December 2017 Fitness Business Update

Want to turn your passion for fitness into a business? Want to earn money online and stay accountable for your fitness goals at the same time? Check out my December 2017 fitness business report.

I wasn’t planning on talking about my blog income or fitness business goals much here on Ironwild. But the more I talk to others, the more I realize how important sharing it could be.

I started blogging after my daughter was born in 2014. My primary goal was to earn money from home. It took me about two years, but I figured out how to make $900+ per month just from my blog. I could have made a lot more (some bloggers do it full time and make 5+ figures monthly). But I got overwhelmed and my fitness goals started to take a backseat to blogging, so I took a break.

For almost a year, I focused on just getting healthy again.

But something didn’t feel right. I felt like blogging was a big, powerful secret I was keeping. It felt like it was what I was meant to do.

But I didn’t take blogging back up because I was worried that I couldn’t balance it with my fitness goals. So I gave myself an ultimatum – if I wanted to blog, it needed to be about health and fitness.

Related Reading: How I’m Using My Blog To Reach My Fitness Goals (& Make Money!)

For the sake of my mental and physical health, I didn’t want to be less committed to fitness. I decided to go all-in and become a personal trainer. (Mission accomplished last month!)

But I knew that I didn’t want to go back to work immediately (baby #2 is due in a few weeks) and I knew that I wanted to tap into the crazy income-generating potential that blogging held. I just knew in my heart that a virtual business was in the cards for me.

So I started this blog knowing that it would take some time to build and knowing that it would be mostly fitness related.

But like I said, I started talking to more people about health and fitness and realized that blogging can be more than a tool for accountability. It can be used for making money, too – no matter who you are.

P.S. This post contains affiliate links. If you choose to make a purchase using my link (at no extra cost) I may receive a commission. Read more about that here.

A Fitness Business That Can Work for Anyone

Every time I talk to a personal trainer in real life, they say they wish they had a way to make more money. They say they wish they knew how to build a website. They’re weak on social media and don’t know how to market themselves. They don’t even know about all of the opportunities there are to make money online.

Related Reading: How to Make Money Blogging

Every time I talk to my mother-in-law (who is a NASM certified personal trainer), we agree that one of the primary reasons we decided to become personal trainers is for ACCOUNTABILITY. We are ordinary people who weren’t raised in fitness but decided to commit to it fully.

Every time I talk to other people with fitness-related goals, they say they wish they had a way to stay motivated and on track. They wish they could break the cycle of doing great, then falling back into bad habits. They wish they could stop wishing. You know what I mean?

So I had this thought – what would be so wrong with me trying to help others start their own fitness-related blog?

What if I could teach others how to use a blog to stay accountable OR make money? Of course, everything is still weight-loss, mental health, fitness, or nutrition related. Blogging doesn’t have to be such a big secret, even though it feels like it is for me.

I want to share my monthly goals and income with you so that you can see how blogging helps me stay accountable for my health, income, and business. If that’s something that can inspire you, soak it up and roll with it!

Find last month’s business update here.

Every month starting now I will share two different kinds of posts – ones related to my fitness goals, and ones related to my fitness business goals. That would be blogging now, but I hope to add real personal training once this baby is out!

So if you’re looking for a way to expand your business as a health professional, or you’re looking for a way to be accountable for your own fitness goals, this is something you’ll want to be reading.

You don’t have to be a personal trainer, health coach, Beachbody salesperson, etc. You just have to be someone who has health or fitness goals.

Blog Income & How It All Works

There are many ways to make money online, but blogging is unique and versatile. There are a few major ways to make money blogging – affiliate sales, selling your own products, with ads, etc. I’m not going to go into much detail about those because I already wrote an entire post about that here. But I would like to share with you my first “income report” for this blog, even though I currently don’t have any real monetary goals since this blog is NEW.

If you want to learn about starting your own blog, I wrote this fitness blog post just to explain it.

I did, however, make a few pennies this month through social media and blog stuff. Keep in mind that I am not currently trying to make money actively, and I still consider myself in the “building” phase.

December 2017 Fitness Business Report – Income

IZEA: $3.00 (Sponsored Tweet)

InfoLinks: $0.25 (Ad Network)

Amazon: $3.47 (Affiliate Links)

Activate: $0.44 (Sponsored Tweet)

Media.net: $2.09 (Ad Network)

ShareASale: $3.20 (Affiliate Links)

Total: $12.45 (+$7.44)

(This income is based on just over 6,000 page views for the month. That’s NOT a lot of page views, but I did see some major growth over the last month because last month I finished at about 3,000 views. Not bad for a new blog.)

The Traffic & Important Growth

I know that metrics like page views are important to many bloggers – we’re really nothing without them. I was pleased to see that my page views more than doubled over last month. You can see that the blue line, which is December, is a little higher than November’s orange line. There were a few small spikes, which helped me finish the month at 6,361 page views, which was an 84.54% increase over last month.

These numbers aren’t huge, but the people who come to my site are still sticking around for quite a bit (an average of 3 minutes and 21 seconds), which is important.

On my last blog, I was able to make $900/month with 32,000 or less page views. I was able to reach that level of page views within a few months, but a few things are different this time around.

The biggest difference here is that I had to start my social media accounts from scratch, so I have about 10,000 fewer followers on Pinterest and about 10,000 fewer followers on Twitter. I’m still seeing growth so I’m not worried about those yet.

A Very Short Explanation of How Blogging Works

A blog is just a website. To own a website that has income-generating potential, a domain name and independent hosting is needed. My domain name is ironwildfitness.com and I am hosted using a company called Siteground.

Once you have a website, you can build it and write about anything you like. Your blog can be promoted in several ways (so people actually visit it) but most bloggers use social media for primary traffic.

You provide content (blog posts, articles, whatever) and people read it. You can then make money by promoting products you’ve created or by promoting for others. This can be done with links or ads that link to other brands. You can promote essentially anything. The brands or networks will track the source of their sales or leads (your blog) and give you a cut. Easy, peasy.

That is a very short, very general explanation – but you can see how it’s like any other type of marketing. Your blog is a marketing tool.

Or, if you want, your blog can just be yours to vent, share fitness goals, and connect with others.

It’s pretty cool!

If you’ve never been a blogger, it may sound intriguing but very confusing. Here are some more in-depth posts about blogging for business or fitness.

How a Blog Can Be Used to Reach Fitness Goals

Without accountability, no goals would ever be met. I plan to use this blog to share before and after pictures, workouts, recipes, and reflections PUBLICLY. I find that building a community and telling others about my goals is big-time effective when it comes to follow-through. With blogging, you decided everything that happens on your blog. That means the level of transparency and vulnerability you take your blog to is your own choice.

For me, the more transparent I am, the more people I really connect with. You can have that, too!

Do you have more questions? I look forward to sharing next month’s fitness business update with you all but want to make sure I address all of your needs, so let me know below!