An In-Depth Guide to Body-Building Blog Niches

Are you a fitness junkie who’s been thinking of starting a niche blog? 

If you answered “yes,” you’re in the right place.

Between 2023 and 2027, the content marketing industry is projected to grow by $584.02 billion.

If you’re looking for ways to monetize an audience, blogging is one of the best options.

When coupled with an effective email newsletter strategy, you can build, grow, and earn from your audience to build a powerful lifestyle business.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to start your own niche body-building blog, including practical advice on niche selection, audience targeting, content creation, and monetization strategies.

Here’s how you can get started, grow quickly, and start cashing in on your passion.

Let’s begin!

Why Listen to Me? I’ve written over 1,000 blog posts and run a niche website, Hockey Question, that’s received over 480,000 visitors since 2022. I also run Storey Time, a newsletter where I teach people how to become full-time digital writers.

Understanding the Basics of Body-Building Blogs

If you want to earn from your body-building blog, you first need to understand how blogs work.

The basic premise of a blog is providing value through information.

As humans, we consume information nonstop through:

• Blogs

• Books

• Courses

• YouTube

• Podcasts

• Newsletters

• Social media

How we consume information varies from person to person.

Some people prefer videos on YouTube, while others prefer listening to podcasts.

And others prefer blogs.

Just how many prefer blogs? 5% of the world? 10%? 20%? Nope, way more… About 77% of internet users read blogs.

That means roughly 3 out of every 4 people who scroll the internet from their laptop, phone, or tablet are visiting niche blogs regularly.

When coupled with the size of the fitness industry, it’s an incredible opportunity for anyone looking to tap into that massive market.

The global fitness industry is worth $112 billion and is expected to reach over $202 billion by 2030, sSo launching a body-building blog is an incredibly lucrative opportunity (for now and the long term).

Planning Your Fitness Blogging Journey

Now that you understand the potential of the body-building blog niche, it’s time to start planning your blogging journey.

Odds are pretty good that you know a great deal about fitness, but translating that expertise into a blog is a new skill that you need to develop.

Here’s how to plan your fitness blogging journey:

1. Set Achievable Goals.

The first step to launching a successful fitness blog is to set goals.

There’s no real way to get around this step. It’s the most important part of the journey. If you don’t set goals, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

To ensure that your blog is a success, you should set up core goals to reach towards.

Your goals should be measurable, trackable, and tangible, so you will know at any point in time how close you are to the goals.

Here are three core blogging goals you can set:

Income Goal

How much do you want to earn from your blog each month? Or each year? Set a monetary goal. For example, “I’m going to reach $5,000 per month from my blog in 18 months.” 

You could even set smaller goals working backwards, like $2,000 at 12 months, $1,000 at 6 months, or making your first dollar at 3 months.

Traffic

How much traffic do you want monthly? Monetizing your blog isn’t about monetizing your blog. It’s about monetizing your traffic. Without traffic, you won’t earn a dime. Set a goal to hit 5-50,000 visits per month by month 6-12.

Email List

Have you ever heard the phrase, “The money is in the list?” Well, it is. You’ll want an email list if you’re trying to earn a full-time income from your blog. You should be capturing your visitors as subscribers, so you can send them newsletters regularly. 

Try to aim for 5% of whatever your traffic goal is. So if you’re trying to hit 10,000 visitors per month by month 6, you should aim to get 500 email subscribers per month. After 1 year, you should have 5,000 people on your email list.

2. Pick Your Niche.

The next step in planning your fitness-blogging journey is to pick a niche.

We’ll cover this step more in-depth below, but the gist of it is this: You can’t just have a “fitness blog.” You need to get more specific than that.

The fitness industry is massive, which means there’s plenty of competition. In order to stand out and get traffic, you need to niche down even further. For example, you could be focused on biohacking, distance running, or calisthenics. And, even from any of those sub-niches, you could go even more niche.

3. Create a Content Calendar.

The third part of the process is to craft a content strategy.

A body-building blog is only as good as the content it puts out.

