How to become a fitness influencer: step-by-step guide
- 6 steps to become a fitness influencer
- 1. Define your niche
- 2. Determine your competitive edge
- 3. Decide on your brand voice
- 4. Select the platforms to post on
- 5. Create a fitness influencer bio that makes your profile visitors subscribe
- 6. Create a content plan and stick to it
- How to become a paid fitness influencer
- Choose your way to become a paid fitness influencer
- Create a landing page and add it to your social profiles
- How to be a successful fitness influencer — 4 tips
- 1. Post high-quality content
- 2. Expand the reach of your fitness influencer account
- 3. Increase the engagement in your fitness influencer account
- 4. Track statistics and adjust your posting
- The bottom line
When you have decided to become a fitness influencer, your main goal is to gain hundreds of thousands of active followers interested in sports and dieting. If you want to become a paid fitness influencer, then you also need to choose a way of making money and set your social media profile accordingly. Below you can read about how to do all this.
Choose one niche and stick to it. You may become a health and fitness influencer, a weight loss influencer, a gym and workout influencer, and so on.
Choosing a particular niche makes you grow as a fitness influencer faster. This is because you can create highly targeted content this way. And such content is necessary for fast follower count growth because:
- your audience sees it more often. Narrow post topics mean less post competition. Your posts are more likely to be shown on the #homefitness hashtag page than on the #fitness page because your posts have to compete with fewer posts added by other fitness influencers.
- your audience likes it more. Narrowly targeted content considers specific interests and pain points, the ones that concern specifically your audience. It resonates with the audience better than general fitness content. Therefore, it is the best at catching your new followers.
Choose a niche that you are good at to become a fitness influencer. Keep in mind that you will have to regularly tell users something about it and discuss it with followers and fitness gurus. You can get the influence on social media only if you prove that you can give reliable information and unique insights, and respond quickly.
If you want to become a fitness influencer, be ready for tough competition. There are already a lot of fitness influencers on social media. You need to offer something unique and valuable to users so that they notice you and subscribe.
Think about your advantage that can beat the competition. You may have:
- unique knowledge. Perhaps you have something to tell users about a topic that is little-covered on the web, or you have unique insights on a popular topic.
- a unique delivery. Perhaps you can talk about complex things in simple words, or you deliver everything with humor. The delivery can even be cynical — there are people who subscribe to it.
Make your competitive advantage noticeable. State it in the bio, and demonstrate it in posts and comments. Then your chances to get new followers and keep the old ones are higher.
You need a brand voice to become a fitness influencer. A strong brand voice makes you stand out among your competitors, and helps you and your audience find each other.
A brand voice includes:
- vocabulary. Decide which words to use: whether they should be scientific terms or simple words, whether there should be slang, and if so, which one — modern to attract a young audience or outdated to attract an adult audience.
- your brand phrase. You can come up with a short phrase and constantly repeat it in your posts.
- emoji. Decide if your brand voice needs them. If yes, then choose the ones that you want to be associated with your brand.
- tone. Decide how to talk to the audience — in a friendly or formal manner, and so on.
- expression. Decide on the dynamics of your speech. Your speech can be loud or quiet, quick or slow, it can be a non-stop flow or include distinct pauses. Your gestures can be sudden or smooth.
Choose a social platform where you can become a fitness influencer. Choose the one where:
- you have few competitors. The fewer fitness influencers on the platform, the easier to win the audience's attention.
- users are involved in fitness content. If you see users on a platform giving a lot of likes to someone's fitness content, then you have all chances to see them giving the likes to your fitness content on this platform.
- the prevailing content format suits you. If you want to create long videos, then go to YouTube. If you want to make short and accurate texts, then go to X (Twitter). If you are into short videos, then you should become a fitness influencer on TikTok.
When you start becoming a fitness influencer, choose one platform only. Creating content and communicating with the audience takes a lot of time. You almost certainly will not have enough time to keep it at a high-quality level on several platforms.
The way you design your social bio is crucial when becoming a fitness influencer on Instagram or any other social platform. Users often check your social profile before subscribing. And the bio is the first thing they see. Users subscribe if they see:
- the word "fitness" in the name or username, as well as in the bio text. This is how users can know they are in the right place — your page content may be interesting to them.
- your advantage in the bio text. This is the main reason for users to subscribe to you and not to another fitness influencer.
"Fitness" and your competitive advantage are the bare minimum you need in your bio to gain followers and become a fitness influencer or gym influencer. If you want to make this process to go faster and get paid as an influencer, then you also need the right link in your bio. Below we explain where it should lead to.
