Starting a fitness blog can be one of the most gratifying and rewarding jobs for fitness enthusiasts.
With a fitness blog, you will be doing something that you love while helping and inspiring others to pursue and achieve their fitness goals. Furthermore, you can also earn money in the process.
However, creating a fitness blog can feel overwhelming for some people, especially if you've never done something similar before. And even after starting your fitness blog, you need to ensure it stands out so that it can attract readers.
But, you don't have to worry about all that, as this article has exactly what you are looking for. In this guide, we've outlined the benefits of starting a fitness blog, steps to starting a health and fitness blog and topics to cover in your fitness blog.
You will also discover some great tips to running a profitable and successful fitness blog. With that said, let's get to it.
1. Why Start a Fitness Blog?
Most people struggle when it comes to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. And this is where your fitness blog comes in.
It will give you the opportunity to share health and fitness insights, advice, tips and expertise with other fitness enthusiasts. Here are a couple of reasons why building a fitness website will be a great idea.
1.1 An Effective Means of Promoting Your Fitness Business
Fitness blogging can be an effective tool for promoting your fitness business if you already have one.
When properly set up and optimized, a fitness blog will help you to reach more potential customers who otherwise may not have known about your fitness business.
1.2 Help Others on their Fitness Journey
As you may have noticed, most fitness centers across the country are packed to capacity in January.
But by the time March comes around, most people have already abandoned their fitness goals – mainly due to lack of motivation.
And this is where your health and fitness blog comes in. As a fitness expert, a fitness blog will give a great platform where you can offer practical wisdom, solid advice, and actionable insights.
As a result, you will provide your target audience with the inspiration and motivation it needs to pursue its health and fitness goals.
1.3 Source of Passive Income
If your posts are relevant, informative, and actionable, they will soon bring thousands of readers to your blog.
And with a sizeable following, you can then decide to monetize your health and fitness blog by joining a health and fitness affiliate marketing program. You can also explore other monetization avenues, depending on your preferences.
2. Steps to Starting a Fitness Blog
As you can see, creating a health and fitness blog comes with numerous advantages. But if you've never created one before, you may be wondering where to start. Here are the steps to follow when starting a fitness blog:
2.1 Select a Niche
Niche selection is arguably one of the most important steps when creating a blog. And your fitness blog is no exception. A niche is simply your blog's focus or topic.
When selecting a niche for your fitness blog, it will be highly advisable to avoid starting a general fitness blog.
Starting a general fitness blog will make it extremely hard for you to build a sizeable following of loyal and dedicated readers.
Furthermore, there's too much competition on Google. You will be competing with some of the largest health and wellness brands, which have thousands of dollars to spend on marketing.
Therefore, your fitness blog may struggle to rank on Google. And in case it ranks, it will be nowhere close to the first pages.
Instead, you should choose a niche with a certain area of health and fitness. For instance, you can decide to focus on different types of yoga, weight lifting, or nutrition.
Once you've settled on a certain field, you should then narrow your focus even further by choosing a sub-niche within that niche.
For example, if you decide to focus on yoga, you can then niche down to yoga for men, yoga for women, yoga for children or other sub-niches.
By niching down, it will be easier for you to connect with your target audience, rank on Google and grow your blog.
2.2 Pick a Name
After selecting a niche for your fitness lifestyle blog, you then need to settle on a catchy blog name.
If you already have a fitness business, then your blog name should be the same as that of your fitness business.
However, if you are simply into fitness blogging and you don't have a fitness business, then you have more options to consider. You can try out different combinations and then choose one that you like.
But regardless of the fitness blog name that you choose, make sure it's short, memorable, catchy, related to your specialty and simple to pronounce.
2.3 Choose Your Blogging Platform
At this point, you already have a niche and name for your fitness blog. You then need to choose a platform, which you will use to build a fitness website.
There are two distinct blogging platforms available. These are hosted sites and self-hosted platforms.
