10 Helpful Tips: How to Get Online Personal Training Clients
Amalia Pop
2020 was a hectic year. We had to readjust many things from our lives, but we also learned a lot from the past year’s experiences.
One of those things? It’s always a good idea to back up your business and have an online version of it. No matter the industry.
The internet is packed with everything someone may need, including great fitness influencers, gym instructors, and personal trainers who managed to build their followers base.
In case you’re a personal trainer and what to start growing your business, here are a few tips on how to get online personal training clients and make a name for yourself.
1. Start with Your Local Community
Whenever you want to grow a business, you have to start somewhere. The best thing to do is begin within your local community, which you surely know how to address.
By narrowing and focusing your efforts on making people from your local community informed of your online training service, you’ll get bigger recognition later on.
To get people to know about your business, start building your online presence by listing your business in local online directories. A few places to consider would be:
- Google Business
- Bing Places
- Yahoo Small Business
- Foursquare
- Hotfrog
- Yelp
- TripAdvisor
- Best of the Web (BOTW)
- Spoke
Making people from your community aware of your online presence will also help you with possible future local partnerships.
2. Grow Your Online Audience
Once your local community knows about your online presence, you have to start thinking big, right?
With 3.96 billion people currently using social media worldwide, social media is the place to be right now if you want to grow your online business. And here are a few very popular platforms that will help you get the exposure you need.
This is the hottest social media platform at the moment, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users. Therefore, it’s a great place to expand your business because you already have friends and family who can share your posts and help you get more online personal training clients.
Start by showcasing testimonials from your current customers in creative and useful ways that will help your Facebook audience notice them.
Share helpful tips, short exercises everyone can do at home, motivational quotes, and anything you think it’s relevant and informative for your audience.
Moreover, you can always boost the posts you want to be noticed by the right people: those interested in fitness, weight loss, bodybuilding, etc.
You can basically use a Facebook page as a public portfolio for the world to see.
Joe Wicks’ Facebook profile has everything it needs: testimonials, training videos, recipes, links to his blog articles, and more.
Instagram is the platform where your creativity is very much welcome, and all the platform’s features help you create an eye-catching visual.
Make the best use of your Instagram account and post regularly helpful tips, exercise routines, and nutritional recipes with visually appealing filters and catchy descriptions.
Convert all your regular posts into Instagram stories to increase your visibility. They are the first thing everyone sees when entering the platform.
Moreover, Instagram reels started to increase in popularity, so you too can create reels showcasing different exercises your audience can try at home.
Like Facebook, Instagram allows you to create sponsored posts or stories of anything you feel you don’t want your audience to miss.
- YouTube
YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine on the internet, so it’s a good idea to start a fitness channel and create more lengthy videos for your followers.
These videos can be full workouts of over 30 min, shorter sessions, or even videos with nutritional recommendations.
A YouTube channel will keep engaged the followers who can’t afford a paid subscription to your premium app version or a 1:1 online training session, but they can easily turn into your loyal customers later.
For example, Fiit is an app that offers YouTube sessions led by professional trainers, but if you want a tailored program, you go download and pay for their app.
- Website
An official website shows that you are determined and serious about your career as a personal trainer.
Your potential clients will browse your website for a training plan they’re interested in, so make sure to provide all the information about your training and ways people can contact you.
Information about yourself is also relevant, so make public any certificates you got after your training to increase trustworthiness.
Create a clear list of everything you’re offering, together with their prices, so that people can make an informed decision.
Your website should also include direct links to your social media accounts.
Kayla Itsines’ website has everything for a successful recipe: engaging copy, straightforward information, and links to social media platforms.
- Blog
Now, if you create a website, you can add a blog category to it and offer your audience precious information from your industry.
Your blog should include articles on trending topics from the fitness industry. In this way, when someone searches for such a topic, they are more likely to discover your blog and your services as a personal trainer.
To discover these hot topics, you can use a free tool like Answer the Public, which offers you an extensive diagram of related questions to what you’ve searched for in the first place.
Base your articles on answers to these questions, and you’ll have a better chance to appear in people’s searches. Not to mention the credibility boost you’re going to get.
I typed in personal trainer, and I got a series of related questions:
3. Set up a “Book now” button on social media
A good personal trainer has an organized schedule. It’s the only way to go if you’re planning to get more online personal training clients.
