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Welcome to Building Your Coaching Business!
Teaching you to build Your Coaching Business is the most important thing I do!
Coaching Business Training: List Building Article Marketing Strategy
If you are a coach, speaker or author you need this strategy to develop a following. Watch this short 6 minute video for a email list building strategy. Building your email list is very important for becoming fully booked and selling your books, booking more speaking events. Your email marketing strategy is where loyal relationships are turned into paying clients.
Get More Business Show: What’s your burning Question about Pay Per Click Advertisng?
Okay, this is really new territory for me. I have done pay per click advertising for my promotional products agency, but never for my coaching practice. But, I’ve been hearing from many of the people I consider mentors that pay per click (ppc) is a quick and accurate way to discover what key words and phrases convert. Ahh but many new to the idea of using online marketing don’t even know what convert means. You can lose a lot of money fast with pay per click if you haven’t optimized your landing page. You can pay for a top spot on Google with ppc – and if done correctly you are paying for results. If you haven’t optimized your website or landing page to convert visitors you’re just paying, and paying.
I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below and tell me what you want to know. David will help us understand the basics of ppc and how it fits into our over all online marketing strategy for building your coaching business.
Following is an article by my guest on this Friday’s Get More Business Show, David Szetela, on the topic of landing pages that convert and why they are critical for the success of ppc.
Amateur PPC advertisers ignore the importance of landing pages entirely. Sophisticated advertisers know that PPC landing page design and testing is at least as important as building and optimizing great ad groups with great ads.
Expert PPC advertisers realize that PPC landing pages have more impact on conversion rates and ROI than anything else they can do. And the few truly god-like advertisers don’t stop at landing pages; they build, test and optimize the entire conversion path, from the landing page through the last page of the conversion process.
As usual, I’ll try to start out with simple concepts. First, what’s a PPC Landing Page? It’s simply a page on your site that is customized to match the theme of a particular PPC ad group — the keywords and ad message.
Which brings us to Important Point #1:
The PPC Landing Page can, and often should, look very different from the other pages on your site.
This is often a difficult but crucial concept that’s hard for many site owners to grasp. They’re accustomed to thinking about their site as analogous to a bricks-and-mortar storefront: one entrance (the home page) through which all customers enter, linked to other pages where site visitors can (hopefully) easily find what they’re looking for. Site owners often design their home page to satisfy the needs of casual browsers as well as visitors who are looking for specific items or information.
This design viewpoint makes sense when the source of site traffic is natural search or links from other sites, since it’s difficult to know or infer the visitor’s need/intent.
But with a properly-constructed PPC campaign, the advertiser knows with laser-beam precision, by virtue of the search term used and the ad message that elicited the click, the visitor’s need and intent.
Let’s pause for an alternative metaphor. Most sites are not like a storefront with a single entrance. Think of a circular building with multiple entrances. Signs around each entrance describe the products sold just inside the door. The customer who walks through the door sees only the products described by the outside signage. It’s easy for customers to find what they’re looking for, and they can conduct their transaction quickly and easily.
There’s a real-world example of this: Sears stores. Most have multiple entrances, and often those entrances are labeled to indicate which department is just inside the door. The guy who enters the hardware department door doesn’t care that Sears also sells baby clothing. He can spend his precious time in the one department that interests him, find what he needs, and finish his transaction quickly.
What if Sears had only one door? Customers would be frustrated by the necessity to wander around the store trying to find the right department. They would be assaulted by the sights and sounds of thousands of products that don’t remotely interest them. Some would be distracted from their initial goal, run out of time and leave before buying anything.
You may be thinking, “Some people love to shop. They’re actually attracted by the need/opportunity to browse through multiple departments. So the one-door metaphor might be perfect for them.”
Absolutely true. But thanks to the miracle of modern merchandising, your web site can be like the Sears store with multiple entrances — and satisfy the needs/desires of the casual shoppers as well as the focused ones.