You have to post regularly to steadily get followers and finally become a fitness influencer on Instagram and other social platforms. Create a content plan to always know what to post next and prepare the visuals and text in advance.
Decide what and how often to post. Analyze your competitors on the chosen platform for this. Pay attention to:
- what posts get the most likes: their format, topics, hashtags. This is what you should post.
- how often posts are added on average. This is the frequency you should start with.
Create a content plan considering what you've learned from the competitors. Choose the dates for posting. Write a post topic for each date. Here are over 200 fitness post ideas to try.
Then, you need to stick to your content plan — create posts and add them to your profile timely.
Now that you know how to gain followers and become a fitness influencer, it's time to get to what it's all about — making money. Here's what you need to become a paid fitness influencer:
- Choose one or several ways of making money.
- Create a landing page for the chosen method.
- Add the landing page to your social accounts.
Below we describe all the stages in detail.
There are different ways to become a paid fitness influencer, choose what's good for you.
You can become a sponsored fitness influencer and make money by advertising fitness brand products. A brand may pay for a sponsored post or for the number of products purchased on your recommendation. Keep in mind that brands may have requirements that you must meet to collaborate with them. The requirements may include a minimum follower count or engagement rate, among other criteria.
Here is how you can find a brand to become a paid fitness influencer:
- monitor platforms for influencers. These are the platforms where brands add products that they want to be advertised, as well as collaboration requirements and terms. Start monitoring from platforms like Creator.co, there are various offers including those for small bloggers without requirements like minimum follower count or engagement rate.
- approach brands. Contact brands with a collaboration offer. At the beginning of your fitness influencer journey, choose small brands and make sure you can justify the price you request for advertising. This way you have a higher chance to get the offer accepted.
Make purchasing the product you advertise simple so that users do buy it. Create a landing page with the product photos, description, and link for purchasing. Add this landing page to your social bio. A user who wants to buy the product can easily find the link and buy.
We also recommend adding your social media kit to your bio. Once you have become a successful fitness influencer, it is brands who initiate collaboration. If you have a social media kit in your bio, then brands can easily find out everything they need about you and contact you to make an offer.
If your mindset is entrepreneurial, you can earn money by selling your own fitness product, or even several products. It can be a merch cloth that feels comfortable when one is exercising, a protein snack, or you can sell a digital product as well, like a training plan, or something else. Check these fitness digital product ideas.
You don't have to measure up to someone's requirements for a minimum number of followers or engagement rate to become a paid fitness influencer with your own product. However, the more engaged followers you have, the more you sell.
Keep up the quality standard. While you are starting to grow as a fitness influencer or gym influencer, users do not trust your product yet. It is important to build trust by maintaining a high quality of your product.
Create a landing page for your bio, more about this below. Add product photo and description to the page, and also a payment form, and contact buttons. Post about your product and invite users to buy it through the link in your bio.
Choose an affiliate program and get paid for every purchase made through your affiliate links. Consider different programs, and choose a program with requirements that you meet. For example, if you have at least 500 organic followers, you can make money with Amazon affiliate marketing on Instagram. Up-to-date requirements and terms are here.
Get all your affiliate links together on a micro landing page and add this landing page to your social bio. Post about affiliate fitness products in your profile and invite users to buy them through your affiliate links. Direct users to the landing page, where they can find all the affiliate links.
You can make money by allowing brands to show their ads while users are viewing your content. Many social platforms offer partner programs that you can use to become a paid fitness influencer. These platforms show brand ads between or in your posts.
Study the social platforms' partner programs for content monetization and their requirements. For example, content monetization on X (Twitter) requires at least 500 active followers, up-to-date information is here. And content monetization on YouTube requires at least 1 thousand followers, and 4 thousand watch hours or 10 million Shorts views, up-to-date information is here.
Invite users from all social platforms to view your monetized content. Place links to the content on your landing page, and link to the landing page in the bio of all your social profiles. Invite users to go to the page to check the latest YouTube video or X (Twitter) posts, and so on.
If you are going to become a fitness influencer who also posts to a blog on your own website, then choose an advertising network and add its banner to the website. The advertising network will show contextual advertising on them.
Your way to become a paid fitness influencer is clear now. But let's pause dreaming about millions of dollars for a while, and get back to the reality of the work that must be done before you get your millions.
Create a landing page and link to it from your bio. On Taplink, you can create it using design templates for fitness influencers that make page creation as quick as 10 minutes. They provide everything you may need to become a paid fitness influencer:
- links for affiliate products and your products on any website.
- application and payment forms to accept orders and payments independently of a marketplace and without creating a shop website.
- links to social networks and platforms to invite your audience from all over social media to the platform where your content is monetized.
