Becoming an Online Trainer is an amazing career for many qualified PT’s. Once you gain your fitness qualifications, you can write programs to sell online, or as most online coaches do, sell packages or memberships. This allows you as a coach to work almost from anywhere and really create freedom around days & times and takes away the need to be in one particular place like a normal job in most facilities. Hence the popularity of it.

The other real advantage is that you are able to create programs, memberships etc, and then adapt them slightly based on each client’s individual goals, or as a package it may be created once and sold to numerous clients many times over. Meaning you invest the time and energy once and it can be monetised many times over. Not exactly passive income but very different from trading time for money on an hourly rate like most face-to-face trainers. In terms of time, it’s a lot of work to begin with but then you’ll see the benefits of the initial works if you gain more clients and members. The key phrase being if you gain more clients.

The cons are that it takes way more work than what most trainers and coaches think it will. There’s a lot to set up if you really want to automate, and it’s not a simple and easy to understand process for a lot of trainers who are practical and not overly IT savvy. There’s the purchasing and set up off different software and platforms to begin with the time-consuming process of understanding how to implement and automate them. Just like any business there’s customer service, financials that need to be done, and even when everything is in place, there lies the biggest challenge of all – gaining new clients/members and delivering a fantastic product or service where you’ll keep them.

This means developing lead generation tools. Creating catchy headlines, developing graphics to go with information your presenting, videos, long and short text and the list goes on, to gain interest and have people give you their details in exchange for your information.

There are free lead gen options like blogs, social media posts etc. But if you really want to build your online business, you’ll need to boost posts, create social media ads, create google ads or preferably all of these. This all-costs money so you need to know how to do this to one, not waste money on ads that don’t work or have a high cost per click, and two to create a strategy that’s both financially and time efficient. You can’t be just marketing all the time when you need to also be delivering your online coaching products and services.

There’s a big difference between being a Personal Trainer or Coach with a client base, and one that has a business. Creating a great online business on a budget takes time, but anything worthwhile generally does!