How to Sell Fitness Workouts Online

Hey there Sea Changers and welcome back to my series covering some of the ways that we can make money online. Today I am going to tackle a big one by discussing how to sell fitness workouts online. Now, when I started researching this subject, I was going to try and cover fitness as a whole – but you know what, it is just too big, so I have broken it down here and will add others over the next few weeks.

Anyway, as I have said, today we will investigate the world of online workouts to see whether it really is something that you can look at to fund your own version of your sea change.

If we look at this from the beginning, we know that Health is currently one of the 5 top online sales niches with no signs of that changing anytime soon. After all, we humans are always going to be interested in our own health. However, with popularity comes competition so if this is an area that you are interested in pursuing, then you will need to take the following into consideration:

1. YouTube is jam packed with free workouts online, so if you are planning to monetise your product in any way you will need to consider how you are going to stand out from the crowd.

2. You will need to determine whether you are going to focus on workouts only or utilise them as a means of promoting other areas of the fitness story such as weightloss, equipment or specific training needs – we will discuss this more below as we plan our niche and problem solving requirements.

How do we get started?

Usually in this section we would be starting out by asking whether there is a market here? Based on my experience and research I am pretty confident that there is however, as discussed above, we will really need to put some fore-thought into how we plan to sell our online workouts to stand out from the others in this market. So let's use this section to see what is being searched for out there…

What are people looking for?

So, for those of you looking at how to sell fitness programs online, let's just confirm our market numbers:

1. Number of monthly searches

Ok, so to see how many people undertake online fitness related searches online per month, you will need to find yourself a good keyword tool (I use Jaaxy) and enter in the keywords that best describe your market. In this case, let's look at fitness:

Ok then! Looks like the occasional search is done – haha. What this does highlight however is (as I keep harping on about ) that we need to be really careful with our niche. So let's look at fitness workouts:

The numbers are not huge but there is certainly a market there but the main thing is we can start to see what people are looking for – workouts for women and workout videos. Let's look at one more based on our current subject:

Again, a good number of searches and some new ideas – Pilates – that takes us into the workout type scenario and it looks like a lot want it all for free. This is not a bad thing though as I will explain later on…

2. Growth trends

Another important aspect of online sales and niche selection is to check that interest is maintained or increasing for your chosen niche. To gain an insight into this let's check out how the searches for fitness are trending online.

So we can see here that over the past 15 years, searches within the online fitness and workout subjects have remained steady (with maybe a very slight drop). This is a great sign as it shows that interest has been maintained over this time.

What is our niche?

Ok, now the fun part begins – we need to start looking at breaking down our market into a niche. We have already covered above the amount of competition that might be found here and we are only discussing online workouts and not the entire fitness niche.

So to that end, it is time to really consider what you want to do and what it is that you are actually going to cover. Let's go back and have a little look at the search terms that came up in our keyword searches earlier. Off the bat, we can see the following:

• Free workout videos
• Workout videos for females
• Pilates videos

Now, from those three alone, we can start to break this down into a couple of areas such as:

• Type of exercise – Pilates, Yoga, HIIT, Tabata, weight training etc.
• Personal specification – Gender, age
• Targeted workouts – Weight loss, core fitness, muscle building, cardio etc.
• Specific activities – Workouts for soccer, football, horse riders, tennis players, swimmers and so on.

As you can see, there is no limit to the types of workout videos that you can focus on. You may choose one, or a few, or even just general workouts for women aged over 40 – you could even target the 2000 odd new mothers who search for post-partum workouts each month.

And just so you know, that keyword searches for workouts for each specific activity returned at least 1000 searches per month for every one – I even have a friend who makes a good living undertaking personal training sessions for horse jockeys.

As you work through narrowing your targeted niche, consider the following:

• Are you able to solve a problem – Most people undertake searches on the internet to solve a problem – see next section.
• Does it have some, but not too much competition – Another way see if there is a market is to see if you have any competition. If not, then maybe it is because no-one is buying.
• Is it a subject that you have an interest, or knowledge in– I am guessing that you are in this post as you know about, or have an interest in the fitness industry. If you don't have either of these, maybe consider another market as, to be honest, you might struggle to produce solid content if you don't know much about workout management – or worse, have no interest in it – and trust me, people will know immediately if your videos are not up to scratch.

What problem are we solving?

In the first section of this post I mentioned that there is a lot of competition in this area of online activity. Therefore, it is important that we work on finding ways to differentiate ourselves from the others out there producing workout videos and uploading them to YouTube – for free.

We have covered some of this in the previous section around determining our niche, but I wanted to explore it with you in little more detail here as it is such a critical influence in attracting people to your site, channel and potentially selling your product.

