Starting a Community Around Your Fitness Brand

Bringing your users together to form a community around your fitness product achieves several important goals. If membership to the community is free or comes with the purchase it provides a value-add to the product. If there is a cost associated with joining the club it provides another upsell and potentially an ongoing, low maintenance revenue stream.

Either method will help you retain loyal customers, collect email addresses, generate free content and communicate with your “base” much easier.

Just to help you get the wheels turning while you think about how to start a community around your own fitness brand, let’s examine how a few other industry leaders have done it using a variety of approaches…

Free Communities / Clubs	Paid Communities / Clubs:
VitaLife	Billy Blanks Tae Bo
Bodybuilding.com	Team Beachbody
eDiets	Kettlenetics Kettlebell Workouts
ABCofFitness.com	The Firm Fitness for Women
Gaiam Wellness Community	Gaiam Yoga Community

Bodybuilding.com was one of the first fitness brands on the scene when it came to starting an active community built around their brand. That way back in the day when forums were the community of choice. While they still have their very active forums open to the public, Bodybuilding.com has created a full-featured, bee-hive-busy community where members show off their hard work, flirt, network, make new friends and share their secrets and advice. This particular business chose the FREE route and, in return, ensure that their customers spend more time on their website being exposed to the Bodybuilding.com brand and offers from the store. They also open up lines of communication with their customers, develop more of a “fan-base” instead of just a “customer base” and have free, search-engine friendly web content created for them all day every day.

VitaLife has done the same thing, although not quite as successfully as Bodybuilding.com. It is completely free and members can upload profile pictures, update their own blog and share fitness tips with each other, all while being exposed to Nike’s VitaLife brand on every page.

On to the paid communities, one of the best implementations I’ve seen in awhile comes from Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman partnering with yoga juggernaut Gaiam to create a full-featured online community called the Gaiam Yoga Club. Not only does this club manager to bring Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman’s fan base closer to the Gaiam brand, but it generates a semi-passive revenue stream. For $5 a week members receive a self-paced yoga program including nine hours of online video, over 60 yoga and meditation podcasts, online chats with Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman and all of the typical functions of a community including message boards, photos and networking tools. While $5 a wee doesn’t sound like much, consider if you could manage to get only 1,000 members to join and stick around; $5,000 a week in semi-passive income is nothing to shrug at. Gaiam also has a free community centered around health and wellness called the GAIA Community.

GT Media has also done well with paid communities that increase brand awareness, educate consumers on their products and generate semi-passive revenue. For instance, the Billy Blanks, Firm Direct and Kettlenetics brands each have their own clubs with membership rates of a few dollars per month.

How to Get Around “The Catch”
The catch with charging for membership is that you have to forfeit all of the free content generated by your users. After all, anyone could see the content if you didn’t keep it behind a password-protected wall. So what’s the incentive to join if you get the content for free (minus the interaction, of course)? And since search engine spiders don’t know the password to access content, all of that free, user-generated, keyword-rich, content goes to waste in terms of your search engine optimization efforts.

But here’s how you get around that catch: By dropping a little piece of code into your site you can implement what’s called First Click is Free (FCF), which Google has even suggested in their Webmaster Guidelines. What this does is allow their search engine spider to access, index and RANK your content so it has a chance to appear when people search for the topic. Users can then access that one page if they click thru from a Google search result, but are asked for their username and password whenever they try to access another piece of content belonging to the community. So now you get to charge for membership, capitalize on all of the wonderful, search engine friendly, keyword rich, free content being generated by your PAYING users and – perhaps best of all – leverage that user-generated content as entry-pages to get new, potential members interested in your club before hitting them with the upsell when they attempt to browse further.