How To Start A Fitness Blog | Step By Step Guide

Learn how to start a fitness blog in just a few easy steps! Use this step-by-step guide to become an official fitness blogger in just minutes!

Note: I only recommend things that I have used and love. This post helps you set up a blog with Siteground as your host. If you choose to make a purchase using my links, I may receive a commission. That doesn’t change your price!

How do you become a fitness blogger? How do I start a health food blog? What fitness blog names should I consider?

If you find yourself asking any of these questions, you have come to the right place! That’s because this step-by-step guide is going to give you simple steps to help you with everything related to starting a health and wellness blog.

I was there once, too. Now that I have about nine years of blogging experience under my belt, I would love to help you get started in the world of fitness blogging. Being a personal trainer helps, too!

How To Start A Fitness Blog When You Have No Clue What You’re Doing

It doesn’t matter if you want to start a fitness journey blog or a health food blog.

Maybe you want to start a health blog as a personal trainer like me. Perhaps your goal is to sell online personal training packages, or pre-made workout programs and fitness printables. (I do that in my shop!)

Or maybe you just want to chronicle your personal fitness journey (I also do that).

No matter what kind of fitness-related blog you want to start, I will get you there by the end of this post!

When I was you, Googling “how to start a fitness blog and make money,” there honestly wasn’t a lot out there.

I mean, tutorials on how to start a blog are plenty, but they aren’t all fitness-specific. (Oh please, you know you want to make money.)

In fact, I have noticed that many personal trainers and other wellness professionals have considered going online, but don’t know where to start. That’s where I come in!

In this complete guide, I am going to not only do the technical stuff involved with starting a wellness blog, I am also going to help with all of the other stuff.

What other stuff is she talking about?

The other fitness blogging stuff includes things like:

Picking fitness blog names
How to be a success fitness blogger
Learning to make money with fitness blogs
How do you write a fitness blog post?
How to become a professional fitness blogger
DIY fitness blog growth
Social media stuff like your Instagram fitness account

And a whole bunch of other resources that will help you figure out how to start a fitness blog without a hitch!

You should know that fitness blogging, while unique, involves nearly as much work as running any other business.

While your overhead is nil, there are still a lot of working pieces and a lot of small details to sort out.

Like with any other business, the business of being a fitness blogger (personal trainer or not) will take time and work.

But for now, we’ll start with exploring the first step – and that is how to start a fitness blog.

How To Become A Fitness Blogger 101

Before we get into the simple steps you need to take to start a health blog, let’s take a look at a quick overview of how it works so you have the best understanding of what it means to start a fitness blog.

Here are the main things you need to start a fitness blog:

A self-hosted website (somewhere to put your content)
Written content and images that you will fill your blog with
A way to get your content out into the world (or better yet, several ways!)
Some way (or again, several ways) to make money with your shiny new fitness blog
Later on, you’ll also want to pick or create products you want to sell

Don’t worry if you don’t know what a self-hosted website is, I will explain it as best as I can shortly!

So. You know the basic things you need in order to start and become a fitness blogger. But you can’t really have the last three items without the first one! Yep, if you’re wondering, hmm, “How do I start a health blog?” the answer is firstly, you need a website.

Then you can put all of your amazing fitness blog ideas on it! (Because I know you’re full of wonderful creative things, right?)

As a fitness blogger, you can either choose to create all of your own products, or sell as an affiliate. Or, if you’re like me, you can do both!

I personally sell my own fitness challenges and workouts, as well as printables to help moms and fitness-oriented people. In the spirit of diversified income, I am also an affiliate for Amazon and a handful of other companies. (This means I promote their products for a commission.)

Lastly, I also have income-generating ads on my site. This has proven to be a good, steady source of income.

I got into the ad network known as Mediavine about four years ago and I’ve been making a minimum of $500 ever since. Sometimes, I’ve made up to $1000 a month from ads alone (and that’s with a small blog)!

If you’re inclined, I suggest reading about my exact income breakdown by reading one of my income reports.