To have everything organized to the minute, an online booking system is all you need. Maybe you think creating an online booking system for your small business is complicated, but it’s not. Actually, if you want to increase the number of online personal training sessions, it is the best thing to consider. Plus, such an app allows you to take payments online from clients, so you don’t have to worry anymore about how to collect your income.
All you have to do is to create your Goldie app account, set up your services and prices, and then personalize your booking website link and share it with your audience. You can also add a “Book now” button on your website, Facebook, and Instagram pages, so people will be able to book a session through social media too. By the way: in Goldie, the online booking system is available in the free plan. You can download it from the App Store or Google Play.
4. Share Customer Reviews
Everyone nowadays wants to make an informed decision about the products and services they’re buying. This means they’re going to search and read for reviews. They are considered more genuine and extremely helpful, as they come from real clients who already tried a product/service.
In fact, 79% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from someone they know.
People have so many options these days that they need guidance to pick a good service, and reviews will surely help them.
After all, no one wants to spend their time and money on something that doesn’t benefit them.
A good practice to get more online personal training clients is to make public the reviews you got from your existing customers, to which you can and should answer. Make sure you answer both positive and negative reviews. At the end of the day, all opinions matter and you want to show your customers that you value all their opinions. For more details, check out this article about how to respond to negative reviews.
You may get people’s attention through ads, but through these reviews, you’re building trust with your existing and potential customers.
The previously mentioned Kayla Itsines website has a forum section, where you can ask questions and get honest feedback from people who tried the app before. These are not necessarily reviews, but they can act like ones.
5. Ask for Referrals
When you’re passionate about what you’re doing and also organized by showing flawless client management, you’ll surely impress your current customers, so it won’t be difficult for them to refer you to their friends.
You can go one step further and ask health professionals to recommend you whenever they have a chance. You can start a partnership with chiropractors, weight loss surgery clinics, or physiotherapists in your area and recommend each other to your current clients.
6. Offer Free Nutritional Advice
Fitness exercises show better results when combined with a healthy nutritional plan. Your clients probably know this, so you can surprise them with free nutritional advice.
To get more online personal training clients, you should include these nutritional plans on your website and social media platforms to be available for your potential clients.
By offering precious information without expecting something in return, people will be more willing to join your team.
You can even post on Instagram a healthy recipe from time to time, like in the example below:
7. Join the Personal Trainer Network
You can get more exposure and gain more online personal training clients by joining training directory listings.
In such a directory, you can provide all the information people need when searching for a personal trainer.
Here is one example:
8. Get in Touch with Other Fitness Professionals
Your close connections should not be just your clients and health professionals (like I mentioned before), but other fitness professionals too. In this way, you stay in touch with everything that’s happening in your industry.
If you’re a new personal trainer, it’s even better to get associated with other professionals from your field.
Moreover, you’ll get to learn from experts that are doing this job for years and even collaborate with them on bigger training events and workshops—be they online or offline.
9. Run a Fitness Giveaway or Contest
Get your followers moving (maybe even literally) by hosting a fitness giveaway or contest on your social media profile.
Having this kind of event is an excellent practice to get more clients for online personal training and gain more audience exposure.
You can make your own rules here, but you should offer attractive discounts or promotions to the winner at the end of the event.
Explain everything clearly to the participants and pick an exciting picture for your text, so you’ll get more eyes on the contest.
Here are a few tips regarding the rules you should include in an online contest or giveaway:
- A very clear start and end date;
- Instructions on how to enter the contest. A common practice is to comment, share and tag a friend;
- Specify the way you’ll choose the winner and when you’re going to announce them.
10. Continue to Nurture the Existing Relationships with Your Clients
It’s only natural to have a precise aim to get more online personal training clients, but you should never forget to keep pampering the relationship with your current customers.
So, continue to include them in your email list and always let them know when you’re hosting events in your area or alternative online events.
They chose you from many other personal trainers, so it’s only normal to show them your appreciation.
Wrapping Things Up
The online world is an excellent place to be, as it can offer you so many possibilities to start your business.
Getting more online personal training clients isn’t that difficult if you explore everything the digital place has to offer.
Which method do you think will work best for you? Let us know in the comments section below. 🙂
This article was incredible and I found SO much value in it! Thank you!
Good article. I will be dealing with some of these issues as well..