Most PPC landing pages should be designed with the multiple-entrance metaphor in mind. PPC keywords represent the intent/desire of the shopper. PPC ads are analogous to the signs around each of the multiple entrances — describing what’s inside the entrance, and the benefits the visitor can enjoy. The PPC landing page is like the shoppers experience once they step inside the door.
Which leads us to Important Point #2:
The first and most important objective of the landing page is to convince the visitor that they’ve come to the right place.
David Szetela
Online advertising expert David Szetela is Owner and CEO of Clix Marketing, one of the few agencies that specializes exclusively in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, creating and optimizing clients’ Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter advertising campaigns.
Clix is also one of the few agencies paid according to their performance – as a percentage of profit or a commission per sales lead generated. Szetela’s 25+-year career working for small magazine publishers as well as Apple Computer and Ziff-Davis Publishing has provided him deep experience in direct response marketing.
He is active in the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and is one of the authors of SEMPOs Advanced Search Advertising course. His articles on PPC advertising have been published in MediaPost, Search Engine Land, MarketingSherpa, on his company’s blog, http://www.clixmarketing.com/blog, in his weekly Profitable PPC column published by Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=sew_experts/profitable_ppc), and in the SEW blog (http://blog.searchenginestrategies.com). He is the Principal PPC Editor of the paper and online publication SEMJ.org (http://www.semj.org/editors.html). He is also a frequent speaker at Search and Advertising industry events like Search Engine Strategies, SMX, PPC Summit and MarketingSherpa Summit, and he hosts a weekly radio show called PPC Rockstars (http://www.webmasterradio.fm/Advertising/PPC-Rockstars/), distributed by Webmasterradio.fm and iTunes.
Article Marketing for Coaches: The Life Coaches Guide to Article Ideas that Multiply
Chris Brogan Inspired
I have a mindset for framing posts that will hopefully be useful to my community, while also being worthwhile to my business (I derive a high percentage of business referrals from my blog posts). Chris Brogan
One of my fav blogs to read and comment on is Chris Brogan’s blog. This last week he posted 20 Blog Topics to Get You Unstuck. I liked his list and wanted to create one of my own – or I will expand on some of the topic ideas from Chris’s list.
The opening quote from the same post is the exact mind set I teach my coaching clients to cultivate.
- Useful to your ideal client (your community of ideal clients)
- Worthwhile to your business – lead generation
Okay, so here’s my list of article ideas that multiply:
- Start with who, what, when where, why and how.
- who is my ideal client (examples: parents, CEO, small business owner)
- who surrounds my ideal client (examples: children, employees, other small business owners)
- who would your ideal client like to spend more time with / less time with
- what does your ideal client want?
- what questions does your ideal client have?
- what challenges does your ideal client have?
- what mistakes does your ideal client make?
- when does your ideal client get inspired?
- when is your ideal client happy?
- when did your ideal client last read a book, take a vacation, go out to dinner – why not more often?
- where is your ideal client?
- where does your ideal client want to be?
- where can your ideal client find resources?
- where are the mentors that your ideal client admires?
- why should your ideal client do some thing (any particular thing)
- why invest in books, training, resources to meet your ideal client’s needs?
- why set goals, make changes, etc
- why not…
- how to … well you know
- Make a list! List are great as a creative brainstorm idea not only for your own article ideas – Top 10 – The Best, The Worst, 7 tips
- Favorite resources – what are your favorite resources that apply to your coaching message. They can be online or off line resources.
- Favorite blogs – Make a list of your favorite blogs that are content rich with information that would appeal to your ideal client.
- Share a recipe – Recipes are not limited to food. What about a recipe for social media zen? What about a recipe for better employee relationships.
- Do over – What if you could do something over, how would you do it, what would you do? (#20 on Chris Brogan’s list)
- Survey Says… – Conduct a survey on Twitter? Ask a question and see what comes back? Use other survey tools, ask the questions to your blog readers, to your email list, or on your social networking groups.
- Fantasy Island – Create a fantasy world. What would a perfect parenting day look like? What would a perfect workplace function like?
