistently. Posting often not only shows your audience that you are active and engaged, but it gives you more opportunities to be found organically. Additionally, posting at the correct times has a large impact on your engagement. Do some testing and find the best time to post your content.

Share Your Expertise

Showing users and potential personal training clients why you are a fitness expert is extremely important. This builds your credibility and adds valuable content to your social media page. It can also create very good impressions for new users visiting your page for the first time. If you are an expert in nutrition, create posts about healthy eating tips, how to eat nutritiously on a budget, or any content that shows users why you are an expert. Another option is writing up informational blog articles and cross posting them to your social media. This not only helps your rankings for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but you can go into more depth about a subject.

Engage With Your Audience

It is vital to engage with your audience and potential personal training clients when using social media. Make sure to respond, comment, and thank your audience if they give you positive comments. You should also like and comment on their personal posts. This builds a positive relationship with your social media audience and can go a long way when building trust with personal training clients. Posting on your clients photos, timeline, or tagging them in a post (must ask permission first) is a great way to engage with your clients.  For example, saying, “great workout today Julie – you have gained a ton of strength – 20 lbs increase in your squat in just 1 month.  Your rocking’ it girl!” can help you build extremely positive relationships with your clients. 

FitSW has progress tracking graphs in which you could post as well. These automatically take workout data and put it into beautiful looking graphs. Additionally, it is a great way to show the progress that your fitness clients are making. This is a way to extend your reach as well, as many of the clients audience will see this.

Call-To-Actions

Call to actions are an important part of social media campaigns. Make sure you tell your users what they should do at the end of your posts. For example, lets say you just wrote a new blog article on the best full body workouts to do in less than 30 minutes and you want to drive people to your blog. You share it on social media and patiently wait for people to visit your article. However, without a call to action, people will not be inspired to go to our blog. If you put a simple call to action telling users to check out your blog post, you will see much better results. They can also be used to drive engagement. Simply getting users to comment on a post can help your page be viewed more on people’s social media feeds.

Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way for your brand to reach users that are not already following your page. However, too many hashtags on specific social media platforms can make your posts look cluttered. Use 2 or 3 hashtags that are directly related to your business or your post. This will help you drive organic engagement to your site. Once these new users are on your page, you should use the social media strategies we outlined above to make them new clients.

Important Metrics To Consider

Reach

Reach means the total number of people who see your content. Additionally, potential reach is the maximum amount of users that could see your posts. In a perfect world, all of your followers would see every post that you publish. However, this is not the case. This is why it is an important personal trainer marketing metric for you to consider. You want your post to be seen by as many people as possible.

Clicks

Whether it is an organic post or a paid posts, clicks are an extremely important metric for you to follow. Different types of clicks include your CTR (Click Through Rate) and CPC (Cost Per Click). Your CTR has important factors on how many people see your post, or your reach. It directly effects your quality score, helps you understand the messages that are important to your audience, and can help you save money. A higher click through rate means you paid less per click. If you are using Facebook, you can go to the business manager and see information about your clicks and adjust your content accordingly.

Engagement

Engagement is a very important metric because it shows you how many people are interacting with your content. The more engagement you have, the more users will see your post. If you have more people seeing your post, you are building your brand awareness and business in turn.

Hashtag Performance

Hashtags are very important on sites like Instagram and Twitter. They can help you reach users that are not already connected to your page. This is because many people search for hashtags that they are interested in. For example, if you use the hashtag #personaltraining, everyone who searches for this will see your post. After testing which hashtags make your posts receive the most engagements, always add them to your content. This is a great way to grow your audience and your engagement.

Organic & Paid Likes

Once your page has grown a little bit, you will notice that your posts are receiving a few organic likes. These will be from users that directly follow or subscribe to your page. However, you can also promote posts and run page like campaigns. While this does cost money, it helps new users find your business and grows your brand awareness. If you are just starting, or just started personal trainer marketing, it is a good idea to pay for likes. This will help you in the long run and is a great way to grow your audience at the start.

Use Competitors To Your Advantage

Other personal trainers and gyms are already utilizing social media marketing. Furthermore, they have been doing it for awhile and know how to do it. This means you can use it to your advantage! Competitors are a great way to get examples of how to use social media marketing to grow your business. Look at what content they are posting, what message they are conveying, what hashtags they are using, their call-to-actions, how they engage with their audience, and any other information that you can find!

We Want To Help You Grow!

We want to help you grow your personal training business! From the day FitSW was founded, our goal has been to help personal trainers grow their client base. We offer a “Trainer of the Month” promotion in which we select one trainer a month and share their story with the world! All you need to do is email support@fitsw.com and answer the questions they provide you! It’s that simple! Once you are chosen, we will post all of your information to our blog and social media accounts. If you would like an example, please check out this featured personal trainer article! If you have any other ideas on how we can help you grow, we would love to hear your thoughts! Reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or on our support page!

