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How to Start a Fitness Blog


A fitness blog can be an excellent outlet to share your training and personal fitness knowledge with an audience of receptive, health-conscious readers. That sounds great, but can a fitness blog also make money?

If you’re wondering how to start a fitness blog and make money, you’ve found the right article. We’ll cover what’s great about starting a fitness blog, discuss how to choose a niche for your fitness blog, go over what to write about, and explain monetization options.

A big part of starting a blog is getting a website; we’ll also break that down for you. We’ll wrap up with some blog management tips and ideas about how to attract readers. Let’s get started!

What Is a Fitness Blog?

A fitness blog is a website with fitness-related posts targeted at a specific audience. The content of a fitness blog may be focused on a single niche exercise trend, like CrossFit or P90X, for example. Still, many successful fitness blogs present a unified approach to wellness that addresses more than just daily workouts.

Blog-worthy fitness insights can include tips for healthier eating, getting better sleep, and other health-related topics. When they engage with their audience on social media and actively promote their content, a fitness blogger can gain loyal readers quickly, and with a large readership come monetization opportunities.

Why You Should Start a Fitness Blog

There are a lot of fitness blogs covering almost every fitness topic. If you have an idea for your fitness blog, a quick keyword search may reveal it’s already been done. Have all the fitness blogging opportunities been taken? Is it worth starting a fitness blog?

The short answer is yes.

There’s plenty of room in the fitness blog world for a blogger with an entrepreneurial spirit and a fresh perspective. When you’re planning your fitness blog, and you check out the blogs you’ll be competing against, note the content they post, but also pay close attention to how their blog makes money. Many blogs don’t maximize their monetization potential, but yours will.

How Do You Create a Successful Fitness Blog?

What makes a fitness blog successful? The best fitness bloggers publish awesome content, promote it on social media, and pursue multiple revenue streams. Fitness bloggers measure two things to assess their blog’s performance: reader engagement and revenue.

A fitness blogger can earn a large following by offering helpful content and connecting with their readers. The posted content must satisfy the audience’s needs. Still, it can also contain ads and affiliate links and promote whatever you’re selling, like fee-based training sessions or your diet planning service. With an increase in readership comes an increase in monetization opportunities.

Balancing helpful fitness advice with revenue generation is tricky. Here are some popular fitness blogs that are on the right track:

Fitness blogs that make a lot of money do so by attracting a lot of traffic. A percentage of visitors can be expected to interact with ads or purchase promoted services and products. Getting a lot of visitors requires great content, and you’ll find that easier if you select a fitness niche and use your blog to explore it fully, as discussed in the next section.

What Should a Fitness Blog Include?

You’ve acquired a vast amount of fitness knowledge and want to share it. A blog is a perfect platform to do that, but what should your blog cover? What do you write in a fitness blog?

Answering that question requires that you decide on your fitness blog’s niche. While you may expand your scope later, starting with a relatively narrow focus is essential. That will make it easier to attract your initial following.

If you’re involved in multiple fitness categories, pick a few favourites, then find out which of those topics most people are interested in. For example, you may be into yoga, strength training, flexibility workouts, aerobics, kickboxing, and CrossFit. Among those topics, choose your two favourites and start researching on the web. You’ll quickly sense which subject gets the most attention from fitness enthusiasts and see the kinds of blogs covering it.

Once you’ve decided on a niche, you’ll need to create compelling posts that balance information and marketing. Photos are required for visual engagement, and the best fitness blogs include video content. You’ll need to post frequently and on a regular schedule – to effectively connect with your readers, you should plan to update your blog at least once a week. You should also consider using your blog as the hub of an online fitness club you run for your readers. When members share tips, compare progress, and encourage each other, your fitness business will be part of the conversation.

In addition to posts, your fitness blog should have an About page, where visitors can learn about you and your connection to the fitness niche you write about. Include a brief bio that provides authentic details about yourself and links to your social media accounts. The information should feel personal, explain how you became interested in fitness, and let readers know you’re eager to engage. Your fitness blog should also have a Contact page encouraging visitors to provide their email addresses and offer feedback.

When choosing a niche for your fitness blog, consider the readers you want to attract. The best way to serve your audience is to provide fresh useful fitness information, and if you do that, you can earn a large readership and trigger a healthy income stream.