- Ewwww! Bugs - what about pet peeves?
- Current events – what is going on in your world? in your ideal clients world? in the big, big world beyond you and your client and why does it matter?
- Industry buzz - what is happening in your industry and how it important to your ideal client.
- FAQ – what are the frequently asked questions that surround your area of expertise. If you’re not sure than join discussion groups and forums to get real live questions from your ideal clients. Make a list of the questions and answer them on your blog or in an article.
- Myths that need busting – what are some common myths that your ideal client might be held back by and how can your bust the myth and remove the barrier?
- Rock Star Articles! - Interview the “rock stars” or experts that your ideal client would love to hear from. I do this ever week on my Internet radio show Get More Business. Create articles from the interviews (Hey, that’s a good idea! I think I’ll start doing that.)
- Have some fun! - Tell some funny stories. What are some of the funnies things that happen on the job, or in a preschool class?
- Nostalgia – how have things changed in your area of expertise and why is it better, or not?
- Review a book, a movie, a play or a commercial – look for lessons that can be applied using your coaching message.
- Take a tour – Visit every business on the top 100 places to work and write a blog post. Visit the top 10 kid friendly restaurants and create a check list of key things parents should watch for when dining out.
- Write about a client conversation – anonymously of course. There’s a really good chance that if it’s a question, concern or insight of one client it could be one that would apply to others.
- Lessons learned – we learn lessons all day every day if we look for them – lessons we learn from our children that apply to business – lessons that we learn from business that can be applied to parenting children. Lessons from our pets, or strangers, or….
- In a word – pick a word that inspires you and define it, expand it, associate it with your coaching message and apply it some some insight that your ideal client needs.
Take any of these and apply the who, what, when, where, why and how. Ideas will proliferate if you begin to train your mind to think like your client, not like a coach.
Publishing articles is free. If your article is rich with the words and phrases that your prospects use to search for answers your articles will be found. These samples of your expertise have the potential to capture the attention & interest, inspire desire and ultimately action. Articles work like untiring sales reps caring your coaching message as far as your key words reach.
It’s not too late to get started.
Online Marketing: How important is blogging to building your coaching business?
Last Friday on the Get More Business Show, my guest was Cathy Perkins, The Wordpress Wizard . We had several wonderful questions on blogging and using the Wordpress Blog platform. Cathy answers some of the questions on her blog. There are a few more that she will be posting on as well. The show is available here for you to listen and learn valuable information.
Please understand that blogging is one of THE most important tools to evolve and present your coaching message to your marketplace. I mentioned on the show that I had seen a tweet come through from John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing that literally stopped me in my tracks. I did a quick screen capture of the tweet to share with you here:
Blogs are #1 way to Gain Ground as Expert
Jantsch says that your blog is your “expert base” and social media are outposts. Before the social media outposts can make sense you need the platform or expert base that your blog provides.
If this is true, then doesn’t it make sense to elevate the importance of posting regularly to your blog?
On the Get More Business Show Cathy Perkins talks about committing to posting a set number of times a week, and recommends polling your audience. If you’re new to blogging and having built up an audience or following yet, then let me encourage you to post more frequently – say maybe 3 – 5 times a week – in order to attract a following.
Why posting frequently and regularly will establish you as an expert online
Google loves fresh new content and will send it’s search bots out to visit your blog more often if it is updated with fresh, relevant content. Understanding the key words & phrases that your marketplace uses to search by and using these key words & phrases in your content will establish relevance. Posting regular & frequent will attract search engines to update how you rank for those key words. Posting frequently and regularly is one of the best things you can do to impact where you rank in the search engines and how quickly qualified prospects find you when searching for the answers and solutions you provide with your coaching message.
If you are building your coaching business, or promoting your book or your speaking business – a blog is more powerful to establish an international or local expert presence online than any other activity. Tap in to this power and use to your advantage by:
- Create a schedule of delivering samples of your coaching message
- What will your message be for each post?
- How many days a week will you post?
- When will you set time aside to post?
