Personal fitness trainers can make a part-time or full-time living utilizing the internet to find new clients or even to run online training sessions. Although anyone could technically do this, you’ll find the most success and have more options available to you if you are a certified trainer.
In this guide I’ll be teaching you about a website you can use to find new clients. You’ll also learn some tips and strategies for growing this type of business to maximize your earnings whether you want to do it as a side hustle or even as a brick and mortar business.
FindYourTrainer.com
Personal trainers that are certified with an NCCA accredited organization such as the ACE, NASM, ACSM or NSCA can offer both in-home and virtual training services through FindYourTrainer. They connect you with people that are in your local area for at-home services, while virtual fitness has no geographic limits.
It’s free to join this site as a trainer, and you earn your full requested fees. The site makes money by adding a service charge on top of the purchase price that you list your services to sell at. This works great for you since you won’t have to have a large business expense that goes towards fees on this site. High fees can be quite common with a lot of freelance style side hustle websites, so I consider this to be a major plus for this site.
Even though it’s free to join, it can take a couple of days to actually get your profile active and listed on the site. The reason for this is because the site does background checks on trainers before approving them. This is necessary to offer an added level of safety to clients since the most common service on the site is to visit a client in their own home for personal training.
Side Hustle vs Business
This could potentially be a side hustle that is unrelated to your normal job, but the extra required certification means that not every will be able to do this business on sites like FindYourTrainer.com. However, there’s nothing stopping you from starting a personal training business outside of this site. You could even do group virtual training by creating a YouTube channel. I’ll talk more about this possibility next.
For existing personal trainers that already run their own business, this can be the perfect way to get additional clients to boost your revenue. Although you can do online coaching, FindYourTrainer has a lot of people that want in-person training. This could be at your gym or facility, but many of them want private training in their own home too. By combining this extra source of work, you can help to ensure that you and your employees stay booked as much as you want.
YouTube & TikTok
Working out and getting into shape is definitely more of a visual medium. You’ll be able to demonstrate techniques to people much easier by simply showing them on a video than you could with text and pictures on a website. For this reason, video social networks are often the ideal place for personal fitness trainers to showcase their skills.
By creating a channel on one or even both of these sites, you’ll be able to gain much more exposure that can lead to followers and many more clients. Sites like YouTube will allow you to earn a share of their advertising revenue once you have topped 1,000 followers, so you could even make money from this additional side hustle.
A trainer that teaches others during private sessions has a limited number of hours in a day, which then limits their clients and their income. You could expand to do group training, but even that will have an upper limit to the earnings potential. However, by going virtual and putting your training into videos on YouTube, you could actually build a large enough following over time to make a full-time living without the need to do private coaching anymore. YouTube channels can sometimes take years to gain a massive audience that brings in the big bucks, but if you steadily grow your videos over time while also earning a living from training, you can still reach your long-term goals.
Fitness Websites
It’s possible to create your own fitness website too. Using a combination of media including pictures and especially video will make for a more effective site. With your own website, you can collect email addresses for a newsletter or even sell things to your audience.
Imagine each of the sessions you would coach for a trainee that comes to you for a specific purpose. This training could be put into video format and actually sold to your followers. Just like running a YouTube channel, it’s also possible to make a full-time living selling digital fitness training courses on your own website. You just have to be willing to do the work to make it happen. Patience also helps a lot too, since it can take months or even years to gain a large following online.