I Spent $500 Marketing & Advertising my Personal Training Business, here’s how it went..

• Targeting: I did 8 miles within my zip code, you could spread it to 10-15 based on your city, but time is money and if a client is requesting on-location training, additional driving time reduces my hourly rate.

• Household Income: This is a must, though all households at income could use personal training, it’s the households with the most disposable income that convert the highest. And if you’re spending ad dollars, that’s where they should go. Depending on your city, set your max bid for your campaign (mine was $1), then adjust accordingly for household income brackets. For example, if the top 10% bracket is up to $1, then set a -20% bid adjustment for 11-20%, -30% for 21-30% (ie. $0.70 max bid), and so on. This is exactly how mine was setup:

You could further target as well, by age, or by gender eg. if you’re a female and you want to work with other females.

Results: STRONG. Like 3x bodyweight deadlift strong. I kept my average CPC under $1.00 and my targeting was very niche, as a result I converted 3 clients on my Gold Package ($600) for a net profit of $1700.

But I want to reiterate that Google ads are for the business who aren’t ranking organically. This is great for the short term, but you could maximize ROI by investing in SEO. A $500 investment in SEO could set your business up for the rest of your life.

Alternative: Facebook Ads – I’ve ran Facebook ads for other businesses before and I don’t think it would be a great fit for personal trainers. You could target all the same demographics, but it doesn’t beat a person searching for a “personal trainer” near them. If you do decide to run Facebook Ads I would run them in 2 ways:

1. In January – Capture all the New Year’s Resolution folks, leads to a much higher ROI.
2. Retargeting – Ever shop for something then see an ad for it later? Yeah, that’s called retargeting and there’s a reason it’s highly effective. You could set the same thing up on Facebook, you just have to be able to paste a snippet of code on your website (it’s pretty simple).

SEO Tools – Keyword Research, and Copywriting

If you’re on a $500 budget, you’re not exactly in the position to hire a SEO company… but I don’t think you need one. “Personal trainer” is a relatively low competition word and you should be able to rank your business yourself.

There are hundreds of ranking factors according to Google, that work on a number of algorithms. We know that they aren’t public, but thanks to marketers worldwide, and a plethora of case studies, we do know what the strongest ranking factors are:

• On-Page SEO: You already know that your title tag needs to include Personal Trainer and your city (eg. mine is Personal Trainer in Maui – Jay Soriano). That’s a good start, a lot of personal trainers don’t even set this up correctly. But you need to have keyword optimized content on your website as well (more on that below).
• Off-Page SEO: Backlinks are the #1 ranking factor, I mean, why do you think I’m writing this post? People searching for personal training advertising and marketing ideas aren’t exactly future clients. No, it’s in hope that one day someone will find this article helpful and use it as a resource for their article, thus improving the backlink profile of my website.
• Local SEO: It’s quite simple, you really just need an optimized Google My Business profile, and you need to start getting some reviews. That’s all you need to rank in the local 3-pack. If you want, you could build more local citations, or use a service like Bright Local to do it for you.

Here’s exactly what I bought for SEO:

1. MarketMuse $69 – The perfect tool for on-page optimization. This tool suggests content length, as well as keywords you should be using in your page/post. It also shows your “content score” vs your competitors ranking in Google. I bought a lifetime access license on AppSumo for $69. Since they feature limited time only deals, it likely won’t be available when you read this, thus I suggest their trial or Surfer SEO.
2. ContentBot $147 – I know great content is the single best thing you can do for SEO, but I actually hate writing. This tool is sooo convenient to get you a good start on blog posts. I bought a lifetime license on AppSumo, but there are plenty of competitors in this space.
3. Ahrefs 7 Day Trial for $7 – Ahrefs is probably the best backlinks explorer, this allows you to see what backlinks your competitors have and potentially replicate them. You could get away with just spending the $7 for the trial, Moz also has a 30 day free trial, but their tool isn’t as good. With this tool, enter your competitors domains and see which links you can replicate, there should be a lot of easy wins such as niche and local directories.

Results: STRONG. I was on the 1st page in Google within a month, and I convert clients every single month. This is easily the best investment you can make.

$277 on Thumbtack – To round off the $500 planned spend, I pre-funded my Thumbtack account with $277. Thumbtack is a service that helps you find service professionals. It’s kind of like Yelp, but their system is based on quotes versus Yelp is more for reviews. Thumbtack is market dependent, because in most markets they’ll rank top 3 for “personal trainer” which is where they get their traffic. Bark is another option, but I haven’t used them yet.

Results: KINDA STRONG. Like you’re benching bodyweight kinda strong. Thumbtack is great because you should get a ROI. I put this in the category as Google Ads, it’s something you run when you start, but it’s not something you keep going. Leads for me in Maui cost about $10-15, and be sure to contact Thumbtack support because you can get refunds for bogus requests.

If the customer contacts you and only you, you’ll convert about 90% of the time. But sometimes a customer requests multiple quotes, at that point you’ll have to sell a little – but you should convert about 33-50% of the time.

Overall, $500 is all I had to spend to get my personal training business up and running. And assuming you charge what the average personal trainer charges ($50-75), you’ll make that money back (plus some) in 10 sessions.