This OriGym guide will cover everything you need to know about sharing your ideas and experiences online while generating an income. By following the 12 steps below, you can turn the idea of fitness blogging into a viable career path.

Table of Contents

• Step 1 – Choose A Niche
• Step 2 – Find A Memorable Name
• Step 3 – Find The Right Hosting
• Step 4 – Work With An SEO Agency
• Step 5 – Identify Relevant Topics
• Step 6 – Do Keyword Research
• Step 7 – Write In-Depth Content
• Step 8 – Structure Your Content Effectively
• Step 9 – Enhance Your Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
• Step 10 – Publish Your Posts The Right Way
• Step 11 – Outreach For Exposure And Backlinks
• Step 12 – Monetise Your Fitness Blog With Services
• Before You Go!

Step 1 – Choose A Niche

The initial stages of starting a fitness blog are often where things go wrong. Taking the time to do some preliminary research and analysis is crucial if you want this venture to succeed.

The majority of aspiring fitness bloggers go wrong in the brainstorming stage by failing to choose an appropriate niche for their blog. Instead, they choose a topic such as ‘fitness’, which is far too broad and generic.

To make your fitness blog successful, you need to pick a niche within a specific area of health or fitness. This could include:

• Yoga
• Running
• Triathlon training
• Bodybuilding

The list is truly endless. What matters is that you pick a niche and create a reputation as an expert in that area. For that reason, it’s a good idea to choose a niche in an area of personal interest or experience.

Example – Gretchen’s Vegan Bakery

Vegan baker Gretchen Price runs a successful health and fitness blog that solely focuses on vegan recipe ideas.

Having built a reputation as a vegan recipe specialist, Gretchen’s website now gets hundreds of thousands of clicks and subscribers. Her health and fitness blog has been such a hit that she has even gone on to write a book, be featured in vegan food magazines, and monetise her health and fitness blog to make it her primary income.

Had Gretchen just focused on ‘nutrition’ or recipes’ as the topic for her blog, her name would have been drowned out by the hundreds of other blogs trying to stand out in the sector.

Instead, she exclusively shares vegan recipes and posts specifically about her plant-based lifestyle. It’s no wonder she’s one of the biggest names on the web within this domain!

Another good way to create authority in a niche is to complete a relevant qualification. Let’s say your blog is about muscle-building recipes. In this case, it might be a good idea to complete a Sports Nutrition Course to back up your claims. Or if you want to write a blog sharing fitness advice, you should become a qualified personal trainer.

Step 2 – Find A Memorable Name

The next step towards creating a fitness blog is to choose a name. The name of your blog can be anything you like. You can use your own name or a name affiliated with your chosen niche – it just needs to be memorable!

For example, nutritionist and strength coach Steph Gaudreau has successfully utilised her own name for her fitness blog. On the other hand, fitness blogger Faya Nilsson has been just as successful in creating her branded, memorable fitness blog named Fitness on Toast.

Good branding is essential when setting up a fitness blog. It’s what separates you from other similar blogs and shows people that you are professional and they should listen to what you have to say.

The key to good branding is consistency. When creating a fitness blog, you need to ensure you carry the same theme, ethos and quality across the entire web. That includes your fitness blog as well as your social media profiles and third-party sites, such as guest blogs.

Reserve Your Domain Name And Social Media Usernames

Before you decide on a name for your blog, you need to make sure it’s actually available as a domain name. You can do this using a site like GoDaddy.

With fitness blogging domain names, there are some small rules of thumb that are good to follow to ensure your domain is the best fit for you:

• Use your brand name in the domain
• Make sure the name is easy to type
• Ensure your brand name is easy to say
• Keep your domain short
• Choose a memorable name
• Take the ‘.com’ option if available

Next, check to see whether the name is available across all relevant social media channels including Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, and any other platforms you might want to use. Remember: consistency is key.

There’s nothing worse than thinking of a distinguishable brand name and creating your blog, only to realise that you’re stuck with “FitnessJungle9” as your Instagram or X handle – if you think Fitness Jungle is a good name, that is!

