The Beginners Guide to Building an Online Personal Training Challenge

Online Facebook challenges for personal trainers can be a brilliant way to offer potential clients some value up front and to position themselves as an expert to an audience that already knows you, likes you, and trusts that you’re professional and able to help them.

You can run free challenges and paid ones. A free challenge offers potential clients a zero risk opportunity to achieve some success towards their goal - it builds confidence in you as an online personal trainer, and it allows potential clients a chance to experience your personal training services.

Designing Your Online Personal Training Challenge

Your first step is to decide what your online personal training challenge will offer and what to call it. This will very much depend on how you run your business and your ideal clients but here are a few tips.

Deciding on a Name
Free challenges are usually shorter in duration than paid ones and normally finish with a call to action - encouraging people to join your mailing list or to buy into a new intake of online personal training. A good name will include the duration and goal of the challenge.

For example, “6 weeks to ditch the dad bod” or “30 days to a flatter stomach”.

Decide on the Duration of the Challenge.
It’s typical for free challenges to run for a shorter time than paid, perhaps up to 7 or 10 days - and usually less time than that.

Paid challenges have to deliver more value, and so run for longer, anything from 14-60 days.

The duration is entirely up to you, but it should be a reasonable time frame to achieve the goal that you’ve challenged them to or at least make good progress towards.

Have a clear start date - and finish date, so that people understand exactly how long they are working for.

Deciding on the Features
Next, you'll need the contents of the challenge. The easiest way to build these challenge features is to include everything the client needs to get the result you promise in the name.

If your challenge promises to reduce a dress size in 6 weeks, what tools and systems do you need in place to make sure the client accomplishes that goal? Just off of the top of my head I'd say:

• A way to track nutrition
• Easy meal ideas
• Strategies to prevent calorie over consumption
• Easy workouts to follow at home or in the gym
• A Facebook community to check in

Don't worry about getting this perfect in the beginning. Your first intake of participants will provide you with the feedback you need to test and tweak.

Setting Up Your Personal Training Challenge

There are a few things you'll need to get set up before you launch your online training challenge to make sure things run smoothely for yuo and the participants.

A Landing Page to Onboard Interested Participants
Your landing page will be where you send people who might be interested in your challenge. It should contain the details of the challenge and how to sign up. Like this one My Personal Trainer Website did for their client, Earnest.

A Follow Up System/Email Software
You'll need a way to let your would-be participants that the challenge is about to begin and reminders up to the start date. For this, you'll need an email marketing software like Aweber or Mailchimp.

A Platform to Run the Challenge
You'll need a place to actually run the challenge from. Somewhere you'll connect with the particpants and manage their programs, etc. There are multiple ways to do this but the simplest is via a Facebook group. It's free and your clients will likely be on Facebook already.

If you want to get fancy, you could use PT Distinction. They have systems in place specifically to help you run challenged. Here's a video from them to show you how that works.

A Post Challenge Offer Page
Once your challenge has finished, you'll be trying to up sell your paid online training service to those that participated in the challenge. For that, you'll need a post challenge page with an offer on it that's specific to the participants.

You could also offer incentives to those that complete the challenge like discounts on training.

Marketing Your Online Personal Training Challenge

Once you know who you’re helping (e.g new mums who want their pre-baby bodies back), and the method you’re going to use to help them (e.g bodyweight movements performed at home in the time their new babies are napping) your next step is getting your message to those clients.

Advertise On Your Facebook Business Page
Facebook is a brilliant platform for this and you don’t need any fancy tunnels, ads or business pages. 

Advertise On Your Personal Page
While it makes sense to advertise your online personal training challenge on your Facebook Business page, posting on your personal page to advertise your product is also a great way to increase reach without spending any money.

If you feel worried about feeling ‘salesy’ or weird about putting business stuff on your personal page - people see your content far less than you think (or would want).

Plus, your friends are exposed to thousands of adverts every day - if they are your friends, they will want to support you and see you succeed.

Build an Audience By Posting Often
Your goal is to generate excitement around your launch. Posting frequently about the launch of your online personal training challenge - as well as your normal posting of things people will find valuable.

If you don't have the time to post every day, consider a scheduler like Recurpost and schedule all of your posts in one day to go out over the week. Like this:

​Talk to people you meet in real life about the thing you’ve made to help them with exactly this sort of problem. Spend time in Facebook groups that are set up around that problem - the search box is a powerful tool, and will allow you to target just about any demographic.

Use Facebook Live
Go live every day addressing some of the questions which people might have and addressing their objections. Consider some of the things people might worry about:

• I don’t belong to a gym
• I’m short on time
• I’m unfit and worried I won’t cope
• I have a young family to attend to
• I have never exercised before
• Will I be able to afford it?
  

It doesn’t matter if no one tunes in during your live, as Facebook will show your friends your video after you’ve finished as well. 

Chris from the CJ Rubric posted a live video everyday to offer tips and advice. All to get more eyes on the launch of his fitness challenge.

Network With Your Fans
After you’ve gone live, spend an hour or two every day online answering messages, and chatting to people that might have questions about your product.

​If you think that they wouldn’t be a good fit for what you’re offering don’t be afraid to offer them access to your challenge. If they're not a good fit right now, tell them that you’ll re-launch in the future and that might be a better time for them - and make a note to follow up with them when the time is right.

Deliver Your Online Personal Training Challenge

On the day of the launch, pick a date that you’re "closing your cart" - and stick to it. Cart re-opens, “oops that was the wrong link” emails, or suggestions that you’ve found a secret stash of your product in a back room makes you look disorganised and dishonest.

By now, you should have a group of participants ready to get involved in your challenge and it's your job to do an amazing job for them.

It'll seem like a lot of work for a little return but remember, online personal training challenges are a long. You're attracting people who are looking for free stuff and that means no matter how great the challenge is, they likely won't be able to hand over any cash for your paid program.

The ROI comes back to you in the short term if you're lucky and a few people take you up on your post challenge offer. But a lot of the ROI will be from people talking about you and expanding your community.