If you’re not putting out regular content, you’re not going to generate traffic or earn a meaningful income.

The most effective way to build a successful blog or even newsletter is to stick to a regular schedule for publishing new content like once per week, 2-3 times per week, or 5 days per week.

If you set specific days to publish (i.e., Monday, Wednesday, Friday), you will be  much more likely to stick to it, pushing you one step closer to the goals that you set in step 1.

Exploring Popular Fitness Niches

Now that you understand how to plan out your fitness blog process, it’s time to talk about your niche.

As mentioned above, you can’t just be a “fitness blogger.”

You need to choose a sub-niche if you want to succeed. Fitness is a massive market, and you’ll have trouble cracking into it if you make a general fitness blog.

The best strategy you can take is to look at specific types of fitness niches and pick a smaller lane to own.

Evaluating Profitability: Understanding Your Market

When you’re analyzing sub-niches of fitness, one of the most important aspects is profitability.

Chances are, you’re not just starting a fitness blog as a hobby. You’re probably wanting to earn a decent income from your fitness blog, right?

Well, then you need to start thinking like a business. This means analyzing the profitability of your market. For example, if you’re choosing different niches, which one do you think has more money? Street Workouts? CrossFit? Just think about it, and think about the audience that’s involved in either one.

Street workouts fall under calisthenics or body weight workouts. The group is typically made up of people heading to local parks and playgrounds to work out.

Within CrossFit, you have people actively taking part in classes, attending specific CrossFit gyms, and buying CrossFit equipment. Plus, a decent percentage of CrossFit enthusiasts also attend CrossFit competitions. The term CrossFit is even branded.

So, which one has more money in it? Street workouts or CrossFit?

If you answered CrossFit, you’re absolutely right.

There’s more money, more products, more events, and more hype.

Assessing Market Demand and Competition

So what about market demand?

It’s important to not just understand how much money is in a niche, but also how much market demand there is.

One way that you can analyze past, present, and future demand is by diving into a free tool called Google Trends.

Google Trends shows you how many people are searching for specific terms in Google’s search engine over different periods of time. It helps you see if certain topics, niches, and keywords are trending up, down, or remaining the same.

Google Trends is a great tool to help you compare how large a specific topic is to another and can also help you understand where the market is heading.

Here, I analyzed how many people are searching for “crossfit” versus “street workout” over the past five years in the United States.

The results show that searching for “crossfit” is actually trending downwards over time. It’s losing popularity.

If you’re thinking of turning CrossFit into a long-term business, you may want to keep that in mind.

But Google Trends isn’t just helpful for looking at which way something is trending. In the screenshot above, look at how street workouts (red) match up against crossfit (blue).

The red line appears to be basically flat…and much lower. What does this mean? The term “crossfit” is currently a significantly larger market overall.

So even though “crossfit” appears to be trending down, the overall market size is way bigger than “street workout,” which means that it’s a much more viable niche to go after.

Passion Over Profits: Selecting Your Fitness Niche

Your niche has to be profitable if you’re wanting to make a living from your body-building blog, but your ability to monetize isn’t everything.

If you were just interested in making as much money as possible, why not just become a lawyer or doctor?

The reality is that you have to have some level of interest in your niche – the more you enjoy it, the better.

Using the two examples above, if you hate CrossFit, but love doing street workouts, then street workouts is the smarter choice. Even if there isn’t as much money in it, there definitely is a market there.

You need to find the crossroads between your passion and market demand in order to determine which niche is right for you. And when you do find it, you need to go all in if you want to monetize it.

Content Strategies for Fitness Niches

As a brand new blogger, you may be wondering…

What kind of content do I have to write?

The reality is that if you want to make your blog a success, you’re going to need to put out a ton of content.

You should be publishing once per week at a minimum (but ideally, a few times per week).

The thought of creating hundreds of pieces of content over the next 6-12 months alone can be overwhelming, but don’t worry. There are dozens of ideas that you can pull from to create awesome content that your audience will love and find valuable – which you can leverage to earn a solid income.

