Why Do I Need a Personal Training Website?

The benefits from having your own personal trainer website

This article is taken directly from my free book on “How to Create a Personal Training Website“.

Believe me, once you understand the benefits and tailor your site correctly, the answer to this question is obvious. It is difficult to express how essential a web presence becomes once you get accustomed to the branding, passive income, and convenience of online payment and marketing.

Brand Building – Your brand is the most important aspect of your business. It encompasses the quality instruction you provide, the inspiration you give to your clients, the general look and feel of your business persona (like the continuity from your business cards, to your fliers, to your website), everything that makes your company yours.

A professional, clean, and helpful website will help solidify and extend the presence of your brand. Heck, 90% of personal trainers don’t even own their web persona. Just having your business on the web will put you in the top tier of marketing trainers and differentiate your business.

Alone, a site can’t make an average trainer better, but it differentiates the better trainers because it demonstrates their ability to work for their clients using all the resources available to them.

Lead Generation – Yes, even though it is not the main reason to have a site, you will get new leads from it. The leads you get will easily pay for the site’s set up and maintenance costs.

Personally, I receive about 10-20% of my ‘new’ leads (leads that are not referrals or people I meet by happenstance) through my website. Now, think about that for a moment…this website that I worked on once continues to engage new clients and convince them to email me for more information. That is powerful stuff.

Why does a professional site benefit you? Because a prospective client’s first interaction with you is when they review your website. A typical new client will first interact with you on the phone or in person…who knows if you’re in a good mood when you first meet a potential client. But if they first ‘meet’ you through your site, and you’ve invested in a professional and informative site, you know you’re putting a good foot forward 24/7. Although we acknowledge here that a good site won’t always solidify a new client, a bad site will definitely turn away potential clients.

Client Maintenance – Once I begin working with my clients, we set up a password-protected personal program page (say that 5 times fast!) where they can pre-pay for 3 months of training, pass messages to me, or keep track of their workouts on an excel spreadsheet. This personalization brings you and your client closer, allowing you to work together asynchronously at your own convenience.

Allowing them to post their results to my site let’s me track their progress (from their point of view) and learn how motivated they are after each week. This allows me to give the right stimulus when my clients begin to hit their personal wall of resistance.

Online Payments - By allowing my clients to pay me through the web, I’ve eliminated the uncomfortable song-and-dance where we have to send a ‘reminder’ to bring cash to the next session. This, in and of itself, has knocked off half of my stress level because I’m not particularly comfortable reminding my clients repeatedly for money.

Newsletters, Marketing, Books, Articles, etc – Remember stuffing envelopes and dedicating a Saturday Football game to maintaining contact with clients? With my site, now I create one brochure or article that I want my clients to read, post it on my site, and then send an email. Know what’s even better? I can track who opens the email and views my material. That’s an incredible advantage of ‘knowing’ your customer.

Quite a few professionals have found the avenue of ‘blogging’ as a quick way to get their name recognition and authority status on the upswing. Although I haven’t begun blogging, I respect it’s ability to connect with readers, sway opinions, and create a cult of authority. This may be an unexplored avenue for personal trainers to exploit in the future.

Email marketing – One aspect that my personal trainer website has opened up that I never imagined is targeted email marketing. When I have clients lagging, I send them a special offer for a free session or mile-marker session to life their spirits. When I have a potential client I haven’t heard from in a while, I can quickly check up on them to see if they may need my services. These hooks can reel in clients that were just about to call it quits to suddenly pony up 3 months of sessions.

New media : video, tele-seminars, audio/visual demonstrations, interviews – Even more fantastic (and I’m just starting to explore these options) is the ability to use social media to interact with my customers. Instead of waiting until our next session, my client can email me about a certain exercise that she forgets exactly how to do. I shoot a quick video, put it on her personal web page, and she sees not only the correct movement, but reconnects with the program and is less likely to burn out. I can also post videos of other trainers that show good technique for clients that need another point of view.

These are a few of the possibilities and your website really is just limited only by your imagination. Hopefully you’ve seen one or two ideas here that made you stop and think, “Ya know, that would be nice to have…”. So let’s keep moving forward on some of these ideas and expand how they work for your business.

In my free book on How to Create a Personal Training Website, I detail step-by-step how to get your site up and running. Go ahead and grab it for free and get your own personal training website up!

— Leslie

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Why Do I Need a Personal Training Website?