The most successful online trainers are successful for a few reasons. First and foremost, they are great coaches who get their clients great results. But there is a lesser-known reason:

They are fitness content writing machines who are everywhere, all the time.

What follows draws from my own experience as a pioneering online trainer. It also draws on dozens of case studies from Bach Performance Hybrid Fit Biz clients.

Keep reading to find out how to:

• Have an endless stream of ideas for articles, videos, and social media post
• Ensure your content resonates with your audience
• Leverage your content to build your business
• Join the conversation on how to become a content machine, here. 

To have an endless stream of content ideas you must first know who your audience is. If you have in-person clients, listen carefully and probe deeply about their top issues. Whenever you are asked a question, make a note in your phone. Common questions may include:

“Do carbs make me fat?”

“Are squats bad for my  knees?”

“How can I build muscle while losing fat?”

The questions your clients, friends, and family members ask about getting in shape are what you need to write about.

But many trainers write for other trainers instead. They want to impress their peers. My business partner, Daniel Freedman, says he saw the same thing in his previous career as a news executive: reporters writing for other reporters rather than the public.

Stop. You are making a fundamental and tragic mistake.

Write for your clients. Solve their biggest problems. Write in plain English. Explain the solution in a way “real people” can understand, even though they don’t have an exercise science degree.

Three Bonus Tips:

1. Look at Reddit/fitness to see the popular topics

2. Head to Quora and see the questions being asked. Answer a few. If you get feedback, expand your answer into a full article.

3. Open your favorite magazines and websites and note the headlines of the articles

Big magazines like Men’s Health and Shape spend thousands of dollars and countless hours deciding what to write about each month. Leverage their hard work by looking for trends. 

Ensure Your Content Resonates With Your Audience

Here’s a simple strategy we use at Bach Performance to make sure our content a solves a problem for our audience.

Step One: Post a short social media status covering the topic.

Step Two: Gauge interaction. Is the post gaining comments, shares, and likes? Likes and shares show how interested your audience is in the idea while comments can bring up other talking points, questions, or concerns for an article.

Step Three: Take the feedback, dig deeper into your topic, and write the full article.

Using this plan enables you to test an idea and gain feedback. If there’s enough interest, create a viral article that drives new leads your way. This article will help, too. 

Here’s an example of this at work:

Responses to this post became a key piece of this T-Nation article which had over 100,000 views in 24 hours and brought in four new clients at top prices within a week.

Leverage Your Content Work To Build Your Business

You’ve put in your research, tested your article idea, and spent hours handcrafting the perfect article. You hit publish and voila…78 readers. WTF! 78 readers all of your work? It’s an outrage. Especially since articles you wrote as fast as you could type got 10 times as many readers. Or maybe 20 times as many readers.

And you know this article would help millions of people. Back to the drawing board to write more articles and get 78 more readers a pop, right?

Wrong.

As Derek Halpurn of Social Triggers explains in this article, your focus should be 80% on promotion and 20% on developing extremely valuable content.

The takeaway? Rather than focusing on creating more articles that generate small numbers of readers, swing for the fences by reaching large numbers of readers with the content you’ve already created.

Here are strategies to make your content work for you.

Backlink newer articles to older, pillar content pieces. If you have multiple articles on low carb diets and fat loss, link them together and drive traffic to readers who are already reading about the topic.

Turn articles into a video or Facebook live. After writing an article you should have a working script. Rather than letting your content rot away in the depths of cyberspace, film a video covering your topic in-depth and share it on YouTube to gain traction there.

Once a month, take an article you’ve written and teach a Facebook live session on the topic. like weight training versus cardio for fat loss. Beyond the quality information, your followers will see your personality as well as your knowledge, leading them to know, like, and trust you that much more.

As an example, we did a week long build up for a Facebook Live on a Friday here which generated over $10,000 in new business after offering online training on the back-end.

Turn the audio from the Facebook live into a podcast or audio recording. Integrate into future articles.

Did you write an article only to find you were wrong?

Or, did you leave out details that would have made the article better?

Weave key points, research, and talking points from past articles into new articles. There’s no need to endlessly reinvent the wheel.

There are many ways to repurpose your content. Which ones you choose is up to you, but do everything you can to maximize the reach of the hard work you’ve already done. Here are four ideas.

(1) Change your delivery methods. You can film video talking about the topic after reading this guide on how to make fitness videos. 

(2) Repurpose content on different platforms. This could be as simple as making an infographic covering the points of an article on Canva and share it on Instagram.  

(3) Edit old articles and link in new content regularly.

(4) Email your list and share the same information in a different way.

P.S.

Do you have more questions on how to use your content to build a business?
Join us on Facebook at the FREE Hybrid Fit Biz Group. 

Daniel Freedman, my business partner and former editor of The Crossfit Journal, and I run a FREE Facebook Group to help busy fitness pro’s like you cut through the fluff and build a flourishing online fitness business. Recent topics include how to master online sales, how to never run out of content ideas, and how to structure your business for long term success. 

We’ll see you there: FREE Hybrid Fit Biz Group.