If you’re new to the world of online coaching or if you just want to get some ideas on how to enhance your coaching business, then you have arrived to the right page.
In this article we’ll go through the basics of how to coach online and what’s required to have a chance to succeed in this fast growing market.
The plan
If you want to make a living as a coach, you need to think about your coaching as a business. Regardless if you’re doing coaching online or face to face, you need to have a clear business plan to be successful. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just try to make it simple and scalable.
Let’s start with your product, your coaching service.
You need a good description of your coaching service. What does it include, what does it not include, for how long will it last, who is it made for, is there people that shouldn’t buy this product, what is the target of the service? By answering these questions your potential clients will be able to decide if your service meets their needs.
So now you have your service description. The next question to answer is how will you produce it?
Regardless of what type of coaching content you will provide, it needs to be accessible online, so using some kind of online tool is recommended.
The next step to think about is how you will get your coaching content to your clients. Since we are talking about online coaching, you obviously need an online platform that allows you and your clients to connect. This platform should be the same as the tool you used to create your content with, so that you don’t have to use several different programs.
Your business plan should have a clear client path, where you describe step by step how the clients access your service. This has a great impact on the quality of your coaching service, especially when you start to get more customers.
The place
Now you have created something that your customers can buy. But where do they buy it? That’s the next question to figure out.
Most online coaches have their own websites. On the website your customers can read about you and what you are offering. It should also be made clear how the purchasing of your service is done. Creating a website doesn’t have to be something to loose sleep over, but if you think that it’s a too big step for you right now, you can try to manage with using social media only. Which takes us to the next step.
The promotion
Fantastic! Now you have a service and a place from where to buy it.
What you need now is visibility. You need the right kind of people, people that are interested in your services, to visit your website.
The most common way to get visibility nowadays is being active on social media. We would even go so far and say that your coaching company can not succeed without you being on social media. There are a lot of different medias available, but you do not need to be active on all of them. (Or you can, but then you won’t be doing anything else…) Try to figure out on what media your customers spends time on.
Not many coaches use solely social media to promote themselves. It’s also a good idea to visit discussion forums, exhibitions or events to meet potential customers. There are also coaches that use paid advertisements in a way or another.
Once you get famous enough though, you won’t actually need any of the above mentioned solutions to give you visibility. The word of mouth will take care of it for you. But that won’t happen over night. It takes years and years to create a successful customer retention.
The money
Now we have arrived to the most interesting but also the most challenging area. How to make a living on online coaching.
We can divide this into three segments. The cost of producing your service, the service price and the number of customers. They are all connected, and the only way for you to be successful is to make sure there’s a good balance between them.
We at Coach4Pro think that the first one, the cost of producing your service, is the most fascinating one but also the most challenging one. This has resulted in two articles about how to produce quality coaching for large amounts of people. Since we have written about this before, we will only touch this with a few words. Basically you should try to pre-create and automate as much as possible without loosing the personal touch with the clients. And instead of trying to offer your services to everyone, try to focus on a segment where you can grow.
It’s better to be the best at a specific thing than to be average at everything.
The service price can be very difficult to set. It’s a good idea to do some research and find out what prices your competitors with similar services have. But in the end, it’s a matter of supply and demand.
If you want to compete with low prices, you need to either have very low production costs or be ready to earn less per sell. If you put a higher price than your competitors you need to make sure that your clients are buying something extraordinary. Bear in mind that there is nothing expensive or cheap when it comes to online coaching, only value for money.
The number of customers is the single biggest factor in making money as an online coach. More customers means more money, as long as you can produce. A big challenge here is how to keep the quality of the service high when your customer numbers increases. Again, we have great content written about this already, so make sure to check that out.
Summary
- You need a business plan and a client path.
- You need a place from where to buy your coaching service.
- You need an online tool from where you actually do your coaching.
- You also need a place from where you get visibility.
- And you should always reflect on if what you are doing is earning you money.
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