- Set up and work with a powerful, flexible blog platform
- I personally recommend Wordpress blog platform – we’ll discuss this later this week in future posts.
- Connect your blog with your social media outbosts and other bloggers.
I strongly urge you to host your own blog rather than host with blogger.com or wordpress.com. Hosting your own Wordpress blog is very simple. In a future post I have created a short video on how simple it is to set up a self hosted Wordpress blog.
I register and host all my domains at My Small Business Website. They have friendly, 24/7 customer support and they install Wordpress blogs at no additional charge for all hosting accounts. They do not customize the blogs but they do install. We’ll talk more about how to customize your blog. Don’t worry, it’s very simple.
Remember, It’s not too late to get started!
Get More Business Show – LinkedIn Expert, Viveka von Rosen
Honestly, I never really liked LinkedIn, to me it never felt very “social”. It felt stiff and unfriendly. I have a LinkedIn Profile – but until recently, never really cared. But all that is about to change!
Friday, March 20, 2009, my very special guest is LinkedIn Expert, Viveka von Rosen. I sought her out on Twitter because I didn’t want to ignore LinkedIn any longer. I decided I needed to understand LI better so I could advise my clients how to incorporate LI into their over all Social Media strategy.
I found the following post over at Viveka’s blog which intrigued and excited me to learn about LinkedIn. This post made LinkedIn sound a lot more social – right up my alley!
After you read this post, leave me a comment with your burning question about LinkedIn so Viveka and I can discuss Your question live on Get More Business Show this Friday, March 20th.
Enjoy this post by Viveka, @LinkedInExpert.
Is it the size of your network or what you do with it?
by Viveka von Rosen
I am what you might call a promiscuous networker. In fact, I never say “no” to anyone (on LinkedIn that is.)
Folks like me are known in LinkedIn as LIONS (LinkedIn Open Networkers). LinkedIn’s take is that you should only invite people you know (although Scott Roberts, Senior Director of Business Development at LinkedIn sings a different tune – and we love him for it). Nonetheless, since I am in the field of social media strategy and marketing – working with both corporations and individuals – I find I need a giant network as a service to my clients. The larger the network, the bigger the portal into the LinkedIn world, and the more likely you are to find the diamond amongst the gravel. A large network is very useful for people in Sales and Recruiting, JobSeeking and Marketing of any kind – where it is a numbers game. It’s awfully hard to connect to someone who is not a first or second connection. Never mind those not in your network at all.
Scott Roberts, Senior Director of Business Development of LinkedIn was recently quoted in a Right Management Press release as saying “LinkedIn’s research has found that the quality of an individual’s profile and the number of connections dramatically impacts response rates to job opportunities.”
“C” level folks might want to remain “LaMBs”(“Look at My Buds” – coined by Laurie Macomber Of Blue Skies Marketing.) LaMBs know everyone in their network, and if you are lucky enough to connect to one, you will find their network much more useful than a LION network. LIONs love LaMBs. I can contact Laurie and I know she knows everyone in her network and could, should she choose to, give me a very warm written, perhaps even verbal recommendation. (LaMBs had better have someone in their company who is a LION if they are selling product or services.)
For those wanting top grow a LION network, let me throw out a few caveats. Firstly, LinkedIn only allows you 3000 invitations, so don’t go inviting everyone in your 8000 person database. (You can accept as many invitations as you want). When you do invite someone, make sure you let them know how they know you and why you want to connect.
Be aware of the IDK. (I Don’t Know). Get even one IDK now and LinkedIn will limit the functionality of your profile. When inviting someone to connect with you, ask them to archive your invitation if they do not want to accept it. Most people are not aware the penalties LinkedIn enforces as a result of an IDK.
For most people, the ideal network lies between the LION and the LaMB. If you want to strategically grow your network beyond people you know, but don’t want to be completely promiscuous, I suggest going to TopLinked.com’s top 50 list and inviting all of those folks. (You can now download that list as a CSV file) They will say yes, open your network to about 10 million, while keeping your first connections close at hand.
