How To Become a Successful Online Personal Trainer In 2024
Gabriela Popa
If you are wondering how to become a successful online personal trainer in 2024, it’s your lucky day! We’ve prepared a comprehensive guide on becoming an online fitness coach for you. We’re here to help you find your niche, learn how to promote your services and find out what tools you can use to start your new online fitness business.
Before we give you all the details on how to start online fitness coaching, let’s see what an online fitness trainer is, how to be an online fitness coach and the advantages of training online in 2024.
What is An Online Personal Trainer?
An online personal trainer or fitness coach is a professional who offers online classes outside a studio or gym, allowing clients to take their programs virtually from the comfort of their homes (or wherever they want).
If you already have a business as a gym or fitness trainer, going virtual might be exactly what you need to bring your business to the next level. On the other hand, if you are getting started as a fitness trainer, an online business model might become a competitive advantage you can use to build your customer base.
Benefits of Becoming an Online Fitness Trainer
If you are still unsure if being an online fitness coach is the best move for you, here are some other benefits of this type of business.
- It’s a scalable business model: you can increase your client base as much as you want since you are not limited to your city or area.
- It’s flexible: you can work from wherever you want, whenever you want.
- It’s cost-effective: you can stop paying for that expensive gym rent and equipment.
If we’ve convinced you, let’s get started! Bookmark this article and take your time to learn how to start online fitness classes. Here are all the steps you should be taking to set up your personal online coach or trainer business.
Find Your Training Niche
As with any other type of business, the first thing you need to do as an online personal fitness trainer is to find your niche and target audience. You can’t be everything to everybody, so you should take your time to decide what type of training suits you best and what kind of clients you should be looking for.
Whether you want to become an online yoga teacher, a fitness coach, a gym trainer, or a pilates trainer, you should consider your certifications and personal preferences, as well as how popular the niche is.
It’s all about finding that sweet spot between what you are good at and your audience’s needs. Take your time to research all your options properly, and make sure you use tools like Google Trends to get an idea of what people search for online.
Get Certified
After you find your niche, the next step you should take is getting certified. In the online field, your potential clients need to see that you are a certified expert in your area, and thus you can help them reach their fitness goals.
If your niche is relatively narrow, you can consider taking more certifications for sub-niches like ashtanga yoga and hatha yoga, for example. This will help you grow your customer base, increase the number of classes you can take, and offer some variety to your online training.
Determine your USP
With so many online trainers out there, determining your unique selling proposition is an essential step you should be taking to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Your unique selling proposition is a statement or a headline highlighting your unique qualities and what makes you different from other online trainers.
Think about why anybody would want to attend your classes, what your strengths are, and what makes you… you. Don’t just focus on your achievements as a trainer or athlete; think about your personality, life story, and style.
This will help you get the customers you want and feel like you have a purpose and stand up for something.
Learn Online Marketing Strategies
Next, you should start promoting your classes in the online environment. You will have to become familiar with online marketing and learn how to promote yourself in this competitive environment.
If you are new to online marketing, the first step you should take to learn how to start an online fitness coaching business is to read our article on personal trainer marketing ideas. Here are some more details and examples you will find helpful at the start of your journey.
1.Create a website
Start with buying a domain and creating an SEO-optimized website for your services. Add a blog to promote success stories, tutorials, and other relevant content to your niche. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated. A simple and clean design with quality photography will be perfect.
Here’s a beautiful example of a website that’s quite simple yet makes a great impression.
2.Grow Your Social Media presence
Next, implementing a Social Media Strategy is a must. You should optimize your Social Media profiles to increase your personal branding and market yourself as an expert in your area.
Then, create Social Media pages for your business and create a content plan to grow your presence and increase your client base. First, choose the Social Media platforms you are familiar with and that are relevant for your potential clients, like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube.
You can follow what other fitness trainers post for inspiration, but don’t copy them. Remember, your Social Media presence, just like your business, should be unique. Here’s a beautiful example with the Instagram feed of a Pilates instructor.
