Workouts Website
Magazines like Men’s Health sell primarily because every month they have advice and tips on how to alter your workout to keep your gym visits fresh, or to focus on different muscle groups. They make their money from your purchase money as well as from advertising and it is big business.
It’s possible to replicate what these guys do on the internet, and in fact a search for “gym workouts” gives a total of 2.3 million results on Google. The top two results are paid for and those slots will not be cheap. Sure enough a quick look at www.bodybuilding.com proves that there is a store, and advertising and this is in fact a business, not simply a nice place to find free workouts
If you are not a qualified gym instructor then you might want to get yourself qualified in terms of credibility, but there are other qualifications that count, for example doctors, famous sportsmen/women and sporting competition winners.
Focus on variety, you may want to do a different workout a day, or a week, or simply have 5 routines for losing weight, 5 for bulking up, 5 for all round fitness etc. The key is that there should be sufficient materials to keep your visitors coming back to the site, and ideally to bookmark it and tell their friends about it. This way you will drive quality traffic, build trust and be able to sell your products to a captive audience. Make sure that you include instructions on how to do each exercise, or point your readers to a site that has these instructions.
Another way to keep your content fresh is to pull material from other sources, such as free article sites (www.ezinearticles.com) and/or RSS feeds. You may want to regularly update your readers on matters such as how to treat sports injuries, or new insights into metabolism changes brought on through age and/or exercise for example. You can get this information directly fed to you by email or even directly to your website from blogs and other websites, and it is usually available for re-publishing.
You don’t need to be a web design genius to do this. Many blogs will allow you to benefit from advertising, or you can have a website built for you on a template basis so that you simply upload your instructions and post them as and when you are happy with them. A good web designer can teach you how to do this basic maintenance and should support you through the first few posts.
Once you have a solid readership you need to add a store. You can find suppliers for the things that you want to sell on line, and many will “drop ship” for you, meaning that they will take care of delivery. You can get a free store from www.zen-cart.com and I am sure there are plenty of others out there.
Promoting any website is tough but with this subject matter you are at least working with something that a lot of people are interested in. There are many keywords that you can use to drive people towards an exercise related website simply through good SEO techniques. Have a look at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
to get a list of well searched key words to use for your site.
Social networking sites such as www.Squidoo.com and www.Myspace.com are also great places to find readers. If you are new then read up on how to use these sites to send out bulletins to your “friends” and to groups of interested users.
You should also promote your website offline. Google analytics has opened my eyes to how effective this is, despite my website being in English and targeted primarily at readers in English speaking countries my largest audience is from Taipei, where I live and naturally talk about and promote my website. This is not big time promotion such as TV and Radio, but simply talking about what I do, handing out business cards and letting people know that I am enthusiastic. It will be interesting to see whether I develop an equally strong readership in Shanghai.
You can search sites like www.alibaba.com or even just search on www.google.com using your local area, or a country or region that you know produces the goods cheaply. The benefit of finding local suppliers is that they will often break up large lots for you when you are starting out, whilst overseas manufacturers are generally looking for large orders.
Another place worth looking when you get serious about suppliers is “worldwide brands” who run a business rating and ranking suppliers, both domestic and overseas. If you have trouble finding cheap, reliable suppliers then it may be worth investing the $250 they want to join the service. I should point out that I am an affiliate and have an interest in promoting this site, I even set up a website at www.neversayanything.com to promote their service.
Be careful about copying material from other websites, this could get you sued for breach of copyright. It is usually ok to re-use materials if you credit the copyright owner and/or link to their site.
Another approach is to offer customised gym workouts for individuals at different stages of fitness and with different goals. You had better know what you are doing before charging for this service though.