It is pretty easy to get started as an online coach and many people rush in and set themselves up as coaches without giving much thought to how they will get clients for their business. After a while they give up on the idea of being an online coach because they do not have sufficient clients to make it worth their while.
In this special report we will provide you with 6 proven ways to get clients for your online
coaching business. It is not enough to just setup a website
and expect the clients to come. You have to stand out and
prove that you know what you are
talking about.
People want to hire online coaches
to add to their knowledge and increase their chances of success. So you need to put the message
out there that you are the coach that can really help them rather
than the others
that are available. So please read every word of this short report
and take action so you can become the
“go to” online coach.
There are not many other things
that shout “expertise, authority and credibility” than a book on your
niche. Authors are perceived by most people to be experts. It doesn’t
matter if they have read the books or not! The fact that the person is an author in the niche is all that matters.
Now you are probably
thinking that it takes a lot of work to write a book. Yes you are right it does! But you will certainly stand
out in a crowded market
if you have written a book because
most of the other online
coaches that you are competing with will not have been bothered to do this.
You do not have to write the book
yourself. There are professional writers out there that will do most of the work for you. This is not going to be a cheap option but if you don’t have the time or the writing skills
to write your own book then use
a writer to do it for you.
If you outsource the writing of
your book then you will need to provide a plan for the book to your writer. You will also need to tell them
the style that you want the book to be written in and provide them with specific
information that you want to include. It is essential that your book provides good value to your readers
even if you give it away.
So think clearly about what you
want to include. Your target market will have a number of problems that they need to resolve so write your
book around some of these. It is important that the book is valuable
but you do not want to give everything away (otherwise why would they want to hire you as a coach?).
Talk about how you have
implemented your own ideas in your book and also how you have helped others achieve the results that they wanted.
It is really important that the reader
gets the sense
that you can help others
as this will make them much more inclined to purchase your coaching services.
You do not need to write a lengthy
tome. We would suggest 6 to 10 chapters that are concise
and
clear and have actionable elements to them. Add an introduction to your book and tell them that you are now an online coach. Mention this a
number of times throughout the book and tell people how they can find you
online (website, social
media etc).
What about publishing your book? The easiest way to do this is to go down the self publishing route. It is unlikely that you will be able to use
a publishing house for your book because it will not have the potential
numbers that will excite them.
You don’t need them anyway
as it is so easy to self publish.
Save yourself
a ton of money by using platforms
like Amazon Kindle
and Barnes & Noble to self publish
your book. It is a good idea to create
hard copies of your book as well and you can use Create Space
to do this for a reasonable price.
One of the most important thing
you must do for your book is to create a compelling cover for it. If you are not good with Photoshop or graphic design this is not a problem as you can go to Fiverr.com or similar gig websites and find a good cover designer there.
You will need to tell them what you are looking for and
what platforms you are using
(Kindle etc).
You will be amazed at the quality
of the designs that these people can create for only a few bucks. Even if you can do it yourself
why spend your precious time on this?
Use your time to find clients for your
coaching business!
Once you have your book in digital form and physical
form there are a number
of things that you can do.
You can provide it as an incentive on your website for visitors to opt in to
your email list. People are reluctant to give out their email addresses these days as they know they will receive promotional messages. Your book will be a good way
to persuade them to
do this.
Don’t worry too much about making money with your book on Amazon
Kindle for example. Price it at around
$2.99 so it is low enough for people to make an impulse buying
decision. You can actually give your book away for free to encourage people to leave reviews on Amazon which is an excellent idea.
You could create a competition on Facebook to win a copy of your book. If you do a lot of networking then give hard copies of your book away.
Make sure that you add your contact details in your book such as your phone number,
your website address
and your email
address.
Go and write your book to boost your credibility and stand out in the market!
TheDigitalMarketingCoach.com or JohnSmithCoaching.com. Choose
a domain name that reflects
your coaching business. It
is OK to use your name but remember that not many people will know who you are at
the beginning.