I share all of this to give you an example of how fitness blogging can work. But it’s ultimately up to you to decide how you’ll monetize your fitness blog.

Okay, so, about starting that fitness blog.

Fitness blogging is easy to get into if you just follow a tutorial. This is where that ultimate, just-like-the-pros, step-by-step guide goes into play. Except they really are simple steps for this part.

Don’t get overwhelmed – this will be faster and easier than you think!

How To Start A Fitness Blog | Step By Step Guide

Step 1: Choose a hosting company.

From an actual fitness blogger: In order to have a fitness blog with money-making potential, you need your blog to be self-hosted. In simple terms, this just means that you own all of your own content and your site isn’t hosted by a free blog-making site.

If you make a free site that’s hosted by a free blog-making site, you run the risk of owing that company money when you start to monetize your blog. (Because you’re gonna be a successful fitness blogger some day right?!)

Because of that, a lot of companies won’t work with bloggers who aren’t self-hosted. You want to own 100% of what you create anyway, of course.

So, you NEED to be self-hosted. In order to do this, you need a company to host your site (and all its files).

I use and recommend Siteground for all types of blogs. So the first thing you’ll want to do is visit their site if you plan on using them. I highly recommended for epic customer service alone!

You’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Step 2: Choose a hosting plan.

If you’re using Siteground, simply click “Sign Up,” on the home page. I assume it would be super similar with other hosts. They recently updated their whole site to be even more user-friendly, so I’m sure you’ll be just fine here. 🙂

You’ll then be asked to choose from three hosting packages – Start Up, Grow Big, or Go Geek. Here’s a snapshot of that page last I saw it:

Do note that the prices you see on this page assume that you purchase an annual package. You get a price break for buying a year in advance.

AN ASIDE: HOW DO I CHOOSE A HOSTING PACKAGE?

If you only plan to have one site, you can choose the Start Up plan for now. If fitness blogging is your main game, this will work perfectly.

However, if you plan to focus on your blog a lot or have more than one site, you may want to consider choosing Grow Big or Go Geek.

The Start Up plan is best for blogs getting up to 10,000 visits per month, and if you are working on your blog consistently, it’s very possible that you reach this number in just a few months.

You may even reach the Grow Big number of 25,000 monthly visits depending on how hard you are working on your blog. (I am currently getting over 30,000 monthly page views, so I know it’s possible!)

Just remember that you can always upgrade – even mid-year.

Step 3: Choose a domain name.

Once you’ve chosen a hosting package, you’ll need to choose a domain name for your fitness blog.

This is essentially going to be your blog name or something very close to it. My domain name is ironwildfitness.com.

This is sometimes free with the purchase of your first hosting package at Siteground. (It depends on the name you choose and what kind of promotions are running, but it was free for me.)

How do I know what fitness blog names are available? The hosting company will let you know what is already taken.

Tip: Don’t be surprised if your idea for a fitness blog name is already in existence. You can still get fitness blogging, just be flexible. Honestly, the more I blog, the more I learn that a name isn’t everything.

In my opinion, there are some dumb blog names out there, and it doesn’t effect the blog’s ability to earn.

Simply choose a domain name that fits well with the topics you’ll write about and pick something that you’ll not be embarrassed to tell people about.

Since you’re starting a health and wellness blog, I suggest that your name imply this in some way. Your name is something that you should consider carefully. Can you commit to it for years, potentially?

(I have seen a lot of youfullnamefitness.com type of deals. This is a good fallback if the name you want is taken.)

But don’t worry, fitness blogging doesn’t have to be super black-and-white. You can write about personal topics as well as other related topics successfully, as long as the overall content is fitness-related.

Back to the domain name.

Remember that you’ll have this name for at least a year, if not longer!

It’s possible that someone will already own the domain name you want, so I recommend preparing a few ideas for this step.

I also recommend that if possible, you include keywords in your domain name.

That means that your domain name (which will be your blog name and part of your URL) tells people at least a little bit about your blog’s content.

