As a fitness professional, you likely are well aware that there are only so many hours in the day.
Hours to train clients, hours to plan for those sessions and so on. This finite capacity of time restricts your ability to grow your income through training sessions and classes alone.
That’s why earning passive income by becoming a fitness affiliate marketer has become increasingly popular among those in the fitness industry.
Affiliate marketing is the process where an affiliate (you and/or your fitness business) earns a commission for marketing another’s products or services. In other words, you promote, and when others buy it, you get paid a percentage of each sale. In the fitness industry, the possibilities for affiliate partnerships are vast.
Affiliate marketing spending in the U.S. is expected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022, more than triple what it was 10 years earlier.
Benefits include earning passive income with little risk. (Passive income is revenue you earn without actively working.) If a fitness affiliate marketing program doesn’t work out, you can move on and find a new one. Find out more about affiliate marketing with our guide.
The following are four tips to help you become a fitness affiliate marketer (and earn extra income passively).
Determine what your following needs, wants
This is critical. You can promote a fitness affiliate partnership all you want, but if it doesn’t fit or make sense for your audience, it’s not going to go very far.
Also important to keep in mind, there are a ton of fitness affiliate marketing programs out there, so you can afford to be picky. You definitely don’t have to pick the first one you find.
Think about the characteristics and demographics of your following as a starting point: age, gender, interests, challenges, goals, etc.
As you begin to look through the programs out there, ask yourself: “Will my following really want to buy this?”
In affiliate marketing, you get paid when you generate sales, so if your audience isn’t interested from the beginning, what’s the point?
Consider your expertise and who you’re reaching online. What complements your fitness brand and could be of benefit to your following?
There are extra bonus points for going with products and/or services that you use and approve of personally. That authenticity will go that much further with your audience.
Remember that what you want to offer should be quality and something you approve of. You’ll find plenty of junk out there when researching affiliate marketing programs. Make sure you’re going with something that won’t ultimately ruin your online credibility or reputation.
Become a fitness affiliate with your chosen program
Once you’ve done the research and settled on the perfect-for-you fitness affiliate marketing program, it’s time to sign up.
Each program has different registration processes, so it wouldn’t hurt to have a top three programs that you’d consider applying for, just in case.
More likely than not, there will be an online application form. After submission, you’ll have to wait for the program to accept you as an affiliate. This typically will take up to a day or two.
If, for any reason, your application is not accepted, you’ll already have your back-up choices to try.
Time to promote
Once you’re an approved affiliate, you can begin to promote the related products and/or services. This includes the sharing of your affiliate link, which is provided by the program to track any sales you generate so that you can get compensated.
But be careful here. It’s not as simple as it sounds.
There are a few considerations you should make when it comes to strategy. The first is straight-forward: Go multi-channel. This includes (but is not limited to):
- Emailing your client list
- Creating posts across your social media accounts (such as Facebook or Instagram posts, tweets, YouTube videos, Pinterest pins and so on)
- Talking to your clients in-person
- Publishing a blog article (or articles)
The second consideration is a bit more nuanced, but it goes back to the point where you should be authentic. You want to promote products or services that you can personally vouch for, of course. But you also should factor in this authenticity when you’re actually promoting for your fitness affiliate program.
In other words, the more salesy you are, the less successful you’ll likely be. Strategize some angles for your promotion. Some ideas include (but are not limited to):
- An unboxing of the affiliate product
- Daily review updates of you using the product/service for the first time
- Hosted Q&A where you answer questions about your experience with the product/service
- How you use the product/service in your regular daily life
Measure, analysis and pivot as needed
If you’re committed to growing a strong passive income stream, then you’ll have to do more than simply post (even if you are executing a planned strategy behind the content and promotion).
Measure the performance of your posts on whatever social media platforms you’re using, watch whatever analytics are available from your fitness affiliate marketing program and monitor your overall audience growth and demographics as well.
To stay relevant and effective not just with your affiliate promotion but your overall content as well, you must be aware of your metrics.
If something doesn’t perform well, dig into the possible reasons why. If something performs exceedingly well, you’ll want to dig into the reasons why there as well.
This will help you adjust and pivot as needed according to the objective data, not just whims of what you feel might perform better.
And in the long run, monitoring your performance will help you decide on a bigger level which fitness affiliate programs are worth your effort and which are not.
While you’re exploring passive income opportunities through fitness affiliate marketing, consider DailyStory. Our digital marketing platform integrates with Mindbody and Rhinofit to better serve fitness studios and gyms and offers such features as SMS text message marketing, email marketing, automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.
