If you’re considering a career as an online personal trainer, market growth statistics are on your side. The online fitness market is robust and growing, with a healthy compound annual growth rate of 26.72 percent expected from 2023 to 2030.
Whether you’re already training clients in person and want to transition your services to the online space for greater reach, flexibility, and scalable income, or you’re just beginning your journey as a fitness professional, learning how to become an online personal trainer is a smart choice for growing your business.
This article will look at nine steps you can take to launch your online personal trainer business and set yourself up for success. We’ll also share several Jotform resources that can help you along the way.
What is an online personal trainer?
An online personal trainer or fitness coach does the same things an in-person fitness professional does, but using digital platforms.
They provide training sessions and fitness instruction, recommend workout and nutrition plans, conduct fitness assessments, track client progress, and more — all while using digital platforms and online tools to deliver their services.
These online tools include websites, fitness tracking apps, videoconferencing software, scheduling and appointment apps, payment processors, software programs geared specifically to personal trainers, and more.
How to start a career as an online personal trainer
Let’s consider some important steps to becoming a successful online personal trainer. This list is by no means exhaustive:
- Decide on your specialty
- Earn related certifications
- Determine your target audience
- Establish your service offerings
- Offer a seamless onboarding experience
- Provide easy payment options
- Market your services
- Collect client feedback
- Create an app
Let’s take a look at each of these steps.
1. Decide on your specialty
Determining your training specialty early is essential for success as an online personal trainer. A generic personal trainer offering standard services to all kinds of clients will likely struggle to stand out and find enough clients to create a thriving practice.
If you’re like every other online personal trainer in the market, why should clients choose you? Determining what makes you unique and different is especially important in the online space, where your potential clients have thousands of other personal trainers to choose from.
Examples of online personal trainer specialties
Here’s an example. Instead of focusing your business on programs for women over 40, you could specialize in working with executive women over 40 with demanding careers and very little time to work out, which your fitness training specifically addresses.
Or you could provide customized workout and nutrition plans for amateur athletes training for endurance events. You could specialize in post-surgery rehabilitation training or fitness programs for individuals with disabilities.
Other personal training specialties include prenatal and postnatal fitness services, mobility and recovery support, endurance training, training for professional athletes, and fitness training focused on building outdoor skills, like hiking and kayaking.
The possibilities are endless.
2. Earn related certifications
Though you don’t necessarily need a specific degree, certification, or license to become an online personal trainer, completing a certified personal trainer program and passing a certification exam will help establish you as an expert, boost your credibility, and give you a competitive advantage online.
The prerequisites for many certified personal trainer programs include a high school diploma, CPR certification, and AED certification(training to use an automated external defibrillator). CPR/AED certifications are often offered together.
Personal training certifications are offered through organizations like the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), the International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA), the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the National Council on Strength and Fitness (NCSF), and the American Council on Exercise (ACE), among others.
3. Determine your target audience
Establishing who your target audience is will help you focus your service offerings, come up with marketing ideas, and set a business growth strategy.
It’s very important to know as much about your target audience as you can before you begin marketing your services. Otherwise you won’t be able to create messaging that attracts and converts a percentage of this target audience. You want to find the people who are perfect for your services and happy to pay for them.
One way to help determine your target audience and gauge their specific needs, wants, and desires is through an audience analysis survey. Jotform makes this easy.
You can choose from Jotform’s ready-made survey templates and customize them with our drag-and-drop builder to quickly collect responses online. It’s also very easy to create a new survey from scratch.
You can easily share the survey over email, link, social media, QR code, or website embed.
4. Establish your service offerings
You’ll need to know what services you’re offering before you get started. This is something you can iterate on as you work with more clients, but it’s a good idea to establish at least a few ways clients can work with you from the beginning.
The specifics of your personal training services and how you package them can also help differentiate you in a sea of online personal trainers.
Here are some examples of service offerings:
- High-end, private, personalized 1-on-1 online training sessions for a small number of clients
- Live group online training
- Hybrid online and in-person training
- A library of recorded video training programs
- Training and nutrition programs delivered via PDF
- Customized workout plans delivered via email paired with accountability check-ins
5. Offer a seamless onboarding experience
First impressions matter, and one of the best ways to let your clients know they’re in capable hands right from the start is by presenting a seamless onboarding experience.
A smooth onboarding experience helps you build client trust, improve client satisfaction and retention, set your clients up for success, and establish expectations.
Jotform’s easy-to-use forms make streamlined onboarding a breeze. For example, use our Personal Trainer Client Intake Form Template to collect relevant information from new clients, including previously diagnosed health problems, current medications or injuries, health and fitness goals, and more.
