Audience Growth

How To Become a Fitness Influencer in 11 Steps

by · Published Nov 11, 2022

If you like working out, being a fitness influencer seems just like the natural next step. Or rather, a dream come true — since you can get paid for doing what you enjoy, sharing your advice and fitness journey with others, while staying in shape. But is it really that easy to become a fitness influencer, especially when you want to make a living from it? 

In this guide, we’ll look into what a health and fitness influencer does, the specific steps you can take to become one, and several tips you can apply to optimize your fitness social media content.

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What is a fitness influencer?

A fitness influencer is someone who promotes healthy living, often by sharing their personal experience, tutorials, and advice on the topic of physical activity, dietary habits, and mental wellness.

They often create and share content through social media — for example, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube — and/or on their own blog. 

Fitness influencers with a social media presence can monetize their fitness journey by selling fitness courses and workout equipment, or by partnering with brands to promote their products and services.

Pros and Cons of Being a Fitness Influencer

✅Lucrative niche

❌Constant pressure to get in better shape

✅Great opportunities for collaborating with other creators

❌Saturated market

✅Popular niche

❌Few original content ideas

✅Make content while doing something you love

❌Potential for misinformation

Influencer vs. content creator

Content creators make videos, write posts, record podcasts, and make other types of content that they share through social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. They might earn money through the platform they post on, partnerships with brands, and other means.

Influencers make content a lot like what content creators make, too. The main difference is their goal is to build the largest audience they can so they can recommend products from brands and get paid for doing so.

That makes influencers a type of content creator, while not all content creators are influencers.

How to become a fitness influencer (11 steps)

Being a fitness influencer is as simple as creating fitness content, using it to build an audience, and monetizing that audience through partnerships with brands. But while that process is simple, it isn’t always easy. Here are some clear, actionable steps to get you from your first post to a full-time career as a fitness influencer.

1. Start right now

If you’re not a fitness influencer yet, there’s really only one thing you need to do if you want to be one. Start posting fitness content. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to find the best platform, the optimal way to film your content, and which brands you’ll want to work with. Trying to get the answers to all these questions before you start is a great way to make sure you never start.

At its core, being a fitness influencer means creating content that people will like so you can recommend fitness products to them. You can become a fitness influencer by posting your first piece of content.

So go out and start.

2. Find your niche

According to SignalFire, there are more than 50 million creators worldwide, with 93% (46.7 million) of them being amateur individual creators. So yes, the competition is fierce.

To stand out among the sea of fitness enthusiasts, and ultimately become a fitness influencer who’s able to monetize their audience, you need to know what your niche is. There are tons of niches to pick from within fitness, including:

  • Personal training
  • Yoga
  • Pilates
  • Calisthenics
  • Weight lifting
  • Crossfit
  • Dancing
  • Running
  • Nutrition
  • Mental wellness

Some of these categories can be combined. For example, yoga and pilates, personal training and nutrition advice, etc. 

If you already have experience or know that you’re going for a certain niche, proceed to research it and define your target audience. If you’re just starting out and not sure which niche to go with, just think of what you’re interested in and research several of them to decide.


3. Choose to start on one platform or many

Fitness influencers have a ton of platforms to choose from. Some are more suited to the fitness niche than others, so you’ll want to pick your platforms carefully. That’s why some influencers choose to start creating on multiple platforms at once, that way they can grow their audience in more than one place. Others focus their efforts on a single platform, only adding more when they’ve built up a significant audience on their first platform.

Here are the advantages of each method.

Advantages of starting on one platform

The main advantage of starting on one social media platform? It saves you a ton of work. You can tailor each piece of content you make for that specific platform, avoiding the tinkering and edits that come with adapting it to other channels. That means you can potentially create more content more quickly since you’re saving on the time you’d spend on multiple platforms.

With this approach, you’ll also learn the ins and outs of your single platform a lot faster than if you scattered your attention throughout multiple channels. You’ll figure out what people who use that platform like and what they expect to see. You’ll also get a feel for its terms of service and monetization options.

Advantages of starting on multiple platforms

The single best advantage of creating content for multiple platforms right out of the gate is reach. When you start on a single platform, you have to build your audience from a more limited pool of users. Sure, there can be a lot of overlap between people who scroll through TikTok and those who watch YouTube videos, but most people tend to use one platform more than the others. By starting your content journey on multiple platforms at once, you can get your content in front of more eyes overall.

By trying multiple platforms at once, you might also find you have an affinity for one of them over the others. Your vibe might be a perfect fit for TikTok, for example, while YouTube viewers might not appreciate it as much.