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How Do You Monetize a Fitness Blog?

Do you want to make money with your fitness blog? There are several ways to do it.

  • Sell ad space: With fitness activities comes the need for fitness equipment. Google AdSense lets you choose ads that relate to your content. For example, you can advertise fitness gear, and if you’re promoting products you believe in, your endorsement will help readers and result in steady passive income.
  • Conduct online training sessions: Your blog content will recommend fitness goals and activities that require training – training that you can provide through online sessions. You can create a virtual workout space using Zoom and hold effective training sessions.
  • Affiliate marketing: If your posts contain affiliate links, you can earn referral commissions promoting fitness gear. Amazon Associates is a great starting point, but you should consider your niche and seek out related fitness products and brands with affiliate programs.
  • Offer meal planning: Help people eat healthier by creating customized meal plans. A nutrition-savvy fitness blogger can make money selling meal planning services that give clients a clearcut path to weight loss.
  • Run a virtual fitness club: Many fitness blogs feature a fitness club that the blogger runs. Members sign up, subscribe to a monthly newsletter, and join a community of other fitness enthusiasts. By encouraging this fellowship, a blogger can target their followers as a cohesive group that can be marketed to more effectively.
  • Partner with a gym: If there’s a gym that offers training in your niche, a partnership could be lucrative. Research gyms to learn about their approach and then reach out, suggesting a fee-based agreement in which you publish content that promotes their services.
  • Work with a gear retailer: Look into businesses that sell the protein power, resistance bands, yoga mats, or kettlebells you train with and blog about. Send them a post you’ve written that mentions one of their products and suggest a mutually beneficial arrangement for paid promotion. They may be open to a partnership that will increase your blog’s profitability.
  • Partner with coaches and trainers: Find coaches and trainers that focus on the same niche as your blog and suggest a partnership. Publish a post that would appeal to their customers and, in an email pitch, link to that post. To sell the partnership concept, provide details about the audience your blog reaches and highlight the impact you have through social media.
  • Use your email list: The monetization strategies listed here benefit from a large audience that’s reachable through multiple channels. With a newsletter, you’ll get a monthly opportunity to promote your blog and target a subset of your readers who are most likely to respond to your promotions.

It takes time to get readers, so it may be a while before your fitness blog starts making money. However, once your blog has traction, it can become a steady source of income.

Setting Up Your Fitness Blog

When starting a blog, focusing on the content and potential revenue is natural. Amidst the swirling post ideas and monetization opportunities, you must also focus on setting up your blog. With popular blogging platforms to choose from and the availability of affordable web hosting, setting up a fitness blog is easy, as we’ll discuss below.

Pick Your Blogging Platform

There’s a wide range of blogging platforms available, most offering a feature set that includes a content editor, design templates or support for themes, SEO tools, and ways to extend your blog’s features with third-party apps. The best platform for your fitness blog is one that provides those features while keeping rates low and adding value through support and training.

The platform option that gives bloggers flexibility, simplicity, and low cost is WordPress.org. This solution doesn’t include hosting or a domain, but that is not a problem, thanks to the wide availability of affordable WordPress web hosting. WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), providing a simple framework to design, publish, and manage a website. It supports thousands of professionally created themes, many designed specifically for blog sites.

WordPress is the perfect platform for fitness bloggers and is great for users with any web design experience. It offers a variety of site-building options, with sophisticated drag and drop tools that require no coding knowledge, plus numerous plugins and integration options. 

Choose a Web Hosting Provider

Some blogging platforms include web hosting, but the best choice, WordPress.org, requires self-hosting. Many hosting providers have full-featured service offerings built around WordPress.

HostPapa, for example, offers low-priced hosting plans that feature a one-click WordPress setup and include free domain registration, a free standard SSL certificate, unmetered bandwidth, and ample resources. Plans also include world-class support, free training, and a collection of features that make creating and managing your fitness blog easy.

Choose Your Hosting Plan

The web hosting market is populated by competitive providers offering low-cost shared hosting plans, where one computer runs many websites. Shared hosting is the most affordable type of hosting and is perfect for your blog.

The best shared hosting plans are built around WordPress, with low pricing and generous feature sets. Low introductory rates are limited to the first year only, as are offers of a free domain and SSL certificate.