Here are a few ideas:

Fitness Basics

The vast majority of your content should be beginner content. This is basic content that can attract newcomers to the fitness world. For example, if your niche is focused on weightlifting, you could put out blog posts like:

• How To Do a Dumbbell Shoulder Press

• How To Do a Chest Press Without a Bench

• How To Lift Weights Without Hurting Your Back

A large portion of your visitors will come directly as a result of someone typing in a question into Google to find out some information.

Your blog post can be the answer on the other end to help someone with their workout.

Workout Plans

Another popular content type you can utilize with a body-building blog is workout plans.

One of the main things that newcomers to fitness struggle with is knowing what they should be working on. They don’t know what muscle groups to work out, and they don’t know what kind of exercises they need to do. They also don’t know the reps, sets, and how to rest. You can craft plenty of your blog posts around workout plans alone.

Body-Building Diet Plans

Similar to workout plans, other people want diet plans. They want to lose weight or gain muscle, but they just don’t have a clue what they should eat.

If your blog is more centered around diet or if you offer both fitness and diet advice, creating entire diet plans can be a simple way to craft regular content.

Incorporating Video Content

Don’t forget to add video content.

Video is a crucial part of any modern content-marketing strategy. If you want to ensure that you’re serving the widest group of people, you should offer different types of content, like video.

Video is especially powerful when teaching something technical like workouts that require a visual guide to perform them correctly.

You can start a YouTube channel in conjunction with your blog or simply add videos to your blog posts.

SEO Tips for Fitness Bloggers

Since starting my niche blog journey with my website, Hockey Question, two years ago, I’ve amassed nearly half a million visitors to my website.

One of the keys to getting thousands of visitors to my niche blog every month is search engine optimization or SEO.

If you want to monetize your body-building blog, you need to leverage different traffic strategies, like SEO.

Understanding Fitness Blog SEO

Fitness SEO is really no different than any other niche.

While the term “SEO” can seem intimidating, the basic premise is quite simple: It all comes down to creating and optimizing content that people are truly searching for in Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

So to create the best SEO-driven fitness blog, you just need to figure out what people are searching for to improve their fitness and create content that answers those queries.

Keyword Research for Fitness Bloggers

While there are fancy SEO tools you can use to find “hot” keywords and spy on competitors, the easiest way to get started is to simply head over to Google.com.

For example, if you head to Google and type in “workout plans,” you’ll see a ton of content ideas thanks to Google’s autocomplete tool.

Google only shows autocomplete suggestions based on real searches that people are making, and the autocomplete suggestions are given in order of how often they’re searched for. So the top results will have the most search volume, while the bottom results will have the least.

Simply start typing in a core keyword around your niche, and you’ll find dozens of ideas.

Here’s what happens when I type in “workout plans.”

Right away, I can see several ideas for blog posts:

• Workout plans for men

• Workout plans for women

• Workout plans for beginners

• Workout plans to lose weight

• Workout plans for weight loss

• Workout plans reddit

• Workout plans to build muscle

• Workout plans at home

• Workout plans for women to lose weight

Right there, I have 9 ideas for content topics that I could write an entire post around.

Let’s say my niche is CrossFit, since we mentioned that niche previously in this guide.

By typing in “how to crossfit,” we find a wide range of other ideas:

• How to crossfit at home

• How to crossfit program

• How to crossfit rope climb

• How to crossfit train

• How to crossfit pull up

• How to crossfit for beginners

• How to crossfit competition

• How to crossfit open

• How to crossfit ropes

If you’re ever unsure of what kind of content you can create, simply head to Google, start plugging in different topics related to your niche, and see what results come up.

The “sweet spot” is when you can see that people are searching for a term, but there aren’t any blog posts answering the query (or the posts aren’t in-depth or don’t provide a solid answer).

That’s where you can come in and offer that first post to answer it (or offer a better post), so you can rank high in the search engine results page (SERPs) and get traffic to your blog.

Monetization Strategies for Fitness Blogs

Like other blog niches, you can earn a ton of money with fitness blogs.

The question is: What are your options to monetize?