4. Find your voice

When you’re just starting your journey as a fitness influencer, the stakes are incredibly low. You can make a ton of mistakes that will have absolutely zero impact on your later career, meaning it’s the best time to experiment.

One of the ways you absolutely need to experiment as an influencer just starting out? Your voice.

In a crowded niche like fitness, influencers can start to sound a little too similar. After all, there are only so many ways you could film a workout video or share a nutrition plan, right?

But try to think about it another way. Every piece of content is a combination of dozens of tiny choices, from how you frame a video to the words you use in your voiceovers. When those choices add up, they make up your voice.

Want to see a few examples?

Here’s Renaissance Periodization, a YouTube Channel with almost 3 million subscribers.

Dr. Mike has a PhD in Sport Physiology and uses that expertise to cut through fads and trends. Viewers come to his videos knowing they will get accurate, factual information they can apply to their fitness journey.

Compare this to Michelle Lewin, one of the top fitness influencers out there, with nearly 16 million followers on Instagram.

@michellelewin

With this routine you will feel your legs and glutes on fire 🔥

♬ sonido original – michelle_lewin

She’s pairing the flashier aspects of bodybuilding and fitness with an open vulnerability about being a new mom and the sorts of insecurities that can come with that.

That’s the difference voice makes. Early in your influencer career, you should be constantly tinkering with yours until you find something that’s uniquely you.

5. Create content consistently until you reach 100 posts

Content creation isn’t just a single skill. It’s multiple skills rolled into one discipline. Skills like video creation, editing, posing, social media strategy, and more. Every single one of these skills is essential to becoming a fitness influencer, and you won’t develop them by reading guides on the internet. There’s only one way to build these up: practice.

The best way to practice being a content creator? Create a bunch of content. Making 100 individual posts is a big goal, but it’s the best way to get a ton of that initial practice out of the way early.

Make sure you experiment with different kinds of content, like long-form and short-form, nutrition plans and workout videos, and even collabs with other creators if you can swing them. The goal is to get as much experience as you can, as quickly as possible, while building a habit of creating content consistently. Don’t worry about analytics, followers, or engagement at this stage. Just focus on making the best content you can.

6. Review what worked and what didn’t

Once you’ve got at least 100 pieces of content to your name, you can start looking back at them to evaluate their performance. What kind of content gets the most engagement? Do you notice any trends, like when you gained the most followers and when you only gained a few? Are there types of content you enjoy making more than others?

You’ll want to use each social media platform’s built-in analytics as much as you can for this. YouTube Analytics, for example, can tell you everything from how your audience finds your content to how much of your videos they actually watch. If these built-in analytics aren’t enough, third-party tools like Buffer or Social Blade can help you crunch the numbers just a little bit better.

7. Adjust your content based on these lessons

When reviewing your analytics, try and come away with insights that go a little beyond “my numbers went up here” or “my audience didn’t like this.” Why? Because these insights will guide all the future content you make.

Being a fitness influencer isn’t just about making content and getting deals with brands. You’re essentially a marketer, building an audience that brands will pay to get access to. Like any other marketer, data and analytics should guide what you create.

These can be small adjustments at first, like prioritizing some kinds of content over others. Over time, you might even learn that a certain style of editing is more popular with your audience and make it your trademark. Think of your content as constantly evolving, with continuous adjustments based on what your audience likes best.

8. Build your audience aggressively

After you’ve built up a decent amount of content — and you’re continuing to create consistently — it’s time to get more aggressive about building your audience. After all, influencers make their living by influencing their audience (i.e. recommending products and services to them). You’ll need a big audience to make that work.

So how do you build your audience? Beyond adapting the content you make so that it performs well with your followers, here are a few more tips:

  • Collaborate with other fitness influencers: Collaborations allow you to fresh content by bringing in a collaborator with a totally different style from yours and putting what you make in front of more people.
  • Branch out to new platforms: With a habit of constant content creation, now’s a good time to expand to more platforms. Whether you started on one platform or just a handful, growing your presence to more is a good way to access a new audience.
  • Ask people to follow or subscribe: While repeating this over and over can be grating, mentioning it here and there is essential to growing your audience.

9. Become an authority

When you start your journey as a fitness influencer, there’s nothing wrong with being a beginner. Even better, taking the perspective of someone who’s just starting their fitness journey and learning along the way can make you super relatable as a creator, which is a great way to build an audience. But as you grow over time, your audience will learn to look to you for advice and they’ll start to think of you as an expert.

