Only about 18 percent of people who buy gym memberships will use them consistently.
What if you could tap into the other 72% who want to be healthy, but don't have the time to go to the gym.
You can, as a virtual personal trainer.
It can be an amazing experience for people who are passionate about fitness and want to make it their career. And yes, there is definitely money to be made for those who are willing to do the work.
But like anything, it's something you need to work on and attempt to improve on with every video.
To get you started, here are 11 tips to help you launch your business and grow your brand.
1. Choose Your Brand. Be Your Brand.
One of the first lessons you need to learn is to think of yourself as a business entity and a brand.
This is a serious transition for a lot of self-employed people.
They say, "But it's just me. I'm just John Smith." Well, John Smith is your brand.
Be aware of that and perfect it.
Your personality has to flow into the brand. In this space, a brand that's not you is incredibly transparent and will come off as fake to your audience.
If you're trying to personify this high energy workout guru in your videos, it's not going to resonate or gain any traction if you're actually far more laid back.
Be that laid back person. Your real self should come through the screen and connect with your audience.
If you have a filthy mouth you will have more success as the Gordon Ramsay of fitness, versus trying to squeeze yourself into a box that doesn't fit.
2. Choose Your Market
Don't try to be all things to all people. It doesn't work that way. Focus on one core market to start off, and give it all your attention.
That niche market could be:
- Seniors
- Stay at home moms
- Regular guys who hate the gym
- People in rural areas
As a virtual personal trainer, any of these markets are ripe for your plucking, but just focus on one to start.
Otherwise, you're watering down your messaging and your brand.
That doesn't mean that you can't expand later. But in the early years sell one product, to one market, with one message.
3. Build Your Web Presence
As a virtual personal trainer, your web presence is your livelihood. Treat it like your most valuable business asset.
Take things seriously. Don't just build your workouts in excel.
You're better than that.
Use a complete set of virtual personal trainer tools, all in one solution. You can actually use one single tool to be your:
- Fitness library
- Workout builder
- Profile page
- Online training
You can get started right now for free, by clicking here to learn more.
Just because you're using free tools doesn't mean you need to settle for things like watermarked web pages or videos. You can still look like the best virtual personal trainer on the net, with a limited budget.
You don't have a Fortune 500 budget, but your audience won't know the difference.
4. Steal Like an Artist
This is actually the title of a great book by Austin Kleon, aimed at how to find inspiration from all around you and turn it into your own original ideas.
It dispels the myth that all creativity somehow arrives in the form of a lightning bolt revelation that hits you from out of nowhere.
In his book, he says, "the reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds."
He added, "Nothing is original... all creative work builds on what came before."
Even though the title and concept use the cheeky word "steal," that's not what we're talking about.
You're not going to plagiarise or rip off someone else's work. But you can study, credit, remix, mash up and transform.
Creativity comes from being around other creative people or studying what they do. They don't have to be in your area. A great song can inspire a great movie. A great movie can inspire a great painting.
You're not stealing if you're drawing inspiration from other areas. Immerse yourself in art and creativity.
You can take a look at another virtual personal trainer's workout videos and say, "I really like how they did this and that." Then take a piece of that and apply it to your own videos.
5. Try Everything
As a virtual personal trainer, you need to be an expert on all things fitness related. This is an area where things move really quickly, so you need to stay up on all the current trends.
These new "advances" in workout technology or techniques could be silly time-wasters in your mind.
That's Ok.
But you need to be able to articulate why it's a waste of time to your audience, and what people should be doing instead.
Take NBA superstar LeBron James' and his new controversial pregame routine. You need to articulate what he's doing here.
What do you see? A valuable way to build balance? Or a grown man standing on two bathroom pillows, opening himself up to injury.
Either opinion is fine, but you need to be able to back it up.
People are going to come to you with these questions, so you need to be able to answer them.
Try everything, and read everything that comes up in your industry.
Sign up for Google news alerts and sign up for mailing lists for all things fitness.
6. Don't Be Afraid to Fail
You're not going to be perfect right out of the box. Divorce yourself of this idea and be prepared to fail.
The key is to fail the right way.
If you lose, don't lose the lesson. There are valuable lessons in just about every failure you will encounter as a virtual personal trainer.
That lesson may be as simple as, "My audience really is not on LinkedIn," or "Fridays are a terrible day to host a webinar." You often won't know until you've tried and failed.