Growing your client base is one of the most important aspects of being a personal trainer. More clients means more revenue. With more revenue, you can expand your personal training business. It may seem like a daunting task to get new clients for your personal training business, but it is easier than most people think! While there is no guaranteed way to acquire new personal training clients, there are multiple strategies that can help. In this article, we will go over multiple ways that you can get more clients for your fitness business.

Use Social Media To Your Advantage

Over the past few years, multiple social media platforms have emerged. With their success comes many potential opportunities. It is now easier than ever to connect with millions of people located across the world. This is why it is so important to use for your personal training business. Social media has made it easier than ever for potential personal training clients to find your business. So, what are some aspects that can help you grow your social media audience and in turn, your fitness business?

Be Consistent

One of the biggest aspects of social media is consistency. This not only has to do with the amount of times you post, but with your overall voice, content, and aesthetics. Know the people you want to engage with and develop content targeted at these individuals. Make sure that your content is visually appealing. Humans are naturally driven to aesthetically appealing visuals, so making your content look professional will help you with engagement. However, arguably the most important part of growing your social media platform is posting consistently. Posting often not only shows your audience that you are active and engaged, but it gives you more opportunities to be found organically. Additionally, posting at the correct times has a large impact on your engagement. Do some testing and find the best time to post your content.

Share Your Expertise

Showing users and potential personal training clients why you are a fitness expert is extremely important. This builds your credibility and adds valuable content to your social media page. It can also create very good impressions for new users visiting your page for the first time. If you are an expert in nutrition, create posts about healthy eating tips, how to eat nutritiously on a budget, or any content that shows users why you are an expert. Another option is writing up informational blog articles and cross posting them to your social media. This not only helps your rankings for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but you can go into more depth about a subject.

Engage With Your Audience

It is vital to engage with your audience and potential personal training clients when using social media. Make sure to respond, comment, and thank your audience if they give you positive comments. You should also like and comment on their personal posts. This builds a positive relationship with your social media audience and can go a long way when building trust with personal training clients. Posting on your clients photos, timeline, or tagging them in a post (must ask permission first) is a great way to engage with your clients.  For example, saying, “great workout today Julie – you have gained a ton of strength – 20 lbs increase in your squat in just 1 month.  Your rocking’ it girl!” can help you build extremely positive relationships with your clients. 

FitSW has progress tracking graphs in which you could post as well. These automatically take workout data and put it into beautiful looking graphs. Additionally, it is a great way to show the progress that your fitness clients are making. This is a way to extend your reach as well, as many of the clients audience will see this.

Call-To-Actions

Call to actions are an important part of social media campaigns. Make sure you tell your users what they should do at the end of your posts. For example, lets say you just wrote a new blog article on the best full body workouts to do in less than 30 minutes and you want to drive people to your blog. You share it on social media and patiently wait for people to visit your article. However, without a call to action, people will not be inspired to go to our blog. If you put a simple call to action telling users to check out your blog post, you will see much better results. They can also be used to drive engagement. Simply getting users to comment on a post can help your page be viewed more on people’s social media feeds.

Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way for your brand to reach users that are not already following your page. However, too many hashtags on specific social media platforms can make your posts look cluttered. Use 2 or 3 hashtags that are directly related to your business or your post. This will help you drive organic engagement to your site. Once these new users are on your page, you should use the social media strategies we outlined above to make them new clients.

Referrals From Current Personal Training Clients

Referrals are a crucial part of not only growing your business, but maintaining a steady client base. Most personal training businesses are dependent on referrals, though you would be surprised how many personal trainers do not ask their clients for them. This may feel awkward for you to ask your clients for referrals, but it is well worth it.

The PTDC created an sample script of how to ask a current client to refer them:

Me: “Thanks again for your great work today! You really smashed those deadlifts. There’s something I’d love to have a quick chat with you about.” (Make the compliment specific)

Client: “Of course.”

Me: “I’ve noticed that I’m going to have some gaps in my schedule coming up due to some personal issues with a couple other clients. I’m asking my clients first if they know anybody who might be interested in training. I want to make sure I keep the spots open to look after my clients friends and family first before marketing to the outside world. Do you know of anybody who might be interested in training?”

Client: “Actually yes. My sister was talking about working out but is afraid because she’s had an old shoulder injury, I think it’s tendinitis.”

Me: “Great! I have a lot of experience working with shoulder injuries and am happy to get in touch with her physio to get all the details. Do you mind asking her permission for me to call her?”

Client: “Not at all. I’ll ask her tonight.”

Me: “Thanks. I appreciate that. Here’s a card for a complimentary meeting and week membership that you can give to her.”

Structuring Your Referral Script & Asking For Referrals

The script above is merely used as an example and is a good place to start. However, make sure you find a script that sounds like yourself and works with your business! Make sure your script offers the client a free meeting and training session to pass on to the personal training client they are going to refer. This is very important as it gives the client being referred a chance to try your services for free.

