One of the most popular ways for fitness professionals to attract more clients and earn more money is to become an online personal trainer. Becoming a personal fitness trainer attracts individuals because it creates an environment where you can not only be your own boss if you wanted to, but the cap on your income can be manipulated to your discretion. As if it wasn’t great enough, online personal training or hybrid programs cultivate an environment that is constrained by time as much.
Developing online training service options that assist people in achieving their fitness and health goals while requiring minimal time allows you to reclaim that all-important personal and financial independence. The duties of a personal trainer are broad and vary depending on what a client wants. This is good because it gives the field a broad range that allows trainers and clients to all achieve their goals and work on what they would be working on. Expanding on that, if we look at online personal training the possibilities are endless compared to the limits an in person personal trainer has. Online personal trainers can help clients improve their fitness levels, body image, health, and performance in the same way that traditional personal trainers can, but with less time constraints and more flexibility. Trainers can now train anyone, anywhere, at any time, thanks to modern technology. By starting an online personal training business, every personal trainer will have another way to generate money and expand their personal and financial freedom. However, before you can coach customers via online platforms, you must first become an online personal trainer.
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Get Certified as a Personal Fitness Trainer
First things first, getting certified as a PFT is crucial to your transition. Certification programs will ensure that you are gaining all the tools you need to train your clients with success and run a successful business. If you begin to train individuals without any proper certification, you may run the risk of legal issues, but on top of that you may injure someone gravely if you are not equipped with the fitness tools to guide them on their journey safely. Getting certified is important to consumers because it establishes credibility and confidence, and those characteristics should be important to you as well, especially if you are guiding people on their health journeys. Earning an online personal trainer certification gives you insight into supporting clients online, understanding business and program creation, developing your business, and providing you with credentials designed to improve your clients’ lives while ensuring their safety. In summary, it uses a set of principles, standards, and suggestions to assist safeguard the integrity of the personal training business as a whole.
Getting certified can be done in less than a year from an accredited institution. Some quick research can find you some options and then it is up to you to get in touch with those schools and find out if they are the right fit. Having conversations with admissions advisors and financial aid advisors can give you a good idea of the school you are visiting. Find out your options and see if the curriculum is a set of guidelines that will advance your career and act as a stepping stone to your success. Don’t be shy, ask questions about how you can achieve your goals. How will lessons be taught? What is the graduate rate? How will you pay for it? If the school is a good fit for you, all of these answers will assist you on your path.
Starting Your Journey as a PFT
Once you are credited you can start building up your business and meeting up with clients. Since meeting in-person is the norm for now, some graduates like to start meeting their clients at gyms or in public areas before they transition into online work. Once you think you get in the groove of things and begin meeting client goals you can begin to transition into online work.
A good method to transition into online work is starting off with a hybrid-model. This means that instead of an abrupt switch, you can ease clients into online methodology. You can take a client and give them detailed workouts to do, after you do it with them together in person, the next time you meet it can be just online. Whether it be facetime, zoom, google meet, or any other medium in which you can communicate virtually, you can ensure that they are comfortable enough to workout via telecommunications but also independent enough to continue their workout regimen. You allow your client to follow your guide in between in-person exercises and check-in with them by email, text message, phone, or another mode that provides for tracking and accountability.
Building Your Model
After you’ve begun to transition and understand what it’s like to be a personal fitness trainer from behind a screen, it’s time to expand the machine.Understanding how to organize your business from start to finish is very beneficial for new online trainers, and understanding how to structure your business from start to finish is very helpful for new online trainers. Learning how to use online PDFs, video databases, and managing clients through your website and management platforms will all be crucial components to running a well oiled machine.
Tools such as PDFs outlining detailed workouts and even services that help you make and send out informative videos will most likely be needed to continue your career online and these things can all be self taught or picked up through some sort of educational program.
If you are going to be a self taught career driven professional, it’s important to look up various seminars and stick to a rigorous work ethic that involves trial and error. Building a business from scratch isn’t technically easy work, but it can be fun and informative and it gives you the opportunity to tweak your model the way you and your clients like. There are also online training certificate programs out there that differ from regular personal training certificates. These programs guide you through a curriculum that gives you the tools of business such as creating a business card, gaining more clients, and managing your work out regimenes. Going through an organized program can create more of a structure for aspiring online PFTs, while being self taught can create more flexibility but less outside guidance. Both avenues can lead to success if you put your best foot forward and you treat your passion for fitness with integrity.
Market To More Clients
On your journey to perfect your PFT model, you’ve learned some of the ins and outs of online training, you’ve received a certification that helps create some structure and teaches you how to develop assets out to offer additional services, and now all you need to do to be more successful is attract more clients online. To do this you need to focus on your marketing skills.
The idea is to target your online fitness services at an audience with whom you already have a relationship. Your target market is in your neighborhood. Many trainers believe that since they are online, they can make offers to everyone in the world, and although this is true, everyone else is doing it as well. Unfortunately for you, big fitness giants with far larger marketing resources will overshadow the smaller guys if you dove into the same pool. Consider that, rather than competing on such a large scale, individuals in your local neighborhood are more than likely interested in online training as well. And you’ve already got a foothold in that market. Use your resources to dive into that local pool and expand that way. One way to do this is to ask your clients for referrals and initiate some sort of referral program. You can also advertise your services at local community areas.
Another way to gain more clients and expand your business is investing in some marketing. You are not a corporation, so there’s no need to hire a marketing team but there are ways to put out ads online or even advertise yourself to the online world and gain some real life support. With some quick research, you can utilize tons of tools that can help you learn how to put out online ads and build your brand. It’s good to build a social media presence or even take some online seminars or masterclasses on how to do that. Building your brand involves consistently posting updates, sharing client progress (with their permission) and even sharing fitness news or tips. Perspective clients want to see that you are a welcoming person and not just a fitness robot. With enough work on your online presence and marketing you are sure to build up your repertoire and make your fitness model a well oiled machine.
Anyone who wants to call themselves an online personal trainer can do so, but this does not imply that they are competent. A real certified online personal trainer will be familiar with health and safety regulations, as well as program design. While there is no secret formula for a lucrative online personal training, it is possible to make a lot of money doing it. Online personal trainers that can establish an online reputation, engage with customers through processes, and create a scalable business model that is not dependent on the number of hours in a day that are traditionally dedicated for in-person training make the most money. After getting certified, Transitioning existing in-person clients to online clients is the most natural approach to start an online personal training business. One of the ways to establish an online personal training presence is to create online exercise plans and make them available to in-person customers as you begin your transition process.