Trademark Your Name

Trademarking your brand name is a good idea for two reasons. Firstly, it means nobody else can use your brand name, but secondly, it also protects you from having to rebrand if anyone else tries to use the same brand name as you.

In fact, this actually happened to us here at OriGym. Another company tried to utilise “OriGym” as their brand name. Unfortunately for them, it is a trademarked term and they had to change not just their name, but all their banners and signage, social accounts, branded gym equipment and more.
The moral of the story? Failing to trademark your brand name – or accidentally using a trademarked name – can be a costly affair.

Step 3 – Find The Right Hosting

Think of building a website in the same way as building a house. If you utilise a free website hosting services such as Wix or the equivalent, it’s like renting a property – you don’t actually own it. These are called hosted platforms, and they are a big no-no if you’re serious about making money from fitness blogging.

There are many reasons that hosted platforms are best avoided if you’re looking to start a fitness blog, including:

• Google doesn’t like these websites
• Slow loading speeds
• Poor aesthetics
• You do not own the domain
• Can’t add non-Wix supported features
• SEO helps the free website, not yours
• Lose SEO backlinking revenue streams
• Lose AdSense revenue stream
• Wix is not really free

To get started properly, your website needs to be self-hosted. This will give you full control of your website domain, which then allows you to start making money from fitness blogging.

Choosing A Self-Hosting Platform

WordPress or Magento are probably the two most popular and effective website-building platforms and both will give you what you need for starting a top fitness blog.

Here’s how to start a fitness blog using WordPress, as this is the most popular platform:

• Go to WordPress.
• Click the “Get Started” button.
• Create an account.
• Check your inbox to activate your account.
• Put your fitness blog name in and tell WordPress what the blog is about.
• Enter your registered domain name and select “I own this domain” when it says that the domain is taken. If you have not registered your domain yet, you can do so in this step.
• Depending on which option you selected in the previous stage, you will then be prompted to either switch the domain over to WordPress or to select  a domain to build on.

For our example, we will assume that you haven’t got your domain yet, so decide your domain and press select once you’re happy, as  shown below:

• The next step is to select the plan most suitable to you. You will be presented with the choice of three plans: Blogger, Personal, and Premium. If you want to make money as a fitness blogger through AdSense, ensure the premium option is selected.

• Once you have selected a plan, you will then be prompted to fill in your personal information before pressing “continue to checkout”.
• Put in your card details and you’re all set!

Step 4 – Work With An SEO Agency

Now you have your domain name and hosting sorted, the next step is to make a start on building your fitness blog – or having it built for you.

While WordPress provides its own website builder tool, it can be difficult to get your website looking exactly how you want it to. Let’s face it, you are probably not both a graphics designer or a qualified web developer – chances are that you’re neither!

Instead of going it alone, your best option is to find an SEO agency that also offers web development. They will not only design a visually pleasing website, but they will also engineer it to be easy to find on search engines.

Picking The Right SEO Agency

Like most things in life, quality differs from company to company with SEO agencies. If you want to find a good SEO agency to help you create a fitness blog, here are a few things to look out for:

• Do they have plenty of case studies or success stories?
• Is there a gallery of websites they’ve created?
• Have they won any awards?
• How long have they been trading?
• Do they have good reviews on Trustpilot or Feefo?
• Are they a Google partner?

Once you have got your website up and running and looking the way you want it to, the next thing you need to think about is your content. Keep reading because we’re about to explain how to rank your articles to the top of Google!

Step 5 – Identify Relevant Topics

Before you jump head-first into writing the first post for your new fitness blog, there are some key fundamentals and core practices that you must understand before you share a blog post online. Trust us – failing to follow these practices will be a waste of all the effort that you’ve put in so far.

Firstly, we mentioned earlier about writing content for your health and fitness blog that makes you an authority figure. Some key points to keep in mind include:

• Ensure that you stick to topics within your niche
• Carry out topic and keyword research before you start writing
• Create a content structure for your fitness blog
• Promote your content (don’t just post and hope for the best!)
• Get backlinks

Don’t panic if you don’t know what any of the above bullet points are referencing. The purpose of this article is to answer all of those points for you and provide a step-by-step guide to ensure your success.

