You have your personal trainer certification and your clients. Your TikTok and Instagram accounts are up and running. You’re working hard, but you feel like you aren’t meeting your earning potential.

Whether you currently own your own business or offering your services on a freelance basis, know this—you can make a comfortable income as a personal trainer.

What’s the secret? Why do some personal trainers barely make ends meet while others are making triple digits?

Now’s the time to up your personal training business game and shatter your income goals.

7 Key Triple-Digit Elements for Personal Training Business Models

1. Find your Niche

A niche is a small but profitable segment of the population that shares needs, preferences, experiences, and characteristics. As personal trainers who have found their niche, you solve specific problems regarding their exercise and fitness needs and goals.

How does finding your niche make the difference? From a business perspective, offering your services to anyone who’ll take it is like casting your net in a big lake with hundreds of other competing fishers. You might catch a few fish, but since you have a whole lake to swim around in, and you’re confined to your small edge of the lake, you know you aren’t meeting your potential.

Find your niche to set yourself apart from the competition. Instead of casting a large net to see if you’ll get lucky, take a moment to notice the oysters off the shoreline. Be the first to dive for the oysters, and you’ll have to stop when you fill up your buckets.

More than just “netting” clients, by finding your niche, understanding their needs and problems, and offering hard-to-find tools for solving those problems, clients will choose you over your competition anytime.

Build your business around meeting your niche’s needs, and your target clients won’t blink twice when deciding between personal trainers.

Pro tip: Learn more about finding your niche.

2. Know Your Worth (and Charge for It)

One of the most challenging aspects of building your business is knowing what to charge. Often because they aren’t considering their business expenses, time investment, and personal income goal.

Unless you aren’t investing a penny in software, apps, equipment, internet, or rent, all of these elements need to be included in your pricing structures.

Keep in mind that both undercharging and overcharging for your services will mean that you won’t be meeting your earning potential. When you calculate the price of your services and programs, take into account your expenses, your personal income goals, your profit goals, and the time it takes to develop programs and run your business.

How can personal trainers create a pricing structure that will ensure they cover expenses, pay for services, and still make a great income? The 7-step method for coaches to calculate their rates is summarized below:

• Calculate your business expenses.
• Identify your ideal hourly income.
• Set your profit goals.
• Choose a sales goal.
• Divide your sales goal by work hours.
• Calculate time investment for all of your services.
• Determine the minimum clients you’ll need per service.

Pro tip: Set the right pricing using the 7-step method.

3. Automate Your Training Programs

Automated training programs are one of the best-kept secrets of personal trainers who make triple-digit incomes. Even ten years ago, the only two ways to offer your services as a personal trainer were by offering one-on-one training sessions or group classes with rotating guidance.

Now, you can offer your personalized training programs to all of your clients through apps and software for them to carry out in their own time. Trainerize, for example, allows personal trainers to pre-record exercises or choose from pre-uploaded exercise libraries and personalize meal plans and lifestyle suggestions. At the same time, you can offer live coaching sessions with your clients when need be.

What happens when you automate your training programs? You can train ten, thirty, or even one-hundred clients at the same time that you would train one client one-on-one in the gym. Software like Trainerize allows you to automate your program while personalizing it for each client so that they can train on their own time.

4. Offer Package and Membership Services

The standard way of working with clients is by offering one-on-one sessions and charging them by the hour. While charging by the hour may allow you to increase session fees, client retention isn’t guaranteed.

What’s better for you—charging a new client $80 for one session, only to never see that client again, or locking in a client for weekly sessions over two months for $70 a session? You may make more money in the first session with your client, but by securing a client for up to 10 sessions, you’ll have much higher income from that individual client.

What are some of the ways you can secure income with a client? Offer service packages (like five personal training sessions, an individual meal plan, and a lifestyle guide) at a discounted rate or offer monthly memberships with a set fee and defined services.

When your clients sign up for a service package or membership for an attractive price, they see greater value in making a long-term commitment while you secure income for a more extended period.

5. Offer Digital Products

Have you created a unique method for increasing muscle definition? Do you want to share the nutrition principles you follow for reducing body fat? Have you built one of the only workout plans that exist specifically for your niche? You have high-value knowledge that has the potential to improve people’s health and help them reach their fitness goals. Additionally, by harnessing that high-value knowledge in the form of digital products, you can significantly increase your income.

Aim to create, brand, and sell digital products that contain high-value, unique information and guidance for your niche. Some ideas include downloadable training materials, courses, e-books, programs, and custom branded fitness apps that people can purchase through your website or App stores.

6. Establish Passive Income Streams

Passive income is money that will flow into your business without actively seeking those sales.

Health coaches often overlook passive income streams, but they are a great way to earn additional long-term income with minimal upfront effort.

Some ideas for passive income streams into your business accounts include:

• Creating affiliate links to products or other services where you make a small commission for every purchase made by someone who went through your site to purchase.
• Earning commission for the sale of others’ products and services as add-ons to your programs.
• Having others carry out extensions of your services and paying you for brand or program use.

Note that for passive income strategies to be effective, it is vital to invest a significant amount of time researching the product or service you are offering and set up the programming early on so that you only have to do minimal work in the months and years to come.

7. Up Your Digital Marketing Game

Digital marketing is the ultimate way for you to break down geographic barriers and reach your target market across the country and the world. When you invest your time and resources in an effective digital marketing strategy, you get a much better return on your investment than if you depend on traditional marketing.

If you are new to digital marketing, make sure that you consider the following:

• Integrate consistent branding, including voice, tone, and values, throughout your marketing communication.
• Use marketing channels that your target audience uses.
• Take advantage of social media spaces where you currently have a presence.

Digital marketing strategies integrate some or all of the following elements, depending on how your target audience behaves.

• Email marketing
• Social media platforms
• Getting featured or mentioned on others’ accounts and in digital journalism
• Google ads, social media ads

Don’t forget the most crucial element of digital marketing communication: Calls to Action. No matter what your digital marketing strategy is and how you choose to communicate with your target audience, always use every occasion where you have an audience present to ask them to take action. Whether you want to increase newsletter subscribers, or promote your new training program, provide an easy way for your audience to engage directly with you. Every click is an increase in the opportunity to turn a reader into a lead.

Main Takeaways

You can be a financial success as a personal trainer. As an entrepreneur and business owner, a pre-established hourly wage, and the hours in your shift don’t limit your earning potential. By implementing tried and true components into your business plan and putting methods for capturing more clients into practice, your income can see a significant increase.

Know that maximizing your income will not come quickly. However, your income will increase significantly as you implement these tips into your business plan and yearly strategy. You can stay motivated by remembering that if you do your research and put your knowledge into practice, you, too, can be a personal trainer with a great income.