Many personal trainers have pretty good success with traditional personal training models. Working with people in your local area is a great way to build a fitness business and help many clients reach their health and fitness goals.
However… If your business has become a little stagnant or you’re beyond ready to scale, you may be thinking about how to get your fitness business to the next level. You might be wondering if online personal training is the solution to help your business grow.
So the question on everyone’s minds… Is online personal training profitable?
The short answer is 100% YES.
Personal trainers can really benefit from incorporating online training within their existing business. And we are going to show you how! But first, let’s make sure we are all on the same page about what online personal training is.
Online training is different from virtual training. Virtual training consists of offering training sessions directly to a client virtually – like over Skype, Facetime or Zoom. On the other hand, online personal training involves training clients online with resources like educational videos and group training programs, by using training software and other online tools. You can still have one-on-one meetings with your clients, but these sessions don’t have to happen as often.
Online personal training can be really profitable because it helps you:
- Attract new clients that are not a great fit for traditional personal training.
- Break your income ceiling and scale your personal training business.
- Increase retention and make more money per client.
Let’s cover each of these three reasons online personal training is profitable, so that you can have a better idea of why and how to make the most of training clients online.
- Reason 1: Online personal training helps you attract clients that aren’t a great fit for the traditional personal training model.
- Reason 2: Online personal training can help you scale your fitness business.
- Reason 3: Online personal training helps you increase retention.
Online personal training helps you attract clients that aren’t a great fit for the traditional personal training model.
In the oversaturated fitness industry, one of the most impactful things personal trainers can do is find the right market. There is an extremely profitable market out there that the traditional personal training model just isn’t reaching, so tapping into this market can help you push your fitness business to the next level.
To better understand this valuable market, let’s start by talking about the difference in cost between a gym membership and personal training.
On average, a gym membership costs around $50-60 per month. Let’s say that one personal training session costs the same. However, since most personal training clients will probably want to do 2-3 sessions per week, it could cost as much as $520-$780 a month. This is pretty expensive for most people. There are plenty of people out there that want something better than a gym membership, but simply can’t afford to shelve out that much a month.
Let’s imagine for a minute someone that can spend around $299 a month on fitness and wants something more personalized. He can afford the gym easily, but he’s not really getting the experience that he wants. And though he has a little more to spend, he still falls short on being able to afford a personal trainer 2-3 times per week.
Here, we have our gap in the market.
And this market is big.
Think about this: What percentage of people can afford to spend $700 per month on fitness?
The affluent few.
How about people that can spend more than $250 per month on fitness? Now, that’s a little more accessible right?
That’s not all though. One study found that only 34% of US gym members are satisfied with their price/performance ratio at their gym, and wish for better products or services. There are also people that travel and live remotely and don’t want to commit to a traditional gym membership or people that would rather workout from home because of COVID concerns or general preference.
These are all the market segments that are not well served by the traditional gym or personal training model on their own. Since online personal training is affordable and flexible, it allows you to meet the demands of the people in this segment, regardless of location. Offering online personal training gives you a serious edge over traditional training models, helping you attract more clients from this very large, untapped segment.
Online personal training can help you scale your fitness business.
As a personal trainer, you are your business. You use your knowledge and experience to help clients reach their goals. You can certainly scale, but your growth is limited by your capacity. There’s only so many training sessions you can squeeze into one day, on top of all the other administrative duties and responsibilities you’re dealing with.
With in-person training there is a ceiling to how much you can earn.
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If you want to break your income ceiling, online personal training can help you step out of the traditional model and make better use of your time. Online personal training allows you to offer the same resources to multiple clients and take on many more clients at once.
This is your ticket to a million dollar fitness business. Seriously! Let me put this into perspective: We have trainers using TrainerFu that charge $150/month and have more than 1500 clients. There’s no way a personal trainer could sustain that many clients with in person training alone.
You can scale like this by building an awesome online group training that you sell to many clients at once. Group training can make a huge difference when it comes to your capacity and help you grow much faster.
Here are few tips to build an awesome online group training program:
- Nail down a niche. You need to know your target market so that you can create online training programs that fit their needs perfectly.
- Make a program that is applicable to all your ideal clients with little modification.
- Have a marketing strategy that attracts people in that niche. (Ok, sure. That’s easier said than done, but building a thriving business isn’t easy! We have an Ultimate Guide to Personal Trainer Marketing that can help you get started.)
- Delegate! Or at least plan to as soon as you can. You may not be able to hire right now, but eventually your goal should be to hire someone to take things off your plate as your workload increases, thus increasing your capacity even further!
- Bottom line: This type of model is possible only with online personal training, and this should be your target sooner rather than later if you want to be really profitable.
With in person training, your growth is limited by the number of hours you have in a day. With online personal training, the opportunities for growth are nearly endless, as you can use tools like TrainerFu to help you make the most of your time and serve many, many more clients.
Online personal training helps you increase retention.
Increased retention means keeping clients around for longer and can help you make more money per client. Online personal training offers an opportunity for better retention over the traditional personal training model.
Think about it. Life happens: People lose jobs, move, start a family. Traditional personal training can be really hard for those clients to keep up through changes in their life or schedule.
However, online personal training allows you to offer various options that meet the needs of your clients during their different times. With online personal training you can continue working with a longtime client that just moved cities. With online personal training, you can help a new mom workout when it fits her schedule without a need for weekly visits to the gym.
By creating a product catalog that gives your existing clients options, you can make more money per client no matter where life takes them. Offer your clients this convenience and watch retention and profits soar.
Ready to get started with online personal training?
So let’s sum it all up. Online personal training allows you to attract that large untapped market of folks who don’t fit into the traditional personal training model. It allows you to maximize the number of hours you put in, by sharing pre-made content and offering group training programs. Lastly, it makes your fitness business even more robust by offering clients alternatives that fit their ever changing lifestyles.
The best way to get started with online personal training is to use a platform built for this very purpose. TrainerFu helps personal trainers grow their businesses and become much more profitable by providing the tools they need to make the most of online personal training.
For further reading, check out our Ultimate Guide to Starting Your Online Personal Training Business. Here is what is included in the guide:
- Why online personal training
- Package and pricing
- How to train your clients online
- Marketing your personal training business