Favourite Fitness Influencers + how to Become an Influencer
Wellness and fitness influencers have been popping all over the internet in the last few years. They’re promoting a healthy lifestyle, sharing healthy recipes and exercise tips, and making you want to jump off of your sofa and out of your pajama bottoms and get in the best shape of your life. So you’ve decided: that’s it, you want to know how to become an influencer too. Because let’s face it: it’s a pretty sweet gig! Between sponsored products to review and invitations to fancy events, working as a wellness blogger is fun in so many ways.
Today, I wanted to share with you how you can become a wellness blogger, but also who the best fitness influencers are out there to look up to for inspiration. Hopefully, this will help you on your quest to figuring out how to become a social media influencer too!
How to become an influencer
Here I’ll only be talking about what I know and do best: the wonderful universe of fitness influencers, wellness bloggers, healthy food influencers, and the like. But these tips apply to any type of influencer.
So first — in order to become an Influencer, you first and foremost need to meet some criteria. That is, your content must make brands want to collaborate with you. Reporting from the get-go will help you benchmark your progress, so you can measure the influence of your posts and publications as you go. Do start a spreadsheet now. If your following isn’t growing, or brands aren’t interested, you’ll have to revise your editorial strategy. So you have to remain flexible. Brands are looking for a return on their investment — and you’re being paid to offer them visibility. It’s a good idea to know what already works well out there and what niche you could hop on as a Facebook influencer (or any other platform for that matter, there are so many apps for influencers these days!) It’s a good idea not to be too broad in the topics you tackle (I’m a terrible example of that myself). The more niche you are, the more likely you are to gather a dedicated crowd fast.
But before brands start knocking on your door, you need to gain influence. You can use various social networks for this: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, a blog — you name it. Closely monitoring the social trends for fitness influencers is important. Also important: your followers! To become a wellness blogger, you will need to have a certain popularity and engagement. It’s not just about the number; your followers also have to be engaged. Don’t even think about buying followers, that terrible terrible ship has thankfully sailed, and brands are wiser than ever. Just don’t do it.
My top tip here is to be yourself and not try to be someone else. Be genuine, share your own fitness journey. The more down-to-earth and relatable you are, the more people will relate. Think of Yoga with Adriene for example: nothing fancy, just a girl in her living room with her dog doing yoga. It works because people relate. Be relatable, take us on your journey of you being you — that’s all you got and it’s an amazing thing!
Create a Community
Creating a community around health and wellness blogs is what every successful fitness influencer should aspire to do. Set up a strategy, create momentum on your news feed, know how to use hashtags, and eventually transform the community into paying customers. Start thinking of products you could sell along the line. For fitness influencers, it could be workout plans or gym clothes. For food influencers, it could be recipe books or diet plans.
To start attracting likes and followers, you have to be religious about posting. Publishing a post once a day, at a fixed time is a good idea. This will have the advantage of retaining followers, as this is what the algorithm gods deem appropriate. Increasing the frequency of posts only makes sense when the community understands the positioning of the Instagram account, so no need to go overboard here, once a day is already a lot.
Hashtags are designed to index and position content. While the most popular can earn likes, a specific hashtag will attract followers who are passionate about sports, for example. The positioning will be clear and it will be easier to gain credibility. Do your research and don’t overuse hashtags — 8 to 10 per post is plenty these days. Many wellness influencers also spruce up their posts with emojis to turn them into engaging bits of content and create more engagement. I think that’s a good idea too!
High visibility on some social networks requires a good aesthetic. Image quality is essential, especially on Instagram. Investing in a quality camera will turn out to be a good investment for anyone wishing to become a fitness influencer.
My favourite fitness influencers
Another thing to do while figuring out how to become a social media influencer is to be inspired by the top ones out there, and then try to do better than them (ie. not copy them). Below is a list of my current favorites:
Natacha Oceane
Natacha is one clever cookie and everything she does and suggests on her channels is always backed by science. She’s very transparent about partnerships and has gone as far as terminating some deals because she felt she was part of something that was promoting unhealthy habits. She’ll also extremely fit, funny, gorgeous, positive, and fun. Her partner Mario is also pretty easy on the eye 😉 A true inspiration.
Chloe Ting
You’ve been sleeping under a rock if you don’t know who Chloe Ting is by now. Her free Youtube workouts took the world by storm during the lockdown and her strategy is great: give excellent and free workouts and bank of pageviews for her earnings (via ads). She’s gotten a lot of crap recently, but I’ve been doing her workout videos for several months now and they really work.
Adriene Mishler
I’ve mentioned her above, but Yoga with Adriene is to me such a breath of fresh air because she is so relatable. It’s not polished (she often leaves things unedited which is funny), her dog Benji often gets in the way, her yoga flows are really great, and it’s just so down-to-earth, fresh, and fun. We need more Adriene’s in this world!
All in all, if you want to know how to become an influencer, I’ll say this: take the plunge — just do it. Sure, a little strategy will help, but you’ll never know if you’re the next big wellness influencer unless you give it a try. So go on, start a health and wellness blog today!
Hello! This was a fun readd, thank you for sharing!