Become an Online Personal Trainer in 4 Simple Steps

Most personal trainers start their careers serving their clients on the gym floor. This is an incredible experience, and for lots of personal trainers, they love the atmosphere and energy of face to face training. But when gyms close, sometimes at very short notice, having a permanent online element to your business can be a fantastic way to continue providing an exceptional service to your clients.

It doesn’t mean you can’t still do one to one, but it does give you scope to provide a more complete service, to have an impact on your clients’ and also to scale and grow your business.

Set Up Online Personal Training in 4 Steps

There are a few things that you need to be clear on when you have an online personal training business. The clarity around these things is required because the online marketplace for personal trainers is highly competitive and your prospects are being bombarded with guidance not only from other trainers, but also from apps, from celebrity trainers and influencers, even follow along workouts in apps.

Step 1. Identify Your Ideal Client

This sounds counter intuitive, but it’s absolutely essential advice. In fact, if you take nothing else from this article, this is probably the most important piece of advice in it. You might think if you serve a broader audience, you’ll attract more leads but in fact the opposite is true.

Since your prospects can choose from literally any online trainer anywhere in the world, the more hyper focused you can be about who you help, the better.

Check out Body Transformations for Parents. They took online training and made it specific to parents' health goals.

If you don’t currently know who your “ideal client avatar” is, think about your favourite client. Either a current client or one from the past. The kind of client that you looked forward to training, that you could have a good conversation with, and who got outstanding results.

Picture them in your mind when you think about how to market your services. By targeting all of the marketing for your online personal training services towards that specific person, imagining you’re speaking directly to them, you will become better at attracting more people just like them.

If you still can't think of anyone, consider your location a niche. No matter what town or city you're in, I bet my morning coffee that there'd be enough people in it to train online and run a successful online personal training business.

Step 2. Solve A Specific Problem

Offering one main service inside your business makes it easy to sell. It’s clear, simple and people understand what you do. To do this, start by thinking about what the main service is that your clients think they need; and base your online training package around that solution. It’s about keeping the solution as easy to understand as possible even if you could offer other things too.

Often a mistake people make in online training is trying to offer everything. And even if you can help your clients with a wider range of problems, that’s something you can offer once they’re inside your online personal training business.

If you give people too many options before they’ve bought from you, and understand how your personal training packages work, they’ll become confused and not become a client at all.

Step 3. Offer A Result In A Specific Time Frame

While the ideal scenario is that people become devoted clients and stay with you online for a long time, in the beginning, they have a lot of uncertainty about what they can expect.

If you offer one clear result in a relatively short time frame (at most, 3 months, for example) they have short term milestones to keep them focused and motivated. You can also set them mini milestones within that time period to keep them working towards the bigger goal.

Check out how the 5A Protocol offer a 12 week solution. Just because you can't see an ongoing membership fee on the page, doesn't mean they can't offer it in the back end of their service delivery and keep clients on for longer.

At the same time, the short term commitment is a low barrier for people that think they might like to try your coaching services. They don’t have to sign up for a full year like they might at a gym, and that can help them to overcome a long term financial commitment barrier.

At the end of their commitment period, you can invite them into your programme longer term if they’ve had incredible results and you’re a compatible match to work together.

Step 4. Move To Online Training From Face To Face

This can be a struggle because you might genuinely love serving your clients on the gym floor. The benefits of being online is that you have more time freedom to serve your clients in a meaningful and energised way.

You might consider transferring online for a number of reasons, but the improved freedom is likely to be an attractive draw for most personal trainers. Just keep in mind that face to face to time is often swapped out for time marketing and managing your business.

Have a date in mind when you’re going to “launch” your online personal training service as a supplementary service to your face to face training. Alternatively, if you’re leaving face to face training and you’re aiming to bring as many clients as possible onto your online model, letting them know your intentions with plenty of notice would be a fair and professional way to go about it.

Summing Up

Becoming an online personal trainer can feel like a big move inside your personal training business - especially if you’re leaving face to face training completely. Knowing that it’s your business, and it has to work for your lifestyle is the most important thing. If you’re unhappy without an online element to your personal training business - perhaps after gyms closed you felt vulnerable - your own personal happiness and professional security is the most important thing.

You might anticipate that you will likely lose some of your clients that either don’t understand or don’t value an online training model - and being comfortable with that before you tell them about your plans to serve them through the online platform instead. If you could use some help getting started with transferring over to online personal training, you could check out this course to help.