How To Make Money Through Fitness & How Brands Can Work With You

We’re all looking for a bit of extra cash these days. Whether to pay for a holiday, looking to purchase our first home, or even to be able to afford things for every day life. So, how can you make some extra money? If you’re someone who hates fitness and exercise in general then this one definitely isn’t for you. However, if you eat, sleep and breath fitness then keep reading on!

Before you can even contemplate turning your passion for health and fitness into a profitable business, you’ll need to become a qualified personal trainer and get all the certifications and legal bits done first. This is why we said you need to love health and fitness to begin with. Becoming a personal trainer takes time and ALOT of effort. There is a great deal to learn, not only about fitness, but also about the human body. After months of revising, you will be put through a few exams, including a practical session on a test client. Once you become qualified, you will then need to get all your legal documents in order – such as insurance, just incase something happens to one of your clients. 

Once you’ve got all the boring bits out of the way, there is nothing stopping you! All you have to do now is find out how to make money. That’s where we come in. There are actually many ways you can make money through fitness, you just have to think outside the box and get a bit creative.

Create A Blog

One way you can start making money from your passion for fitness is to create a blog. A website is a great platform for you to start from. Here you can create useful articles to help others looking for health and fitness tips. You can also use it as a base to sell workout plans in the form of Ebooks or diet plans to potential clients who come across your blog. However, the strength of your blog with determine how much you can make as a fitness blogger so make sure…

• Your content is on point
• You upload new content regularly
• The SEO of your website is good
• Gain backlinks to your website from high authoritative websites

It’s unlikely you will make much, if any money from your blog to begin with as it won’t be seen as a high authority website and therefore won’t show up highly in web searches. However, don’t et that get you down. Think of the bigger picture. Build up your blog to make it awesome, with really useful content and the people will come.

Get A Job As A Personal Trainer

OK, so at the moment getting a job as a personal trainer isn’t all that easy seeing as we all in lockdown in some form, with many gyms closed for the foreseeable future. However, now is the best time to get yourself qualified with all this extra time you have at home with not much else to do. Then, when gyms do reopen, you’ll be good to go! 

Getting a job as a personal trainer, even just as a temporary job for say 6 months or so will do you wonders! You will be getting seen by gym members (your target audience) on a regular basis. You can start to build up relationships with potential clients. Offer help and suggestions to people in the gym that you think could benefit from your services. Ask if you can teach some of the classes at the gym so people can see what you’re like as a trainer. This will be a great way for you to be seen as a professional trainer.

Become A Social Media Fitness Influencer

OK, so this one also won’t happen overnight – unless you are completely lucky with an amazing first post! Social media can work in two ways for you to make more money. You can either use your platform to connect with people looking for fitness workouts and inspiration. They might come across your page after you’ve posted a really great fitness video and start to follow you. Then you can offer one to one online or in-person training to your followers. 

The other way you can make money is by working with other companies. If you have a good following and engagement, companies will want to collaborate with you to promote their products to your followers. Building your social following, engagement and subscribers is a must if you want to earn money through social media.

Online Personal Training

Once you have a good client base, either through word of mouth, in person training or even through your social media platforms, you can start to offer online training services. This will be much easier for you to do in the long term as you won’t have to go out and see each client. Instead you can put together workout plans, nutrition plans for your clients and catch up with them maybe one a week/month to tweak their plans and see how they’re going. Just ensure you have good plans for each client and they aren’t just copy and paste generic plans for each client. Your plans should be customised to each individual. Do NOT try to get away with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible! You should still want each client to get as much out of your workouts as possible. 

How Brands Can Work With You

With the online world as it is these days and everyone so much more accessible, it makes working with brands all over the world so simple. You just have to know where to look and how to start.

Get Blogged

Websites such as Get Blogged is quite a new one around that offers brands and bloggers a simple way of getting in touch with each other. Brands can create a free job listing on their marketplace, for us bloggers to then apply for if we feel we fit the criteria. For example, say a brand wanted to work with a UK based sports blogger. They would post their job in the marketplace stating the price they are willing to offer for the job and the criteria they are looking for.

So far i think i’ve worked with the Get Blogged team maybe 10 or so times and it’s been very simple and straight forward. You apply for work that suits your niche. They then tell you if you’ve been accepted. You do the work that’s set out for you and upload the link for that assignment. Payment then comes through via Paypal (generally within 24-48 hours). It’s as simple as that. There is always work on their job boards from things for beauty bloggers, fashion bloggers, and even us UK sports bloggers.

Become a Brand Ambassador

If you’re a fitness influencer and have established an authority in your sector, then perhaps you could start to think about becoming a brand ambassador for your favourite companies. Brands look for authenticity and it’s a viable pathway for people to make money.

This doesn’t have to be a modelling collaboration, it could be that you review their products on your blog and social media platforms. Perhaps you go to their events and walkabout their products. Just make sure you ONLY work with brands you truly love and use regularly. Promoting everything and anything will quickly make you lose all credibility and your followers will begin to stop trusting you. Also, make sure you are clear when you talk about a brand/product if you have paid you to do so. This will ensure your audience know it’s a sponsored post. Hiding paid work will also make you look untrustworthy. It’s also illegal not to disclose a paid for advert in many countries. 

Public Speaking

If you have either developed a reputation as an authority figure via your blog or simply have great academic background within fitness, public speaking could be a great additional way to monetise your fitness career.

• Speaking at events
• Tradeshows
• Television
• Youtube

Affiliate Marketing Links

One of the biggest methods of how to make money fitness blogging is via affiliate links. This is where an advertiser or business has an item they wish to sell through your platforms. They will give you a percentage of commission on each item sold that comes from your link or code.

The affiliate company will either give you a trackable link to place on your posts or a discount code for you to give out to your audience.

So, the more you promote and talk about their product, the more likely it is someone will click on your link or use your code to purchase a product. The beauty of affiliate links is that you can make money whilst you’re still sleeping!

Competition / Giveaways

The last on our list for how to make money through fitness is with a competition or giveaway to your audience.

Competition giveaways have several benefits…

1. Giving back to your followers.

2. The brand you collaborate with gets great exposure.

3. Your subscribers get to engage with you.

4. You get paid by the brand that wants to enter the competition/giveaway.

Getting in touch with brands for competition giveaways could not be simpler. You could either get in touch direct through PR agencies to see if any would be willing to work with you. Or, you could do a shout out on social media looking for brands.

Using tools such as Journo Requests or Response Source allows you to reach thousands of business owners, PR agencies and blog owners in just a few minutes. These requests get sent out to all business owners, who will reply directly back to you if interested.

So, as you can see, there are plenty of ways you can make money through fitness, you just need to be passionate about what you do and to get a bit creative.

We hope you found this article on sports bloggers UK helpful but if you have any questions, please do get in touch.

The Fitness Focus Team