Make sure the lesson is never lost.
Why did what a certain thing fail? Was it the wrong strategy, or was it the right move at the wrong time?
Learning from success is easy. "That worked, let's do it again." It's that simple.
But learning from a loss can take a lot more study and introspection.
If a particular series or ad campaign flops, hold a post-mortem to figure out what happened. What can we learn from this? Was anything salvageable?
Success is not a flat and straight uninterrupted road, with no bumps along the way. You will encounter a lot. Expect problems, delays and epic disappointments along the way.
That's what separates the successes from the failures. The success stories will tell you about the adversity they triumphed over.
Meanwhile, the failures will tell you excuses for why they quit.
9 out of every 10 startups will fail.
Why?
Sometimes it's a bad product-market fit. Or sometimes it's a case of the entrepreneur tasting their first real dose of adversity, and preferring to go back to the security of being an employee.
7. Don't Wait for Perfection
A lot of people who want to be a virtual personal trainer are type-a perfectionists. This can lend itself to getting lots done in a day, but it can actually hold you back when you're getting ready to launch.
They won't want to go public until everything is flawless. They will want their website to be perfect (spoiler alert: it never will be) and their videos to be impeccable (see previous).
It's better to release an imperfect product than it is to stay in production purgatory forever. A flawed (but released) product can be improved on the fly.
The longer you leave your business on the whiteboard, the less likely you will be to actually launch it. The more you obsess over your brand, the more you are going to find wrong with it, and push it off.
Take a look at Gary V's first video. It's a far cry from what he does today. But if he would have waited to be perfect, he would have never become the millionaire influencer he now is.
8. Work Smarter, Not Harder
As a virtual personal trainer, your job description will include a lot more than just trainer.
You're going to be your own:
- Sales lead
- Community manager
- Head of marketing
- Blogger
- Bookkeeper
Your attention is going to get pulled in 50 different directions in any given minute. You need to teach yourself to stay focused and work as efficiently as possible.
That means you're constantly going to be on the lookout for new tools to help you pack as much work as humanly possible into every work day.
That also means you're going to have to accept help from outside parties and even outsource parts of your day-to-day. If someone is better at something than you are, it may pay to let them do it for you.
Let's say, for example, you're not great at blogging. Would it make more business sense for you to hire a freelance writer to write it from your point form notes?
Are you better off paying their rate, versus you staring at a blank word document for 4 hours? Probably. You're a virtual personal trainer, not a blogger.
It often makes a lot of sense to do what you do best, and outsource your weaknesses.
At the very least, you should focus on the parts that will make you the most money, or where your talents and time are best utilized.
9. Own Your Social
No matter what you may read in the ads, you cannot buy success in social media.
Paying a company a small sum of money for 100,000 followers on Twitter or Instagram will actually do you more harm than good.
Sadly, success in social media, for a virtual personal trainer or any other business, needs to be earned and developed organically.
You can't fake influence. To gain it, you have to legitimately influence people.
How do you do that?
Provide real value in your content, and have real conversations on social media. That means put away your sales pitch and just talk about fitness. People will trust and follow you if you provide "the goods."
Also, don't ignore or delete negative comments. These are an opportunity. Tackling a negative comment head-on can very quickly turn a hater into a fan.
Remember what we said in the first point. Let your personality shine through, as well as your expertise. These two things are what will drive your success in the social world.
10. Don't Just Serve Your Customers. Wow Them.
Why would someone choose you over the other virtual personal trainers? Because you blew their socks off.
It could be your personality, your insights, or maybe even just your set or music.
You need to find your unique selling proposition and focus on it. That is what's going to earn you fans and followers, instead of just customers.
Only wowed customers will recommend you to their friends and family because you're in the forefront of their minds and they can't wait to recommend you.
And speaking of which...
11. Ask for Referrals and Good Reviews
Don't fake your own online reviews. This can blow up in a big way.
Don't hurt your name and your brand by trying to fake this.
Instead, focus on wowing your audience, and never being too shy to ask for a good review or a referral.
Take it a step further by coming up with your own incentive programs to encourage people to spread the word about the great work you do.
Want to Take Your Virtual Personal Trainer Business to the Next Level?
We hope this helps you launch your successful businessas a virtual personal trainer. But we can do more than just give you helpful advice in blogs.
We offer a full suite of virtual personal trainer tools and templates that you can try for free right now.
Click here to see what we offer.