Are you a fitness coach, physician, yoga trainer, fitness blogger, or gym owner? Do you prioritize fitness as the most crucial element of being healthy? Are you thinking of starting your own online fitness business?
If so, you’re in the right place!
Welcome to the ultimate guide on how to start an online fitness business.
This article will walk you through setting up your own online fitness business, selecting a niche, and growing your audience.
This beginner’s guide is designed to walk you through the entire process.
Here, we will cover the why, the how, the what, and the where of starting an online fitness business.
We will also cover the naming of your enterprise, setting up web hosting, selecting a WordPress platform, and everything you will need to create a successful online fitness business.
By the end of the article, you will have the information you need to plan, launch and run your business!
Why should you start an online fitness business?
If you’re into fitness, have trained people before and want to turn your passion into a business, why wouldn’t you?
An online fitness business can include exercise videos, fitness routines, healthy diet, and information around the niche. All the things you may already know well, just in an online form.
Here are a few underlying reasons to start an online fitness business:
Convert your passion for fitness into a business
As an expert in fitness, you can turn your ideas, techniques, thoughts, and passion into a great business. And what better way to present it than online?
You can educate millions and motivate them to adopt a healthier lifestyle from the comfort of your home.
Grow your fitness brand
Building an online form can help you grow your brand if you already own a physical fitness business.
Internet marketing can benefit your business. Most customers search online before most purchases, so an online presence will surely help.
Having an online presence helps with every aspect of your business. From building trust and authority to showing customers where to go if they want to attend a class.
Increase audience outreach
The global online fitness market is valued at $6 million and is projected to reach $59 million by 2027. That’s a huge target market!
With an online presence, you can reach out to a wide range of audiences across the globe and grow your business. And the best part is, that it equally benefits you as well as your audience!
Offer a flexible schedule for customers
Many people would love to get into a healthy routine but do not have a fixed time to go to the gym. Some people just have no idea about how to begin!
An online fitness business offers a solution. Not only does it offer a flexible schedule, but you can do it in the comfort of your own home.
Convert your audience into paying clients
Businesses, either online or physical, are all about making money! In exchange for products or services you offer, you get to make a profit.
You can sell products like gym equipment and supplements by integrating eCommerce into your website.
You can add a membership portal that allows access to your content to subscribed members.
How to start an online fitness business
If you’re looking to start an online fitness business, we have five detailed steps. We will also be discussing marketing and monetizing your venture.
Let’s start:
Step 1: Select a niche
The fitness industry is huge. It includes eating healthy to self-control, weight loss to motivation and meditation, diet plans, exercise, workouts, pilates, zumba, yoga, and so much more.
Looking at all the aspects of fitness expertise can be a smart move but we suggest working within a particular niche.
What do you mainly specialize in? Is it providing workout videos and routines, or is it offering and suggesting a healthy diet plan?
Do you plan on posting a whole routine of workout videos, or is it going to be a blog website with recipes and healthy eating ideas?
Here are some popular ideas with an existing audience to give you inspiration:
- Weight loss
- Bodybuilding
- Healthy eating
- Functional movement training
- Nutrition plans for better health
- A diet regime for all age groups
- At home workout plans
Selecting a niche helps you in many ways, from choosing a target audience to keeping your focus.
A niche-based business website enables you to gain authority in your place and stand out from the rest.
Before choosing a niche, be sure to consider your passion.
Are you passionate about your subject? Are you sure you’ll enjoy working in it? Do you have enough experience for a fitness business?
You don’t have to come up with your niche in a day. We suggest ensuring you understand your wants and needs along with the market demands and business potential before selecting your niche.
Step 2: Come up with a suitable name for your business
The name of your business can have a significant impact on its identity and how others view it.
Naming your business is an incredibly important step. It comes with great responsibility because it frames your business and frames audience perception.
Before generating name ideas for your online fitness business, we recommend putting the following question into perspective:
- What is your business going to be about?
- Who is the target audience?
- What content do you plan to offer?
- Is the name just for your website or for a business too?
- Is the name too challenging to spell or pronounce?
We suggest considering these questions before coming up with your business name.
We also suggest using the same name in the online form if you already own a physical business.
Moreover, you can look at your competition or view expired domains for inspiration.
Once you come up with a name, one step remains – the domain test. Other businesses might have already used the word you’ve come up with.
We suggest coming up with two to three alternatives if your chosen domain name is unavailable. You can also be creative with domain naming, such as adding a region, niche or location to the name.
Think www.popularfitnessnameincity.com instead of www.popularfitnessname.com.
