The fitness industry is booming, with more people than ever before looking to get in shape. This means that there are plenty of opportunities for online fitness trainers who want to grow their business by establishing a presence on the internet. In this post, we'll cover how to use technology and social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to increase your visibility and generate leads for your online fitness business!
What Technology Do I Need?
To establish an online presence you will need some basic technology. This includes:
- a domain name
- website hosting and web design.
- You will also need an email address (such as the one you're reading this on) to send emails if people sign up for your mailing list or contact you about your business.
- A online fitness software to manage sales, memberships and communications to your clients.
You can use free resources like WordPress to build a site with its own domain (e.g. yoursite.com) and a free email address from Gmail. This will allow you to create a professional-looking website in minutes, without any technical skills or expertise required!
You can also use Facebook Business Pages for your online fitness business if you want to keep all of your content on one platform (e.g., social media). You'll need access to the advanced features like analytics so that you know what's working, but this is another effective way to grow your business online with no cost at all. As an added bonus - businesses have found success using their customers' photos as testimonials on their product pages (leading them to buy more!).
What tools to use to generate leads
To generate leads for your online fitness business they are going to need some basic contact information (like their email address) and a way to subscribe or get in touch with your business. You can create an opt-in form for this by using free tools like OptimizePress, LeadPages, or MailChimp.
- OptimizePress is platform that allows you to design extremely professional looking landing pages without any knowledge of coding whatsoever! With just a few clicks you can build customized layouts for your website--and not only is it FREE but the designs are GORGEOUS too and include templates from famous brands such as Google, Nike and Adidas!
- Leadpages also makes generating leads easy because they have prebuilt lead capture forms that are mobile responsive so people on their phones don't need to scroll left & right when filling it out! You can also test different design templates and landing pages on their lead builder, which is a site that displays your website in real-time.
To create an email list you'll need to do some of the work yourself - but luckily there are tools like MailChimp that will walk you through it step by step so you don't have to worry about learning how to code or anything like that (unless you want to). This program lets you compose emails with ease and then automatically distributes them as HTML formatted versions for all major browsers. You can use this tool just for sending sign up forms too if that's what interests you most!
Social Media
Another way technology could help grow your business online is when using social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. You'll need to create accounts on these sites (and learn how they work) but the beauty of them is that once you do - your followers can see new content from you instantly!
This means that whether or not people are online at a given moment, they will still be able to interact with your business through social media just by checking their phone in between meetings for example.
The key to success when using this strategy however is consistency: it's important to post regularly so that people start looking forward to what's coming up next...or follow your posts if you want more likes & comments. The easiest way we recommend doing this is by setting aside time every day - say an hour or two each morning or evening - to post your content.
If you're not sure what to post, you can always use a free online tool like Canva to create graphics for your posts (e.g., beautiful photos of people exercising) and then share them on Facebook or Twitter! You might also want to check out our social media 101 checklist.
How to close the sale
One of the fastest ways to generate leads as an online fitness trainer is by creating a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is something that your potential clients can download for free (like a pdf, video, or audio file) in exchange for their contact information and email address.
For example - if you're interested in teaching kettlebell training courses - you could create "6-Week Workout To Lose Weight" guide and give it away to potential customers to get them more involved with your brand/business.
When they see there are lots of great resources available through signing up for your weekly emails, it will make them feel like they're being rewarded simply for opening up the emails! Plus: since you have their contact information, you can follow up with them right away and ask if they're interested in any of your other services.
The key to all of this is having a system to manage your online fitness business. You need an easy way to sell your programming and services online, an easy way to distribute your workouts and keep tabs on the progress of your clients, and an easy way to communicate with them.
I hope this article has shown you how to grow your business online. To recap, these are some of the most important things to remember:
- Have a mechanism to capture leads
- Have a system for managing your online fitness business.
- Consider using social media sites like Facebook and YouTube as well as creating an incentive for people to sign up for your emails (i.e., a free download).
PS: Our CRO wrote a great article on how to close the sale! Read here