For more strageies on how to grow your LinkedIn Network, attend one of Integrated Alliances Network Building Webinars.
And of course, invite me (Viveka von Rosen) to Link In with you!
Click: The Ultimate Internet Marketing Book (non-geeky guide)
I’ve been hearing Jeff Herring, The Article Marketing Guy, talk about his mentor, Tom Antion, and his book “Click: The Ultimate Internet Marketing Book“. Jeff’s references to Tom Antion reminded me that I have Tom’s Full Wake ‘Em Up Video Professional Speaking System. In fact, I was among the first to purchase this comprehensive system from him about 10 or 12 years ago.
Although Tom has had his book Click: The Ultimate Internet Marketing Bookout for a few years I hadn’t read it yet, so I went over and bought it today just to see what Jeff Herring kept referring to. I thought it would be relevant for those of you that are speakers or that are coaches & authors who are ready to expand their business with speaking.
I realized a couple of things as I read Tom’s book:
- This is so simple that ANYBODY that can read can not only understand what Tom recommends, but should also be able to do what he suggests and / or direct a hired “geek” to implement powerful strategies.
- The content is universally practical and could also be used for coaches and authors – even if you don’t want to build your speaking business using the Internet.
The topics are varied from registering your domain & developing your website, to getting traffic. Tom also includes a step by step process of going from concept to creating a product and selling it.
If you’re a speaker, coach or author and you’re looking for an all in one comprehensive guide to understanding how to build your speaking business on the Internet, Tom Antion is highly qualified – not only does he make millions every year on the Internet – but he has trained other highly profitable speakers and Internet Marketers over the last 12 years. (Jeff Herring, Robert Middleton) After purchasing and reading Tom’s book myself I highly recommend it.
Tom’s book – won’t be the last book you’ll need as you’re building your Online Marketing strategy, but if you’re just starting out on the Internet it’s a simple, yet comprehensive start.
Conversion is King – No Matter How Much Content You Create!
Conversion: The percentage of visitors who take a desired action.
The desired action can take many forms, varying from site to site. Examples include sales of products, membership registrations, newsletter subscriptions, software downloads, or just about any activity beyond simple page browsing.
A high conversion rate depends on several factors, all of which must be satisfactory to yield the desired results — the interest level of the visitor, the attractiveness of the offer, and the ease of the process.
Yeah, I know what you’ve probably heard about content being “king” – but, nah, not so much. Yes, content is extremely important but if your content is not created with conversion in mind, it’s worthless. It’s just a bunch of “blah, blah, blah”.
But don’t let that scare you from creating content.
Conversion is a mindset. It’s about knowing what your customer wants and presenting the your coaching message in the words of your client needs. You’ve probably heard the explanation in sales “when you’re shopping for a 1/4″ drill bit, what you really want is a 1/4″ hole – the drill bit delivers the hole.
Same thing with coaching, or your motivational speaking – your people don’t really want a coach, they want to be better parents, make more money, achieve excellence.
Your content needs to deliver the message of how to be a better parent – not just that you are a great, highly experienced parenting coach.
Articles that deliver information on how excellence is acheived with self leadership. Your message should allow the reader to see themselves in the picture of success that you paint for them. This is a message that will resonate!
If you’re not converting the numbers that you’d like to with your blog and your articles, begin to make small changes. Look for a few extra subscribers a week or a day. Over time it will be hundreds even thousands.
Below is an excerpt from a post I read today that explained the concept of “turning knobs” or making small changes to improve conversion.
Free to Freemium: 5 Lessons Learned
by Ranjith KumaranLesson Five – “Boring” things can give you lots of conversion lift
Conversion lift doesn’t always come from groundbreaking changes in product, offers, or funnel analysis. These days I will look for ten 1% lifts in conversion before one 10% magic bullet; in reality there probably aren’t a lot of 10% lifts left after the first handful. Get into the groove of turning knobs a little at a time, learning, and iterating; you never did this further down the funnel when you were selling ads and you are likely out of practice. Other mundane things that you haven’t invested in start to get a lot of play: customer service SLAs, quality of service, and even the right terms of service are all areas which can drive conversion. Look for a 1% lift in conversion right now, it’s in there somewhere; then do it again a million times.
