💪 How to Start a Fitness Blog (And Make Money)

Wondering how to start a fitness blog in 2024? That’s a smart move because the health and fitness industry is ripe with opportunity.

In 2020, the global health and fitness club market was valued at an astronomical $81 billion, and it’s expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 7% between 2021 and 2026.

Meanwhile, the market for home fitness equipment was worth almost $7 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach nearly $9 billion by the end of 2023.

A 2018 survey found that almost two in five people in the US had spent money on home gym equipment in the previous 12 months, while Google Trends data shows that search interest in the niche has increased significantly in the wake of the pandemic.

Clearly, there’s no shortage of opportunities in the fitness niche, which means there are lots of reasons for starting a blog.

In this article, we’ll dig into some of those reasons, then deep-dive into the practicalities of how to start a fitness blog…

1. Choose Your Fitness Blog Niche
2. Choose a Blogging Platform
3. Decide On A Domain Name
4. Buy A Domain Name & WordPress Hosting
5. Pick Your Fitness Blog Theme
6. Create A Brand Logo & Color Palette
7. Build Your Key Landing Pages
8. Bring Your Content Ideas To Life
9. Plan Your Blog Post Promotion Strategy
10. Monetize Your Fitness Blog

Let’s first start with the basics.

Why Start A Fitness Blog?

While some fitness bloggers are purely in it for the love of blogging, most get started for more practical reasons.

In our experience, these are the three biggest benefits of becoming a health and fitness blogger:

Attracting New Clients

Say you run a fitness business.

Maybe you’re a personal trainer; maybe you sell workout gear; maybe you even have your own gym. Or perhaps you offer fitness advice through an online course.

Either way, starting a fitness blog is a fantastic way to bring in new clients.

Why? Because it allows you to target valuable keywords that your prospective customers will be searching for.

For instance, Ahrefs data shows that the term “online personal trainer” receives 4,400 searches a month in the US alone:

If you sold personal training courses online, that’s absolutely a keyword you’d want to rank for.

Starting a fitness blog, creating content around that term, and building backlinks can make that happen.

Demonstrating Your Expertise

Starting a fitness blog has more benefits than driving direct sales.

Anyone with some kind of fitness business can also showcase their expertise through informational blog content.

Informative blog content gives you an opportunity to answer the sorts of questions your fitness-focused audience might be asking. Things like:

• how to deadlift
• how to bench press
• how to squat
• how to do face pulls
• how to do bulgarian split squat
• how long to rest between sets

By creating this sort of content, you get to prove that you really know your stuff.

That way, your target audience feels reassured that you’re a credible source of information, which makes them more likely to buy from you down the line.

Generating Passive Income

But having your own health and fitness blog isn’t just about selling products or services.

The fitness niche also offers plenty of opportunities for affiliate marketers to build a consistent stream of passive income.

We’ll talk more about monetizing a fitness blog through affiliate marketing later on in this guide, but in short, it’s about targeting valuable commercial keywords like:

• best creatine
• best weightlifting shoes
• best adjustable weight bench
• best squat shoes
• power bars reviews
• best shorts for thick thighs

Then join affiliate programs run by your favorite health and fitness brands, and recommend their products to your audience.

Every time someone clicks your affiliate links and makes a purchase, you earn a commission.

(N.B. we talk all about choosing affiliate programs — and much more besides — in our ultimate guide on how to start affiliate marketing.)

Successful Fitness Blog Examples

Before you start a fitness blog, it pays to take a closer look at your competitors and draw inspiration from their successes to generate some compelling ideas.

What sort of topics are your rivals writing about? What do their fitness websites look like? And how are they making money?

With that in mind, let’s take a look at three successful fitness blogger examples:

Nerd Fitness

As the name suggests, Nerd Fitness is a website aimed at people who don’t conform to the stereotype of your classic, buff gym-goer.

Rather, it’s for regular people who want to get fit and healthy in a supportive, judgment-free environment.

Nerd Fitness has a bunch of free informational content covering things like exercise regimes and diet explainers.

All of that stuff exists as a tool to sell membership site subscriptions, which give users access to a wealth of fitness-related content.

Love Sweat Fitness

Love Sweat Fitness describes itself as “a community of inspired, empowered, and motivated women dedicated to changing what living a healthy lifestyle looks like for all women”.

Founded in 2014, it offers tons of nutrition and training advice, plus a “secret” (i.e. closed) Facebook group where members discuss everything from relationships to how to wash their leggings.

The site has a couple of avenues for monetization. First, it has an app featuring premium fitness plans, with subscriptions priced from $8.25 per month. And secondly, it runs an online store selling its own health supplements and workout gear.