Once you have a few dozen posts up and have been building your email list, it’s time to start generating income from your blog.

There are dozens of different ways that you can earn an income from your fitness blog:

• Sell a digital product

• Sell an ebook

• Sell a course

• Display ads

• Affiliate marketing

• Sponsored content

• Advertise for another website

• Sell a physical product

• Charge a membership fee

There are three popular ways that people monetize their niche blogs:

1. Display ads

You can set up display ads by signing up for ad network sites like AdThrive, Ezoic, and Mediavine.

These sites will display other brands’ ads on your website automatically whenever someone visits, earning you “passive” income.

Just keep in mind that most of these ad networks have minimum traffic thresholds (and other requirements) in order to apply to be on their network. Once you’re accepted, they’ll set up display ads on your fitness blog that generate ad revenue for your site automatically. 

Whenever someone visits your site, you earn an income every second an advertisement is shown while they’re on the page.

2. Affiliate marketing

WIth affiliate marketing, you promote other people’s products (i.e., Amazon affiliate products) and link out to them. If someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchases a product, you will get a small commission from each sale. This is also semi-passive.

While Amazon is the easiest affiliate network to get set up with, you can also create private affiliate deals with businesses to earn you even higher commissions.

3. Selling their own products

The third (and most profitable way) to monetize your fitness blog is by selling your own products and services. This could be physical or digital goods or even your services.

Some examples include:

• Digital fitness guides

• Paid workout plans

• Workout apps

• Coaching programs

• Fitness programs

• Fitness cohorts 

• Group coaching

• Fitness books

• Fitness courses

• And more

Since you’re selling your own products and services in this case, your profit margins will be much higher than promoting other people’s products via display ads and affiliate marketing.

Social Media Marketing for Body-building Blogs

If you want to generate traffic to your blog, you have three common paths:

• Search traffic (Google via SEO)

• Email traffic (from your email newsletter)

• Social media traffic (organic traffic via posts)

We’ve already covered search traffic, so now let’s talk about social media.

Engaging With Your Audience on Social Media

With SEO, it can take a few months before you start seeing traffic come into your blog.

But with social media, you can start posting and drawing social traffic and followers to your blog almost immediately.

The one difference with social media compared to SEO is that your posts aren’t as searchable, so it’s a fire you constantly have to feed with new logs. But it can be a powerful channel to bring in traffic fast (and consistently).

Engagement Strategies on Social Media

Your best path for successfully drawing social media traffic to your blog is to pick one platform and post consistently.

Don’t get caught up trying to start a Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn account.

Just pick one and be faithful on it:

• Post a few times each day.

• Engage with other accounts.

• Put your blog link in your bio.

That’s it. Those are the core principles of a successful social media strategy for fitness bloggers.

Maximizing Instagram Engagement

If you want to take your Instagram game to the next level, then you’re going to want to start networking. This means building relationships with other fitness creators and influencers, engaging with each other and collaborating to help each other grow on the platform.

If you want to speed things up even more, you can pay influencers to hype up your social media account or blog. Leverage other people’s audiences, and you’ll grow a lot faster.

Building a Community Around Your Fitness Blog

While you can build a tight knit community on social media, nothing compares to email marketing.

Why?

Because with email, your audience directly opts in to receive your marketing messages, which means that they’ve shown the most interest in your business and blog.

To master email marketing, generate blog traffic, and monetize fast, you need to start a newsletter.

The Power of Email Marketing

There’s no marketing more powerful than email.

The return on investment (ROI) for email is 36:1, which is higher than SEO, social media, and even paid ads.

If you want to generate sustainable traffic and income for your body-building blog, you need to make email a core pillar of your strategy.

Email does two things for your blog:

1. Allows you to generate traffic on command

The reality is that search engine and social media algorithms change monthly, weekly, and even daily in some cases. 

You can’t completely rely on a single channel that’s dictated by a single platform or changing algorithms.

Social media and search engine traffic can’t be fully relied on in today’s day and age, but what you can depend on is email.

