How To Build and Grow a Fitness Industry Community

​Personal training, particularly when based online, is likely to generate more leads when you have an audience that is highly engaged with your message. It doesn’t have to be the biggest audience, but rather one which regularly consumes, interacts with and shares your content.

​One of the ways you can grow this audience is by working with other professionals that work in the fitness or connecting industries and have bigger reach than you, or an audience of different people in order to get exposure to new potential clients.

1. Choose Your Collaborators

Creating collaborations with other fitness industry professionals can be a powerful tool - when used correctly. An important factor would be that you are familiar with their content and their values and they align with yours too. That means doing your research thoroughly to make sure that you respect their message before you associate with them. 

You’ll likely be looking for someone who has a slightly similar audience to you - or an audience of similar people. You don't need to stop at personal trainers either; you can reach out to professionals working in complementary industries such as nutritionists, psychologists, massage therapists, or specialists within personal training such as postpartum trainers or menopause specialists.

2. Build Rapport and Connection

Like so much of the fitness industry, the first step in working with someone is to build a relationship. Working alongside another coach or specialist that has a skill set that benefits both your audiences can generate leads for you both. 

Start by having a conversation about what you’re looking to achieve. Offer to give your expertise or take some of their workload off them before asking for anything in return. Make it clear how what you’re proposing would benefit their audience (rather than your business). If you can, show your value upfront. You could do this by, for example, writing the article and sending it with no expectation of anything in return. 

You might invite people to work with you that has a complementary skill set that your audience are interested in. Often these collaborations become a network and once you’re part of the circuit and you’ve been seen to do a good job, it can become self-perpetuating and you may get inquiries and offers to come to you.

Once the collaboration has been agreed, promoting it among your both your audiences as a way to generate some excitement over it will be important. You might talk about it on social media, include links on your website, and potentially even pay to advertise or promote the content. ​

3. Working Together

A collaboration isn’t just about what that professional can do for you - you’ll need to be able to offer something of value to their audience too. So how you suggest working together will be dependant on your particular skill set and specialisms. 

Interviews: A good start for a piece of “pillar content” could be an interview. If you conduct the interview on Zoom, you’ll be able to record it, and repurpose the content into other platforms, such as videos on YouTube, or Podcasts.

Podcasts
Working with another trainer that has a podcast is a great medium because they are likely to take care of the editing and distribution of the episode to the various podcasting platforms. People listen to podcasts in one of two ways. Either they follow the entire podcast and listen to all episodes when they get released, or they browse for any available podcast episodes on a given topic from several different distributors.

Either way, properly labelling and tagging the episode so that it’s easy to search will be important. If you want to go a step further, you could timestamp individual questions within the discussion so people can jump to the part of the episode that’s relevant for them. This is particularly useful if the episode is very long. 

Instagram Takeover
Taking over the social media account of another trainer and creating content for their feed can be useful if you have a relevant skill that their audience would like to hear about. Gary Vee calls a takeover “a 50/50 value exchange”. This could be used by face to face personal trainers if they took over their gym’s Instagram for the day to give an insight into what people might expect from working with a trainer.

Reaching out to a larger audience this way is a powerful method of growing your social media accounts and showcasing your talents in specialist instruction or sports. You might want to consider which metrics to track ahead of the take over so that you can measure the impact it had on your business.

In practical terms, this might involve being invited to log in to that account, or simply to use a dedicated business phone to upload the content. Inviting their audience to follow your own account several times during the takeover, and can generate some conversations with people that you wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to connect with. It’s important though that these are done with the intention of serving the audience that you’re speaking to, not just generating followers on your own account. 

YouTube
Creating high-value videos on YouTube that can be shared is a great way to collaborate because, after Google, YouTube is the next biggest search engine online. Therefore, people are very likely to turn to YouTube if they are looking for instruction on how to do something.

You could collaborate with someone on YouTube to provide high quality, well-produced instructional content that people would search for as a solution to their specific problems. These are often extensively shared, and can even be monetised. This requires some preparation and skill but could be a valuable way to create advice on training, food preparation, or recovery methods, for example, that would be useful for both your audiences. 

Guest blogs
​Many trainers struggle to keep their websites up to date with relevant and well-written blog content. If you’re a good writer, you might reach out with a proposal on a blog title - or even a fully written article - which includes backlinks to your site. This can generate traffic from that trainer’s blog to yours for people who are looking for more information about your services.

4. Create the Call to Action

Having a clear call to action at the end of the collaboration project will be important to generating leads, but the specific call to action you use will be dependant on the platform you’re working on.

It could be as simple as encouraging people to follow your account or subscribing to your channel. It could be something more interactive, like giving them the opportunity to ask questions that you answer. 

Collaborations can be used regularly to reach different segments of the market that match your specific personal training offering.

5. Introduce Collaborators

You'll likely work with several collaborators during your time as a personal trainer and one of the best way to multiply the size of your audience while helping your colleagues and their audience is to connect your networks together.

For example, you could introduce your physio friend to your Pilates friend so that the physio has someone to send their clients for long term back care.

Networks like this, where everyone is helping everyone are pretty common in successful business circles but it's not productive to wait for someone else to built it. It's up to you.