That’s why you’ll want to put some time into building up that expertise. You can do that in a few ways:

  • Working with experts: There are tons of fitness experts making content out there. Working with them can be a great way to learn more for your own journey as well as give more value to your followers.
  • Taking a course: Seek out courses that will either make you explore different areas of fitness or deepen your knowledge in your own niche.
  • Get official degrees and certification: Imagine how much more trust you’d get from your audience if you had a degree in sports science or a similar field? While this can be a time-consuming, expensive avenue, it’s more than worth it in the end.

10. Look for ways to make money

You’ve gotten really good at making content and you’ve built a sizeable audience. It’s time to start earning some money. If you’ve been creating content consistently for any length of time, you’ve probably unlocked some monetization options on at least one platform. If you haven’t checked, now’s the time to! You’ll be surprised how many built-in methods you have access to for earning money on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

On top of that, this would be a good time to start reaching out to brands — if they haven’t already started reaching out to you. Work on your first brand deals, recommend products to your audience, and build up your skill in this essential part of being a fitness influencer.

11. Build your content into a business

It’s time to turn this passion project into a full-fledged business. While brand deals can be super lucrative as your audience grows, they’re not the only way to make money. For many fitness influencers, the business of content creation includes these income streams:

  • Digital products: Think custom workout routines, nutrition plans, or online courses.
  • Physical products: Whether it’s a new kind of shaker cup or a line of health food, physical products are an important part of a fitness influencer’s business.
  • Merch: Having your personal brand represented on products like workout gear and shaker cups can bring in some serious cash.

6 Tips for optimizing fitness content on social media

Now that you have a concrete idea of how to become a fitness influencer, let’s take a look at some tips you can apply while building your social media profiles to grow faster.

1. Regularly interact with your audience

Like any content creator, you’d want to build a relationship with your audience. After all, your success as a fitness influencer largely depends on them.

Make sure you regularly interact with your followers. You can respond to their comments, make videos and posts to show your appreciation, create giveaways to give back to your followers, run polls on the kind of content they wish to have (and create that content), and ask for their feedback on your current content.

2. Build valuable, actionable, fact-checked content

With so many fitness influencers and enthusiasts out there, your followers will have a high standard when it comes to fitness content. 

Make sure your content is actionable and backed up with scientific evidence. Ideally, you should get certified as a fitness coach, personal trainer, or nutrition coach if you want to provide advice and make money in those niches. 

Having proper, fact-checked content plus certifications can help increase your credibility and set you up as an expert in your niche — which can attract more followers and in turn, help build your brand.

3. Set up a social media calendar and post consistently

Posting consistently can help you gain followers, as people now know when to expect your content. This can positively affect your engagement, which is something that brands look for when it comes to social media influencers they can collaborate with.

Make sure you create a backlog of content (or at least, content ideas) you can post and schedule them with a social media calendar. You should aim to have at least one week’s worth of content ready to account for any emergencies, such as sickness. 

4. Use analytics (but don’t obsess over them)

Data is important when you’re trying to become a successful fitness influencer. You need data to know what’s working, what’s not working, why, and how you can improve in the future.

Regularly report on social media metrics as you’re starting your creator journey. These include the number of followers, traffic, engagement rates, click-through rates, and more. Pay attention to the kind of content that hooks people in, and regularly experiment with your content to know what works for you.

This is especially important when it comes to partnering with brands since they need data to know whether it’s worth it to work with you. Having your results ready can also help build your influencer portfolio and media kit when you want to reach out to brands.

5. Put most of your energy into your best platform

Whether you started your content creation journey on multiple social media platforms or just one, you’ll soon start to find out which one’s your best. While you might be tempted to put more energy into platforms with smaller followings to get them in line with your bigger social media accounts, try and resist this urge. Putting most of your energy into your best-performing platforms means you’ll get more results for the work you’re putting in.

6. Collaborate with other creators

We’ve mentioned this a few times already, but it’s hard to overstate just how powerful the right collaboration can be. Whether you’re working with other fitness influencers or creators from a completely different space, getting access to their audience while having the opportunity to create content from a fresh perspective can be a massive boost to your growth.

Put in the work and you can become a successful fitness influencer

It’s not easy, but certainly not impossible to make money as a health and fitness influencer. To start getting paid for sharing your fitness advice and tutorials, make sure you follow our guide and tips to optimize your fitness social media profile.

Follow The Leap on TikTok and Instagram for more monetization tips for creators. We also make a newsletter.


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The Leap Team

The Leap team is here to share stories, advice, and tips to help you start making money as a creator.
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