When searching for a hosting plan, seek one that’s initially under $5 per month and renews for between $10 and $15 per month. Your plan should include free domain registration, a free SSL certificate, and substantial web space and bandwidth allotments. In a market populated by good WordPress hosting providers, HostPapa stands out as exceptional, with plans that include everything described above, plus world-class support and free training.

Buy a Domain Name for Your Fitness Blog

To create a unified brand identity, your domain name should be the same as your blog name. The easiest way to register your domain name is through your hosting provider. You’ll probably be offered the first year of domain registration for free, but there’s an annual fee you’ll have to pay to keep your domain name. Expect to pay between $10 and $15 a year.

Select Your Fitness Blog Theme

There are many professionally designed, blog-focused WordPress themes, and some are made specifically for fitness blogs. They’re all free, or you can pay a small fee to use a more feature-rich version.

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Fitness Club Lite

The Fitness Club Lite theme features an attractive design that’s great for blogs that host a virtual fitness club. It’s flexible, with a custom sidebar widget and boxed layout options. It offers helpful social media integration and makes implementing a contact form easy. The pro version, which adds enhanced features, costs $29.

Yoga Fitness

This is the ideal theme for your blog if your main topic is yoga. The Yoga Fitness theme is mobile-friendly and built to boost SEO. You get eye-catching banners and CTA buttons, plus it’s easy to set up pages for services, testimonials, club news, and more. A pro version of the parent theme is available for $59.

Bosa Fitness

The Bosa Fitness theme is great for fitness bloggers because it allows practically limitless customization. You can choose from multiple header and footer layouts, it’s built for speed and compatible with many popular WordPress plugins. The pro version, which increases your layout options from 3 to 14, costs about $50.

Gymzone Fitness

GymZone Fitness will delight readers with its eye-pleasing layout. This free theme is ideal for bloggers, too, because it’s so easy to configure. It’s SEO friendly and loaded with social media integration features.

Fitness Coaching

The Fitness Coaching theme enables bloggers to create beautiful websites that their readers love. It includes flexible layouts, language translation, RTL layout support, easy-to-configure menu options, and more.

CGym Hub Lite

The CGym Hub Lite theme has a reader-friendly design that will beautifully showcase your fitness blog content. It’s built to enhance your site’s speed and boost SEO. CGym Hub Lite is easy to use and offers flexible, responsive layout options. There’s a free version and a pro version that costs $30.

Fitness CrossFit

If you plan to blog about CrossFit, this may be your theme. It has an SEO-focused design that ensures fast page load time and a look that will hold your readers’ attention. The free version of this theme is great, or you can get more flexibility with the pro version, which costs $40.

Bootstrap Fitness

Bootstrap Fitness is an adaptable theme that allows you to create a unique fitness blog and is designed to optimize the user experience. It’s clean, responsive, and SEO-friendly. The free version will get you started, but you can upgrade to the pro version for $99.

Real Fitness

The Real Fitness theme is incredibly easy to set up. You can build custom page templates and create the perfect look for your blog. This theme enhances your blog’s SEO and features a responsive layout. The pro version, which enables even more customization, costs $39.

Fitness Insight

With the Fitness Insight theme, it’s easy to customize your site to create a truly unique look. This theme features a clean, well-optimized design that’s great for fitness blogs. The premium version costs $40 and includes advanced features and customization options.

FitnessBase

FitnessBase is a lightweight theme that ensures your pages load fast. The design is responsive and mobile-friendly. You can make your blog look great with advanced typography, a sticky menu, an eye-catching header, and more. The parent theme, with enhanced features, is available for $99.

Fitness Park

The Fitness Park theme makes it easy to create the right look for your fitness blog. It features a user-friendly page design and multiple layout options. The free version has all the features you’ll need to get started, and you can upgrade to Fitness Park Pro for $59.

