As you probably know, December and January are times of reflection and goal setting for many athletes. Not surprisingly, this is also a time where we see a significant increase in training plan sales on TrainingPeaks.com. Last year, we saw a nearly 50% increase in plan sales on TrainingPeaks for the two months of December and January, over October and November plan sales. On a bigger scale, according to Google Analytics, Internet search traffic for the term “training plans” increases by 100% in January over the levels they’re at in mid-December.
Are you going to be part of the fun this year?
Selling plans through TrainingPeaks is a great way to increase your income – we’ll send you 70% of the revenue from the plan. It’s also a great lead generator for your coaching business. When an athlete loads the plan they purchased into their TrainingPeaks account, they’ll get a daily email containing your workout information for the next two days, as well as be able to reference the plan anytime within their TrainingPeaks Calendar. Every day they are reading your expertise and advice on training and racing. Your plans are doing the marketing for you! Once the plan is finished and the athlete is thinking “What next?”, other training plans of yours will be the first thing that comes to mind. And eventually, when the athlete is ready to take it to the next level and get a coach, you can bet that they’ll wonder if you’re available.
Promoting Your Training Plans
The key to successful plan sales is to promote them through your communication channels during this crucial time (December and January). Here are the various ways to promote:
- List the plans for sale on your website, or link to the plan information in the TrainingPeaks plans store.
- Promote them through Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels.
- Use the “coupon code” feature of a plan to offer a special discount; for example, you can do a New Year’s giveaway or Holiday discount for certain plans. With the Holidays and New Year season coming up, use these themes to your advantage.
Plans can be created for specific race distances or specific athlete abilities. For example, you may have a Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced iron distance training plan. They can also be created for specific races. Do you have relationships with local race directors? If so, try to team up with them to be the official plan provider for their races. Even consider providing plans at a discount or for free to local race participants – this can be a win-win situation for both of you!
Prepare Your Profile
Are you ready to get started? Ok, one more thing. Before you start writing plans and making them available in the TrainingPeaks store, make sure you have all your ducks in a row on your TrainingPeaks profile. If you go into your account settings, you’ll see a place to upload a headshot within your “Personal Info”. Make sure that a good, professional headshot is uploaded. Then, go into the Social and Sharing tab > Public Profile. The “About Me” section within your Public Profile is what will show up with your plan information when someone clicks on your name under “Plan Author”.
While you’re in there, your Public Profile is also the information that will show up for you in our Coach Directory when an athlete goes in to search for a coach. Having a complete profile will give you and your training plans much more credibility and professionalism, so we highly advise that you fill out all of the fields.
Ready to go? Here’s how to create training plans to sell on TrainingPeaks.
