Passive Income Opportunities For Personal Trainers
Fitness and personal training has traditionally been an in-person business. You train a set of clients and are limited by your time and schedule.
The internet has revolutionized the fitness industry as much as it has everything else.
The first thing you’ll realize about this list is that it’s not completely passive. The passive income dream is more of a myth than anything, so I choose to look at it as scalable businesses whose earnings aren’t limited by the time in your schedule.
Ebooks -
Ebooks are potentially a great choice if you’ve got something to say. They are generally a lot more research heavy and focused on value to the customer.
Need to be targeted to the right market through social media, paid traffic and email marketing.
Ebooks generally work well in combination and can often be given as a free bonus when people sign up for your email list or buy one of your other products.
Recipe Books -
Write a list of recipes that fit your audience. For example, vegan muscle-building meals or keto fat-loss meals etc. These can be set up and then left to make money from your traffic the same as the ebooks. Just make sure, as always, that everything is high quality, valuable to the customers, and targeted to your audience.
Recipe books/cookbooks take substantial research as well, like ebooks, as well as high quality photography.
Varied Meal Plans -
Meal plans that are standard and sold to customers. Set up meal plans covering certain goals, dietary restrictions, metabolism, current shape, etc.
Basically, the idea is to have a meal plan that is specific enough that you can cover most customers but you don’t have to write personalized plans for every single client. As with most “passive” income, it requires a chunk of up-front work and then can be left to make money using a traffic source like Instagram/YouTube/Facebook or paid traffic from those sites or google.
As far as upfront work goes, this one is one of the least intensive but most profitable routes you can go down. Meal plans are not particularly difficult to construct when you know what to put in them, they can be sold as a subscription service for continuing plans, can be almost entirely profit on every sale, and can be sold online or to in-person clients.
This works best when you know your audience. An Instagram business account allows you to track the analytics of your post and breaks them down into age, country, gender, etc. so you can tailor plans to your audience. If your audience is 16-20 year old males in America for example, you’d likely want to start with meal plans that them bulk based on the stats they list and their estimated caloric requirements.
After the initial meal plan period, you may want to assess clients who aren’t getting the results they want, offer them 50% off the next periods meal plans, and tweak the calorie requirements to help them get on track. I subscription period of 1 month to 90 days could work well.
Training Plans -
Online training plans are exactly the same as the passive meal plans, but even simpler. There are generally fewer variables for the workout plan, so there will be fewer categories. Strength, hypertrophy or both for example. You could use the same Instagram
analytics to assess your audience composition and then develop the first plans to target that group. You could then build further plans to target a larger and larger group.
(You can also do non-passive versions of the above by offering personalized training for each client. You can charge more for this but are more limited in number of clients you can accept.)
The following options aren’t really passive at all, but follow the principle of making a lot of money for the amount of effort, but only with a significant audience.
Youtube -
If you have the freedom, then YouTube can be a fun and rewarding way to build a brand and secure another source of income. As with everything, this works best in combination with the other options as you really need a huge view count in order to make much money on YouTube. It’s also not really passive, you have to keep producing the content and staying up to date with youtube algorithms in order to get views. But then, yes, the videos make money on their own.
Blog/Website -
This one is a no-brainer anyway, you should have a website already. You can set up a free website on wix or squarespace, just make sure you have one. It adds a ton of credibility to your personal brand, and if you put the effort in, can bring in clients and sell your other products.
Like YouTube, this option requires continuous effort to maintain. But having someone keep your website/blog updated with new content can be easily outsourced. You likely won’t make money specifically from your posts either, the money will have to come from the combined effort of blog posts, email marketing, and a dedicated sales page. Again, make sure this is all laser focused on the right audience in order to get the most for your time and money.
Email Lists and sales pages - this isn't passive, so I didn’t include it, but is extremely useful and should be looked into in combination with all of the above.