Launching Your Fitness Blog on WordPress

Launching your blog will be easy if you work with a great hosting provider. Using HostPapa as an example, here’s how easy it can be to start your fitness blog:

  1. Select your hosting plan. When you access the HostPapa website, you’ll see a range of competitively priced hosting plans. The Starter plan lets users run a single website and comes with free domain registration, a free standard SSL certificate, and 100 GB of storage. That’s a perfect hosting plan for fitness bloggers.
  2. Enter the domain you decided on. You’ll have to specify your domain name early in the signup process. You’ll get the chance to verify that the domain name is available and see the price.
  3. Enter personal information and billing details. You’ll see the total price for the selected service period, plus what you’ll pay for domain registration, an SSL certificate, and any selected add-ons, as applicable.
  4. Access WordPress. HostPapa’s Starter plan offers a one-click WordPress setup, so getting your WordPress workspace up and running is incredibly easy.
  5. Install your WordPress theme. Once you install your chosen theme, your fitness blog will come to life. You can add your static content, explore how to create and manage posts, and start adjusting the layout.
  6. Install WordPress plugins. Extend the functionality of your blog with WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO to improve your ranking in search results. Jetpack enables social media sharing and provides site performance statistics. There’s also Contact Form 7, which makes it easy to create a form that encourages visitors to become followers.
  1. Set up Google tools. Google Analytics Dashboard tracks useful site statistics, and the Google Search Console is a must-have tool for keyword research.
  2. Publish content and promote your fitness blog. With your website set up and ready for content, you can publish your initial posts to let the world know about your new fitness blog.

With a great hosting provider, setting up your website will be easy. If you have considered your hosting requirements, decided on a domain name, and picked a theme, the day you launch your fitness blog should be a hassle-free experience.

Managing Your Fitness Blog

To hold your readers’ attention over time, you’ll need to post helpful and interesting content regularly. Below we’ll discuss how to do that, plus, we’ll explain the importance of using Google Tools to optimize your website.

Create A Fitness Blog Content Plan

To keep readers coming back, you’ll have to post regularly and often. You’ll have trouble gaining loyal readers if you update your fitness blog infrequently or on an unpredictable schedule. Maintaining a consistent publishing schedule and preparing posts takes planning, as explained in the following content plan creation tips.

  • Set a publishing schedule: Readers of your fitness blog will appreciate an update on the same day every week. A predictable flow of content will hold your reader’s attention and cause them to anticipate your next post enthusiastically.
  • Blend your blog content and training content: If you’re a trainer and produce written instructions for clients, that’s fodder for your blog. When planning posts, consider writing about the approach you take in your most effective training sessions.
  • Plan for required images and video: Many of your posts will require photos, video, or both. Spend time in your workout space to get pictures and videos ready to have them on the day you want to publish. 
  • Freshen your niche focus: Stay on top of trends in your fitness niche. New perspectives on fitness will be useful to your readers, and the currency of your content will lend legitimacy to your brand.
  • Get inspired by other fitness blogs: Follow other fitness blogs to get ideas for your content. Familiarizing yourself with a new viewpoint can trigger a creative spark and enable you to generate new, unique content for your blog.
  • Plan social media posts: Each time you publish a new post on your fitness blog, you’ll need a social media post to promote it. When you create your content plan, account for the related social media activity that will be required.

A content plan will keep you aware of all the new content you have to create and help you stick to a publishing schedule. It will ensure you stay ahead of the game and remind you to think ahead about what your readers will want to see in the coming months.

Create Content without Breaking a Sweat

A lot of your blog content may be instructional – photos, videos, and text explaining exercise techniques, diet tips, etc. That’s valuable information for your readers but can be a little dry. You should also post about new perspectives in fitness, tell stories about people achieving their goals, and try to include niche-adjacent topics your readers will be interested in. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Include general wellness tips: Sharing tips about sleep, work-life balance, and mindfulness can help round out your content and give readers a broader fitness perspective.

Share an inspirational story: If you helped someone overcome a fitness challenge or have your own success story, post about it to inspire readers and encourage them to meet their goals.

Write about your fitness goals: If you’re passionate about fitness, you probably have goals you’re not sure you’ll ever reach. Writing about your most challenging fitness goals is relatable and will make your readers feel you’re part of their community.

Showcase a club member’s fitness journey: If part of your blog is an online fitness club, readers will love to see a fellow club member name-checked for their recent successes.

Offer gear reviews: Go into depth about one of the products you earn affiliate commissions for. With an entire post devoted to explaining why you use the product, your honest recommendation will benefit your readers and serve as an irresistible promotion.