How To Find Trending Topics

When deciding on topics to research for your articles, it’s a good idea to see what is trending right now. What does your audience care about? What are they searching for?

Using a few of the following sources you can soon find trending topics:

• The news
• Fitness forums
• Social mentions
• Trending topics on social platforms and in groups (e.g., Facebook groups)
• Google Trends

However, the most powerful and effective way to find relevant topics is to manually search and monitor other fitness blogs to find topics that your audience would be interested in too.

To do this, pull up 10-20 fitness blogs on a similar theme to your own and then go down the last 10 blog posts for each website. You will soon see topics that reoccur from one website to another. This can now become the focus topic of your article.

Step 6 – Do Keyword Research

When starting a blog, one of the most important components is the inclusion of keywords within your articles. “Keywords” are words or phrases that summarise or define your article’s content. These keywords are commonly typed into search engines, such as Google or Bing, by users looking for content on that particular topic.

When starting a health and fitness blog, the first step in actually writing content should always be to find the right keywords to target in your blog post. To do this, you will need a keyword discovery tool, such as Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner or Moz.

When looking for a keyword for your fitness content, you want to find a keyword that has the following:

• Low keyword difficulty score
• Medium/low traffic
• Relevant to your trending topic

Let’s look at these steps in more detail.

Keyword Difficulty

Finding the keyword difficulty score on Google Keyword Planner is really simple. The tool will simply tell you whether a given keyword has low, medium, high or very high difficulty.

On Ahrefs it is also very simple, but the results are a little more granular. It provides keyword difficulty scores from 0-100. Anything above 30 is considered very hard to rank for.

Each platform has its own metric scores for this, but the more time you spend using the platform, the easier it gets to really understand what you are looking for. The key thing is to identify relevant keywords with a low difficulty score, as you will find it easier to rank well on search engines for these terms.

Medium / Low Traffic

When starting a fitness blog, you want to find keywords where the traffic is in the middle or towards the low end. For example, let’s say you want to write health and fitness content about yoga, and you’re looking to start a yoga blog. If that is the case, it would make sense to write an article on yoga poses.

However, a bit of research on Ahrefs shows that ‘yoga poses’ is a bad choice as it’s a ‘super hard’ competitive keyword with a high search volume and a keyword difficulty score of “73”.

This means you would be competing against tons of yoga blogs as well as big health and fitness sites such as Men’s Health. All of these sites will have extremely authoritative domains, so you’re unlikely to outrank them.

Using Ahrefs, you can search the ‘Matching Terms’ category for alternative suggestions. As you can see below, each keyword suggestion is accompanied by a keyword difficulty (KD) score and a volume demonstrating traffic flow:

You can then search by traffic and scroll down the suggested list until you find a suitable keyword that has decent traffic but a low keyword difficulty.

In the list above, you can see four keywords that we found in under 30 seconds using this approach. This suggests that “2-person yoga poses” might be the right keyword for your first blog post.

Step 7 – Write In-Depth Content

When thinking about how to start a fitness blog, you may not have considered the length of your content to be a big deal. However, according to a study by Semrush, blog posts that are 3000+ words generate the most organic search traffic.

This means that writing long and in-depth fitness content gives you a higher probability of ranking well. And when you think about it, it makes sense! Users want to find all the answers in one place, and long content allows all aspects of a topic to be covered.

In-depth content also increases dwell time. This simply means how long someone stays on a website once they click through from search results. It’s one of Google’s top 3 ranking factors so the longer your average dwell time, the better.

You don’t need to be an SEO expert to understand that the longer an article takes to read, the more time the user spends on the page. This is why when starting your fitness blog, you need to create topics that you can write a lot about.