Do not be afraid to ask for referrals! You might be afraid that it seems desperate or it may feel awkward, but it is not that way at all! If you have a good relationship with your clients, they will be willing to refer a friend because of their good experience. Furthermore, these referrals have a much higher chance of becoming your personal training clients! The NFPT proves this fact saying, “referred prospect conversion rates are much higher than most other leads”. The best part of referrals are that they are free! In this competitive industry, it is nice to have a free option to get more clients.

Offer A Free Session Or Trial

A free session should not be something you only offer for referred clients, but something you should offer all of your potential personal training clients. Free consultations or sessions are a great way to make new personal training clients feel comfortable and see what kind of trainer you are. Consequently, it is important for these prospective clients to have a good experience. Look professional, be friendly, and make sure you are approachable. Also, make sure they know how you can help them on their fitness journey. If you make a great first impression, show that you are an expert, and you’re friendly, you will gain a lot of new personal training clients through these free trials.

Offer A Free Group Session

Offering a free group session to prospective personal training clients can be a great way for your business to gain exposure. This should be done in a public place, such as a park, that is in a central location. Post fliers, send an email, and post this free group training session across social media. Furthermore, you should take a strategy from later in this article and post fliers in coffee shops (see more information about this in the Referral Exchange With Other Service Professionals section).

It is important to note that you should make this free session as fun as possible. You want new personal training clients to have the best experience so they have a higher chance of coming back. Additionally, you want to make sure that people know that you are a fitness expert. If you spend 30 minutes posting fliers & sharing it to social media and 20 people showed up to your free fitness session, it is well worth it.

Testimonials From Current Personal Training Clients

Would you rather buy a product off of amazon that has an average rating of 4.5 starts or one that has 2 stars? The answer is clear. Testimonials are very important in any business, but especially in the personal training business. They offer potential clients a chance to see what other people think about you. However, asking for testimonials can seem like a daunting task, similar to asking for referrals, but it is vital to grow your client base. So, how do you ask for testimonials from current personal training clients?

The PFP came up with a list of sample questions to ask your current clients:

• When did you start your fitness journey?
• What motivated you to start?
• What were some of your goals when you started?
• How have your goals changed?
• What have been your greatest achievements?
• What were/are your biggest struggles?
• Is there any advice you would give to new clients/members?
• What is your favorite thing about your workouts?

This is just one example of a script to gather testimonials, but do some research and find the perfect script for your business. However, make sure you have a way to gather testimonials from your clients. It will offer social proof to prospective personal training clients and really help you grow your business.

Referral Exchange With Other Service Professionals

Using other service professionals in your area is a valuable resource you should be utilizing. There are a number of ways that personal trainers are able to obtain new clients by using businesses in their areas. First, post your cards in coffee shops and similar businesses. This takes minimal effort and time and can get you a few new clients. You should also be forming cross-referring relationships with local businesses. This includes the nutritionists, chiropractors/physical therapists, hair stylists, massage therapists, sport coaches, doctors, and anyone similar to this in your area. Reach out to these people/businesses and offer them a cross-referring partnership/relationship. The more referrals you give them, the more they will give you. This is a sure-fire way to grow your client base, while also helping out other local members of your community.

Emails

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools that any business can use. There are a number of reasons for this. First off, it is highly affordable compared to other marketing strategies and yields breathtaking results. It also offers you a chance to build rapport with your clients. Your personal training clients want to know that you are dedicated to helping them during their fitness journey and email marketing is perfect for this. Emails are also a great way to generate new leads for your business. For example, if you offer an eBook on how to eat healthy on a budget, in exchange for a individuals email, you can build an email list full of people who look to you as an authority on fitness.

How Often Should I Send Emails & What Should I Send?

Sending the right amount of emails with the right content is important to keeping users on your list happy. You want to send at least one email a month, or a maximum of once per week. Make sure not to send to many emails, as this can become annoying and people may start to unsubscribe from your email list. Additionally, do not only send emails about signing up for personal training. Offering your list high value information, such as free eBooks or quality information about your niche is vital. Without these emails, no one will open your sales focused emails. If you do not know what to send your clients, or are having a bit of writers block, hiring a content manager may be your solution. They can create high value fitness articles that will bring in a lot of fitness clients.

FitSW Wants To Get More Personal Training Clients!

We want to help you grow your personal training business! From the day FitSW was founded, our goal has been to help personal trainers grow their client base. We offer a “Trainer of the Month” promotion in which we select one trainer a month and share their story with the world! All you need to do is email support@fitsw.com and answer the questions they provide you! It’s that simple! Once you are chosen, we will post all of your information to our blog and social media accounts. If you would like an example, please check out this featured personal trainer article! If you have any other ideas on how we can help you grow, we would love to hear your thoughts! Reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or on our support page!