This post advocates for selling fitness information like any other good in order to ensure its success in the market of information. Good fitness information is valuable, but only if people know how to recognize, access, and implement it. Good fitness information must compete with flashy and inaccurate information, making it all the more important that knowledgeable practitioners work to sell their knowledge effectively.

Selling Fitness Information

Being in the know is marketable. Data helps influence trends, sell goods, and allow people to more effectively utilize their time. This is especially true when it comes to fitness. Fitness information is valuable across all cultures, backgrounds, and countries, providing access to new and more powerful ways to move.

The problem is: people tend to buy what they want rather than what they need.

Good Fitness Information Isn’t Always Flashy

One of the biggest issues in selling good fitness and body mechanics information is that while the information is precious, it’s not necessarily as desirable as flashy tricks promoted by unscrupulous salesmen.

What’s cooler, learning how your body works by carefully studying movement, or watching someone backflip and lift lots of weight while disregarding any potential negative consequences?

There’s a major reason why it’s hard to sell good fitness information effectively: it’s difficult to create fun content that encourages viewers to study how they move and its impacts on their physical well-being.

Selling Good Fitness Information

This may just be me talking, but a complete and diverse workout regimen isn’t always the most exciting media content. Sure, there are cool videos out showing depth drops, slam dunks, and handstand pushups (if you even find those feats cool), yet they only represent part of a complete fitness strategy. Therefore, we must sell.

We must sell good fitness information like any other product, using excitement and sales tactics to attract attention. Professionals package good movement information with flashes of fantastical to keep people interested.

By bundling dense detail with tricks and displays of athleticism, knowledgeable teachers can access a wider audience. Without excitement, information sources struggle to survive competitive markets and people succumb to the traps of fashionable fitness information, leading to injuries and/or purchases of superfluous products.

Sell fitness well we must, because the fat shots aren’t working.

Selling Fitness Information in the Digital Era

Fitness information benefits from a combination of cheap market entry and expansive avenues for profit. Cameras and internet access are ubiquitous, lowering the barrier to entry for videos and fitness demonstrations. Ad revenue, brand affiliations, and product sponsorship are open to those who write, speak or record fitness information compellingly. There is no surprise that tons of information is produced daily.

When something proves monetizable, the market typically swells (assuming no supply constraints). This is especially true of fitness information in the digital era.

The high potential benefits and low barriers to entry into fitness information markets has made them colossal and ever-growing. My browser AI says that 360 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute: we cannot to keep up with content output.

The growing ability to produce fitness information, along with its ability to monetize, incentivizes both good and bad information to be produced.

Everyone wants to make easy money. People are always hoping they will be the lucky person to win the Powerball or strike gold. Cheap cameras and high-paying sponsors convince people that creating fitness information can be a low-cost way to make money.

The trick is finding a way to make good fitness information that stands out in the crowd.

Extreme Stands Out in the Crowd

With an ever-expanding variety of fitness information publications to choose from, we tend to gravitate toward the ones that offer the most dramatic benefits. It’s more exciting to learn how we can backflip than it is to learn how to control our hips throughout a full squat range of motion.

Our time is limited, and we like to get the most out of each interaction.

At the same time, we seem to have ever-shortening attention spans available for content. I am more likely to click a 30-second handstand tutorial than I am to watch a 15 minute discussion on the nuances of the handstand.

This means that if we want to get people to watch, we have to hook them quickly. Creators may be compelled to produce distorted content designed to stick out and grab attention (try and tell me with a straight face that you haven’t fallen for rage bait).

Creating Quality, Actionable, and Palatable Fitness Advice

My goal with Efficiently ELITE is to captivate viewers and provide reprieve from the struggles of everyday life while also serving as a tool to improve fitness in sustainable increments.

It’s hard to give fun and quality advice that gets people to take a step toward improving their fitness, but if we provide valuable, self-contained opportunities to improve, we are more likely to get people on the right track toward good fitness information.

Make Fitness Information Accessible in Smaller Increments

For good fitness information to succeed, it must account for our behavioral tendencies. Typically, we have a few major things we seek in fitness information:

• We want information that produces noticeable changes.
• We want information that we can use to achieve our goals.
• Most importantly, we need information that interests us.

Good fitness information can succeed if it avoids doing too much. Often, we are so excited by the prospect of helping that we overload the recipient, providing far too much information for their present needs. This not only makes their task more challenging, but it creates a negative association with the task, making it seem more difficult and even harder to pursue.

Fitness information is most accessible when each publication pursues a single effect and allows the viewer to engage with it, learn, and feel the satisfaction from completing the lesson/ task before teaching something else (I like to do this through techniques I call Micro Assessments, where I take a few moments to study a specific body part or type of movement).

Pursuing Good Fitness Information in Spite of Scams

While real, sustainable health and fitness routines can be interesting, I know that people will get lost in misinformation and flashy stunts unconcerned with the long-term health of the practitioners. I hope that while some may get lost in tricks and scams, others find their way to quality resources that help them and future generations learn.

I want people to be able to learn from someone who helps them do better.

We all have unique learning and content preferences, and greediness when building an audience would be at odds with my goal of helping people learn to move effectively. I believe that I can help people learn to build good systems, and I hope others will keep making information better.

Roadblocks Along the Way

The most difficult facet of the fitness information market is that quality information has to compete with snake oil purveyors who know what they are selling can hurt people.

Some people don’t realize they are doing something wrong, and that’s ok, so long as they are willing to take new information and grow (for a discussion on how to help out when you are new to the task, check HERE). This can be challenging to correct as they truly believe that they are correct and providing a good service, but at least their heart is in the right place and they can be persuaded by logic and reason.

No amount of reason will persuade those who deliberately falsify information for their own gain. It is sinister to knowingly publish and perpetuate content that harms people solely for money. Yet, false information is abundant and lucrative. If we wish to keep good information available and accessible, we have to support it and build it when we can.

Any other questions, comments, or suggestions? Let me know!

-G

If this information appeals to you, consider reading The Pitch to learn what EfficientlyELITE is all about!