The reason that email works so well is because when you choose to communicate with your audience, you don’t have algorithms gatekeeping your message. All you have to do is hit “send” on an email, and your audience will receive it directly in their inbox.

When you have a new blog post, you can send your “owned” audience to it immediately with a newsletter, rather than having to wait for search engine traffic to start rolling in after a few months.

2. Monetization

Email also allows you to monetize better than simply having a stand-alone blog.

Since you can send communication to your audience at any time, you don’t have to wait for them to choose to come back to your blog. You don’t need to wait for the algorithm to show your social media posts to them.

When you have a product or service you want to promote, you can simply email your subscribers and guarantee that a large portion of your audience will see the offer. The more people you’re able to share your offers with, the more money you’ll make.

Turning Blog Visitors Into Email Subscribers

So how do you turn blog visitors into repeat visitors? By capturing their emails.

You’ll want to ensure that you have an email signup form on your website.

You can have a static (unmoving) form on your website, or you can have a popup form on your site that prompts visitors to join your newsletter like the example below:

No matter which way you promote your newsletter, you’ll want to make it an integral part of your blog marketing strategy to ensure that you will keep your blog visitors coming back over and over again.

Case Studies: Successful Fitness Blogs

If you want to launch a successful fitness blog, your best strategy is to learn from those who have already succeeded.

Here are a few of the top fitness blogs (and what you can learn from them):

1. Arnold’s Pump Club

Arnold’s Pump Club is a fitness blog created by the one and only… Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Arnold and his team created a blog that’s built around key fitness principles, as well as general healthy habits and life advice.

What makes Arnold’s blog so successful? For one, every blog post he puts out is research-backed and full of holistic health insights, fitness plans, and healthy recipes. And secondly, he’s hitting publish daily.

If you want to get good, you need to put in your publishing “reps.”

Arnold’s not wasting any time here breaking into the blogging world.

And let’s face it, if the Governator of California is hitting publish daily, how often do you think you should publish if you want to be successful?

2. The Pivot by Robin

The Pivot is a fitness blog created by Robin Arzón, one of the most popular fitness instructors in the world. She’s the leading instructor of Peloton and their Vice President of Fitness Programming. Oh, and she’s a two-time bestselling author.

Arzón’s blog is an extension of her Instagram presence and acts as a home base for all of her mindset musings, fitness regimes, and life advice. 

Something Arzón does really well with her blog is getting her audience engaged and taking action on their goals. She recently hosted a #3for31 challenge where she got her Instagram followers to subscribe to her newsletter, so they could receive regular blog updates.

In the challenge, Arzón’s audience had to post a picture of their daily walk, jog, or run. At the end of the competition, one lucky person won one year’s access to her exclusive private club, Swagger Society.

3. Ajenda

Ajenda is one of the leading fitness blogs for middle-aged to senior women with a focus on menopause and weight loss.

Dr. Jen Ashton is double board certified in OB-GYN and obesity medicine and has a degree in nutrition. She’s ABC News’s Chief Medical Correspondent and offers advice on health and daily wellness strategies.

In her health and fitness blog, Ashton does a great job of offering a science-based approach to her audience. She also writes with confidence and authority, which is a refreshing approach, especially when dealing with people who are dealing with confidence issues and need a strong voice to lead them.

Grow Your Fitness Blog With beehiiv

Ready to start your journey in the world of body-building blogging?

Dive deep into your chosen niche, create compelling content, and watch your fitness blog grow with beehiiv.

How?

With beehiiv, not only do you get to send newsletters to keep your audience coming back to your blog regularly, but you also get a completely free website.

beehiiv is the best all-in-one blog and newsletter platform that lets you send out newsletters that live on as blog posts.

If you’re ready to launch your own niche fitness blog to turn your passion into profit, then there’s no better option than beehiiv.

With beehiiv, you get:

• An all-in-one blog and newsletter platform

• Several growth tools (referral program, recommendations, Boosts)

• Multiple monetization options (paid newsletter, Boosts, Ad Network)

If you’re ready to launch your own successful fitness blog, then get started with beehiiv today.