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Personal Training

Create fitness and nutrition programmes to help people improve their health.

What's Personal Training?

A personal trainer creates one-on-one fitness programmes for their clients, motivating and guiding them to achieve their goals.

Clients may wish to lose weight or gain muscle, and as a personal trainer you'll teach and help them to exercise properly using workouts and specific plans. You'll instruct and advise clients, using a range of fitness machines, classes or weights.

To work as a personal trainer you'll need a Level 3 personal training qualification, ideally one accredited by a reputable organisation such as UK Coaching or the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA). This can be gained during your degree studies or through an apprenticeship or training provider. In addition it's advisable, but not compulsory, for you to hold a relevant first aid qualification, which ideally should include a cardio-pulmonary resuscitation certificate (CPR).

4 Step Overview

(1) Setting Up a Business Plan

(2) Create an Online Presence

(3) Acquiring Customers

(4) Scaling & Growth Marketing

Setting up a Business Plan

A personal training business plan is useful for any personal trainers wanting to go solo and set up their own personal training business.

Putting together a personal training business plan will ensure you cover all the key events and information you need to successfully launch your personal training business.

Having a personal training business plan will make the process of starting any personal training business smoother. It can become very easy to quickly start working with clients and avoid planning out the bigger picture.

Playlist: How to start a Personal Training business

Create an Online Presence

Online fitness studios can be broken down into 2 types of business models. These are based on video on demand (VOD) that forms your studio’s foundation:

Transactional (TVOD): One-off fee for your content.

PROS:

  1. You can create a high-ticket offer at $197+.
  2. Once the product is ready, you can sell it for years to come.
  3. You can easily promote your online personal training business to in-person and virtual clients.
  4. It’s easy to boost your business through referrals by creating an affiliate offer for third-party trainers to sell.

CONS:

  1. You need to continually find new customers to keep the revenue flowing.
  2. Your income is not recurring or predictable.
  3. Can take a lot of time to create comprehensive online classes.
  4. You need to invest a lot of time into marketing to make money.

Subscription (SVOD): Recurring fee for access.

PROS:

  1. You can earn a recurring income.
  2. Your income is more predictable.
  3. Customers stay subscribed for longer.
  4. The business model is built for scale.
  5. You can easily promote this to online and in-person clients.
  6. Video content can easily be repurposed for marketing.

CONS:

  1. You’ll need to invest time into regular content creation.
  2. Trade-off short-term income for long-term income.
Playlist: How to choose a business model

Acquiring Customers

Think of this website as an additional way of advertising yourself, and when learning how to get clients for online personal training you should seek to promote yourself in the best possible light by implementing a variety of techniques.

Whilst designing an entire website may seem like a stressful process, as an online personal trainer it should be the core of nearly every strategy you implement to attract new clients.A website is a perfect way to present your chosen method of attracting new clients - e.g. inquiry forms and consultation requests.

Alternative methods can be done through social media accounts and advertising locally. Social media is a valuable tool for helping your business connect with people who want a personal trainer. It provides you with an opportunity to connect with your audience on a personal level and send them interesting con tent. To figure out the right platform(s) for your business, look towards your target audience. Your target audience will determine which platforms you use for your campaign, as you want to reach them where they frequent the most.

Videos: How to acquire Personal Training clients

Scaling & Growth Marketing

If you want to reach relevant results, you must optimize your personal training website to appear on the first page of results.

To start using SEO, select keywords that are relevant to your business. Focus on keywords that your target audience would use to find a personal trainer.

As a general rule, stick to long-tail keywords, which are keywords that contain three or more words. A keyword like “personal trainers in Harrisburg, PA” is going to attract more interested leads than a keyword like “personal trainers.”

Playlist: Marketing for Personal Trainers