Fitness Professionals Blogging For Profit

Written by Fit Geek on May 30, 2009

If you’ve been around the internet and internet marketing for long enough you’ll have seen adverts and emails telling you how you can make money with your BLOG. You sometimes here it being called “monetising your blog”.

The basic concept is around creating a BLOG, with some content getting enough traffic and then selling advertising on your site. Great idea in theory, but in practice it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it, it wasted more time, effort and money than it made. In fact I made nothing, cos I didn’t get anyone to advertise on it (

The other option is to create a BLOG and then put google adsense on your page. The idea is that you get enough traffic on to your blog who will read your content and then click on the google adwords adverts that appear and you get a cut of the money the advertiser has paid for the click. Once again great in theory, but in practice it doesn’t really work. I’ve tried this too and made a whopping 0.23 USD from it.

Now for some people this does work, if you have enough visitors, you can start making some money, but to be honest it is much to much like hard work.

It seems as if these marketing gurus have been misleading us, those sneaky guys!

However, I know of a way that is actually more likely to make you money from your BLOG that is much more accessible and doesn’t require a critical mass of traffic or any selling of advertising space.

When you create a BLOG you are building relationships with your readers, that IS the primary purpose of having a BLOG. It is a means of engaging new people in to your ethos of fitness and showing them you know your stuff by writing posts that are both informative and conversational (hopefully a bit like this BLOG). Also adding videos that you have created and possibly finding others that are entertaining and informative, related to your BLOGs subject.

Over time your readers will grow to know, like and trust you, but ultimately the reason you are writing the BLOG is to bring those readers in to your group of paying clients/customers.

You’re not writing this BLOG for fun are you! Are YOU?

So what do you sell them?

OK, obviously you are going to sell them your stuff. Personal Training, your bootcamp, weight loss classes, e-book if you have one. But really the amount of stuff you have to sell them is kinda limited.

Selling other peoples stuff is where you can also look to monetise your BLOG. This is easy, many products out there have what’s called an affiliate program, where you can register as an affiliate and sell their e-book, course, software on their behalf.

Think Turbulence Training, or Dax Moy’s Magic Hundred, they can be sold by you as an affiliate. Often you’ll make 50% commission on every sale, sometimes much more! This can have a very positive influence on your bank balance, and truely make good money from blogging.

There is one caveat to this, ONLY sell stuff that you believe in yourself, that means you have to buy it yourself, use it and actually like it.

You don’t want to annoy your trusting readers with products and services that suck do you… You’ll see from time to time I will recommend a product, or the adverts on the right hand side of this page are all of stuff I have used and continue to use. They are products that I really think you would benefit from, the same should go for what you recommend too.

So certainly making money from your fitness blog is possible, but remember to be selective with what products you promote and always continue to provide entertaining and informative content.

COMING SOON

Now if you don’t have a BLOG yet, or you are still using Wordpress.com or Blogger.com to host your BLOG, then in just a weeks time, on June 8th, I will be releasing a brand new MyFitGeek service to help you get your blogging really working for you. So make sure you keep a check on your emails over the coming week for more information about this exciting new project.

You’ll want to stay alert too because you really cannot miss out on what I have coming.

Creating Content For Your BLOG

Written by Fit Geek on May 16, 2009

The danger of creating BLOGs is that the owner quickly forgets to update with new content. The site becomes dormant and you valued readers turn their back on you and your BLOG.

I’ve got too many BLOGs! At last count I have about 8 and I just created a new one just last week. Keeping up with updating all these sites is a right royal pain in the butt. It is not easy to have new content coming through on a regular basis and is always difficult to maintain a freshness with your content too.

Ultimately all that effort and time to get a great looking BLOG up and running has been wasted and you basically have to start from scratch again.

I’ve had BLOGs that have remained dormant, one that went great for well over 18 months but, then started to look a little dated so I kinda forgot about it… A shame really as it really wasn’t all that bad and the content on there was pulling great search rankings. But I got busy doing other stuff, I got busy with my clients, the bootcamp I run, and the other projects I have my head in and it very quickly gets forgotten.

The solution to this is to have a system.

A system of writing new content each week without fail. I have three afternoons where I don’t have clients, this is when I write.

I force myself to write, I just start writing on a pad and do that for 30 minutes without stopping, sometimes it flows and i produce some stunning content. Other times it is like pulling teeth, and the result is not so great, but I get at least something down every few days each week.

Other fitness marketers have similar rituals, I know for a fact that Craig Ballantyne gets up every morning and writes for an hour. This is his habit to make sure he is producing content all the time.

So set in your schedule a time to write, and write free flow for at least 30 minutes. Don’t get me wrong it is hard work to get started sometimes but once you are in the habit you’ll produce stuff regular as clock work.