Fitness is something that many people are already very passionate about or want to learn more about. If you’re already a fitness professional or just someone who has a lot of passion and fitness knowledge, a fitness blog is a great platform for sharing that knowledge and reaching out to others.
You can even devote the site to documenting your own fitness journey. The topics you can touch on are endless.
The internet is such a great way for people to communicate, educate and find common interests and things they’re passionate about. Starting a site is a great way to spread information and reach out to a huge population of people.
In order to make sure that things run smoothly and have some traction from the start, you need to plan ahead to set yourself up for success.
There are endless possibilities of what your fitness blog can be. Whether it’s a general health blog, women’s fitness blog, or personal fitness journey blog. Remember, this is your own personal brand and online personality that you’re starting. In order to ensure that people can easily find your content and actually want to read it, it’s important to do things right from the start.
Table of Contents
What Do You Want To Talk About?
Over time your site may evolve and grow into something different, but it’s good to have a solid idea of what you want to begin with. What’s inspiring you to start in the first place? Is there a story you want to tell? What kind of audience are you trying to reach?
There are so many different realms of fitness. You could talk about just general fitness topics, nutrition for fitness, bodybuilding or any kind of exercise really. If you’re wanting it to be a more personal journey type of site, you could write about your journey and experience in bodybuilding, weight loss, yoga, CrossFit, etc.
Having a clear idea of the type of content and topics you want to stick to will help keep your site focused. Especially when you’re just getting started, it’s good to stay on track so that new readers are clear on what your blog is actually about and you’re not just putting up random posts about anything and everything.
What Will Your Name Be?
Once you’ve decided on the type of content you want to create, it’s time to come up with a domain name and title for your site. This name should be somewhat related to your topic, but you also want it to be memorable, catchy and appealing to your audience.
Your title should give readers a little bit of insight as to what type of blog it is. So they’ll know just by looking at the title whether it’s something that they might be interested in.
It might take some time to come up with the perfect name, but try to get creative. Experiment with a bunch of different ideas, try some alliteration and wordplay.
Build Your Website And Set Up Hosting
Now that you’ve got an idea for your content and name, it’s time to start building the site itself. This part can feel pretty overwhelming, but you really don’t have to be a computer whiz to build a beautiful website.
In order to get your site up and running, you’ll need to get a host for your website and a domain name. A host is basically where your website lives on the internet. It’s a server that you can access and makes running your website possible.
Using WordPress on Bluehost is what we recommended for getting started if this is your first website. It’s a hosting service where you can set up your blog domain name while also signing up for hosting. Along with being very inexpensive and user-friendly, Bluehost makes it easy to get started with WordPress, which can save you a lot of time when writing and publishing articles.
How to Find Readers Interested in Fitness
You may think that readers will just come across your site easily. But it’s actually really important to put yourself in the right spots to be found and make your site more visible. There are plenty of things you can to make sure that your targeted audience is able to easily find your content.
Be More Active In the Existing Online Fitness Community
There are so many people already active in the fitness realm, why not get involved so they can learn more about you? This will help them discover your blog.
Participating in online contests and challenges is a great way to get involved and increase your credibility and visibility. You can also submit videos and articles to be featured on other sites that will help lead people to your own.
Make Your Content Easy to Share
Adding share buttons to your blog content will make it very likely for readers to share with their social media profiles. Chances are, that person has other friends or followers that are also interested in health and fitness who will then discover your blog. Some of them will then share your content, and the cycle continues.
Create your content for SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, helps narrow down internet searches to help users find exactly what they’re looking for. It helps the people who are looking specifically for, bodybuilding, weight loss information or women’s fitness sites find yours when they use any search engine.
Optimizing your content for SEO by adding in keywords that people might search for, alternative text on any images of your posts, creating meta descriptions. There are plenty of resources available that can help makes sure that you can be easily found by the right audience.
Get Creative With Your Titles
The title is obviously the first thing readers will see and it will be the thing that either draws them in or sends them away. Not only does it let them know if the article is relevant to their interests and what they’re looking for, but it also gives them some insight into how interesting it actually be and how the tone is.
You want to make people curious, while still giving them some clue as to what kind of information is in your post.