Think about your own search behaviours when you are online – I would hazard a guess that most searches you do are in order to solve a problem. These can be in a number of ways such as:

1. You know what you want but are not sure which fitness regime to choose – i.e. “I know I need to prepare for a 10 mile race but I really don't know how to do it”.
2. You have a problem and need a solution – i.e. “I want to get fit”.

Your goal here is to determine just what problem/s you are trying to solve for your readers. This may be one problem that spans your site or differ for each post that you write. For example, if you have chosen weightloss workouts for women for your niche, then problems might be:

• Post Partum – losing the post baby weight.
• Mid life – gentler workouts that still burn calories.
• Sports – high cardio workouts for women who run.

In these cases, women would be searching for those topics based on having a problem and needing a solution. Your site would outline and review the best options for them.

Alternatively, if your site is about weighs training, then you would be addressing the fact that I know I need to build muscle but don’t know how to do it. You would then be outlining the best processes for each aspect of the subject such as:

• Gym workout.
• Exercise regimes.
• Supplements.
• Heavy versus light weights.
• Online coaching

Note: You do not need to identify every possible problem that your readers may have straight away. In many cases, the more you write, the more ‘problems’ will present themselves so initially you really just want to make sure that there are some that may need solving as we have found here.

Are you just doing workouts?

Ok, so we know from the title of this post that we are discussing the processes involved to set yourself up to sell fitness workouts online. But before we move on I just wanted to share something with you from my own experience. Those of you who have read my bio on this site may have read that my wife and I actually own a couple of Pilates studios ourselves.

Our dominant market is females aged 30 – 60 and when they join us, we usually ask them what fitness means to them. These are the top 5 answers that we get:

1. Lose weight/be skinny.
2. Not get tired.
3. Keep up with kids.
4. Eat right.
5. Exercise daily.

Why am I telling you this? Well it may come in handy for you when you consider the problems that you are trying to solve within this industry. Remember – what fitness means to you may not necessarily be what fitness means to others. This means that the ways that you make money from your online workouts may not necessarily be from the workouts themselves. We will discuss each of these money making methods in the next section but in essence, you really have three options:

1. Shoot workout videos based on your targeted niche and sell access to them.

2. Focus on other problems and include your workouts as one of a number of ways to solve them.

3. Shoot your videos and publish them for free access then sell the range of clothing or equipment that you use in the videos.

Tip: Still not sure? Have a look and see what others are doing. It might just help you with some ideas.

How do we sell fitness?

Ok, let's come at this from two angles:

1. Selling our workout videos
2. Using our workout videos to make other sales.

Selling our workout videos

We have already established that there are a lot of fitness videos available out there for free so the trick here is to convince your readers that you can provide more for a cost than they can get elsewhere. The key here is value. You need to be not only solving the problems of visitors to your site or channel but also providing value to them as well.

That will hopefully build enough trust in you to make them want to purchase from you. Some suggested ways to do this are as follows:

• Provide basics and then sell packages – one common method here is to provide the basics, or first two videos of an entire regimen and then refer users back to your site where they can join a membership area to view the rest of the videos. Your added value here is that you would provide extras such as nutrition, personalised advice and exercise programs, access to discounted clothing and so on.

• Sell your videos based on problem solving – write some blog posts on the problems that you readers may be facing and clearly outline what they can do to solve them. The secret here is to give them an outline of the exercises and even a workout sheet – then if they want to follow you on video they can purchase from you. This way you have solved their problem and built their trust without the need to purchase but then offering them the chance to get more from you at a cost – Maybe throw in a bonus video if they buy two.
• Create a DVD – I know we are talking about online stuff here but what I mean by DVD is that you produce a narrated catalogue of all of your workouts that you can ‘talk' the viewer through each exercise group with explanations, expected outcomes, encouragement etc. You can obviously sell these as actual DVD sets (some people still like something tangible for their money) or via download.

Using our workout videos to make sales

The second option here then is to use our videos to attract viewers to other products that we may choose to sell, either from an affiliate marketing point of view or selling our own products. The process is pretty much the same as we covered when discussing the sales of our own videos. We provide value and solve problems via our videos but within them make reference to other products that can be purchased to further assist with their problems including:

• Supplements
• Equipment
• Sports clothing
• Safety gear
• Books
• Recipes

There are a number of ways that you can include these products for sale including:

Affiliate programs – Affiliate programs are setup directly by companies or marketplace platforms (Amazon, Ebay etc.) that allow you to join and then refer traffic to them via customised affiliate links.

To find affiliate programs in the fitness space, simply type “affiliate: weight sets” into your search engine. (obviously substituting ‘weight sets' for whatever product it is that you are choosing to sell) Below are the results for our search:

From here you can search through and find programs that:

• Relate to your niche/problems that you are solving.
• Have quality products – your brand can be severely damaged if you promote poor quality product.
• Have solid payment and customer service arrangement.
• Pay decent commissions.
• Have good testimonials covering commission payouts and quality of product.