Step 3: Know your target audience
A niche helps you identify your target audience, but there’s more to it than that.
Your business is not only about you. Everything you do creates an impact on your audience.
That’s why we think audience analysis is essential.
Who is your audience? Who are your services developed for?
You need to go beyond and think about everything from your audience’s perspective: why they’re on your website, how can you benefit them, and what should you be offering?
With this in mind, you can find your target audience and focus on converting them into customers.
Step 4: Decide your business model
Remember when we said earlier that business is about making money? It is, and there are ways to do it. Deciding on a business model helps.
A business model helps define how your business will generate revenue. Therefore, when you start, it is necessary to determine the type of model to support your goals and incorporate it into your business plan and market search.
It simply outlines how your fitness business plans to make money.
The model comprises factors like:
- What products will you be selling or what service are you going to offer
- How to market the service you offer
- What sort of expenses the company will face
- How the fitness business expects to make a profit
An online; fitness business innovates the structures based on these models:
Fee-for-service model
This is what it exactly sounds like, changing the fee for a specific service offered. A business set on this model can increase its earnings by working for additional clients or increasing its rate.
Subscription model
Essentially, the customers are required to make a recurring payment for ongoing access to the service.
Bundling model
This model involves businesses selling two or more two products together in a single unit for a lower price than they would charge selling the products separately. An online fitness business can implement this model, offering various training packages in a single unit that benefits the clients.
Step 5: Select a suitable platform for your website
Once you have finalized your niche and name and a business model, it’s time to select a platform to build on.
There are free as well as paid platforms. If you’re serious about starting your business, we recommend using a content management system as your platform as they offer enriched features and flexible customization.
WordPress.org is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) for hosting websites. It powers over 40% of the web.
It is a self-hosted platform where you buy your own domain name and web hosting.
We think self-hosted works best. There is a little more work involved, but you get complete control of your website, the design, feature, niche, customization, and every aspect of your online business.
To explore more options, you can check out our article on content management systems.
Step 5.1: Selecting reliable domain and hosting
Once you select a domain name for your business, it’s time to purchase and use it for your website.
A domain name is the address of your website, where your visitors type the www. name into the web browser to land on your website.
Our domain name is ‘wpastra.com‘ .
When selecting a domain name, we suggest going with a name that is memorable and easy to spell. The shorter the domain name, the easier it is to remember.
Also, we recommend adding popular extensions like .com or .net or .io.
Finding the best WordPress hosting service for your fitness business can be difficult. With so many hosting providers, which do you choose?
We have an article on the fastest managed WordPress hosting that might help.
Step 5.2: Setting up a business website in WordPress
To use WordPress, you need to set it up. Many hosting providers offer automatic WordPress installation, others let you install it in just a few clicks.
We have a detailed tutorial on how to install a WordPress website if you need it.
Setup takes just a few minutes and most of the work is done for you. Simply answer a few basic questions and WordPress will take care of the rest.
Step 5.3: Selecting a theme
Another great advantage of using WordPress is the availability of responsive themes!
So, what is a theme?
WordPress theme is a group of files built to change the appearance of your website. It includes style sheets, graphics, CSS, animation, and other files.
There are various types of themes, such as multipurpose, full-site editing, and niche-specific.
Themes control many things on your website ranging from layouts, fonts, and color schemes,
While there are hundreds of online fitness WordPress themes, we recommend choosing Astra.
Astra is built to deliver high performance and functionality. It operates efficiently and offers hundreds of professionally designed templates.
It can be a perfect fit for your online sports business because the theme is lightweight, speed-optimized, responsive, retina-ready, and most of all – free!
Step 5.4: Selecting plugins
Before setting up your website, we recommend installing and activating a few necessary plugins on your website.
A plugin is an addon that adds features or enhances existing ones.
You can use them to customize your website and add the features you need.
Check out our list of must-have plugins to get started.
Step 4.4: Setting up your fitness website
Now that you’ve every element to get your online fitness business up and running, it’s time to set up.
You’ll need to install a theme, design the homepage and necessary pages and publish it for the world to see.
If you choose Astra, all you’ll need to do is install the theme, install the Starter Templates plugin, select a gym or fitness website template and Astra does the rest.
To beautifully design and set up your website from scratch, follow our tutorial guide: How to make a WordPress website.
Step 5: Creating content and publishing it
The success of your online fitness business depends on the type of content you publish. Online businesses are defined by the quality and quantity of that content and it will make or break your venture.
Your niche selection gives you an idea of what kind of content to post on your website.
For an online fitness business, it can be workout videos, diet plans, video tutorials on how to get started and similar content.
