How to Launch a Successful Fitness Membership Site

It’s 2020 and it’s time to turn your business into a more lucrative and well-oiled machine. How? With a fitness membership site.

Before you dismiss the idea, because it seems “too big and demanding”, think again. 

Today, the technology you need to build a site, launch your own mobile app, take payments and market your brand is more accessible and user-friendly than ever before. And the demand for quality online fitness education has been growing steadily since 2004.

So, if you’re serious about making 2020 the year you level up, keep reading. You’ll learn how to pick your niche, plan your course, create your site, and market it effectively.

Why You Should Start an Online Fitness Membership Site

Over the last 15 years, the web has become a busy and lucrative place. It has opened more doors for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses faster. 

Take the average Uscreen fitness membership site. It uses over-the-top applications that deliver video content and has around 343 monthly subscribers and earns an average of $7,503 per month. 

Beyond online search demand, there’s more evidence to support the creation of your very own fitness membership site. Here are three good reasons: 

More Reach and Income Opportunity

Creating an online fitness program places your business on a global stage. You’re able to reach more eager customers with content to help them achieve their fitness goals. And because it’s all online, you effectively scale your business without putting in any additional man-hours.

People are Consuming More Content Today

Content has taken on a new life. Today, people are consuming more videos at a rapid rate. For example, Facebook gets over 8 billion video views per day and around 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute.

And it makes sense. Video is easier to digest and just as accessible as text-based content. 

What’s more, people use their mobile devices to view content on the go. This means more opportunities to reach an audience hungry for your content.

People will pay for premium content

Will people really pay for your content? 

It’s a common question, especially because there’s a lot of free content on almost every topic online. 

It all comes down to convenience. People want quality, ease of access, and structure. Creating a fitness membership site that meets this criterion is no different than paying for a monthly subscription to the New York Times.

Creating Your Fitness Membership Site

Building a fitness membership website is less complex than you think. It takes planning and execution, much like researching and committing to a workout routine. And as you’ve seen, it is possible to generate results in build a healthy online business.

Here’s how:

Pick Your Niche

To get started, you’ll need to identify your niche. A niche is a product, service, or interest that appeals to a small, specialized group of people. 

For example, Naturally Sassy is a fitness membership site with a twist. Founder Saskia Gregson-Williams is a professionally trained ballerina and qualified personal trainer. She developed her programs by combining classical ballet with strength and cardio.

How do you find yours?

Here are four questions to help you establish your niche:

What Are Your Interests?

As a fitness professional, this is a good chance you zeroed in on a particular interest you have. It could be helping people lose weight and build more muscle. Or you may have an affinity for bodybuilding or strength training.

Identify exactly what you are most interested in. If you have more and more interest, list them on a piece of paper and then prioritize them in order.

The idea is to establish what resonates most with you.

How Much Knowledge Do You Have?

Creating your fitness membership site means producing content that positions you as an authority. You need to have a fair amount of knowledge about fitness education you’ll share.

As you move down your list of interests, indicate which you know most about. It’s also a good idea to identify knowledge gaps should you wish to learn more before establishing your fitness membership site.

How Large is Your Audience?

Audience size is just as important as quality content. You need to know that people are looking for a site like yours to increase the probability of launching and running a successful membership site.

How do you establish your audience size?

Keyword research.

Go to Ubersuggest and run a search for terms related to the niche ideas you’re considering. For example, if one of your interests is strength training, you’ll see that the search term “strength training exercises” gets approximately 2900 searches per month on Google.

This means that people are looking for education on strength training. To get a better picture of how large the market is, run additional searches for other related terms.

Who is Your Ideal Customer?

Knowing what people are searching for, it’s time to establish who your ideal customer is.

Creating a persona is a critical aspect of building your site. The content you produce and the marketing material you promote will target a specific customer. Knowing what their fitness goals are and the challenges experienced on their journey towards achieving the goals is, therefore, important.

If you’ve never created a persona before, use this template from DigitalMarketer. It will help you identify basic demographic information along with other important details you can use to get a clear picture of who your ideal customers are and how you can help them.

Plan Your Course

Once you’ve established your niche, it’s time to plan your course. Planning a course involves arranging ideas in an orderly fashion. But to arrange ideas, you need to know the scope of your content.

Get Ideas Onto Paper

The best way to determine the scope of your content is to get all of your ideas onto paper. Brainstorm all of the topics you’d like to cover and order them.

At this stage, you should also start thinking about the format of your content. Will you use text, video, or both?

While the choice is yours, we’ve seen fitness brands thrive by creating video websites. As a medium of instruction, video is easier for members to follow along and repeat exercises they can see. It also helps members practice the right techniques and develop confidence because it’s a more engaging medium than text.

Structure Your Lessons

Next, break those ideas into chapters or lessons. Each lesson should also be broken down into subtopics or ideas you’d like to include or cover. 

Supporting Content

With an idea of the structure of the course and lessons, start to identify and collect supporting documentation. These can be worksheets, fitness tips, planners, or guides members can use as part of your course.

Remember Your Welcome Message

While we’ve covered the meat of your course, it’s essential to kick things off the right way. Include a welcome message for your members. Make it one that reaffirms the value will receive by being a member and also motivational to inspire them to do the work to get the results they want.

Create Your Site

Building a website today is far from the technical challenge it was five years ago. In fact, much of the functionality previously out of reach for online entrepreneurs are now easily accessible. 

Today, you can build your membership website using an all-in-one platform like Uscreen, along with all the features and functionality you need to give your members a world-class experience.

While the list of features can be much longer, here are important features to consider adding to your site:

User Profiles

Membership sites are all about personal experience. Give your members the opportunity to create profiles and customize them with avatars and information like bios to make them feel for.

Forums and Commenting

No community would be complete without the ability to engage. Ensure that your membership site offers your community the chance to start conversations around topics, ask questions, and share feedback and results.

A Smooth Video Player

There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting for a video to buffer. If you plan to produce video content, ensure your video is distributed across a reliable content delivery network.

Process Payments

This is non-negotiable. If you plan to grow your business online, you need to be able to efficiently and securely process payments from members. You’ll need to build to do this on a recurring basis and have control of the process (manually cancel memberships or process refunds). Personal trainer software gives you the ability to process payments from the palm of your hand.

Promote

Having created your course and build your website, It’s time to get the word out about your site. When promoting your business, think of it as a long-term commitment. You’ve done the research and know there is a demand for what you’re offering, all you need to do is position your service in front of your audience.

Get started by identifying the places where your audience is. These can include YouTube, social media websites, and niche fitness sites.

You want to produce content that grabs your ideal customer’s attention and drives traffic to your membership site to sell your fitness program(s).

Your content can be in the form of:

• video ads for social media
• blog posts (including guest posting)
• social media posts
• free downloadable guides and content to help build an email list

In addition to using content to drive traffic to your site, you can also run promotions, and competitions and create challenges.

Take yoga with Adriene. Adriene offers a free 30-day yoga challenge on YouTube. It’s a smart way to introduce new people to her brand. 

Wrapping This Up

Fitness is a high-growth industry and you can make more money in fitness in 2020. Getting started is also easier than you think. Identify your niche, produce quality course content, build a site and promote your content to reach your audience. 

Author: PJ Taei

Bio: PJ is the founder and president of Uscreen, an all-in-one video monetization and OTT platform that empowers video entrepreneurs and creators to monetize their content and build thriving businesses around their videos.