In most cases, you will need to apply for the program before you are allowed to promote their products – don’t take this step lightly or you will be rejected. Affiliate programs will generally want to know:

• Your website name.
• Traffic levels.
• Why you want to join – (so I can make money by selling your gym shoes is unfortunately not generally a good enough answer).
• How you plan to promote their products.

Multi-level marketing (MLM) – If your sales strategies cover products such as supplements, fitness memberships or some clothing lines then you could also try your hand at Multi-Level Marketing companies. If you use them in their basic capacity, MLM programs mirror affiliate marketing platforms in that you make a commission on every sale that you refer to them.

It is however the secondary aspect of these programs – and where the multi-level influences come from – that can really boost your revenue earning capabilities. The process works as follows:

1. You attract a visitor to your site and convert them to the sales page.
2. They are offered an incentive to sign up as a member of the program (there are different names for this but they all mean the same thing).
3. That new member is then placed ‘underneath’ you in a hierarchical arrangement
4. You then gain extra commissions for everything they sell as well.

And yes, the less-than-glamorous name for this method of commission based selling is a pyramid scheme. The advantage of the online world however is that if you do it correctly by providing solutions to the problems of visitors to your site, you don’t have to hassle (and alienate) all of your friends that family.

Some of the more popular MLM programs in this niche include:

• Juenesse – Vitamins, Weight loss and food supplements – also have skin care products if your niche is female orientated.
• ISAGENIX – Predominately weight loss/meal replacements products.
• Omnilife – Covers most supplement niches including nutrition, exercise and weight loss.
• Herbalife – Have a supplement for everything and every niche. Also have some Skin care products.

Note: One final consideration to be aware of here however is that most MLM arrangements require a minimum personal spend per month (typically around USD $100) in order to qualify for commissions for sales that you, or your down line refer. This can make things a little tight if your site is new and not making any money as yet.

White labeling – White labeling is a process where you actually purchase ‘brandless’ products from a vendor, add your own label and then on-sell them via your website or platforms such as Amazon etc.

This process requires a much higher setup costs as you will need to purchase your products, create and affix your labels and manage orders and shipment. Some however will affix the labels that you send them and then manage the packaging and shipment for you. This will cost you less to set up but obviously you will make less on the sale once they take their processing fee.

To find these, a simple search for “white label: sports clothing” found the following (again, you could narrow this down according to your niche and search for options such as “white label running shoes” or “white label: yoga pants” etc.):

From here you will need to follow the same process as with affiliate programs in determining whether they:

• Relate to your niche/problems that you are solving.
• Have quality products
• Have solid delivery and customer service arrangements.
• Have good testimonials covering commission payouts and quality of product.

Tip: This method can be very effective in driving online traffic and sales via the implementation of more traditional sales methods such as kiosks and market stalls etc. As people see and try your products, they can purchase from you there and then be directed to your website for future sales.

What do we need to do?

Ok, so now that we have an idea in regards to our niche and know some of the problems that we can investigate, we need to choose and setup the media that we intend to use to sell our product. This can include:

Build a Website

Websites allow you to solve problems via blog posts, videos and/or ‘how to' demonstrations that people can view in order to identify the solutions that they need. Usually, this process is fairly straight forward in that you build your website, write posts (on the benefits of a particular exercise for swimmers for example), then provide links so that they can view/purchase your video or other apparel.

Promote on Social Media

Social media is a powerful platform that can allow you to get your message out there into the big wide online world. It has the power to reach thousands and allows you to target specific segments if you choose the correct platform. In terms of online fitness workouts, then the obvious social media platform to start with is YouTube. There are other video platforms out there but as YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, then my suggestion would be to start there.

Demo videos can also be posted to FaceBook and Instagram and are great for brand building and exposure.

Join like-minded groups

Regardless of the niche, there is usually some sort of social media group, online forum or membership page that you can join to gain you exposure to potential visitors and sales. FaceBook is a great place to gain access to fitness minded groups and can not only allow you to interact with customers but also gain more information and education in terms of content ideas for your posts or products.

Conclusion

And there it is – How to sell fitness programs online. I hope it has been helpful and as usual, please do not hesitate to comment below if you have any questions, need some advice or have any experiences to share.

Do you want further assistance with any of the above or need help to build your own fitness based website?

Are you looking for a comprehensive training platform that can give you step by step training, 24/7 support, tools to develop and host your very own website, ongoing assistance with SEO and social media and access to some of the best affiliate marketing minds on the planet, then click on the following link to read more about Wealthy Affiliate.

Until next time

Have fun

Paul

Note: If you make a purchase from this page, there is a very good chance that I make a commission from it – these commissions do not increase your sale price. This may include sales made via Wealthy Affiliate.