For example, my blog name is “Ironwild Fitness.” My domain name is ironwildfitness.com. My name suggests to readers that my site has something to do with fitness (because it does) and that’s useful.

It helps me in getting the right audience to my site.

Get the idea?

Note: I recommend domain privacy if you can afford it. It will just protect your personal contact information. If you don’t get it, you may receive calls and emails from people trying to sell you web design or other web-related services.

Once you’ve chosen a domain name and finalize your payment, you already own a fitness blog! You can officially teach everyone you know how to start a fitness blog. Congratulations! Now it’s time to get fitness blogging!

See? Starting a health and fitness blog isn’t so hard! Next comes all of the fun stuff. Don’t worry, I’ll help you with all of that, too!

What’s Next?

Now that you have a website, you can start working on the rest of your fitness blog. It’s almost time to start building your content and social media presence.

This can be really fun, especially if you already have an idea for where you want to take your blog.

But first, you must set up a place to house all of your content.

I am referring to the platform on which you’ll place your blog posts, images, and other blog content. Most bloggers use WordPress, and this is definitely recommended if you intend to have a blog that is highly customized.

I do all of my fitness blogging on WordPress and have never looked back!

Siteground (and most hosting companies) are typically super WordPress friendly. Once you have WordPress set up, you’ll hardly ever need to sign into your hosting account.

You’ll only need to go back into your hosting account to renew your domain name and hosting package, or if you have any problems with your site. (I rarely do.)

WordPress is where you’ll build your site and even log in.

If you’re ready to get started building your site and customizing it, check out this video for installing WordPress within your Siteground account. You’ll be asked to create log in credentials that you’ll use within WordPress – and that’s really where the magic happens!

Building Content + Getting WordPress Ready

Once you have WordPress installed and you’re logged in, you’ll have a lot of learning and exploring to do. You now truly have a fitness blog – and how you build it is up to you.

I have a ton of resources for you, including my free blogging startup ebook. I’m sure you’ve already found a lot of information on your own.

But here is my next assignment for you: familiarize yourself with WordPress, take note of how other bloggers are organizing their sites, how they display content, etc.

Basically just take a look around the fitness blogging world and see what you think might work for you.

There’s a world of possibilities, but eventually you just have to pick an idea and roll with it in order to grow.

It will feel like you have no clue what you’re doing, but over time it will all come together. Trust me, I just taught my 54-year-old mother how to do use WordPress. She’s no pro, but it’s definitely coming together for her. 🙂

If you’re confused about how to build content and how to organize your blog, no worries, my free blogging ebook will cover all of it! Otherwise, Pinterest is a wealth of information as well.

Building A Social Media Presence To Get Eyes On Your Blog

Most bloggers use social media to some extent. More specifically, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter all come in handy.

As your next step, go ahead and set up business accounts for all of these platforms. You can start building content and followers later.

I actually only use Pinterest seriously. You can read about why I ditched FB and Instagram for serious blog marketing if you want.

It really depends on the goals you have for your fitness blog and what kind of people you’re trying to target.

By the time that all of that is done, you’ll probably feel overwhelmed and exhausted with the world of fitness blogging (if you’re anything like me).

That’s okay – it can take some time to learn the ropes and feel confident.

When you’re ready, come back and read the many articles I have for new bloggers.

Here are a few to get you building that successful fitness blog:

Otherwise, thank you for taking the time to read my guide on how to start a fitness blog!

Hopefully everything feels a little less overwhelming and I have answered all of your burning questions like, “How do I start a health blog?” and “How do I start a fitness journey blog?”

This is just the beginning!

I hope that with this tutorial you can spend less time searching things like, “how to start a fitness blog and make money” and actually get to it! I’m excited for your fitness blogging journey!

If you still have questions about starting a health and wellness blog, please send me an email or leave a comment below!

I answer every single comment/question/email! I would hate for you to leave this post still wondering, “How do I start a health and fitness blog?”

If you have anything else you think I should add to this fitness blog startup blueprint, please tell me! Or, share about your fitness blogging journey below. 🙂

How To Start A Fitness Blog | Step By Step Guide