The amount you make as a personal trainer can vary based on different types of certification and experience. Learn about how you can earn more today.
Do you want to become a personal trainer? Is the fear of a low salary stopping you from making the jump?
If you’ve answered yes to both of those questions, you’re in luck.
Because in this post, we’re going to take a look at how much a personal trainer can expect to earn. We’re also going to review a few of the key things a personal trainer can do to maximize their earnings.
When you’re done reading, you’ll know what the average salary of a personal trainer and what separates the high earners from the low earners.
Let’s begin!
How Much Can a Personal Trainer Expect to Earn?
So, just what can you expect to earn if you become a personal trainer?
Well… According to some recent research, the median salary for a personal trainer is $58,318.
If your dream is to become a personal trainer, you might feel disheartened right now if that figure is lower than your current salary.
Remember though – that figure represents an average.
There are plenty of personal trainers who earn a lot more than $58,318 per year. These people are proof of the fact that your salary as a personal trainer.
But what is it that separates a high earning personal trainer, from one that is earning $58,318 a year?
In most cases, the personal trainers that have managed to boost their earnings, have been able to do so, because they’ve taken steps to set themselves apart from the crowd.
In the rest of this post, we’re going to take a look at what you can do to set yourself apart as a personal trainer.
And so, if you’d like to know how you can earn more than average the average personal trainer…Keep reading.
Identify Your Goal
If you want to achieve high earnings as a personal trainer, you first need to get clear about your goals and how much it is that you want to earn.
When you do this you can then work backwards to create a strategy that will help you reach your income goal. And you can create a strategy by acting on the suggestions that we’re going to cover throughout this post.
Based on your goals, some strategies will better for you than others. Once you’re clear about your goals, though, it shouldn’t be too hard to work out what you need to focus on and what you should ignore.
Pick a Niche
One of the best ways to improve your earnings is by becoming a specialist in a certain niche.
When you’re a specialist, you are able to charge more for your expertise.
After all, suppose you wanted to learn how to run a marathon and you were serious about achieving this goal. Would you want to work with a personal trainer who specializes in everything – or one who specializes in marathon training?
On top of that, you’d probably be willing to pay a little bit extra to work with a specialist. You’d accept this as the cost of working with someone who is an expert in a particular field. Your prospective clients are going to feel the same way, if they perceive you to be an expert in a certain niche.
It can be tough knowing what you should specialize in.
One of the ways you can make the task easier is by taking a look at the clients you have worked with in the past, and the results you’ve been able to deliver. If you seem to be doing a good job at delivering a particular result for a particular kind of client, then that’s probably the niche you should go with.
Don’t worry about picking the wrong niche. You can always make a change if things don’t work out in the coming months.
As you’ll see later, picking a niche also makes it easier to market yourself.
When you decide that you’re going to serve a particular market, it is easier to communicate to potential customers the value that you can deliver. Whether you’re doing this in the form of a blog post or a ‘real world’ conversation, everything becomes easier when you niche down.
Keep in mind, that you might also need to get specific certifications if you want to have evidence that you’re able to serve a certain niche.
Stay Up to Date
As mentioned, you don’t have to stick with one particular niche.
The world of fitness is constantly changing and there are new trends popping up all the time. You can potentially make a lot of money if you keep on top of these trends.
Let’s take the example of ‘Zumba.’
You might know nothing about Zumba. But, suppose you have a personal trainer friend in another city, who is having a lot of success running Zumba classes.
If there is no one in your city running Zumba classes, you may be able to experience a ‘first mover advantage‘ by taking action and being the first to run such classes. Because you’re going to be the only person providing Zumba classes in your city, you’re going to be the person that people spend their money on.
Once you begin to do well, you don’t even have to run the classes yourself.
You can just identify an up and coming trend and then hire another personal trainer to run the classes for you. As long as you have a system in place for identifying new trends and implementing them, you’ll be able to benefit.
Change Your Pricing Strategy
You can improve the amount of money you are earning by reviewing your current pricing model.
Ultimately, if you want to increase the amount of money you’re earning as a personal trainer there are only two options –
- Work with more people
- Charge more
If you want to adopt the first option and work with more people, there are a couple of ways you can approach this situation.
The first is to simply work with more people, using your current model.
If you are running ‘one on one’ classes, you simply run more ‘one on one’ classes. However, there are only so many hours in the day and you can only run a limited number of these kinds of sessions
The alternative, however, is to run group sessions.
When you run a group session, you’ll be able to earn more money because you’re working with many people at the same time. This is approach is scalable and makes it easier to earn more money, by working with more people.
As mentioned, there is also the option of charging more.
If you can want to earn more money, you can just increase your prices. This can be a good idea if you enjoy working with individual clients.
Keep in mind that as you raise your prices, there will inevitably be some clients who decide not to work with you anymore.
A lot of the time, this is okay, as the lost revenue is made up for by increasing your prices.
If you want to increase the odds of being able to raise your prices for the foreseeable future, it can be a good do what we discussed earlier and niche down.
Create a Way for Clients to Find You
Another way you can improve your earnings is by creating a system wherein clients find you. This helps improve your earnings for many reasons.
Firstly, it ensures that you always have work – meaning every day you are earning money.
Secondly, though, it allows for you to spend your time doing the things that actually earn you money. This is opposed to just doing the grunt work of finding clients, which doesn’t directly generate revenue.
So, what can you do to so that clients find you?
Create a Referral System
If you’re helping your clients to achieve excellent results, then they’ll naturally be referring friends to you anyway.
However, you can increase the odds that they’ll refer people by providing them with a ‘commission’ for every client that they send your way.
For example, you can provide people a commission which amounts to the cost of the first training session. If clients typically stay with you after one training session, you’ll easily make this money back in a short period of time.
Create a Brand for Yourself
The best way to do this is with the help of the internet.
As with some of the other things that we’ve mentioned, it’s easier to create a brand when you niche down.
One way you can create a brand is producing content designed for your ideal customer. Make sure you are creating content that will speak directly to your target market.
If your niche is marathon running, don’t just create a vague piece of content titled ‘How to Run Faster.’ What you should do is create something such as ‘How to Improve Marathon Times in 1 Month.’
When you create content specific content, it will be easier for your target market to find you when they’re searching Google. Specific content also does a better job of attracting attention from your target audience on social media.
Personal Trainer Paradise?
In this post, we’ve taken a look at the average earnings of a personal trainer, but also how you can earn more, so that you get paid what you deserve. There’s a lot to take in here, so don’t worry if you feel overwhelmed at the moment.
If you’re finding things a little challenging, just pick one concept and implement it. Once you have some success, move onto the next concept. Before you know it, you’ll be well on your way to earning your dream income as a personal trainer.
Want to learn more about how you become a personal trainer? Get in touch and we’ll hook you up with the best personal trainer courses!