Personal training as a career can be a tough endeavor financially. Many trainers do it out of love rather than earning potential, but the potential is still there. The illustration of the personal trainer driving from place to place, waking up early and getting home late, just to barely make ends meet doesn’t have to be the lifestyle for everyone.
In this era of technological advancement and internet marketing, nearly everyone in every industry can make serious money through passive income.
Active Income vs. Passive Income
Active income basically means trading time for money. It’s how 99% of the population earn a living. Anyone who gets paid an hourly wage or a yearly salary is earning active income, no matter the profession. They are getting paid on the basis of time and merit. For example, a personal trainer who charges $50 per session is earning an active income. They get paid $50 for putting in one hour of work.
The drawback to active income is that it’s capped at a certain point. There are only so many hours in a day and so many hours that someone could work without completely burning out. Even a trainer who charges $200 per session in an upscale area can only train so many people.
Passive income is the opposite. Passive income requires putting in a lot of time upfront, while making very little money, to reap greater rewards later on. The better phrase is probably automated income, since passive has a lazy connotation to it. Make no mistake; it takes great effort and long term work to make passive income.
Most people give up early in the process. But if you stick with it, the potential is there to cultivate a lifestyle that allows for financial freedom. It does not require any special knowledge or unique skills, just a plan of action.
Sources of Passive Income in Fitness Industry
There is massive opportunity for personal trainers to make passive income. This opportunity is available to nutritionists, strength and conditioning coaches, yoga instructors, etc. as well. The passive income sources are listed in order of the lowest to highest barrier to entry. Some can literally be started today while others require more traction to develop (i.e. building an audience).
Website Ads
Website ads can be displayed in numerous places throughout a blog or website. So long as you don’t have an ad blocker, you have probably seen website ads within the text of an article or along the sidebar.
Google ads are the low hanging fruit of the advertising world. Once you have a website you can put google ads on right away. Other ad networks require a certain number of monthly page views before they accept your site.
Google ads are sometimes frowned upon because of low pay rates, but when comparing it with other ad networks the difference in revenue is not too drastic.
The Importance of a Website
A website is your hub for written content. It is completely within your control, unlike social media platforms which can shut down your account at a moment’s notice. On a website you can write whatever you want (within reason), build an email list, and sell products or services.
Social media platforms evolve over time. There was a point where a company could post on Facebook and receive tons of impressions because organic reach was still at a high level. Now a company could have millions of followers yet not even reach 5% of their audience with a post due to changes in the algorithm. It has become a pay to play platform.
The popularity of certain platforms can also wane. It seems impossible to envision but there may be a time where Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter become irrelevant and something else takes their place. The key with social media marketing is to find a new up and coming platform where organic reach is at a high level. At the time of this article those platforms would be LinkedIn and Tiktok, but that could change at any time.
Websites have stood the test of time. People may not visit websites of their own volition but a google search result will always take them to a website. They contain the information that will answer a person’s search query. If you can get a person on your site and keep them there, it’s a major win.
This can be achieved with a good content and interlinking strategy. Consider a time where you’ve performed a google search and ended up on a website with a great, in-depth article that answered your question. As you were scrolling through the page, odds are that article linked out to other relevant topics within the same site. Before you know it you have 5 tabs open with great content that you’ll be reading for the next hour.
Affiliates
Affiliate marketing means promoting products or services through one’s content and getting a percentage of the sales. The good thing about affiliates is that you can choose whichever products you want, unlike an official sponsorship where you’re tied to one company.
Affiliate programs are available through marketplaces like Amazon or through individual brands. Amazon is very easy to sign up for but generally offers low pay rates. The interesting thing about Amazon is that you can earn money on products you don’t directly promote. If someone clicks on your link, but ends up buying something else, you still receive a commission on that sale.
Another appeal of affiliate marketing, compared to selling your own products, is that you don’t have to deal with returns or customer service. That is the responsibility of the marketplace itself.
YouTube Ads
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a YouTube sensation to make good money on the platform. The key is in the category of the content.
Fitness falls into what’s known as the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) category. YMYL is competitive but can be very profitable. Advertisers will pay top dollar to associate themselves with popular content. Health and wellness is a billion dollar industry so imagine all of the brands looking to promote their products and services through YouTube advertising.
Unlike website ads and affiliate programs, there are conditions that must be met in order to start making money through YouTube ad revenue. A YouTube channel must have 1,000 total subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time across the past 12 months. Once that happens and YouTube approves your channel, you can start earning.
The good thing about YouTube is that videos rank very quickly. It can take time for Google to index a website and for articles to start showing up in search results. With YouTube there is no lag. Relevant videos should show up in search queries immediately after they are uploaded.
YouTube can be used to promote affiliate links as well. Many YouTubers, in addition to collecting ad revenue, put affiliate links in the description of the video.
Info Products
Info products perhaps best represent the appeal of passive income. Passive income is all about putting in the work upfront to reap the rewards at a later date and beyond. Info products like ebooks, workout programs, and diet programs are typically put together in advance with little to no editing needed afterwards.
The one exception is with courses. Courses require quite a bit of monitoring as customers will typically have questions as they go. In addition, sometimes information gets outdated and requires editing.
