How to Sell Fitness Programs Online with WordPress
The growing demand for online fitness coaching opens doors beyond just coaching in the gym. It’s a wonderful opportunity to create passive income streams by selling online fitness programs – among other options.
Use your expertise and knowledge to create a fitness program, alter it sometimes – and sell it forever to many more people than you could ever personally train!
And guess what, WordPress as a world-leading CMS is the best place to start, because:
- It’s affordable, saving you money on the design and development. Just pick one of the dozens of gym and fitness WordPress themes to get started.
- Whether you want to sell services or products, WordPress has plugins (software) to fulfill any need.
- Hundreds of successful membership sites are powered by WordPress.
Curious how to implement this in practice? It’s all about choosing your preferred method of fitness coaching. Let’s talk about it.
Related article: How To Start a Coaching Business: 5 Key Points
How Can You Sell Fitness Programs Online with WordPress?
Before we get down to the hands-on tutorial of creating a WordPress site for selling fitness programs online with a traditional membership solution, let’s take a look at other options you have with WordPress.Sell Digital Content (Products)
If you know how to organize your knowledge into structured materials, be it text content with images, detailed tables with nutrition pans, or smart workout schedules, selling digital products is your way to go.
You can then launch your WordPress site based on the following:
- a one-time fee to access the content: use e-commerce WordPress plugins, such as EDD or WooCommerce and simply sell plans as products.
- subscriptions: create a membership site with content accessible to paying members only; add more to your library over time (we’ll be talking about it in detail here).
Provide In-Person Training Online (Services)
Before you can sell fitness programs and memberships to clients, they might need to chat with a coach at your gym to learn more about what program will fit their lifestyle and goals.
The best way to meet that need online is by setting up your own availability that can be booked. This is the #1 scenario – sell in-person fitness consultations.
The #2 scenario is selling personal training sessions, when clients pay for individual or group training sessions with a certified trainer online.
Another popular option #3 is group training, when you can give an online lesson to a group of people. This can involve personalized feedback and recommendations.
Any of these cases are doable with the service scheduling software like BookingPress.
Such a plugin makes it easy for you to:
- Add your services for online fitness coaching.
- Add coaches and customize their availability (free/booked days and times).
- Display a booking form on your WordPress site and enable customers to schedule a time with you.
- Accept online payments for consultations or lessons.
- Manage all your bookings, clients and staff members easily online.
Create a Membership Site (Hybrid)
The next method is very traditional and modern at the same time because it involves building a community around your online gym or coaching services and offering pre-made libraries of content at same time. Let’s now take a deeper dive into this method.Sell Fitness Programs Online with Membership Plugin
The membership method is probably the most scalable and suitable for selling fitness programs!
As for what it takes to sell fitness programs with the WordPress membership plugin, we’re discovering in this brief tutorial using the popular ARMember plugin for membership management.
You will be able to:
- create restricted content pages on WordPress with your fitness programs.
- create membership subscription plans to define the level of access to those pages.
- build member subscription pages and members login areas.
- collect money for the subscription or one-time payments.
And now let’s see how easy it is to build membership plans and add fitness plan content to these pages.
1. Install and activate ARMember.
2. Follow the handy installation wizard to set up things step by step.
3. Choose how new members can register and then have access to your fitness programs online.
- Automatically, for example, after a payment.
- You can approve each member registration.
- By sending confirmation emails.
4. Choose the currency you’ll accept for payments.
5. Create membership plans you will offer.
For example, for a fitness membership site, we can have:
- 1 free plan (for learning the basics).
- 1 paid plan (mid-tier monthly fee). You have numerous options here, from the period of subscription to free trial options, grace period, and more.
- 1 paid plan (one-time fee to access all fitness plans at once).
There are many flexible options to decide on a plan type (subscription, free, or one-time payment, etc.).
Of course, customers can upgrade and downgrade from the available plans.
6. Choose the payment gateways you’ll use (e.g., PayPal, wire transfer).
7. Add your actual content with fitness plans to the normal WordPress pages, posts of custom post types. To create a library of downloadable materials with fitness plans, you will have to use the Digital Downloads extension.
It allows you to upload various content types and restrict access to it using permission type settings. You can even set file download limits per plan, send emails to yourself on a new download, etc.
8. Set content restrictions according to the membership plans you create.
The basic setup is finished! The membership plugin will generate member login, member registration, and edit profile pages. You can edit their appearance using the powerful design settings options.
To sum up, you’ll be able to upload various types of content to WordPress, restrict content to it based on the membership plans you provide, and make it easily accessible/downloadable with or without a payment.
ARMember is a very feature-rich plugin, and you will discover tons of options for tailoring to your business model, some of them include:
- 15+ payment gateways for premium fitness plan downloads.
- Content release on a scheduled basis only to chosen plans.
- Automated instant notifications to clients and you.
- Discount coupons and many other marketing tools.
- Integrated advanced spam protection and multiple login security layers to keep your community safe.
- Easily customize default access rules for new content among various plan members
- Import and export member data for data-driven analysis of how well your fitness programs are performing.
Over to You: Why Sell Fitness Programs Online with WordPress?
Once you start selling fitness programs online using WordPress – you will never regret it. Because no other platform or CMS provides so many built-in capabilities as well as commercial software solutions to boost your business.
Let’s sum up why it’s great to start with a WordPress membership plugin in a more constructive wording:
- Create multiple membership tiers with varying access levels to your fitness plans and pricing.
- Sell content one-time or automate recurring payments with subscriptions.
- Sell personalized fitness plans with the pay per post feature.
- Attract new clients with free plans, trial options, and upgrade/downgrade options.
- Engage retention with regularly released content and powerful content dripping options.
Ready to take your fitness coaching career online and embrace the brave new world of subscriptions, memberships, and earning passive income? Time to!
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Brian Denim
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