Health and Fitness is an undeniably huge market – over $22 billion according to the IHRSA. And with obesity continuing along a path of epidemic proportions, there's an opportunity to get involved in an industry that can have a profoundly positive effect on people’s lives.
If you are passionate about health and fitness, then a membership based website might just be a great way for you to serve your community, and in the process, make a decent living.
MemberPress can provide you with all the tools you need to create a great membership site. By removing many of the technical challenges, you’ll be able to spend more time focused on helping your members achieve their goals and building your business.
You might be wondering which areas to focus on when it comes time to build your membership site? Where are your time and energy best spent and which activities will be the most beneficial to your business? It’s like squatting vs dumbbell curls, right? The former has a much higher ROI when it comes to improving your overall conditioning.
That's what we want to talk about today – how to build a thriving membership-based health and fitness website by focusing on what's important.
Ready, Fire, Aim
For under $150 you could launch a membership based fitness website today. So what exactly are you waiting for?
“Ready, Fire, Aim” is probably a phrase you are not unfamiliar with, and it applies as much to your membership website as it does to fitness. The cold, hard truth is that most people will never start and stick with a fitness routine and most trainers will never get around to starting their membership site. They allow some irrelevant factor to stand in their way. They’re content to start tomorrow. But we all know that tomorrow never comes.
Don’t worry about your competition. Sure, there are hundreds of thousands of personal trainers out there. But just like your clients, very few are motivated enough to take action.
Don’t worry about technology: MemberPress makes it pretty easy and offers awesome support along the way.
Last but not least, don’t worry about whether or not you think you can do it. Just getting started is the most important step you can take.
Focus on Building a Strong Community
Your community isn’t just important, it’s everything. Building your community is not something you’re going to accomplish overnight – gains are going to be hard-fought and earned. There are three areas you can focus on to make the process easier:
- Be accessible. – Great community leaders spend more time championing their members than themselves.
- Be humble. – Nobody likes to be talked down to. Impart your experience, but make sure you treat your members as equals.
- Be real. – As much as you try to treat your members as equals, chances are they'll still look to you as a leader. Being open, honest, and transparent is what will earn you respect.
Be Inclusive as Well as Exclusive
MemberPress provides you with the ability to create customized access rules – take advantage of those capabilities. Here’s an idea to consider:
A unique aspect of membership is that it can create a feeling of exclusivity. Having created an exclusive group of members, you'll be in a better position to create a tight-knit community. But not everyone is in the position of being ready to become a paid member.
Using the Access Rules in MemberPress, you could build two or more levels of membership. The first level of membership is inclusive – it’s available to everyone for free. Having a free membership sounds silly, but it brings people into your circle of influence and creates something that, while free, is also exclusive.
Of course, you have to get paid at some point in time. So you should also create a second, paid level of membership. This can be a place where you provide more value. Think along the lines of access to workout routines, nutrition programming information, or even direct access to you on a consultation basis.
The point here is to use the tools available and to make sure you’re not excluding people just because they aren’t ready to commit to a paid membership today. People's situations change and once they see the value you are providing for free members, they'll be more inclined to pay for more access.
Provide Value to Your Members
Stale content is a membership site’s worst enemy. The more content you can provide and the more valuable that content is, the longer you’ll be able to keep members around.
Take advantage of MemberPress's drip feature to release content over time. Doing so stops you from delivering the whole package up front. You want to avoid delivering access to all of your content at the time of purchase. You want to avoid a situation where members are signing up, grabbing all the information they want, and then cancelling their memberships.
Not only is turnover or membership churn like this bad for your business, but it prevents you from being able to help your members on a long-term basis. They will more than likely have questions at some point in time and that’s your real opportunity to develop a stronger relationship with them and demonstrate your worth.
Beyond dripping content, you should also make sure you are always focused on creating new content, interacting with members, and providing as much ongoing value as possible
Monetize Sooner Than Later
Many people are afraid to monetize and as a result, they put it off. The funny thing about monetizing is that the longer you delay, the more difficult it becomes. You don’t want to be in a position where members become accustomed to receiving all your high value content for free.
You can always start with a free membership to get the ball rolling, but make sure people know you’re developing a paid subscription that will provide more content and a higher level of service. This way it’s expected and never a surprise.
Conclusion
The barrier to launching a fitness membership website is low. Using tools like WordPress and MemberPress, you can get started relatively easily and inexpensively.
Here are the key points to remember:
- The health and fitness industry presents a huge opportunity. Most people will never take action so don’t be afraid to get started. As soon as you do, you’ll already be ahead of most of the competition who are still planning and dreaming.
- Focus on building a strong community that is both inclusive and exclusive.
- Provide ongoing value to your members. Provide them with the support and tools to become stronger, faster and healthier. Build relationships and your membership will grow over time.
- Don’t be afraid to monetize. MemberPress provides multiple payment gateways which make the process easy. Nobody expects you to work for free, so don’t.
If you’re in the process of building a fitness membership website using MemberPress, please share your experiences below.
image credit-1: Pixabay
image credit-2: Pixabay
EN 
ES 
FR 
DE 
PT 
The insights on health membership sites from MemberPress are invaluable. The article superbly highlights the energy and possibility of using MemberPress to construct high-quality health membership sites. The real-world examples and success memories add a non-public touch, making it even more inspiring. Kudos to the crew for sharing such informative content material that showcases the impact on and versatility of MemberPress in the fitness industry. Keep up the brilliant work!