This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
All right, all right. What's up? Live from New York City, Chris Guillebeau, Side Hustle School. I just made it to New York, doing an event tomorrow night. And of course, you can keep up with me at chrisguillebeau.com/tour. We'd love to see people as I continue
on the Gonzo Capitalism Tour. Now, of course, the podcast continues as well. Today, we're going to talk about how to become a personal fitness influencer. Well, let's make it more specific. Let's talk about how to become a personal fitness influencer and actually get paid. I really want to help people make a credible plan
to make money from your idea, your project, your passion, whatever it is. So not just go on and get a bunch of Instagram followers, but let's find a way to actually get paid as mentioned. So we've got Priya, a personal trainer from Michigan. She's always been passionate about fitness and now wants to level up her game. In this digital age where fitness and well-being are front and center, she hopes to help and inspire a wider audience. But how does one
go from being a fitness enthusiast to a fitness influencer with a, what was that again? A profitable business model. Let's focus on that. Okay. A detailed question from Priya coming up, quick little shout out to our sponsor and then my answer. Stay tuned. Hi, my name is Priya and
I'm a personal trainer from Michigan. I've always been passionate about fitness. And now I want to leverage my expertise to build an online presence. My hope is to inspire and help more people on a larger scale, especially in this day and age when health and fitness are more important than ever. Could you guide me on the basics of building a business as a fitness influencer?
All right. Thanks for the question. Let's focus my answer entirely around the part about building a business. Okay. There's lots of people that are going to tell you what types of pictures to post on Instagram and how you should comment and engage with your followers. All that is fine.
But what I have seen far too often is people are focused exclusively on that and they don't really focus on the building a business part. So like, what'd you do for your business today? Well, I got 10 more Instagram followers. How many sales did you have? Zero. Building a business
is a project on its own, a focus on its own. It's not just like a couple of tasks, you know, in the midst of like taking photos and posting photos. So building the business, let's talk about that. What exactly is the business model? Are you going to offer direct training? Are you
going to offer training where you're creating workout programs coaching? Are you actually live for that coaching? I would recommend not, if possible, or at least work towards kind of productizing the business to where there's something you're selling, like workout plans, or could be some other kind of program, but something that people can purchase and then engage with on their own. It could be courses, other modules that you build out. It could also be a membership site. I mean, that's a huge thing. So creating a website or a platform where you can
offer exclusive content for a subscription fee could be a lot of things. I mentioned courses already like fitness, eBooks, affiliate marketing, promoting other courses, other recommended products or services, selling merchandise, perhaps, or building the business enough to where you could do advertising on YouTube or one of these other platforms. But I actually think it's best to focus on one of those first options of like I'm actually creating content that people can pay for. This is the business of education. We're going to spend our time focused on that. So what is it
people really want out of all the different information that's out there? How can you offer something that's a little bit different or unique to you or more personalized toward the people you hope to connect with? I think that's the biggest thing is let's think about who they are. And not just thinking about ourselves, which is kind of the tendency in these sorts of things to think, oh, this is me. But what about those people? What do they need? What can you offer them? And I would
spend 80% of my time trying to address that question. What do these people need? How can I offer them something that is of true value? And that's the path. So then post more photos, engage with your audience, respond to questions and such. But if you skip the first part and just
try to focus on the second, it's not going to go so well. And I hope it does go well for you and for everybody else out there, which is why we have this ongoing conversation. I'm always happy to offer my take or to hear from other experts as well. So if you have a question or a comment, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Of course, new episode every day, it's all completely free, wherever you like to listen. Much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle
School. From the Onward Project.