- photos and videos to get users interested in your content and persuade them to subscribe to you.
Also, you have various page design and theme settings on Taplink that allow you to make your page look exactly what you want.
The page we show in this guide is made on Taplink. Follow the link to view the full page.
Create a page on Taplink to become a paid fitness influencer:
If you have any questions, you can always find answers in our guide on building a website for fitness trainers.
When you have created your fitness influencer page, add it to your bio on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter), LinkedIn and other social networks.
Since you claim your social media presence is a way to become a fitness influencer, you should walk the talk. Here are a few things you have to do regularly in your fitness profile.
High-quality content is essential when you grow as a fitness influencer. If users like what they see, they subscribe and remain with you. High-quality content here means:
- clear and beautiful visuals. All colors of a visual work well together. The objects in a video are easily identified without peering. The frames in a video change quickly and smoothly.
- clear audio. Words are audible. The volume is aligned throughout the track. The volume also should be high enough to make sounds and words easy to recognize, but not that high to cause discomfort. This applies to both independent audio tracks and audio tracks in videos.
- readable texts. Use simple words and short sentences. Break long texts into paragraphs of maximum 4 lines, where each paragraph is a single thought. Every thought should be comprehensible immediately after reading the paragraph, without further thinking.
Increase your reach rate so that more users of your target audience know about you. The more of them know about you, the more of them subscribe. This is how you can increase your reach to become a fitness influencer:
- add hashtags to your posts. Then, your posts will be shown not only to your followers but also to users who haven't subscribed to you yet.
- collaborate with fitness influencers. Choose influences whose followers count is close to yours — they are more likely to agree for collaboration without payment. Go live stream together, tag each other in Stories, and create collaborative Instagram posts. This is how you can reach their followers, who are your audience too.
- communicate in the comments. Be active in the accounts of other fitness influencers and your followers. Comment on their posts and respond to others' comments. This is a good way to be visible to your audience.
If you create a new Instagram profile for posting about fitness, link to it in your old Instagram profile's bio. Thus, you can easily get your first followers.
When you want to become a fitness influencer, your aim is not just to gain as many followers as possible but also to keep them engaged. Motivate users to like and comment on your posts, react to Stories, and so on:
- post engaging content: ask users for their opinion, ask them to send a reaction or reply, vote, and so on.
- communicate in the comments and messages. Comment on other people's posts, respond to user comments in your and other users' accounts and respond to the followers' messages.
High engagement helps you be a successful fitness influencer because it causes an increase in your:
- reach. High engagement is a sign for the networks' algorithms that your content is interesting to the users. So the algorithms show your content more often to these users and to similar users who may like your content too. And as we already know from above, higher visibility means more followers.
- income. If you advertise brand products, your revenue is higher because you can request a higher price for advertising. If you promote affiliate or your products, or you monetize content, then your revenue is higher because your ad posts are shown to users more often.
- followers' trust. Communication is an opportunity to show that you are interested in your audience, and that you are open and honest with it.
Now you've got on the track to success and can rest assured you will become a fitness influencer. However, you still have to regularly check your course and build the best routes.
Analyze your social accounts' statistics. For example, if you decide to become a fitness influencer on Instagram, then use Instagram Insights, here we explain Instagram Insight metrics.
Adjust your content plan to your audience. Find out what posts get the most likes, views, and comments. Include more of such posts in your content plan. Add them instead of the posts that get the least likes, views, and comments.
Experiment with the post topics to become a health and fitness influencer. Try new topics in the content plan. You can find ideas in the comments and among your competitors' posts. Analyze your account statistics to know how your audience reacts to the experimental posts. If it engages, then add such posts to your content plan regularly.
Figure out your best posting frequency. Try posting more often, then try posting less often. Check the statistics to know what frequency is associated with the highest engagement. Post with this frequency.
Become a fitness influencer in 6 steps:
- Choose a niche that you know well enough to post regularly.
- Find your competitive advantage that will make users want to follow you.
- Come up with a brand voice and keep to it when interacting with your audience.
- Choose a platform where users are interested in your niche and where you have little competition.
- Make your social bio that attracts followers.
- Create a content plan and stick to it.
Your work as a fitness influencer doesn't end at the 6th step. If you want to be a successful fitness influencer you should keep an eye on your account statistics to figure out the most interesting to your audience topics and adjust your content plan accordingly. Also, you should keep to the plan and add high-quality posts to your page. No less important is to keep communication with your audience.
We believe that you can become a successful fitness influencer and make money doing what you like. It takes time and effort, but they completely pay off and you will get another proof of that every day!