5 Free tools I am using to Help Personal Trainers

Today’s Trainer Ascension is brought to you by beehiiv!

It is without a question that I am a fan of beehiiv.

Beehiiv’s product offering is the best in the business particularly for helping out new writers grow their content. It is a tool that I have personally referred my friends.

The beehiiv team has recently released boosts, a feature that has blown me away. Boosts allows creators to seamlessly tap into a network of thousands of other newsletters to both grow and monetize their own newsletter. Paying for new readers has never been simpler. To use beehiiv’s words:

On the flip side, if you want to monetise your newsletter, use boost to put revenue on autopilot. After adding a few boosts, beehiiv will handle the rest. When users subscribe to your newsletter they will be shown some of your boosted newsletters, if they subscribe and like the content, you get paid. It’s that easy.

There’s no other content management system I’d recommend more than beehiiv, and I don’t think they are slowing down. It is a tool that I am using for LOAD’s product announcements and this very content you are reading now. If you want to start writing or launch an easy website, try out beehiiv.

Most of the time procrastination often feels like a perk. I have recently spoken about how I am an 80% person. I use this knowledge to navigate life, and I found that Jeff’s Bezo had previously said that he makes decisions with 70% of the presentable knowledge.

I gotta say, the 20% sucks. I describe the feeling to an epic bowel movement after a big burrito. You feel accomplished with what lays before you, probably encouraged to snap it to your mates group chat. But you want to leave it at that. You don’t want to pick it up, and weigh it on the scales, find out what hex code it is on the colour chart or sculpt it into the Eiffel tower. You just want to leave it as it is… That’s what it feels like to start a project.

Well, I have a great handful of these and this weekend I ate another ‘big burrito’. Instead of recording content for my training course or finish editing some articles for this newsletter, I threw 20 hours into my app…. To quote Chris Piché (15:20 in this video), “I have so much shit in my toilet”.

This is what inspired today’s article.

I often see asked online what tools a trainer should use to run their business. Many of the answers I read are not good, I usually just recommend tools I use now for LOAD, Calendly for Scheduling & Stripe for payment. But, after using beehiiv for a few months now, there is no reason a trainer should not use it too. For what it is worth, a website could also be achieved simply using Link Tree.

beehiiv:

As mentioned, beehiiv is a great tool and is available to use for free. Once signed up you can setup a ‘publication’, give it a name, and url such as:

trainerdave.beehiiv.com

You now have a free way to communicate with your clients and a way to publish and release information on the web. I think that incorporating a blog is an easy way to create exposure for any business particularly ones which have globally reachable services such as online training.

From here I would setup the social accounts links under the settings to use as a jump pad to everything else.

You wont get access to navigation as that is part of the grow plan ($49/mo) but what you can do is write your navigation in a post and use that instead. Perhaps you can write your packages and put them as featured posts as seen below.

This is an okay starter. Again, you can use LinkTree to achieve this, and many do. However, what we get with beehiiv is mail deliverability!

Calendly:

What you probably need is some sort of scheduling service for training sessions or consultations. I personally use Calendly to schedule meetings with my trainer clients and it works a treat. I block out my availability in my calendar and Calendly reflects this on my booking page.

I would just send my clients a booking link, they then pick a time that works for them and click next. From there they would need to fill out some information and the event would then be booked and synced into my google calendar. This is great because prospects can book a time in my calendar at their own leisure.

At $12/mo, you can integrate Stripe payments directly into Calendly. This works great if you want to create a simple one-on-one self-service booking system. Earlier, this year I built a program to try and tackle this solution for trainers and it cost me a few thousand in development, but you can’t honestly beat $12/mo for a monetised self-service booking system. Plus, these events do not need to be in person, you can use Google meet, Teams, Zoom, a phone call, or set to whatever the invitee chooses.

For Calendly I would recommend creating at least 2 event types.

• Consultation - Free (Online/Phone/in person)

• One-on-One - Whatever you charge / hour (In person) Integrate with Stripe

You can then use the consultation link on your socials, or LinkTree for prospects to easily book their own free consultation.

TypeForm:

For consultations I think it’s important to gather some basic information about the user before you speak, for what it’s worth Calendly allows some basic info gathering but Typeform allows a bit more control on what can be asked. In my Trainer Ascension Bootcamp I talk a lot about processes and metrics. These two items are key to improve the service for your clients. But, without knowing pre-service metrics you are unable to acquire clear, quantitative results.

I would recommend Using Typeform over google forms as Typeform allows you to directly integrate with Calendly for free.

Do note that on the free TypeForm plan you are limited to 10 responses per month. For most, that should be okay, but worth pointing out if you plan to sling the typeform link to heaps of people. For the trainers that only collect basic information, Calendly should suffice.

Stripe:

Not too much to stay here, but if you haven’t already, I would recommend setting up a stripe account. It’s like PayPal but you can actually setup a checkout screen. Stripe allows you to receive payments for services, including subscriptions and you can share a payment link and it looks something like this.

Your clients can then pay with Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay. Its quite easy to setup and probably one of the easiest ways to get paid as a Trainer. You can also create different products and subscriptions directly in stripe!

Loom:

This one is new to me, like 5 days fresh new. I love it. I actually came across this from speaking with one of my clients. He uses Loom to give detailed feedback to his online client check-ins. I am recording my content for my training course with Loom.

I will give you an update with how that goes, but so far, its good.

Without knowing the requirements of a PT’s business, its hard for me to pinpoint exactly what tool is best for their needs. These free tools should enable any trainer, with any experience to improve their backend and reduce some administrative overhead. Of course, this was light reading and is intended to be coastal shelf of info before you wish to deep dive into any one particular tool.

Anyway, that’s a wrap for this week.

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Be good.

- Reagan

Oooo, by the way, we have started a referral program. Share this with 2 of your trainer friends and get a copy of our free PDF. More rewards will be added overtime.