Garage Gym Reviews

Garage Gym Reviews is an authority site that — as you can probably guess — specializes in reviewing home gym equipment, from barbells and squat racks to kettlebells and pull-up bars.

An expert in its niche, the site has gathered a bunch of quality backlinks from sites like Business Insider, Men’s Health, and Inverse.

Its informative blog content focuses on the work required to build a gym in your own home (or garage), while it monetizes through affiliate marketing, with a bunch of buying guides and reviews targeting specific types of equipment.

How To Start A Fitness Blog In 10 Steps

That’s enough theory — now let’s take a look at the practicalities of how to start a fitness blog.

1 Choose Your Fitness Blog Niche

There are thousands (or, more likely, tens of thousands) of fitness blogs out there.

Many of them are huge, with large, well-established audiences.

How can your own fitness blog compete with the big guys (and girls)? Simple: rather than starting a general fitness blog, focus on a niche within the broader fitness niche.

In an ideal world, you’ll have at least some level of interest — and maybe even some proven expertise — in your chosen niche. To give a simple example, if you love to cook healthy meals, you could start a fitness food blog.

Next, think about the types of people who might want to read your blog. They could be:

• Busy professionals
• Parents of young children
• People trying to lose weight
• People looking to get into fitness for the first time
• Fitness veterans looking for expert advice

And lots more besides.

Don’t worry about defining your audience with too much specificity at this point — it’s more about coming up with ideas for the sorts of niches you could be targeting.

Hopefully, you’ll think up a bunch of options, so now it’s time to turn those vague fitness blog ideas into practical angles for a fitness website.

Of course, there are any number of options, but examples could include:

• A fitness food blog aimed at busy parents who want to cook healthier meals for their kids
• A site offering exercise plans for people who only have 20 – 30 minutes of free time a day
• A fitness blog for total beginners who are just starting on their fitness journey
• A review site for homeowners planning to build their own gym

Short on blog ideas? Don’t worry, we’ve got a couple of other tricks up our metaphorical sleeve.

Firstly, trawl through websites like Detailed and FeedSpot to identify examples of other fitness blogs. Find a handful that you love and use them as inspiration for your own fitness blog.

Secondly, once you’ve found a website that you like the look of, you can use it to generate a ton of similar blogs by using one of our favorite SEO tools, Ahrefs.

Unfortunately, Ahrefs isn’t free, but in our humble opinion, it’s worth every cent. It’ll help you with so many aspects of building and running a fitness blog.

When it comes to finding valuable blog inspiration, its Competing Domains function is your best friend. Simply enter one of your favorite fitness blogs, and you’ll immediately be presented with a list of other sites ranking for similar keywords:

The more existing fitness blogs you look at, the more ideas you’ll have for your own blog.

2 Choose a Blogging Platform

Let’s back up a second.

Do you really need to get started in fitness blogging at all?

Couldn’t you achieve the same results by creating a bunch of YouTube videos or starting a Facebook group instead?

If you want a detailed answer to those questions, check out our guide to affiliate marketing without a website.

Or if you’re looking for something more succinct, the answer: yes, it’s totally possible to generate fantastic results through a social platform rather than a website. 

But starting a fitness blog is better because it gives you a bunch of extra routes to bring in traffic and revenue.

Think about it. When you start a fitness blog, you can:

• Use search engine optimization to target relevant keywords and generate traffic from search engines.
• Build multiple social profiles, all designed to bring traffic to your website.
• Run email marketing to promote your latest blog posts.

Essentially, the more channels you have to reach your audience, the less beholden you are to individual social media platforms.

That’s a good thing because social algorithms change all the time. We’ve seen countless examples of big social accounts losing massive amounts of visibility overnight because of a single algorithmic update.

So it’s a better idea to start a fitness blog than a YouTube channel or an Instagram profile.

But to do that, you first need to choose the best blogging platform to publish and manage all your content.

There are myriad options available, from free platforms like Blogger and Medium, to a paid blogging platform that allows for greater customization.

As far as we’re concerned, the smart choice is to create a WordPress website (N.B. we’re talking about WordPress.org here, not WordPress.com).

Why WordPress.org? Well, there are lots of reasons, but the biggest advantages are as follows:

• WordPress.org is cheap
• It’s easy to get started and doesn’t require any advanced technical skills
• There’s tons of scope for customization, which means you can put your own unique stamp on your fitness blog
• You retain ownership over every single piece of content you publish
• There are multiple options for making money, such as joining an ad network — something you can’t do if you choose a free blogging platform
• You can use your own domain name
• The wealth of WordPress plugins — many of which are very cheap, or even free — allow you to improve and customize your fitness blog 

Want to learn more about the pros and cons of various blogging platforms? Don’t miss our guide to the best blogging platforms.