Considering the number of posts you’ll have to create with exercise instructions and photos of you working out, it will be a nice change of pace to write about other subjects. Covering fitness-related topics like those listed above will add diversity to your content and help you foster a sense of community among your readers. 

Set Up Google Tools

Google Analytics and Google Search Console will assist you in running a fitness blog that delivers a wonderful user experience and attracts as many readers as possible.

Use Google Analytics to track blog traffic. You can see which of your posts has the most views, find out the average amount of time readers spend on your pages and get access to data about how many people came to a page from outside of your site. You can use the information from Google Analytics to adjust your content plan to publish the kind of content readers are most interested in.

Use Google Search Console to monitor and maintain your blog site’s presence in Google Search results. This tool can verify that Google can find your site and crawl its contents. Search Console helps troubleshoot responsive design issues and fix indexing problems that can hurt your SEO. It provides valuable traffic data and sends you an alert when your website has a problem.

When you run a fitness blog, using Google Analytics and Google Search Console will help optimize multiple aspects of your site and attract more new visitors.

Promoting Your Fitness Blog

There are several blog promotion techniques that you should use in combination to attract visitors to your blog. Social media and SEO will be the most effective. In this section, we’ll cover the use of six great ways to promote your fitness blog.

  • Social media: Social media should play a major role in your blog promotion strategy, so much so that you can think of your readers and social media followers as the same group. Target the group regularly with posts designed to entice current followers and lure new readers. Create social media posts with the same look as your blog posts, which will help solidify your brand identity. Manage an account on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest representing your fitness blog. If you post frequently and actively participate in the community, the resulting reader engagement will give your blog a strong online identity.
  • SEO: Search engine optimization ensures that people who search using keywords related to your content will find a link to your blog in their search results. Your post titles and headings should contain keywords that refer to a specific topic within your niche. For example, a keyword like “yoga” is far too generic. Say you’ve posted about a unique way to do self-guided hot yoga at home. If you use long-tail keywords effectively, people who search for “bikram yoga at home” will see your link at the top of their search results and be delighted to find a blog with the information they were looking for.
  • Share buttons: Readers who regularly consume your blog content are a valuable resource in word-of-mouth marketing. It should be easy for visitors to share your posts. By prominently displaying a share button with each post, you’ll encourage visitors to share your content, and in the process, they’ll promote your fitness blog to potential new followers.
  • Email outreach: Sending a monthly email newsletter is a great way to engage your readers. It will help you highlight your latest posts, keep readers informed about upcoming blog content, and serve as a secondary platform for promoting offers and affiliate products. Recipients who love your blog will welcome your content in email form, and less committed followers will be reminded that they should regularly check in with your blog.
  • YouTube channel: There’s no better way to communicate workout goals, encourage progress, or demonstrate proper exercise form than through video. For example, you could create a series of engaging fitness videos, one per exercise, which identify the exercise’s purpose and detail the proper technique. Creating a YouTube channel and consistently posting new videos can increase your fitness blog’s visibility and generate income through ads.
  • Guest blog posts: Getting one of your blog posts published on another fitness blog can draw attention to your blog. Reach out to another fitness blogger and suggest trading guest posts. Proceed carefully when choosing a blog to partner with – your guest-post collaboration should be complementary, not competitive. You should exchange guest posts with a blogger with a large audience and who occupy a fitness niche related to yours but not an exact match.

Along with SEO and encouraging people to share your posts, actively engaging your target audience through social media is crucial to the success of your fitness blog. When you’re a part of a community of fitness enthusiasts, it will be easier to attract new readers and encourage current followers to stay.

Start Your Fitness Blog Today!

With your fitness blog, you can enrich the lives of others by doing what you love, and there are plenty of ways to make money as a fitness blogger. Successful bloggers focus equally on reader engagement and revenue. They consistently publish content readers want, then capitalize on the resulting engagement.

If you choose a great hosting provider and a WordPress-focused hosting plan, the easiest part of starting your fitness blog will be setting up your website. In the field of competitive WordPress hosting providers, HostPapa stands above the crowd, offering low-priced, full-featured plans, world-class support, and free training that will make starting your fitness blog easy.

Last modified on: December 11th, 2023

Categorized as Web Hosting

Tim is a freelance writer focused on helping people achieve their business goals through digital marketing.

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