Technically there is no barrier to develop an info product, but for it to be successful an audience is needed. You could make an amazing 12 week bicep workout program ebook but if your website is getting 10 visits per day it won’t make any money.
There’s no magical number in terms of website traffic when it comes to creating info products; people have had success with only a couple thousand page views per month. But these are typically high ticket items where you only need to sell a few to turn a major profit. In the health and wellness field, you probably want at least 20,000 page views per month before considering an info product.
Sponsorships
Years ago, sponsorships were the number one thing sought after by anyone who wanted to make it in the fitness industry, particularly in bodybuilding. In a way, a sponsorship legitimized a fitness influencer or bodybuilding competitor. Sponsorships typically came from supplement companies, magazines like Flex or Muscular Development, and clothing companies like Gasp.
Things have evolved since then. Sponsorships are still a big deal, but as mentioned previously there are tons of different avenues to make passive income. You no longer need to be shredded or win Mr. Olympia to make money in fitness. But for a few people, sponsorships are still a viable option.
Since magazines and other publications are starting to fade away, supplements and clothing are the two major types of fitness sponsorships left. There are basically two ways to obtain a sponsorship, and both require growing a huge audience.
One is to grow a huge audience via the fitness model route. You’ve probably seen it a million times. A good looking, fit person pops up on your Instagram explore feed. Someone you’ve never seen before. You click on the profile and come to find out they have 500,000 followers. Companies will want to align themselves with people who have big followings, particularly if they can determine that following will buy their products.
The other way is to grow an audience through informative, valuable content. The same principle applies; companies will align themselves with a person if they know their audience will buy products. The ironic thing is that this particular audience is typically smaller, yet more profitable for the company doing the advertising.
A larger audience may not translate into sales for the advertiser. Many people follow fitness models on social media because they simply look good, not because they find them particularly thoughtful or interesting. Someone who follows a fitness influencer because they put out informative content is more likely to trust a brand they promote, rather than someone sitting in a bikini on a beach next to a tub of protein powder.
Niche Marketing
Now that we understand the various ways to earn passive income, it’s time to understand how to get there. Health fitness and wellness is an immensely broad topic. It encompasses everything from competitive bodybuilding to transcendental meditation. One crucial element of success when trying to earn passive income is to niche down.
Niche marketing means taking a larger topic, like fitness, and breaking it down into subcategories. You then begin creating content based solely around one of those subcategories. For example, weight loss is far too competitive a topic for a new website. A new website will never rank on Google for the term weight loss when there are tons of more authoritative sites on the topic like Men’s Health, Oxygen, Muscle and Fitness, Healthline, Livestrong etc.
However, if you wrote about weight loss for women over 50, or healthy lifestyle tips for people who work in an office, now you’re in a space that is less competitive. It’s a good way to begin to rank on google and establish authority for the website. As the website gains more views and authority, you can then begin to tackle the broader and more competitive keywords if you choose to do so.
Content
The old phrase content is king isn’t a cliché, it’s the truth. High quality, consistent content is the number one key to success in earning passive income. It can be written, video, audio or a combination of the three but the principle holds true no matter what.
Years ago there were shady tactics that could get users onto a website. But Google’s search algorithm is so advanced that those tricks don’t work anymore. And this is a good thing. Now all you have to do it put out valuable content and not have to worry about a shady programmer getting the upper hand on you.
Blog content takes upwards of 8 months to really gain traction on Google, so in the beginning phases of your website it’s best to just focus on putting out articles without monitoring them too much. Ideally you want to get 100-200 pieces of content on your blog in a year’s time.
YouTube will rank content right away. If you make a video for a keyword or phrase that gets high search volume but low competition, you can rank pretty quickly. Seeing a video get thousands of views early in the process of your passive income journey is a nice confidence boost. It lets you know that this endeavor is indeed possible and shows you’re on the right track.
Keyword Research
How do you find high search volume and low competition keywords? Many companies offer tools that claim to have this information, but it is debatable how accurate the information is. In addition, you may not have the money to pay for these tools.
There are a few ways to do your own keyword research for free. The first step is to put a keyword or phrase into Google and look at the results. If you see highly authoritative sites like Men’s Health, Bodybuilding.com, and Healthline come up, it may be hard to outrank these pages.
However, if you see forums like Reddit or Quora come up, this is a good indication of an opportunity for your site to rank. While you may not know the search volume of this particular keyword, you do know that a well written article could rank.
If you know your niche well, which you should, you can intuitively determine if it is a phrase people are searching for.
Final Thoughts
If this is your first website, don’t go crazy in the creation of the site itself. You can really get lost in the weeds with themes, colors, and the makeup of the site itself. Before you know it, a month has gone by with no articles written.
As long as the site is running at a decent speed, everything is fine. People care more about quality information than a cool homepage slider.
The hardest part of writing can be coming up with ideas. Personally, I like to take a day or two to come up with as many content ideas as possible. Ideally I want a list of at least 20. That way when I open up the document I have my choice of what I want to write about that day. You should be publishing 2-3 articles per week and 1 video per week on YouTube if you choose to go that route.
The articles should be formatted properly with headings and subheadings. These are just the large, bolded words within the article itself. Again, don’t overthink the process. The headings just group your ideas and make it easier to read. Coming up with headings in advance can also help make the writing process easier.
In addition to this article, check out other articles on this site and look at how headers are used.