If you’re an online trainer, fitness creator, or influencer, selling workout programs as PDFs is an easy, low-frills way to grow your online business. All it takes is a well-designed PDF, an outline of workouts and exercises, and a trusty payment system for selling/transacting with customers.
Creating the PDF
When it comes to creating a PDF, you have a few free options. Most people use Google Sheets, while others use Excel. If you want to get fancy and add some design flair to your PDF, you can consider using free templates from Canva.
Gathering payments
When it comes to gathering payments, there are a lot of options with different implications. Here is a short-list of third-party payment providers that are popular for selling fitness PDFs.
- Venmo – Your customers Venmo you directly and you email it to them. This is the most barebones and manual process.
- Paypal – Your customers can click “buy it now” with a PayPal button. However, this requires a bit of a setup process and you may need to get help from a web developer to properly embed your PayPal button on your website.
For a more ambitious set up, you can turn to a number services that let you build your own landing page with an ecommerce integration:
- Wix, Squarespace, and Square – These options come with a heftier effort (and price tag) but it includes a website and payments.
- Etsy – You don’t get your own website, but you get an Etsy profile.
- Shopify – This is the most robust (and expensive) platform, although usually too overkill for selling a digital product download. Shopify is usually best if you’re selling merch or other physical products.
By selling PDFs through a website, your customers effectively “download” your product. Unfortunately, there is no ability to protect your content after a customer downloads your program. This can lead to PDFs being shared on messageboard websites, such as the /r/FitnessGuidesSharing Reddit community, which is entirely devoted to “leaking” PDFs from fitness creators. 🥺
Ultimately, selling PDF workout programs online can be a hassle without a streamlined system in place. But keep in mind that there’s no guaranteed way to protect your PDFs from getting shared outside your site.
Let’s make things easier
Superset is a platform designed specifically for online fitness creators. It is the easiest way to sell a program online.
Protecting your product
We make it easy to link to your own PDFs, or you can take it to the next level and create your own app that’s filled with on-demand video workouts (which have the extra benefit of not being as easily shareable as a PDF). Everything considered, Superset is the best no-code way to create a fitness program that’s completely branded to you.
Payments are integrated directly into the platform. You connect your bank account, set the price for your programs, and start sharing.
We have dozens of fitness professionals using Superset to scale their offering. We offer a free 14-day trial which allows you to upload exercises, workouts, resources, and create as many programs as you’d like!