3.Create a Video Library
The next thing to consider is compiling a video library of the exercises in your online training programs. If you want to become a successful online personal trainer in 2024, you have to offer your potential customers a sneak-peak of how you work to help them become confident enough to reach out.
Here’s a video feed example from the Alo Moves Youtube page where their instructors present a few basic yoga poses.
4.Use Paid Advertising
Another vital part of your online marketing strategy for personal trainers is paid to advertise. With the advanced targeting options offered by Google or Facebook, you can create personalized audiences with people that already showed interest in training at home.
Paid advertising can be intimidating at first if you don’t have relevant experience. Consider taking a few online classes to learn more or work with a paid advertising expert to help you get familiar with all the options.
Learn Tech Skills and What Online Tools To Use
Online tools can make your life a lot easier as a personal trainer, and you can find many dedicated tools to help you with appointments, bookkeeping, and marketing. Even if tech skills are not your cup of tea and it might be difficult for you to learn all these new skills, they will save you lots of time in the long run.
Here are some of our favorite tools you can use to save time and boost your productivity.
1.Appointment scheduling software
In the online world, clients need a fast, safe and secure way to schedule their classes. That’s why one first thing you need when you get started with your online training program is fitness appointment scheduling software.
This tool will help you keep track of your client appointments, and it offers tons of useful features for a personal trainer. Give it a try and download it from App Store or Google Play; it’s free!
2.Accounting software
Bookkeeping might be a pain if you’re new to the business world, especially in the first months. But I bet you would instead use your time by focusing on what you love: training. You don’t have to lose precious time with invoicing or recipes; you can find online accounting software to do that for you. Besides that, by using an app like Goldie, you can see how your business performs in a given period. You have access to monthly and yearly reports, export them, and you can see what activity brings you the most money or which ones are your best clients. The biggest advantage? You can take deposits, full payments and tips online, directly in the app.
3.Social Media scheduling tool
Being present on all social media channels is essential for your business. Anyway, you will soon find it difficult and time-consuming to keep track of all your pages and posts. A Social Media scheduling tool such as HubSpot can help you organize your content and manage all your social interactions in one place.
4.Email Marketing Tool
Keeping your audience engaged and up to date with your new programs and courses is crucial for your online training business’s success. That’s why you need an email marketing tool that can help you send beautiful emails and track their performance like a pro.
Mailchimp is straightforward to use even for tech noobies and has many built-in features and templates you can use to personalize your newsletter.
5.Video conferencing software
As a fitness trainer, the video conferencing software you choose becomes your gym. It’s the virtual space where the training takes place, so it’s important to select something that’s both easy to use for your clients and has all the features you need as a trainer.
We recommend Zoom since it has powerful features, it’s safe, and most of your students are probably familiar with it by now.
Learn Online Training Strategies
If you worked as a personal gym trainer before, you should know that online training is different and has its particularities. As you can’t be physically there for your clients to correct them or show them how to do specific exercises, you will have to do these things online.
While learning how to become a great online fitness trainer, you might realize you need to do more talking than you are used to. This way, you can make sure you guide your clients properly, and they can hear you even while they do exercises and can’t see their laptop screens.
Learn, Adapt, And Don’t Be Afraid To Fail
When it comes to online marketing, everything is changing rapidly, and you will have to continually adapt to using new marketing channels, testing, and seeing what works for you.
The online marketing game is for the long run. Getting your name out there, getting your site indexed, and establishing yourself as an expert in your field takes time and determination. Check out these 8 personal trainer marketing ideas and tips about how to promote yourself.
Don’t worry if you don’t see the desired results after the first weeks. It’s just like sports, in a way. You can’t expect to lose weight and build up muscle after only a few sessions. But you must keep going, be consistent, and learn from your mistakes. Results will follow, and you will soon have the job you always dreamed of.
Now that you know how to become an online personal trainer, all you have to do is get started! What’s holding you back?