Should You Start A Fitness Blog?

By Chris Fernandez   |  Comments 3

Whether or not you should start a fitness blog depends on several factors.

You have to determine your purpose — why you want to do it — who’s it for, and most importantly, do you even want to do put in the time and effort that it takes to run a successful personal training blog?

Overall however, I think that if you aren’t running a blog, you are seriously underserving your audience and leaving lots of free traffic and potential leads on the table, especially when it comes to health and fitness as there are so many wonderful topics from day to day that can be written about to expand your readership base, traffic levels and ultimately, your personal training business.

There are many reasons that a personal trainer blog or a health and fitness blog could be very beneficial for your target audience, to gain more traffic to your website — or perhaps the blog becomes your website — and ultimately, lead to what you are really after, which is more leads and more income for your fitness business.

So today I wanted to leave you with a few thoughts about fitness blogging, and whether or not you should be doing it for your own business.

To Blog or Not to Blog…

In System 5™ I devote quite a lot of time discussing whether or not you should start a fitness blog for your personal training business as it relates to getting more clients and helping your marketing efforts with search engine placement, traffic and having great content available 24 hours a day.

In fact, this topic is so important as well as the reasoning behind it and the ability to manage a website through your blog, that I also devoted quite a bit of time talking about this on my last System 5 “sneak peak” coaching call.

Here’s the replay of the call:

Click here to download the MP3

So let’s get to the heart of it…

5 Reasons NOT to blog:

1. You don’t have enough time to devote to it
2. You aren’t good at coming up with ideas and content
3. You don’t want to be obligated to produce fresh content on a regular basis
4. You don’t know how, or aren’t a good writer
5. Your personal training business doesn’t lend itself well to blogging

These are just some of the reasons you might be hesitant or a little weary of starting a fitness blog, but I can tell you personally that even if you can’t come up with fresh content on a regular basis, don’t worry!

There are ghost writers available, other blogs, news stories, etc., that you can always pull from to help you out.

And as for not knowing “how” to blog…well, let’s just say that if you can carry on a conversation, you can blog!

Really!

Now, time commitments and your business not lending itself to blogging (that would be hard to find!) are legitimate reasons, but there are ways around those as well…

I think that what I’m trying to say is that no matter what, you can and should be blogging in some form or fashion for all the benefits I’ll list below.

5 Reasons you SHOULD blog:

1. You can stay in touch with your current and future personal training clients in one place
2. Your content gets crawled by the search engines so over time, you’ll get free traffic, free leads and more clients
3. Various blogging platforms (like the one I am using right now) also manage content and your website!
4. It’s fun!
5. It creates a platform for your fitness business(es)

So after reading through these 2 lists, there are indeed pros and cons to both…

But I feel that the benefits far outweigh the negatives especially in light of the fact that a blog creates a platform for all your articles, health and fitness information, workouts, announcements, videos, and it can be just plain fun to give a shout out to your clients on your blog, start up a contest or have some real fun doing original and innovative things that will endear loyalty from your clients and improve retention.

I’ll list the reasons why I decided to start this fitness marketing blog, and I think that those reasons will really help you see why blogging is something that you should seriously consider.

My reasons for starting a fitness marketing blog

• Information:

First of all, I have so much cool fitness marketing information that I gather on a daily and weekly basis that can help explode your personal training business that I simply can’t keep it all to myself.

Having a blog allows me to put up a short or long post (whatever is necessary for the topic at hand) and leave it up there for all to see and access whenever you want at your convenience.

In the same way, when you hear about a new or interesting study, recipe or you have a new workout you want to share with your clients, or some tips on dealing with the Holidays, or whatever, that information can go on your blog for all to read rather than you keeping your expertise and perspective to yourself.

Over time as other websites link back to yours and the search engines spider or crawl your website, that content becomes your calling card and like gold.

You’ll start getting a lot of traffic and free leads for potential clients just from having that information out there and updated on a regular basis.

• CMS: Content Management System:

Having a blog allows me to run my entire website through the blog, so updating one page updates everything else on the site in one fell swoop.

If you’ve been following all that I teach about growing a personal training or boot camp business the right way, you know I crave and advocate automation, streamlining your business and not duplicating effort!

A blog is a great way to do that.

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization:

Ass I touched on above, having a blog allows me to create SEO’d pages that will eventually give me loads of free traffic from the search engines as I create more and more content and it stays on my site.

Search engines LOVE targeted and specific keyword focused content, and this is a great way for me to further leverage myself and the time I spend creating that content.

• Archives:

This goes along with SEO above.

A blog allows me to store and archive my content not just for search engines (which is nice) but for YOU (which is better!).

Let’s say I’ve been blogging for 2 years and have so much awesome info that if you just happened upon my site one day, you’ll get access to a treasure trove of knowledge at your fingertips to propel your business to the next level.

• Platform:

Having a blog devoted to personal training marketing and fitness marketing allows me to get up on my soapbox and have a platform to talk to others and inform, instigate and get my voice out there.

I promise you one thing: as I get rolling, you’re going to be seeing my stuff EVERYWHERE because of my blog.

That’s good for me, my business and for helping as many personal trainers as I possibly can to explode their businesses.

• Generate Sales:

Let’s not forget about this!

Making money off of your hard work is a big part of doing business on the Internet.

BUT! As you know already, my primary purpose in life is NOT money, but helping others…

The money will come, and the blog will help direct you to the various businesses and products that I offer so that you can further your knowledge, skills and become the very best personal trainer possible and make more money without wasting time or effort!

• Comments/Dialogue:

This is my personal favorite!

I’ve discovered something over the last few years online with my other blogs: You have some pretty interesting things to say and add true value to everything that I do.

I want to talk to you, and allow you to leave comments for me and others so that we can start an ongoing dialogue for the world to see and comment on…I’ll start the topics, you finish them!

In fact, leave me a comment below about how you feel about starting a fitness blog for your personal training or boot camp business.

• Fun!:

Duh!!

It’s super fun talking to you on a regular basis, and I love doing it.

Running my own fitness blog allows me to keep the conversation going and stay in touch.

Should You Start Your Own Health and Fitness Blog?

I’ll be posting some more information on blogging, how to do it, when to do it, where to do it, and how to get it all going.

But I wanted to just touch on some reasons why you should consider starting your own health and fitness blog for your clients, potential clients and to monetize the traffic you’ll get and all the hard work you’ll put into blogging.

If you are lazy and don’t want to grow your business or simply hate computers, well I guess that’s ok, so long as your other fitness marketing initiatives are in place and successful it shouldn’t be a problem.

But if you have a passion for health and fitness (which you do!) then share it with the rest of the world!

Get a fitness blog going, teach others what you know, stay in touch with them, and increase your business not just by fostering a community spirit with your current clients and customers, but also by gaining NEW ones that stumble upon your content!

It’s a beautiful ecosystem and one that you should really consider doing.

Keep your eyes peeled for more information and posts from me helping you with your own blog, website and getting it all started.

I know this can be pretty tricky, so let me help you and guide you through it and I promise you’ll have a fun and creative outlet that will take your personal training business to a whole new level!

### PS: Oh, in case you forgot about it by now, here’s the replay again where I talked about 3 ways you should be getting traffic from Google, and a whole host of other cool personal training marketing topics to help grow your business:

Click here to download the MP3

January 19, 2010