Tips For Writing In-Depth Content

1. Avoid fluff and long-winded introductions. Just because an article is long, does not mean that it should be packed with fluff. Fluff is what makes users click back and find what they are looking for from another website. Instead, be concise with your points whilst still providing in-depth answers, actions or tips to keep users engaged and reading for longer.
2. Use bucket brigades. Bucket brigades are bridging words or phrases from one paragraph or topic to another. These phrases are massively important for improving your fitness blog’s dwell time. Phrases like “‘this next point is particularly important” are a great way to keep the reader engaged in longer posts.
3. Creating information gaps. Information gaps are where you provide part of the answer for the reader, but don’t reveal the key factor until later. Information gaps make readers keep reading until they are satisfied that they have found the answer to what they are looking for.

Step 8 – Structure Your Content Effectively

There is no wrong or right way to structure articles per se, but there are proven article structures that help drive traffic and get you social shares, mentions, and backlinks.

A backlink is where another website links to your website, and it is considered Google’s number one ranking factor.

Below are some ways to write content that generates backlinks and creates authority.

#1 – Listicles

Listicles are articles that contain lists – it’s that simple! Listicles are extremely easy to put together and they help you get a ton of backlinks to boost your domain authority, plus they generate traffic.

For example, we wrote a listicle article targeting the keyword ‘best yoga studios’, which generated 15 backlinks:

The beauty of this kind of article is that those included in the blog post see it as an achievement to be named one of the UK’s best yoga studios. As a result, they almost always share it with their audience and many even reference it on their website.

This in turn generates backlinks which helps with rankings and boosts traffic to the page too.

This technique works for many different keywords. To do this type of listicle article, all you need to do is find the ”best of” keywords related to your niche. For example, ‘Best bodybuilding Instagram accounts’ or ‘43 best running blogs’.

All your article needs to be is a list of each blog, account, etc., accompanied by a small paragraph or two about why they are included.

Once you have your listicle written up, you can then reach out to the individual or company included to let them know they have been ‘selected’. You can even send a link to the article and suggest how it may benefit them to reference it on their website.

#2 – Ultimate Guides

The ultimate guide approach is one we utilise a lot here at OriGym. For example, this very article on how to start a fitness blog or our popular guide on how to become an online personal trainer.

This approach works best when you have a question keyword that you can answer in detail. For example, this article is an ultimate guide in which we are answering the question of ‘how to start a fitness blog’.

Ultimate guides involve a lot of research and writing a step-by-step plan which the reader can then follow for themselves. This method of article writing generates backlinks from other websites using your blog post as a source since you’ve included all the answers.

#3 – Case Studies

We all love a good case study!

The reason why we love a case study is that it provides evidence of something being true, showing how we can achieve something and how somebody else has proved that it is possible.

For example, if you take a look at our article on how to become a personal trainer, you’ll see that we have used a case study of a previous personal training student of ours, Nicola. Case studies are great as you don’t need any impressive statistics to make people believe ‘they can do it’.

When writing for your fitness blog you can either utilise case studies on people you know or you can do as we have in our article on writing a gym business plan and use yourself as the case study!

Step 9 – Enhance Your Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Your clickthrough rate (CTR) is the proportion of people who see your post in their search results who actually click through to the page. While ranking highly for your targeted keywords is important, it’s essential that this translates into people actually reading your blog – and that means you need to maximise your CTR.

With this in mind, let’s look at some key factors that can help improve your CTR and optimise the flow of traffic to your fitness blog.

Titles And Meta Descriptions

All websites have the option to input a brief sentence or two that explains what the page is all about. This appears underneath the title in Google search results and is known as a meta description. Writing a strong and effective meta description is a great way to improve your CTR.

To improve your meta description, you should:

• Stick to 150 to 160 characters. This is because Google starts truncating past 160 characters in length.
• Include the keyword at the start. This makes it clear to users that your post is directly focused on the topic they’re searching for.

The same principles apply to titles. Putting the target keyword at the start of the title helps Google scan what the article is about. Additionally, it helps users see right away that your topic is the same as what they were looking for.

Use Parentheses And Dates

Another pro tip with fitness blogging titles is to include colons or brackets. Research shows that titles with parentheses have up to 60% higher CTR than titles without them

When creating fitness blog post titles, adding the year to your title also increases CTR as it shows your article is new, fresh and most importantly up to date!