3 Decide On a Domain Name

As we’ve already noted, WordPress.org allows you to choose your own website domain name.

To be clear, that domain name probably won’t be free (at least, not permanently). At the same time, it won’t cost you the earth, with typical costs ranging from $9 – $14.99 per year.

So get out there and choose your new domain name right now!

What do you mean, you don’t know where to start?

Actually, that’s totally understandable. Choosing your fitness blog name is a pretty big deal. 

It needs to sum up who you are and what you’re about. It’ll be emblazoned on your website, social channels, email address, and newsletter. It’s the name people will type into Google when they want to find you. So it needs to be good.

While we can’t tell you exactly what your blog name should be, we can at least give you a few factors to consider. Choose something that…

Is a .com domain. There are lots of wacky new domain name extensions out there, like .fit and .coach, but evidence suggests that 70% of users don’t trust those “newer” domain types. Better off sticking with .com.

Aligns with your niche. Don’t make people guess what your blog is about. Something like myfitnessjourney.com or onlinepersonaltraining.com sets clear expectations.

Leaves you room to maneuver. Niching down too far will limit you down the line. For instance, healthyfamilies.com is a good name for a fitness blog aimed at parents, whereas healthymomswithtoddlers.com only targets a very specific audience (and is also a bit of a mouthful).

Is short and easy to remember. From Google to Facebook to Authority Hacker, the world’s favorite websites tend to have short, succinct names. Why? Because they’re far easier to remember.

Uses synonyms (if necessary). There’s a good chance your first choice of domain name won’t be available, so don’t be too precious. If healthyfamilies.com has already been taken, it’s fine to go with healthyhousehold.com instead.

Isn’t your own name. Unless you’re an established name in the fitness niche, naming your blog after yourself probably isn’t the best move, because it doesn’t tell anyone what to expect from your blog.

Two final pieces of advice on the whole “blog name” issue.

First, if you’re struggling, get some extra inspiration by using tools like Instant Domain Search.

And finally, don’t get too bogged down at this stage. You could spend days, weeks, or months agonizing over the perfect blog name.

Don’t do that.

Instead, give yourself a couple of hours of brainstorming time, write down as many options as possible, take a break, pick your favorite, and move on.

4 Buy a Domain Name & WordPress Hosting

We’ve come to arguably the most technical part of the process of launching your health and fitness blog (but don’t worry, it’s still super simple).

Buying a domain name and choosing your hosting provider is extremely important, because without it, your fitness blog will only exist in your mind. And it’s not going to get much traffic there.

When it comes to choosing a hosting company, we recommend Siteground (although there are tons of other hosting companies out there). In our experience, Siteground is affordable, easy to use, and offers strong performance. That’s all you really need.

Here are the steps to buying a domain and hosting service with Siteground:

Step 1: Head to Siteground’s WordPress hosting page.

Step 2: Pick out the right hosting plan for you. Unless you need more advanced functionality, we recommend choosing the cheapest plan (StartUp), which has everything you need to get started.

Step 3: Click on your chosen plan and type in your preferred domain name. Already registered your domain? Click I already have a domain. If not, click Register a New Domain.

Step 4: Check domain availability. As long as your chosen domain name is available (i.e. isn’t owned by anyone else), you’ll be asked a bunch of questions about your account, location, and payment information.

Step 5: Siteground offers packages ranging from one month to three years. Choose your favored option, being sure to look out for special offers on certain time periods.

Step 6: Add any extra services. Unless you’ve registered your domain already, you’ll need Domain Registration; the other two options are up to you.

Step 7: Pay for everything. 

That’s it — you’re now the proud owner of a domain!

5 Pick Your Fitness Blog Theme

To use a fairly clumsy metaphor, if your domain name was the name of a brick-and-mortar shop, your blog theme would be the interior decor of that shop.

You want it to look attractive enough to tempt people inside, while also being easy for them to navigate around and find what they’re looking for.

It’s important to pick a fitness-friendly theme. You probably don’t want to show a big box of donuts or a picture of someone lying in bed playing a games console. 

Again, your competitor research should give you a few ideas on potential design choices. On the one hand, you want to stand out, but on the other, you don’t want to stray too far from what a health-conscious audience would expect.

Platforms like Astra and Kadence can help you track down the best blog theme:

With so many quality themes out there, you’ll probably feel overwhelmed by choice. If you can’t decide on the best option for your fitness blog, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is it fast?
• Is it responsive (i.e. does it adapt to mobile devices)?
• Does it have lots of customization options?
• Does the theme builder have strong reviews?
• Do they offer excellent customer support?