Hosted sites include platforms like Wordpress.com and Wix. As their name suggests, hosted platforms will allow you to build your site. And they will also handle the hosting for you on their servers.
However, if you intend to monetize your blog in the future, it will be highly advisable to opt for self-hosted platforms.
Self-hosted platforms give you full control over your fitness website. For instance, you can customize your lifestyle fitness blog as much as you want. Furthermore, you will enjoy greater flexibility when it's time to monetize your health and fitness blog.
Wordpress.org is one of the best blogging platforms for fitness websites. WordPress is free and beginner-friendly. Furthermore, WordPress fitness blogs are highly versatile, secure and customizable.
2.4 Buy Domain and Hosting
If you decide to use the self-hosting route, then you will need to buy a domain for your fitness website. You will also need to choose your hosting provider.
Some of the most popular hosting companies include Bluehost, Siteground, Dreamhost, WP Engine, Kinsta, and Hostinger, just to name a few.
You can decide to buy your domain from the same hosting provider or use different companies.
Most hosting companies will also Install WordPress for you. After installation, your fitness website will come with a default theme. Therefore, you will need to customize it using a fitness blog template.
2.5 Start Blogging
Now that you've everything set up, you can start creating content and publishing posts on your health and fitness blog.
And you don't even need to be a professional or experienced content writer to post content on your fitness blog. Your readers will not be wowed by your great writing skills. Instead, they will be more interested in getting expert advice and insights from a fitness professional.
3. Topics to Cover
The type of content you will be posting on your personal fitness blog will depend on your target audience or the type of fitness business you will be running.
However, if you are struggling to come up with the first posts, here are a couple of topics for your inspiration:
- Workout and training advice
- Nutrition tips
- Lifestyle and wellness
- Fitness quotes
- Physical and mental health
- Training gear
4. Running a Fitness Blog Successfully
Starting a fitness blog is the easier part. After all, anyone can create one. However, growing it and making it successful is where the hard work is.
So, how do you run your fitness blog to make it profitable and successful? Here are some actionable tips to guide you:
4.1 Be Consistent
Inconsistency can considerably hinder your blog's growth. So, once you start blogging, it will be highly advisable to have a consistent schedule and stick to it.
You will need to be consistent on how often you will be posting per week, the exact time you will be posting, and the type of content you will be publishing.
Also, you will need to stick to a certain voice and tone. If you keep changing, you may end up confusing your readers.
4.2 Produce Great Content
While it may sound like a cliché, you will need to produce great content for your fitness blog.
Google and other search engines favor great, relevant, informative, unique and fresh content.
So, avoid plagiarizing or re-writing what is already out there. Instead, try to come up with helpful content for fresh and helpful content for your audience.
4.3 Leverage Your Social Reach
Interlinking your content will help you to reach a wider audience. To this end, it will be advisable to link your fitness blog to your fitness YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter accounts.
4.4 Utilize SEO Best Practices
Your fitness blog posts will only rank on search engines if they are properly optimized. And this is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
First, make sure you incorporate the right keywords, depending on your niche and target audience.
Second, ensure your content is highly readable. Ideally, your content should be in a conversational tone.
It should feel as if you are having a one-on-one conversation with your reader. So, avoid jargon, complex words or complicated phrases. Instead, keep things simple.
Third, use internal links. Your blog posts should be linked to each other through hyperlinks. Interlinking will help to direct readers to the next page effortlessly. It can also boost ranking.
Fourth, include relevant images. Blog posts with visual content like images tend to be more popular compared to those without.
Furthermore, adding photos and images to your blog posts will help to break your article, thus enhancing the reader's experience. Also, Google loves images. However, don't overdo it.
5. Wrapping It Up
Blogging is one of the most effective marketing methods for anyone who owns a fitness business. It will provide you with an effective platform where you can share your fitness expertise with your followers. At the same time, it will enable you to capture thousands of leads, which you can then convert to long-term fitness clients. So, if fitness blogging is not currently part of your fitness content marketing strategy, you should make it as soon as possible.