Step 10 – Publish Your Posts The Right Way

#1 – Optimise Your Images

To ensure your posts have a professional look, it’s important to use high-quality images that are consistent throughout your fitness blog – use Adobe Stock images or an equivalent if you need to. Images also need to be SEO-optimised but don’t worry, this is actually really easy to do!

To optimise your images, simply save the file name with your keyword included. Add a general word at the end so Google knows you’re not keyword-jamming. For example, if your main keyword is “paleo diet desserts’ you could save it as “paleo diet desserts image” or “paleo diet dessert table”.

You should also include secondary or supporting keywords in your images. For example, you could save an image as a “Paleo chocolate dessert image”.

#2 – Keyword Density

The keyword density throughout a post should be around 1-2% maximum. That means that, on average, you should include a keyword for every 100 words of your article.

Normally, a density higher than 2% constitutes keyword jamming and gets penalised by Google. Keywords should be weaved naturally into your text as opposed to being forced in – ideally, the reader shouldn’t notice they’re being included.

#3 – Internal Links

You also want to include internal links throughout your articles, directing readers to your other articles and most importantly, your sales pages – otherwise known as the pages that make you money!

Internal links help your readers navigate your fitness blog and direct them to sales-based pages where appropriate. For example, you probably didn’t notice that within this very article, we have linked to other articles, our personal training courses, and the OriGym course prospectus.

Placing internal links throughout your content is imperative as not only will it redirect traffic to your sales pages, but it also supports those pages as a backlink.

#4 – Outbound Links

Many fitness bloggers and fitness content writers are reluctant to include outbound links to third-party sites in their blogs. They see it as diluting their page rank or giving a free backlink – but this is actually the wrong way to look at outbound links.

Google evaluates your fitness blog based on who links to it and who you link to. This is why you should only outbound link to:

• High authority sites
• Trustworthy sites
• Sites with low spam scores

For example, here at OriGym we often link out to sites such as REPs or scientific studies that back up any statements we make.

This tells Google that the OriGym website only links to reliable, highly authoritative, trustworthy sites. Therefore, this site must be trustworthy too, so let’s move it up the rankings!

Step 11 – Outreach For Exposure And Backlinks

Setting up a fitness blog is hard work. Not only do you need to produce top-quality blog posts, but you need to promote your articles, too.

Promotion does not mean simply putting up a link to your new post on Facebook, Instagram and X. That is a mandatory step for any blogger or business.

Promotion means creating an outreach strategy designed to get you shares, social mentions, traffic, clicks and backlinks – all of which support your article and create social signalling to move your post up the rankings.

Let’s look at the various components of an effective outreach strategy.

#1 – Use Email Marketing To Attract Readers

One of the most effective ways to get your content seen is to send email outreach asking for social shares and clicks. If you have an existing email subscriber base, you can send out an email about your latest post accompanied by a link to the article.

Emailing good quality content to your subscriber base will lead to more clickthroughs, thereby improving your CTR and dwell time on your articles. Having your email subscribers click through to your article also sends a social signal to Google that it must be useful to the end user. This can result in Google moving the article up the rankings for your targeted keyword.

#2 – Share Posts In Social Media Groups

You’ve probably thought about using social media to promote your content, but what about social media groups? Of course, you should post your article on your social channels, but if you’re not a member of a Facebook or LinkedIn group that is relevant to your niche, you might want to change that.

Social groups are an untapped resource and can get you tons of traffic, clickthroughs and social shares. There are a huge number of fitness groups on Facebook, and the good news is that you can be a member of as many as you like.

When thinking about how to start a fitness blog, part of your outreach strategy needs to include posting in these groups. It gets you fresh exposure and engagement directly from people in your niche.

#3 – Outreach For Backlinks

As we discussed earlier, backlinks are considered the number one way to get your fitness blog posts to rank and bring in traffic, both of which can get you sales (if you are offering a product or service on your blog).

Think about this logically for a moment – who are the only people who can give you a backlink? Website owners! So, when creating your fitness blog you need to think about how you are going to get your content in front of people that can provide a link from their website.