Once you have chosen your domain
name you will need a web hosting account. If you don’t know what this is it is where your website files are stored
and is the way that you make your site live on the Internet and available to all. There are
thousands of web hosting companies out there that will host your website for a few bucks
a month.
It is unlikely that you are going to get hordes
of visitor traffic
to your website especially when you are just starting
out. So you can go for an affordable shared hosting service
from BlueHost.com or
HostGator.com. There
are many reviews
online about web hosting companies
that you can read.
You must choose a web host that offers one click WordPress installations. WordPress is a free blogging
platform that is ideal for your website. You can easily customize it
without having to know any web code. It is very simple
to add your content
to the WordPress platform as well.
Once you have your domain name,
web hosting and you have installed WordPress (this is easy and there are many tutorials available on YouTube) you will need to choose an appropriate them for your website. A WordPress them is
the design of your site.
How it looks and feels.
There are lots of free WordPress themes available and there are premium themes too. Search for “online coaching WordPress themes” and have a look at the results that you get back. If you have to invest $50 or so in a theme that really works for you then do that. Otherwise go for a free theme that suits you. Install the theme from your WordPress dashboard.
The aim of your website should be to prove to potential clients
that you are credible and that you can help them. Testimonials are valuable
social proof and you need to add these to your website. If you are just
starting out how can you
get testimonials?
Offer your services to people that you know free of charge or heavily discounted in exchange for their testimonial. If you don’t know anyone
then find a suitable place to advertise this. It doesn’t matter what method you use to obtain your testimonials. Just get at least 3 that you can add to your site.
Tell the people that you are requesting testimonials from that they must agree to provide a video testimonial or at the very least a photograph of themselves and their website address so that you can add this. This all helps with authenticity. Never be tempted to add fake testimonials to your website.
Invest in a professional logo for your website. It is important
that you create
a brand that you can use consistently on your website
and your social
media accounts. There
are plenty of good graphic
designers on Fiverr.com that will create
a very professional logo to your instructions for a small
amount of money.
On each of your pages and posts on your website
add a call to action.
This can be for a prospective client
to contact you via your contact form, call you or join your email list. Make your website
work hard for you 24/7 and
set up analytics so that you can see what is working. Your website is a lead generation machine and it needs
to convert.
Now that you have your new shiny website
setup it is time to add some blog posts
to it. Your aim here is to provide valuable
content for your site visitors
but not to give too much away.
Aim to write at least
one new blog post every week and more if you can.
Use different types of media in your blog posts.
Nobody is going to be impressed with just text so add some relevant
images, videos, infographics etc. Create blog posts around how to achieve certain
things in your niche. If you are a digital marketing coach for example,
show your visitors
how to set up a Facebook
page or LinkedIn profile
and more.
When you publish a lot of valuable blog posts you will achieve
two things:
1. You will stimulate your visitors and they will come back for more
2. You will send the right signals to search engines like Google to rank your web pages higher in the search results
Getting your visitors to come back
to your website is very important. Most of your visitors are not going to decide to hire you as an online
coach the first
time that they visit your site. So you need to give them a good reason
to come back and high quality valuable
content is the best way to do it.
It is always a good idea to rank your blog posts and other pages high in the search
results. In order
to do this all of your posts
and pages need to be optimized. This is called search engine optimization (SEO).
In order to optimize
your posts and pages you need to undertake keyword
research. A keyword
is the term that people will enter into the search engines to try and
find you. An example could be “digital marketing coach”.
You can do this keyword
research yourself or outsource it for a few dollars.
You should consider SEO as a long
term traffic strategy. It is not going to be possible for you to rank your web pages on the first page of Google
overnight. If you are in a very competitive market
then you will need some external SEO as well.
This is links from external websites
that develop the SEO power of your website. If you want to learn
more about SEO there are plenty of resources online for this. There are
some excellent videos on YouTube as well about SEO.
If you are a good writer or you
use a professional writer who understands your business then you can create guest posts for other people’s
blogs in the same niche that have high traffic already. Some of these blog owners will already
offer this (you may have to pay for it) and you can pretty
easily find this
on their blog.