Chosen your favorite theme? Now it’s time to install it by:

1. Logging into your WordPress dashboard
2. Clicking Appearance
3. Heading to Themes
4. Clicking Add New
5. Searching for your chosen theme
6. Hitting Install

One final point to discuss at this stage: what if you’re torn between the wealth of premium and free themes?

You won’t be shocked to learn that premium themes offer more customization options. 

But honestly, in our experience, you can definitely get by just fine with a free website theme. And if you need more functionality down the line, you can always upgrade.

6 Create a Brand Logo & Color Palette

There are plenty of WordPress themes out there, but it’s pretty much guaranteed that one of your competitors will have picked the same theme as you.

This is why two other design decisions — your logo and brand colors — are extremely important to your blog identity. They set you apart from everyone else — even those with otherwise similar-looking websites.

For starters, use Coolors to pick out your brand color palette. Every time you hit the spacebar, it generates a new palette, so just keep going until you find a combo that appeals.

Next, it’s time to craft your own logo.

We know what you’re thinking: “I’m not a designer. How on Earth am I meant to create my own logo?”

Fortunately, you don’t need a master’s degree in advanced Photoshop studies to design a logo. 

Instead, use a free graphic design logo like Canva to do all the hard work for you. It has a bunch of templates for you to use and abuse, including lots of gym logos:

Just remember to align your logo with your chosen color palette if you don’t want it to stick out like a sore thumb!

7 Build Your Key Pages

Your next task is building the most important pages on your otherwise threadbare fitness blog.

Specifically, we’re talking about your:

Homepage: This is the first port of call for most people who visit your site, so it needs to look amazing. Beyond that, it should explain what the website is about, and make it easy for people to find relevant content deeper into the site.

About us page: Your opportunity to explain who you are and what makes you tick. Talk through your own fitness journey, and don’t shy away from adding a little color here.

Contact page: At the very least, your contact page should incorporate links to your various social media profiles. You could also add a contact form or email address for people who want to get in touch directly.

Privacy policy: This is where you tell your website visitors what types of data you collect from them. If you’re not sure where to start, use a service like PrivacyPolicies.com.

While the layout choices and page content will require a little thought, the technical process of creating these pages is simple:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard
2. Navigate to Pages
3. Click Create New Page

8 Bring Your Content Ideas to Life

Now the really fun stuff begins, because it’s time to start creating content (you know, the whole reason you wanted to start a fitness blog in the first place).

Rather than simply plucking an idea out of thin air and immediately tapping away, bear in mind that your content should be keyword-focused.

If SEO isn’t your thing, don’t worry, because there’s nothing too complex about writing keyword-targeted content.

It’s simply about spending some time on keyword research to identify terms with decent search volumes and relatively low competition. That way, you stand the best chance of ranking highly — and the higher you rank, the more organic traffic you’ll generate.

You can spend hours (or days) on end using free keyword research techniques, like typing relevant terms into Google and analyzing related queries.

But we recommend saving yourself the time and effort by using a (paid) tool like Ahrefs, which has a Keyword Explorer function that allows you to find matching terms based on a “seed” keyword.

For instance, the seed keyword workout gear produces results like:

Of course, people are searching for “anime workout gear”. Honestly, we despair sometimes.

Anyway, you can use your keyword research to sketch out rough titles for your first 10 blog posts.

Even with this single, simple search, we’ve identified a bunch of potential posts, such as:

• The Best Winter Workout Gear to Keep You Snug
• Rock Out At the Gym With This Dwayne Johnson Workout Gear
• Legwarmers Optional: Our Favorite 80s Workout Gear

Got your titles? Then let’s start writing!

Even if you’ve written a million blog posts before, it’s worth reading the following best practices before you start typing away:

Make sure each blog post has one clear purpose. What key points do you want to communicate? Are they all tied to the central theme of your blog? If not, consider splitting it into multiple posts.

Keep on topic. In a similar vein, don’t allow yourself to veer off on tangents. A blog post about workout gear for women could also reference 80s workout gear, but if you cover the same ground in multiple posts, you risk cannibalizing your keywords, which is bad for SEO.

Remember who you’re writing for. Write in a way they’ll understand and focus on information they’ll find interesting. Unless you’re not writing for parents, don’t bother mentioning the difficulty of working out while your kids are around.

Steer readers toward relevant content. Because you’ve honed in on a specific niche, there’ll likely be some overlap between the various topics you write about. Be sure to link to other relevant posts on your site — it’s great for SEO and makes it easier for readers to find all the information they’re looking for.

