Using an online personal training management site is a great way to grow your business.  It allows you, the personal trainer, to stay more organized by having all of your client information, calendars, workouts, etc. in one place.  It also allows for better communication between you and your clients.  Each client has a simple, easy-to-use portal that he or she can use to see schedules, goals, messages, and workouts.  Using online personal training software is proven to boost client retention and motivation.

Here are 5 components that every online personal training software package should have.

1. Interactive calendar

You should be able to … Continue Reading

The Internet is a great way to market yourself and grow your business.  It is a tool that can help you.  But with the growth of e-newsletters, blogs, social media, and sites such as Facebook and Twitter, it can be difficult to determine what you should do with theses sites.

Facebook and Twitter

Having Facebook and Twitter accounts can be a great way to connect with current clients and attract new clients.  But you should have a professional page set up; do not use your personal page.  Facebook makes it easy to set up pages for businesses and organizations.  For assistance, see … Continue Reading

The best fitness e-newsletters have personality.  In order to write an effective e-newsletter, you need to allow your personality to shine through the newsletter.

As mentioned in one of our earlier articles, most of the successful fitness newsletters have components of the following:

• Articles
• Tips
• Personal anecdotes
• Reviews of websites, products, or books
• Questions and answers
• Exercises or recipes of the week

The topics are endless and you will have to choose content that is useful to your readers.  But keep in timely and informative.  For example, if you want to talk about the health benefits of antioxidants in certain fruits, and strawberries are in season, focus your … Continue Reading

Offering a bootcamp class to your clients or gym members is a great way to showcase your talents.   When done correctly, it can bring in large revenues directly from the class.  It will also increase your exposure to potential clients and can lead to you gaining new personal training clients.  But marketing bootcamp can be difficult.  You don’t want to waste time or effort on pointless marketing attempts.  Here are 3 great and simply ways to market your bootcamp.

1. Send invitations

You want to create an aura of exclusivity about your bootcamp.  Don’t send a postcard (that looks too much like … Continue Reading

For many fitness-oriented people, starting a personal training business is a dream job.  As an independent contractor or business owner, you can often set your own hours.  But with the good, there always is some bad.

Common complaints from personal trainers include not having enough time, feeling disorganized, having an unbalance between personal and work life, earning too low of an income, and feeling overwhelmed from trying to manage so many different appointments and responsibilities.

Many trainers often forget to practice what they teach their clients.  And feeling overwhelmed or disorganized can lead to unhealthy habits and unhappiness.  Let’s face it, in … Continue Reading

Being environmentally friendly is a big issue in today’s society.  A number of eco-friendly fitness facilities and technologies (such as stationary bicycles that funnel energy back into the system as the participant rides) are growing in popularity and prominence.  The good news is that being green does not necessarily have to cost any money.  And being green allows the opportunity for you to create a niche for your business and appeal to equally “green-minded” customers.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promotes 4 steps to being “green:”

1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle
4. Respond

Reduce

As a personal trainer, you can give reusable water bottles to new clients.  You can add … Continue Reading

Need a way to grow or reinvent your business?  Well, the good news is you can do so and it won’t cost you a penny.  Take a moment to evaluate your business, your workouts, and your clients.  It is very, very easy to fall into a rut of doing the same workouts with the same clients.  You might have forgotten why you wanted to be a personal trainer in the first place. 

If your enthusiasm for personal training has faded and it’s simply your “job,” your clients might have fallen into the same trap and view their workouts as unpleasant inconveniences, … Continue Reading

Most personal trainers think in terms of hour-long sessions.  And a recent study from the American Council on Exercise shows that over half of personal training sessions around the country are an hour long.

But don’t give up on the half-hour session.  With a proper pricing structure and good time management, half-hour sessions can be very profitable.

Some of the benefits of half-hour sessions include the following:

• They are more affordable
• They allow clients to train with you with greater frequency
• They are more appealing to a wider array of people, especially beginners
• And most importantly, they allow personal trainers to increase their hourly rate

For example, … Continue Reading

The biggest mistake personal trainers make when they start a bootcamp program is getting too complicated too quickly.  They might have great ideas, but they fail in properly branding their bootcamp and presenting it to potential customers.  Regarding the structure and design of your bootcamp program, here are some basic principles to follow:

Market the Result, not the Process

What this means is that people don’t typically sign up for fitness classes for the sake of doing it; rather, they have a goal or a result in mind.  Therefore, it is more effective to place that result right in front of the … Continue Reading

Writing an e-newsletter for your fitness clients is a great way to keep your name in front of your clients and prospective customers.  It is a very simple and cost effective form of marketing.  When done properly, it can create a loyal following that will help grow your business. 

First, make sure you carefully consider your audience and their interests and goals.  Your e-newsletter will be different based on your typical client.  For example, the content of your newsletter will vary depending on whether you have a sport-specific target population or a general weight-loss target population.

Subject Line

In the subject line, identify … Continue Reading