Online personal Training is all the rage these days. Perhaps your client is iced in and can’t make it to the gym? No worries, you can train them from home. Maybe your client of 5 years is moving across the country; doesn’t matter, you can still train them online. Whether you are using online personal training software to program workouts for your clients, or you are training your clients virtually in real time, you can keep your business from missing a beat.

Online personal training is not only great for continued services; it is also an excellent way to grow your overall training business. Online personal training software allows you to connect with a nearly endless supply of potential clients who are looking to engage in personal training in the comfort of their home. This access is unprecedented and allows trainers to operate much more efficiently, which effectively raises the ceiling of a trainer’s potential earning power. However, one of the first issues that most trainers encounter when they begin to consider online personal training is how exactly to price their online personal training services.

Pricing is a bit of a riddle. Pricing too low leaves money on the table, gives an appearance of lower quality compared to alternatives, and may boost demand for services above the capabilities of the seller. Pricing too high, however, can send a product or service out of reach for many people, severely limiting the demand for the product. So how then should you, a personal trainer, price online training services? There are basically two traditional options when determining a price: market rate pricing or cost-plus pricing.

Market Rate Pricing

Market rate pricing basically entails looking at what other similar products or services are priced at or actually selling for and adjusting your own prices accordingly.

For example, if you decide to sell individualized digital programming services, you would simply look around and see what several other trainers with similar experience as you are charging for programming and then set your own prices accordingly. The problem with this approach, however, is that it is very difficult to know what kind of demand another trainer has for their services compared to you. The trainer that you are comparing yourself to may write a weekly article in Men’s Health or they may be even less credentialed and less experienced than you.

In order to use this approach, you will need to compare to a large number of trainers in order to get a more accurate representation of what the market looks like for your training services.

Moreover, what if it costs you more than it’s worth to you to perform the online personal training services, which would be counter-productive?

Cost-Plus Pricing

Cost-plus pricing basically requires that you calculate the costs of conducting your training services, and then raising your prices according to the amount that you want to net or the percentage of return that you are seeking.

For example, if you wanted to sell individualized programs you would first calculate what it costs you to build the program. Here, you would take into account the cost of the online personal training software that you are using and the opportunity cost of the time it takes you to create the online training program. Opportunity cost is difficult to measure, but if you reasonably could have otherwise been earning a certain amount of income doing something else during the time you were training online, you can count that as opportunity cost.

There may be other miscellaneous costs associated, but for simplicity’s sake, we will stick with just these two costs. So lets say that your online personal trainer software is essentially costing you $5 per client and you could have been training at a local gym for that hour and made $15; your total cost for this program is $20. Now, let’s say that your goal is to earn $20 per online training program. In this scenario, you would price your programming at $40 per session. This is a more simple way to price, but it is not necessarily better.

What if you decide to price your online programming fee at $40 per hour but the market rate for programming by a trainer with your experience and client portfolio size is only $20 per hour? In this scenario, you have probably priced yourself out of the market. However, what if you decide to price at $40 per hour but the going rate when all else is equal is $60.

Now you have left money on the table, given the impression that you don’t really know what you’re doing compared to the trainers charging the higher price, or will become too busy to handle all of the requests for online training (this isn’t necessarily the worst outcome, but more on this in a bit).

Find a Starting Point

If market-rate and cost-plus pricing alone are not the answer, then how should a trainer price their services?

The answer is that even though neither of these methods alone is sufficient to choose a price, together, they should present a reasonable starting off point that you can use to price your service.

First, calculate all of your costs associated with online training.

Next, find 10 trainers that at least appear to be on par with you and find out what they charge for a one-hour session. They will probably vary pretty widely, so calculate the average of these.

Now that you know your costs and the average market rate for online training, subtract your costs from the average price of online personal training. Is this number higher than your costs? Good. It should be, otherwise, why would so many trainers train online?

Next, if you’re just starting out subtract at least 10% of the market price. You’re doing this in order to attract a few more clients without making it seem as if your service isn’t as good. Once you get to the point where you are too busy to continue taking on new clients, it’s time to raise your price.

Pricing is never easy, even if you go through and do exactly what I wrote here; you will still have to use trial and error at least to an extent before you settle on what price really works for you. However, if you take into account some of the above factors you should have at least a framework to get you started.

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