Starting a blog on your personal trainer website lends your website an air of authority. Content marketing is one of the biggest returns on investment for any personal trainer. Well-researched articles that are written with SEO in mind, and perform well on Google can generate more inbound enquiries than any other platform.
Unlike social media, this content is “evergreen”, meaning it continues to perform well over time. Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites, so if you’re using your personal trainer website to generate leads into your fitness business, a blog is a fantastic strategy.
Step 1. Create a Blogging Strategy
In technical terms, a blog is a page on your personal trainer website that has multiple individual posts in it. A well-maintained blog, with articles that are regularly published, seem to perform best. And to really maximise results from your blog, the research into what your ideal client would be Googling to solve their problems begins even before you write a single word.
According to Hubsopt, the more you write the better, but let's be real, once per week is going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and it's pretty manageable.
According to Hubsopt, the more you write the better, but let's be real, once per week is going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and it's pretty manageable.
Doing market research on a niche that interests you will be specific and targeted to a particular area of fitness or nutrition. If personal trainers focus only on fitness generally, their blog content is unlikely to perform well because it's too broad in its approach. To get a better idea of which area you may want to niche down into, consider which aspects of fitness or nutrition you have a personal interest in, personal experience of, or formal knowledge and training in. Asking your clients what they would want to read more about is also a good place to start.
Step 2. Develop Authority Through Blog Writing
There are a few aspects of blog writing you need to understand and practice if you'd like your articles to build trust in your readers and position you as an authority on the topics you write about.
Pillar Content
When writing in your niche, you’re likely to have “pillar content” - the main themes and ideas that you write about. For example, this could be endurance athletes. Your research for the different blog topics would revolve around related topics and keywords.
That might include nutrition for endurance athletes, injury prevention for endurance athletes, 3 supplements to include before, during and after your long-distance cycle, complementary resistance training workouts for Ironman challenges. These topics range enormously and will act as “satellite content” around your main idea. The keyword research can be done on Ubersuggest.
Blog Topics
If you’re stuck on where you might look for topics to write about, contemporary content that’s currently in the news is a great place to start. This is “top of mind” content. You could also check out specialist forums dedicated to your niche, social media including hashtags, and other platforms where trends are highlighted, like Twitter or Google Trends.
Pillar Content
When writing in your niche, you’re likely to have “pillar content” - the main themes and ideas that you write about. For example, this could be endurance athletes. Your research for the different blog topics would revolve around related topics and keywords.
That might include nutrition for endurance athletes, injury prevention for endurance athletes, 3 supplements to include before, during and after your long-distance cycle, complementary resistance training workouts for Ironman challenges. These topics range enormously and will act as “satellite content” around your main idea. The keyword research can be done on Ubersuggest.
Blog Topics
If you’re stuck on where you might look for topics to write about, contemporary content that’s currently in the news is a great place to start. This is “top of mind” content. You could also check out specialist forums dedicated to your niche, social media including hashtags, and other platforms where trends are highlighted, like Twitter or Google Trends.
Structure and Length
Write using a consistent structure across your blog articles. You might consider H1 for your headline, a short 100 words by way of an introduction (which includes the keyword), then H2 for all your sub-headings to give your content the same look and feel, a conclusion, wherein the final 100 words you include the keyword - and aim for the whole thing to be no less than 750 words as that seems to be what Google prefers.
Call-to-Action and Source Links
Ideally, your posts will include a call to action, sometimes called a CTA where you instruct the reader on what you’d like them to do next. If your posts are highly technical, you might want to include scientific research to support your claims; NCBI & PubMed is a great resource for that.
Write using a consistent structure across your blog articles. You might consider H1 for your headline, a short 100 words by way of an introduction (which includes the keyword), then H2 for all your sub-headings to give your content the same look and feel, a conclusion, wherein the final 100 words you include the keyword - and aim for the whole thing to be no less than 750 words as that seems to be what Google prefers.
Call-to-Action and Source Links
Ideally, your posts will include a call to action, sometimes called a CTA where you instruct the reader on what you’d like them to do next. If your posts are highly technical, you might want to include scientific research to support your claims; NCBI & PubMed is a great resource for that.
Step 3. Use Your Content To Promote Your Website
Once you’ve written the blog content, you can then promote it to drive traffic towards your personal trainer website. You can do that through your own channels, like social media or email.
Or you could work with other industry authorities to develop a system of backlinks.
You can download a content marketing checklist for your business here that will reveal how to:
...and much more.
You can download a content marketing checklist for your business here that will reveal how to:
- Perform key research tasks for your content marketing
- Simple steps to optimise your website to rank on the first page of Google
- Creating meaningful, highly sharable content
- Optimising your website authority using a system of backlinks
...and much more.
Step 4. Outsource Your Blog Content
For many personal trainers, sitting at a laptop writing articles every week that are thoroughly researched and supported with authoritative links probably isn’t what they had in mind when they started their fitness business.
Hiring a fitness content writer to handle producing your blog content at a scale that allows your business to grow and even to monetise your blog can be a great solution that frees you up to work on those higher return tasks inside your business that you are uniquely skilled at fulfilling.
There are freelancer sites like Upwork or Fiverr that you could use. The level of quality of those sites is highly variable though. Ideally, your fitness content should help to significantly increase the amount of traffic your fitness website gets and having a specialist fitness writer can really help to fast track that process.
Hiring a fitness content writer to handle producing your blog content at a scale that allows your business to grow and even to monetise your blog can be a great solution that frees you up to work on those higher return tasks inside your business that you are uniquely skilled at fulfilling.
There are freelancer sites like Upwork or Fiverr that you could use. The level of quality of those sites is highly variable though. Ideally, your fitness content should help to significantly increase the amount of traffic your fitness website gets and having a specialist fitness writer can really help to fast track that process.
Summing Up
A blog is a written resource on your website that you can use to promote your personal training services and to drive traffic to your personal trainer website. By writing around a topic and all its ancillary areas, you become an expert in your given niche. In fact, if the content is very good, it can be a source of monetizing your website.
A blog on your personal trainer website can lead to inbound requests from clients wanting to work with you, it could lead to invitations to be interviewed on podcasts or even live on stage at events. It’s an asset inside your fitness business that will bring a long term return on investment in a way that social media simply cannot. It can even be a platform to feed into email marketing.
However, content marketing takes a lot of time and effort to do properly. A lack of a consistent blog posting schedule is the main reason why people’s first page Google ranking is lost. Having a dedicated specialist fitness writer to delegate this task to means that you have a consistent regular publishing schedule, and you can focus your energy on the tasks inside your fitness business that you love and excel at.
A blog on your personal trainer website can lead to inbound requests from clients wanting to work with you, it could lead to invitations to be interviewed on podcasts or even live on stage at events. It’s an asset inside your fitness business that will bring a long term return on investment in a way that social media simply cannot. It can even be a platform to feed into email marketing.
However, content marketing takes a lot of time and effort to do properly. A lack of a consistent blog posting schedule is the main reason why people’s first page Google ranking is lost. Having a dedicated specialist fitness writer to delegate this task to means that you have a consistent regular publishing schedule, and you can focus your energy on the tasks inside your fitness business that you love and excel at.