The form can be customized by adding your logo, updating form fields to suit your needs, choosing your preferred fonts and colors, and adding e-signature functionality. Once it’s customized, simply embed the form on your website or share it via a link.
You can also use the Personal Training Consultation Questionnaire Template to make it easy for clients to schedule personal training sessions, set exercise goals, and share relevant information about exercise-related injuries, health and medication history, and other details that will help you understand how to help them achieve their fitness goals.
The questionnaire template has space for clients to select their preferred personal trainer package options. Simply add your logo, customize the template to your specifications, and embed it on your website or share it over email or social media.
6. Provide easy payment options
Payment for your personal training services should be simple, streamlined, and frictionless — whether your client is buying a package of sessions on your website, paying for a course or video training, or purchasing a workout or nutrition plan.
You can make client payments a breeze by embedding one of Jotform’s easy-to-use payment forms on your website. Forms can be customized to fit your needs, and you can choose from over 40 payment processor options. Collect debit or credit card payments, ACH payments, and more.
Simply choose your payment gateway, add it to your payment form, link it to your account, and embed the form in your website or share it with a link to start receiving payments.
You can even set up recurring payments with Jotform. Maybe you’d like to offer monthly or annual subscriptions, for example.
7. Market your services
Now that you’ve got the bones of your online personal training business set up, it’s time to get serious about attracting and converting your ideal clients — and that means marketing.
There are numerous ways to market your business, but let’s look at a few basic ways.
Your website
Your website is your base of operations. It should be set up so that your potential clients can easily check out your qualifications, discover your training specialties, learn about your programs and pricing, inquire about your services, and purchase your services, among other things.
There are many no- or low-cost website builder options that make setting up a website relatively painless, such as WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace, to name a few.
At some point you may also want to add a blog to your website, where you can regularly create content to demonstrate your subject matter expertise and build your credibility. A blog offers search engine optimization (SEO) benefits, which can help potential clients find your website.
Another way to drive traffic to your website is through your social media channels.
Lead generation
Once you have your website set up and your traffic strategies in place, you’ll want to incorporate a way to consistently generate leads. You can easily embed one of Jotform’s lead generation forms on your website to collect relevant customer details, such as email, phone number, and address.
Gathering this information allows you to follow up with prospective clients and convert them into paying customers.
Jotform lead generation templates are customizable with our drag-and-drop Form Builder. You can add your company logo, rearrange form fields to suit your purposes, and change colors and background images to match your brand.
Newsletters
Email newsletters are another great way to market your business. Sending out a weekly or biweekly newsletter allows you to build relationships with potential clients by showing up in their inbox consistently.
You can send fitness and nutrition tips, information about your services, and other valuable content. When readers are ready to hire a personal trainer, you’ll be top of mind.
It’s easy to add an email signup form to your website so your visitors can subscribe to your newsletter or email list. Customize your email signup form to match your brand, embed it on your website, and start collecting email addresses right away.
Use Jotform Tables to track and manage subscribers. Jotform offers over 150 customizable, mobile-friendly signup form templates.
Here are some other marketing ideas you can try:
- Offer referral incentives to current clients
- Offer free consultations or free classes to potential clients
- Network with colleagues
- Share beneficial fitness content on social media
- Write guest posts for industry sites and blogs
- Pitch yourself to podcasts as a potential guest
- Launch a paid ad campaign to increase brand awareness and lead generation
8. Collect client feedback
Keeping your clients happy will generate goodwill, referrals, and strong retention. Understanding what your clients want and incorporating their feedback into your practice is essential to making this happen.
Feedback collection is easy with Jotform. Choose from hundreds of customizable feedback form templates. You can also easily build a feedback form from scratch with Jotform’s intuitive Form Builder.
You can embed feedback forms directly into your website or send them via email, then track responses to your feedback forms with Jotform Tables. Your customers can easily fill out your feedback surveys from any device.
9. Create an app
Making your own workout app can help both you and your customers track training and workout information.
Jotform Apps makes it easy to create a personal training app to keep track of client details. And the best part? You don’t need coding experience to build it.
Your clients simply download the app to their smartphone, tablet, or computer for easy access, and they’ll be able to view training materials, track their workouts, request appointments for training sessions, make payments, and more.
Customize your app with multiple forms, documents, tables, and more, and modify the design to match your preferences.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of what it takes to launch a successful online personal training career, take some time to map out your business plan. With Jotform’s powerful tools, you have everything you need at your fingertips.
Photo by Kampus Production
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