Lindsey Bomgren built a full-time business from free workout videos by spending six years growing her audience, then monetizing through ad networks like Mediavine and AdThrive, brand partnerships, and affiliate income across YouTube, Pinterest, and her website. She treats each piece of content like an orange, squeezing value by republishing and updating it, and runs a daily Workout of the Day post that drives direct traffic.
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In this episode, I'm chatting with Lindsey Baumgren from Nourish Move Love. She's going to be sharing strategies with us about how she monetizes her 100% free women's fitness content. Lindsay, thank you for joining me today. Can you tell me a little bit about your blog?
Thanks, I'm excited to be here. Yes. So my blog is called Nourish Move Loves. And it's a fitness lifestyle site. Basically, we focus on fitness and filming at home workout content for women. Of course, we have men who do our workouts too, but we particularly focus on women going through kind of the life seasons that I have gone through. That's the bread and butter of my site.
You started off with DVDs, which had limited scale and it wasn't clear how you were going to monetize. And then you found that food bloggers had a model of creating free content that they then monetized using ads. Once you started creating this free fitness content, was there a breakthrough moment that you realized, okay, this is really working and I can make this my full time sustainable profession?
I wish I could say that it was like, ta da, it worked. But like, truly, it was a long game. Like, this is no overnight success story. I'm about six years deep into my business, so spend six years of creating content. Basically, it took me about three years of creating this free workout content for people to really start seeing traction with it. Getting enough eyeballs to, you know, get on mediavine and then transition to ad thrive. But prior to that, I was actually just reaching out to brands and I was like, hey, hey, you send me your free athletic apparel, I'm gonna create some really awesome content in it. And then I'd send it back to them and be like, here's the awesome content I created. They'd be like, well, that's cool. I'd be like, great, $25 a picture. And I came from sales, so I had like this business mentality going into it, which really helped. Cause I'm very strategically always kind of coming back to like, okay, what's making money, what's not making money? Let's ditch what's not making money. Let's pursue what is making money.
Can you tell me more about what you saw in the food and drink or recipe space and then how you were able to recreate that for fitness?
Yeah. So basically in the fitness space, everyone was either selling a workout program or workout plans. And I was like, that's great, but that takes a lot of work and I have to sell to A lot of people in order to make money. And it's a very competitive space to begin with. And so I loved the idea of being able to create content for free that I didn't have to push on anybody or sell on anybody. And so recipe creators were doing that. They're putting, putting out all these free recipes and somehow generating all this income. So diving into that space and learning about what ad revenue was and how you placed ads on your website to generate revenue off that, how you could even create a YouTube channel that had ads and then how you got brand partnerships. So I saw a lot of these recipe creators are partnering with brands, you know, whatever butter they were using or whatever flour they were using. So I could apply this to fitness basically through trying to eventually generate enough content where I was getting enough eyeballs to my site to place ads on my site. And then working with brands and partnerships. And then actually they were like, well, yeah, I have people ask me for home workouts all the time. I'm actually thinking about launching like a mini workout plan to go with like my ebook or my recipe book. And I was like, hey, I'll freelance that out for you. I'll write it for you. So I actually started really getting in with food bloggers and writing workouts for them that they were either publishing on their sites or that they were going to publish with an ebook. So it was like they were publishing healthy recipes. I was giving them the complimentary, like healthy home workouts to go with it.
Okay, Lindsey, so tell me about your strategy for monetizing totally free content.
Yeah, I would say it's a three step process to diversify your revenue stream. So we have our website, we have YouTube, we have brand partnerships, we have affiliate revenue. You need to be diverse across multiple platforms. You need to show up consistently with valuable content. It's a numbers game. The more content you put out, the more times you get the opportunity to show up in people's feed. New content is key, but then also get super strategic. There is every piece of content you have I like to think of as an orange. And you're going to get so much juice out of it. And the way you got to continue to squeeze that orange is through republishing that content, updating that content, looking at seasonal trends of when that content performed. Well for us, driving direct traffic has been a really big game changer for my business. We do that through creating a workout of the day. We drive you directly to our workout of the day. That's our number one performing post every day. If we want to republish it, we do it on the day. It's the workout of the day. So, yes, we love Google, we love organic search, we love Pinterest, we love Instagram, we love YouTube. But we also love creating our own direct traffic that's super reliable.
Lindsay, thank you so much for being generous with your time. It was a pleasure chatting with you.
