Having a little extra money can make all the difference to your quality of life as a student, but with so many classes and seminars to attend, finding the time for a job is difficult. The answer? Start your own small business. There are lots of examples of student startups becoming big and profitable – we all know about Mark Zuckerberg setting up Facebook from his college dorm at Harvard, for example – but even if you don’t become one of the richest people on the planet, you can make a good income to help you through your college years.
One prime market for student entrepreneurs is fitness. A study by sports and nutrition company My Protein found that the average American spends $115 per month on their health and fitness, which includes $56 on supplements and $35 on clothing and accessories — making it a solid choice of industry to get involved in.
Here are some ideas for starting out as an entrepreneur in this highly lucrative market.
Start a fitness blog
There are lots of fitness blogs out there, so how can you start one that stands out from the crowd and enables you to earn some money?
The most important thing is to find your niche – are you a beginner female body builder? A time-poor yoga expert sharing short routines? A runner getting fit again after an injury? Once you’ve figured out your niche, take the following steps to get your blog online:
- Come up with a name. The name of your blog should be snappy, memorable and succinctly explain what your blog is about. A great example of this is the highly successful Nerd Fitness, which is a blog for nerds who want to get fit.
- Build your site. It’s easy nowadays to set up a great looking site without being an HTML wizard. WordPress, Wix, Hubspot and Square Space are just some of the platforms that will enable you to get online quickly.
- Create your content. Having a regularly updated content calendar isn’t just for big brands. Planning ahead and keeping track of content you have already published keeps blogging organized and fresh.
- Gain followers. There’s no point writing if no one is reading! Draw traffic to your site through social media, guest posting, SEO and advertising.
- When you have great quality content and a devoted following you can start making money through advertising, sponsorship and featured content.
Write fitness content for brands
If you have a flair for writing and are knowledgeable about fitness, you could start a business as a content writer for fitness brands. Sports companies love to deliver a message that is inspiring and motivational, and to do this they need excellent writers.
A great example of this is Fitbit; there are plenty of fitness trackers on the market, but Fitbit has positioned itself as the one that is for everybody, whether they’re a world-class athlete or a couch potato who just want to lose a few pounds.
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Getting a freelance contract with a big fitness brand would be lucrative and easy to fit around college, but you will be up against some stiff competition. Having your own fitness blog already will be an excellent way to demonstrate your knowledge, skills and enthusiasm to potential employers.
Invest in some training and start your own fitness classes
Running your own regular fitness classes will help to supplement your student income, but it needs to be done properly. You need a qualification from an accredited program such as the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and you need to learn about owning and operating a fitness business. You will also need to:
- Find a facility. Will your class require an indoor space? Does the space need to provide equipment (for example, if you’re running a circuit training class) or can your attendees provide their own (for example, yoga mats)?
- Create an online presence. Using a template-based website builder like WordPress or SquareSpace you can build a slick and professional website for very little money. It’s easy to find fitness-themed stock photos online to give your website plenty of visual appeal, or you can take good quality shots yourself.
- Market your business. Determine who your target market is and how you are going to reach out to them, for example through social media, paid advertising, local newspapers or leafleting. Figure out what you can offer that will make them choose you over the competition.
Start a business dropshipping fitness wear
Dropshipping is a business model that enables a store to operate without maintaining an inventory, storing products, or having to ship products to customers themselves. Instead, when the store sells a product, it purchases it from a third party and has it shipped directly to the customer.
This model eliminates the need for a warehouse or office space and just requires a laptop and an internet connection, making it a great choice for student entrepreneurs. Setting up a dropshipping business doesn’t require much capital and can be done quickly and easily, meaning you could get your new business off the ground in a few hours if you wanted to.
The fitness wear industry is worth $80 billion a year, so starting your own dropshipping business in this niche is potentially lucrative.
Finding an even more specialized niche will help your business succeed even further: young entrepreneur Tim Rice made $1 million in revenue after setting up a site selling home fitness and mobility products. Other booming niches are wearable tech, a market that is set to double by 2021, and dietary supplements, which are projected to generate around $57 billion a year by 2024.
Start looking for cool stuff to sell on SaleHoo now.
Start a niche diet and nutrition website
A recent survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that 49% of Americans have tried to lose weight in the past year by exercising, cutting calories and eating healthier foods.
Given that there are more than 200 million adults in the US, that’s a potential audience of 100 million people for a diet and nutrition website. The trick, once again, is finding a niche. There are plenty of websites out there for people who are on the paleo diet, or the 5:2 diet, or a raw food diet, so you have to find a way to make your website or blog stand out from the crowd. For example, a raw food diet requires a lot of preparation and organization, so a website detailing hacks that make it easier and more convenient is likely to be more successful than another one simply explaining what a raw food diet is.
Once you have created your website or blog, it’s time to start making money from it. Advertising, guest posting and creating sponsored content is a great place to start, plus you can expand into areas such as personal coaching, online courses and eBooks. Creating a YouTube channel to share tips and recipes will offer another advertising revenue stream, or you could even start a podcast. You could also make money through affiliate marketing, which is the process of earning a commission by promoting another company’s products — easy enough to do when it comes to food and food prep!
The niche fitness business ideas described above are flexible enough to fit in around a heavy class schedule whilst still providing a steady stream of income. Though you will have to sacrifice a portion of your spare time to build and run your business, your hard work will pay off. It isn’t inconceivable that your business could develop further once you have finished your studies…. Either way, running your own company could also help to improve your job prospects, as potential employers will view you as a motivated, independent, and ambitious individual.
Kayleigh Alexandra is a writer for Micro Startups — a site dedicated to spreading the word about startups and small businesses of all shapes and sizes — including ones run by ambitious students like yourself. Visit the blog for the latest inspirational entrepreneurial stories. Follow us on Twitter as well here — @getmicrostarted.
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