Or it can be a blog, tips, videos, audio, or images explaining your fitness business.
To bring more visibility to your website, you should create content and publish it, keeping Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind.
Here’s our tutorial guide on how you can create content and publish it on your website.
To get started with creating content, you’ll need to add a page or post to your website.
Here’s how to add a new post. Adding a new page is exactly the same, just select Pages instead of Posts.
- Head to Posts > Add New from your WordPress dashboard
You can enter the title and use multiple blocks to embed audio, image, paragraph, and videos on the page and design your content accordingly.
- Publish the post
Similarly, following the same steps, you can create as many pages or posts as you like.
Marketing your business
Building a website and publishing content is only half the battle. It would help if you marketed it too.
The need for marketing has always been there. With an estimated 1.86 billion websites, it would help if you had some tactics to get yours noticed.
Tactics can range from sharing content on social media to email marketing. Marketing is a time consuming, but essential part of running a business.
Here are a few proven marketing strategies you can use for your online fitness business:
Use search engines
Some of the most popular search engines, like Google and Bing, have a huge audience. It is the primary way that users on the web can discover your website.
This is where SEO, Search Engine Optimization, comes in.
SEO is a very complex topic but can have a massive impact on the number of traffic you drive to your website.
To mark your online business friendly with SEO, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
The first is keyword research. You need to find the correct keywords to use on your content to rank them well on the search engine pages.
The other way is by building links to your website. You can suggest your visitors share your content on social media and go guest post – getting backlinks to your site.
Overall, SEO is a gradual marketing strategy but can do much for you in the long run!
Share your content on social media
If you are talking about marketing strategy, social media is a must-have. With vast numbers of engaged users, you need to be able to share your business on at least two to three platforms.
Some of the most popular platforms for business are Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Consider where your target market is likely to hang out and concentrate your efforts there.
You can add a social share button on your website to help with this. You could also expand the audience on social media by forming channels or groups and engaging them with your content.
There are also options for social media marketing where you post your content in exchange for a few dollars.
We suggest creating content on the website that is shareable with your audience.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a crucial method of marketing after SEO and social media.
It is simple and easy to set up compared to other marketing methods.
The first step toward email marketing is building an email list. These details help you directly connect with potential customers.
You can send emails when you publish new content or if you have some exciting news.
To do so, many email subscribers and newsletters plugins are available to use on your website.
But, you must keep an eye on the open rates for the performance as not everyone is a fan of marketing emails!
Create partnerships with businesses
So you’ve created worthy content and published it on your website, kept SEO in mind, promoted it on social media, and created emails.
It’s now time to step outside of your website and do more by collaborating or partnering with other businesses.
You can reach out to other businesses with a similar target market and ask them to contribute to your blog.
Or work out an arrangement , where you exchange content providing backlinks to each other’s websites.
You could also collaborate with social media influencers. You can search for influencers in your niche and offer them merchandise or a subscription in return for publicity.
Guest posts
A guest post is where you write a post for another site, providing a backlink to your website as a reward. Backlinks are the primary payment for guest posts. The visitors on a site can be redirected to yours following the link to your online fitness website.
You prepare content on an agreed topic and post it on their website.
The initial starting guest post begins by reaching out to websites that can be suitable for your business.
Start earning from your online fitness business
While the intention of starting an online fitness business ultimately can be to earn money, it takes time, consistency, and patience to get you through the early steps.
A few other ways to start earning from your online fitness business are:
eCommerce integration
It is 100% possible to sell supplements and goods from your website by integrating them into a fully responsive eCommerce website.
Membership website
The membership portal is another form of earning from an online fitness business. You can create courses and content on your website that requires a subscription for your audience to access.
You can do this by using any of the membership plugins and prioritizing the membership function of the website.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliation can be a great source of income for websites doing well in SEO.
Wrapping up
Whether you’re a fitness enthusiast, a professional trainer, or knowledgeable in the fitness field, starting your own online fitness business could be a great move.
This post taught us what an online fitness business is and why we should start this business.
Further, we learned how you could get started.
We mentioned detailed steps to build your online fitness business, from selecting a platform to web hosting, the domain to the theme, and designing and customizing it.
Finally, we talked a little about marketing your business and earning from it.
Have you ever thought of creating your own online fitness business? Which platform, according to you, might be the best? What are your thoughts on this article?
Pratik Chaskar holds the pivotal role of CTO at Brainstorm Force, serving as the backbone of the company. Renowned for his organizational skills, strategic thinking, problem-solving attitude, and expertise in leading and executing plans, Pratik plays a crucial role in the BSF’s technological landscape.
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