A
guest post needs to be of the highest quality.
It also needs to contain
a call to action and a link back to your website (this will also help
your SEO). Guest posting can be a very effective way to get new coaching
clients.
You absolutely have to have a
presence on the most appropriate social media platforms. If you are a business
to business online
coach then you have to be on LinkedIn because
that is where a lot of your potential customers
hang out. Businesses also use Facebook
as well so you need to be on there too.
Facebook is one of the largest
websites in the world and it has billions of users. You can set up a Facebook
page for your online coaching
business in a few minutes.
You will use this Facebook
page to add content which can be blog posts from
your website.
You can add your logo to your Facebook
page and you will need a header
for the page as well. Again if graphic design
is not your thing then head over to fiverr.com and find someone
to do this for you. It is essential that you make a good impression with your
Facebook page.
The same goes
for LinkedIn and any other social account that you set up. Some people believe
that you need to have a presence
on all of the social
networks (Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok etc.) but we
do not recommend this. Just go where your target audience hang out.
If you have several social
accounts you will need to post content to all of them regularly and try to build a following
on all of them. This is a lot of work which
we believe is unnecessary. For most online
coaches Facebook is enough with the addition
of LinkedIn if you offer your services
to businesses.
To build a social
media following you need to add valuable
content regularly to your accounts.
You can also run ads with both Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook
is great because
you can do some really
specific targeting with it. The analytics are also good so that you can see what is working
and what isn’t.
If you are not creating videos
for your online
coaching business then you need to start right now.
These days people would much
rather watch a video than read a lot of text. People lead busy lives nowadays
and they would rather watch
an informative and compelling 5 minute video
than spend 20 minutes reading.
Yes it does require
effort and investment to create professional videos. Do you need to appear in the videos?
Of course you do! Your visitors will want to see and hear you before they are willing
to invest in your
online coaching services.
If you don’t like the idea of appearing on your videos
then you need to find a way to get over this because it is so important. You are not making a Hollywood blockbuster here but your video does need
to be high quality so make sure that you have a good camera and microphone
setup. Don’t publish low quality
videos as it will damage your reputation!
If you don’t have the equipment then hire a local video company to take care of everything. They will provide the correct lighting and everything to make your video great. They will also do all of the editing work for you. Consider this as a good investment in your online coaching business because it will be.
Don’t just stop at making a video for your website.
Create a series
of videos in your niche that provide
valuable information. Of course you do not want to give everything away in the video and you need to tell your viewers that you have a first
rate online coaching business.
You absolutely must have a YouTube
account. YouTube is the second
largest website in the world and gets insane amounts of visitor traffic.
People search for all kinds of information on YouTube and you need to optimize
your videos with the right keywords so that your videos will appear in the YouTube
search results.
If your niche is really popular
you can get thousands of views to your videos over time. There are other video sites such as Vimeo.com and
DailyMotion.com that do not get anywhere near the traffic that YouTube does but upload your videos
to these sites
as well as you will get some views there too.
Despite what you may have heard email marketing is not dead. It is a very powerful way to communicate with prospective clients and turn them into customers. We already discussed that you need a valuable incentive to give away in exchange for email addresses.
This could be your book, a high value report like this one or even a special
video you have recorded that they can’t get anywhere else. It
needs to provide value and be something that a visitor will be excited
to receive.
Once you have the person on your
list you can send them automated emails every few days using an autoresponder service such as Aweber.com or GetResponse.com. There are others
too. It will cost you around $20 a month to start using these services.
You will also be able to send broadcast emails to your email list as well. So if you are offering a discount on your coaching services for a limited time then use a broadcast email to tell everyone about it.
Never bombard your email lists with several emails ma day. This is very annoying and people will unsubscribe from your list. Provide value in all of the emails that you send to your list and always rem and them that you offer a high quality online coaching service.
We have provided you with 6 powerful ways to get new clients
for your online coaching business.
Use them all and test how
they are working for you. You will not make any money from your online coaching
business if you do not have a regular stream
of clients so take action
right now.
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