The desired action can take many forms, varying from site to site. Examples include sales of products, membership registrations, newsletter subscriptions, software downloads, or just about any activity beyond simple page browsing.
A high conversion rate depends on several factors, all of which must be satisfactory to yield the desired results — the interest level of the visitor, the attractiveness of the offer, and the ease of the process.
“Melody, Send me your 6 week eCourse (just two emails a week) that lays out a simple plan to harness the power of Internet Marketing to build my coaching business, create passive streams of income, book more speaking events, and sell more books.” It’s easier than you think! Let’s get started today!
Coaching Business – 5 Tips for Choosing a Challenge, or “Where will Your Business be in 100 days?”
Your coaching business will not be built in a day, but it will be built a little bit every day. Jeff Herring
The purpose of a 100 Day Challenge is to provide a strategy that will help you focus on tasks that will provide steady growth for your coaching business. In a 100 Day Challenge you elevate a particular goal to priority status. The idea is that by focusing on one single challenge or goal you can apply attention and activity to a single goal and see measurable results. If you have not started yet, it’s not too late.
The most important phase of the 100 Day Challenge is choosing the challenge. Here are three tips that I used when I set my challenge for the current challenge.
Tip One – Start at the end
Begin thinking about what you would like to happen in your coaching business. Think about the results that would be the most benficial to you. You might be a new coach that wants to fill your practice; or you might have a full practice, so you might decide that you want to create products that delivery your coaching message that you can sell without having to schedule more appointments in your already full schedule.
Tip Two – Choose a single challenge
The value of a 100 Day Challenge is that a single goal is elevated for your attention and activity. If you choose a goal or challenge that is too big, multifacted, or you might choose several goals, the power of the challenge is diluted because the focus is too broad. We all have things that we know we need to, or should be doing; and some of those things we do everything we can to avoid. I’m not necessarily recommending that you start there. Choose a goal that might be kinda fun as well as challenging. It will be much easier to commit to if it’s something that appeals to you.
Tip Three – Choose a challenge that you can commit to.
What would you do today, tomorrow and the next day, if you knew that in 100 days would bring your more clients, sell more product and allow you to work less and enjoy life more? Start with a challenge you can enjoy and be inspired in the journey to achievement. If the challenge is too big, or to boring you might not stick with it. We all have things we we have to but don’t want to they’re probably going to get done anyway just to avoid the consequences. For this exercise choose a challenge that you can get enthusiastic about.
Tip Four – Stretch yourself just outside your comfort zone.
Choose a goal that will help you to grow in knowledge and in experience. You will be rewarded with greater satisfaction if your challenge stretches you and causes you to push yourself just outside your comfort zone. If it’s too easy or it’s something that you’re already doing you won’t realize the full benefit from the challenge. As you stretch to acheive the goal you will be expanding your capability and reach, there is great satisfaction in this growth. Do not underestimate the power of the energy that comes from elevating a goal and focusing your attention and energy on it’s acheivement.
Tip Five – Must have a “payoff” and measureable results.
There is not much worse that to do something and have no idea when you’ve reached success. So, as you set your challenge you should be able to tract your activity towards your goal. There needs to be a “woo hoo” at the end of the jouney…and along the way. If you don’t plan small benchmarks of success along the way you might get discouraged and quit before you have a chance to experience the power of the 100 Day Challenge.
An example of small bench marks of success and payoff is my challenges to create 100 pieces of content in 100 Days. One of the pieces of content that I am creating is articles. For me the mini payoff is to check my author stats on Ezine Articles. I love to see how many views and click-throughs from my articles. I try to come up with articles that generate more views than the last one. I’ve kinda made a game out of it.
Don’t let fear stop you.
Don’t let the tryanny of the urgent keep you from the important.
Let’s get started!