Let’s say you are writing a listicle-based article on the best personal trainers in the UK for your fitness blog. A good approach to outreach would be to find personal trainers from different parts of the country, feature them in your listicle article, and make note of their email to outreach to them once the article is finished.

Step 12 – Monetise Your Fitness Blog With Services

Once your blog is up and running and you’ve started to attract an audience, you can begin to think about how you can turn this traffic into a steady source of income. Let’s look at some of the services you can offer to help you monetise your fitness blog.

#1 – Sell Books Or Ebooks

If you love to write, composing a book or a downloadable e-book is a great way to not just make money fitness blogging, but to do something you really enjoy at the same time.

Take a look below at fitness blogger and OriGym ambassador Lauren Tickner selling her two E-books via her website:

Here is another example by fitness blogger Zanna Van Dijk, who is promoting her new book “STRONG” via her website to her audience:

#2 – Teach Online Courses

Another good way to increase your blogging income is to create an online course that is appropriate for your audience. Here are some angles you may want to consider:

• Fitness marketing course
• fitness blogging course
• Fitness Consulting
• Nutrition Course
• Programme writing course

This is another service offered by Lauren Tickner, who we mentioned above. She offers an “Online Fitness Business School”, which is a business course for fitness professionals to grow their business online.

#3 – Become A Brand Ambassador

If you’ve established authority as a blogger within a particular niche, then modelling for a fitness brand is a realistic avenue. Brands look for authenticity and it’s a more viable pathway than people think to make money from fitness blogging.

Here is a great example from running fanatic Kelly Ruck. Kelly owns the fitness blog Kellogs On The Run:

Kelly is also one of our brand ambassadors and promotes our Personal Training Diplomas to her audience:

Having a dedicated page on your blog for brand ambassadorship and including links in your social bios for collaborations will encourage brands to reach out to you to model their gym gear, equipment, or in our case our fitness courses.

#4 – Public Speaking

If you have either developed a reputation as an authority figure via your blog or simply have a great academic background within an aspect of fitness – you’re a qualified dietician, for example – public speaking could be a great additional way to monetise your fitness blog.

Public speaking can fit into several categories, including:

• Events
• Tradeshows
• Media outlets
• Television
• News shows
• Brands
• Hosting

The amount you can earn from public speaking will vary significantly – it depends on what you’re presenting, how long for, who for, etc. £500 per day is a typical rate for public speaking, but it can be free if it’s a news broadcaster or into the thousands for some prominent brands.

#5 – Sell Products

One of the easiest ways to make money fitness blogging is to sell products via your blog. These could be your own products, re-selling other products, or becoming an affiliate for leading brands.

Here is an example of the Gym Talk website, founded by Henry Croft. He has added a shop function to his blog to increase his fitness blogging income:

There is a wide range of products you could sell on your fitness blog, including

• Supplements
• Gym equipment
• Fitness courses
• Gym gear
• Fitness gadgets
• Fitness software
• Fitness books

#6 – Offer Memberships Or Digital Subscriptions

Membership subscriptions work in a very similar fashion to selling online courses. The difference is that an online course is pre-defined in terms of course outlay and price, whereas with a membership it is continuous and the price can also change.

• You can create a membership around:
• Educational advice
• Healthy eating recipes
• Marketing or fitness blogging tips
• Monthly webinars or seminars
• Online Coaching
• Meal plans

A combination of some or all of the above would create a great membership offer. How much value you provide and your level of authority will determine how much you can make from fitness blogging via membership subscriptions.

#7 – Include Affiliate Marketing Links

One of the most common ways to make money in fitness blogging is via affiliate links. This is where an advertiser or business gives you a commission on each item sold that comes from your fitness blog.

The affiliate company normally gives you a trackable link to place on your blog as well as a full media branding pack of logos and banners you can use. And given that you will be adding supporting links in your articles anyway, you may as well get paid for them!

Before You Go!

If you’re passionate enough to start a fitness blog, why stop there? Enquire about our CIMSPA-recognised Personal Training Diploma and kick-start an exciting career as a PT. Alternatively, you can download our latest prospectus to browse the range of courses you can study with us!