Attract Readers Interested in Fitness Who Are Already Online
One of the easiest and fastest ways to attract more people are interested in fitness to your blog is through social media. There are many different social media sites that allow you to connect with and reach more people.
Create Social Media Pages For Your Blog
It’s not enough for you to just share your content on your personal accounts. Surely not all of your friends and followers are going to be interested in health and fitness. Create an account for your blog on every relevant social media site – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
This is a great way to help new readers get to know your blog and what aspects of fitness you deal with before they check it out to see if it’s something they’d be interested in. It also allows the readers you already have to have another means of sharing your content and keeping up-to-date with new upcoming content.
Post Often, And At Peak Times
Especially on Twitter and Facebook, there are optimal times to post where you’ll be able to maximize on the number of people likely to see your posts. There are certain points in the day when traffic is higher.
It’s also important to post very frequently – more a than a few times a day. Your followers aren’t always online and they don’t only follow you, meaning not every follower will see every post that you make. Don’t worry about being annoying, you’re just trying to get as many views as possible. Remind people that your blog exists and is still active.
#Hashtags
It’s so important and beneficial to use hashtags on every social media post that you create. It can be a huge catalyst for growth and new followers.
Hashtags will help general fitness enthusiasts find you, and you can also create relevant hashtags to whatever the specific topic is for that post. If you’re posting a recipe, tutorial for workouts, transformation pictures, etc. it narrows down your post so that it will appear in people’s searches and hashtags that they follow. This is a great way for new readers to discover you.
What Kind of Things Do Successful Fitness Blogs Do?
There are a lot of fitness blogs out there, so it’s important to stand out and take the right steps if you want to be one of the successful ones. Here are a few things that can help you in finding success and credibility:
Stay True To Your Brand And Word
It’s important to be genuine and honest with your content. There are a lot of unrealistic expectations, especially in the fitness world. Be real with your audience, and never claim to do something everyday or use a particular protein supplement. That’s a quick way to lose your credibility.
You should always be yourself and let your personality shine through. That’s what will make your blog unique and help others relate to you.
Interact With Your Readers
Whether it be through a comments section on your blog itself, through social media or email, having open communication with your readers is a great way to get feedback on your content, build loyalty and likeability, and more.
It helps you know what people want to hear more about. Maybe you briefly mentioned your favorite yoga leggings last in last weeks post and people want to know more about your favorite brands of workout gear. Always be open and inviting to questions and comments.
Be Consistent
People expect you to put out content regularly and you want to keep the audience happy. Hold yourself accountable and committed. Running a blog can be a whole lot of work, so be realistic about you can do and stick to it.
Planning ahead and being prepared helps a lot. If you don’t have a plan, it will cause you unnecessary stress.
Mistakes to Avoid
Running a fitness blog can be stressful and there many working parts to get in order. That said, it’s absolutely possible. Keep in mind these very common mistakes that bloggers make when starting out:
Spending More Time Creating Than Promoting
Don’t spend a week working on your stretching tutorial. Only to share it a few times on your personal Facebook account. You worked hard on it. And you need to work just as hard sharing it and trying to get it out there.
Forgetting to Create an Email List
Email marketing is a very powerful tool. It’s another means besides social media to remind people about your blog. You can update them on new things and even offer special content to only the people on the email list.
My favorite email tool for this is ConvertKit. It’s built specifically with bloggers in mind and make it easy to organize your contacts list, and set up things like welcome sequences for new subscribers.
Giving Up
It might be a slow start. Maybe you’re not getting the results you expect. It’s easy to feel discouraged when you feel like you’ve done everything you were supposed to do. If that happens, keep trying and be more aggressive.
There are so many other fitness blogs out there. They are all competing for readers attention, so you have to really fight to get attention.
Conclusion
Starting your fitness blog journey can be extremely rewarding. But with enough determination, you can find great success. Some successful fitness bloggers have even left their full-time jobs to work online.
There are many steps to getting started. It can be hard setting yourself up to have a successful fitness blog. Reaching as many people as you possibly can is a whole other concern. It takes a lot of time, energy and commitment, but is very possible. Running a health and fitness blog is a great way to earn a living. It allows you to be part of a community of like-minded people wanting to lead healthy, active lives.
