The most obvious way to use your ACE Personal Trainer Certification is to train clients of course. But there are other possible paths to make the most of your personal trainer cert, either as an additional revenue stream or to expand your career beyond meeting clients in the gym all day. Here are five ideas for leveraging your personal trainer certification to increase both your reach and your revenue in new and exciting ways.

1. Offer Online Personal Training

Why limit yourself to training only those clients that you’re able to meet with face to face? There will always be a place for in-person fitness services, but the world of personal training offers more digital opportunities than ever before. For every client you train in person, there are dozens of others who could use your services but don’t necessarily live in your area.

As an online personal trainer, you can rely on the exercise knowledge, programming experience and coaching skills you already have to help people across the country and maybe even around the world. To get started, look into websites such as findyourtrainer.com or trainerize.com that help trainers organize and deliver online content to clients.

2. Educate (and Sell) Through Social Media and Email Marketing

Social media is rife with people demonstrating fitness protocols and exercises. This content is sometimes decent, but it can also be silly or risky. Instagram, Facebook and other social channels need more certified, qualified personal trainers that can provide trustworthy fitness info online.

Using your personal trainer certification to establish credibility, you could create exercise demos, fitness tips or live broadcasts that educate and motivate consumers about an aspect of fitness that you specialize in. And if you tie your efforts to growing an email list of potential leads and selling one or more relevant fitness products, you’ll be on the road to generating additional income as well. 

3. Write Articles or Blog Posts

The wider your reach becomes, the more you can help people improve their lives through activity. Fitness writing in magazines, on websites and on blogs is incredibly effective for gaining traction with a larger audience and building up your credibility as a certified personal trainer (don’t forget to mention your personal trainer certification in your author bio).

Authoring articles and blog posts (for your own blog or as a guest blogger) also helps you produce content for social media and to share with your existing clients. You could write an article that promotes a workout, shares an exercise idea, provides a series of fit tips or expresses an opinion about a health trend. The possibilities are endless.

How to get started? Most magazines or blogs offer submission guidelines that explain the process of submitting your article/blog post ideas for possible publication.

4. Speak at Community or Industry Events

If you have specialized knowledge or a high-level skill set in personal training, consider educating other personal trainers at industry events on the topics you know well. Could you parlay your experience and expertise with everyday training or working with a certain type of clientele to the role of CEC provider and conference presenter?

Or, you might deliver presentations to a consumer audience in your community. You could speak on general fitness (e.g., “How to get started with exercise.”) or specialized topics, such as running technique, fat loss or active aging.

Think about all the tips you already provide to clients and/or colleagues—it’s possible to repackage that advice into short seminars or conference workshops (or an article/blog post; see suggestion #3 above).

5. Create Programs for Gyms or Fitness Brands

There’s never a shortage of new and evolving programs in the fitness industry and at gyms. Fitness companies, brands and gyms rely on qualified fitness experts to help them develop, implement and teach new programs.

Certified personal trainers can lend their skills and knowledge to this process, whether it’s consulting with a large company planning an industry-wide launch or collaborating with a local gym that wishes to offer new programs and classes on an upcoming schedule.

Deliver the individualized programs people need to adopt long-term, healthy behaviors with ACE’s Personal Trainer Certification.