Make it a two-way conversation. Rather than preaching to your readers, strike up a conversation by asking what they think about the topic at hand. They can carry on the discussion in the comments section or on your social profiles.

Breathe some personality into your posts. Remember, people want to know who you are, so don’t be afraid to throw in a few examples or anecdotes from your personal life. And try to add some emotion to your writing — after all, this isn’t a Wikipedia entry.

9 Plan Your Blog Post Promotion Strategy

“If you build it, they will come” definitely doesn’t apply to running a successful blog.

With so much competition out there, no one will ever see your fascinating nutrition tips or the best advice you have to offer on choosing a new yoga mat unless you get the promotion right.

As we’ve alluded to already in this blog post, when you start a fitness blog on WordPress, you can leverage plenty of promotional strategies. For instance:

Build an email marketing list. Has someone read all the way to the end of your blog post? That’s a good sign they liked your work. So why not ask them to sign up for your mailing list? That way, they get your latest posts straight to their inbox.

Follow SEO best practices. Beyond writing keyword-focused content, there are lots of other ways to optimize your blog posts. Things like meta descriptions, image tags, subheadings, internal links… the list goes on.

Share your posts on social media. Simple but effective. Every time you write a new post, share it on your various social channels. And don’t forget to post it in relevant Facebook groups and subreddits, which often have large and highly engaged audiences.

Run social and/or search ads. If you’re selling or promoting high-value products on your fitness blog, you can potentially afford to pay for traffic. That might mean running Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube ads, or running Google Ads targeting specific, valuable keywords.

10 Monetize Your Fitness Blog

Whether you see blogging as a way to earn a job replacement income or just a nice side hustle, you should definitely think about how your new fitness blog can start earning you a return on your investment.

For most fitness sites, there are three main routes to making money:

Whether you see blogging as a way to earn a job replacement income or just a nice side hustle, you should definitely think about how your new fitness blog can start earning you a return on your investment.

Affiliate Marketing

Sure, we’re biased. But as far as we’re concerned, affiliate marketing is comfortably the quickest, easiest, and most consistent way to make money from a fitness blog.

Even if monetization isn’t your primary goal, you’ll naturally find yourself discussing your favorite fitness gear, equipment, brands, and more.

So why not get into the habit of adding affiliate links to your posts? That way, you’ll earn a commission every time someone clicks through and buys.

Like the sound of affiliate marketing? Check out our guide to the best fitness affiliate programs in 2024.

Advertising

Another low-effort way for fitness website owners to make money is by selling advertising space.

There are a couple ways to do this:

Join an ad network. Networks like AdThrive and Mediavine display adverts to people who visit your site. When your visitors click an ad, you earn a small fee.

Go it alone and search for sponsors. Unsurprisingly, when you cut out the ad network middleman, your earning power can be a lot higher. But on the downside, it requires a lot more work on your part. You’ll need to reach out to brands yourself, persuade them to advertise with you, provide them with reporting and analytics, and find a way to process payments.

Much as we’d like to guarantee that you’ll easily find a big-bucks sponsorship deal for your brand new fitness blog, realistically that’s only going to happen if you’ve already built a large, engaged audience.

So if you like the sound of selling ad space on your site, we’d recommend going down the ad network route to begin with.

Selling Your Own Products

As you’ve seen in the successful fitness blog examples, we showed you earlier in this blog post, plenty of fitness expert bloggers make money by selling products they’ve created.

Some actually sell physical products — which is great if you’ve got the time and money to develop and build them, but not ideal for newbies to the fitness blogging world.

An easier option is to sell digital products or services instead:

Digital products. If you’re a personal trainer, a fitness professional, or someone with expert-level knowledge of the niche, you can make money from your knowledge. Create an online tutorial, offer one-to-one training, or turn your advice into a downloadable asset.

Services. People are happy to pay for niche expertise as a kind of consultative service. For instance, you might help people build their own meal plans or develop their own workout regimes (for a fee, of course).

Conclusion

When it comes to the question of how to start a fitness blog, it’s clear there are no shortcuts.

The entire process takes a lot of time and effort. And if you skip over any of the steps we’ve listed here, you’ll struggle to generate traffic or make any kind of financial return.

However, we’ve built dozens — maybe even hundreds — of blogs in lots of different niches down the years, and we can assure you that all the effort is worthwhile if you just stick with it.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, created a bunch of valuable content, and started generating quality backlinks, you genuinely start to contemplate a life of passive income.

And we can help you make it happen.

Just sign up for our free training and we’ll share the seven secrets that make new blogs 83% more successful.

See you there!