Online Marketing: How important is blogging to building your coaching business?
Posted by Melody Campbell on March 18, 2009 · 3 Comments
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:
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!
![[Post to Twitter]](http://thesmallbusinessguru.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter.png){kind=icon}
Welcome back! Would you like to be updated in Google Feed Reader when I update my blog? Please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks again for visiting my blog! Did you leave a comment? I'd love to know what's on your mind...
Related posts:
Great post Melody. A blog is a great tool for coaches to help them attract clients and communicate their philosophy. I love your tips for scheduling posts!
Excellent post Melody. Regular blogging is such a great way for coaches to attract new clients – focus on the keywords for your "specialism" and you will be amazed how quickly potential clients will be finding you in the search engines. Give them enough information to make some difference in their lives but want them leaving more.
The other thing that I would really encourage every coach to do is to start to build a list of subscribers. Don't let them leave your blog without having the opportunity to connect with you – then when they need you they will be able to find you.
Again really great post.
Take care
Paul
Melody – I'm a new adopter. Just launched my new blog — all SEO'd and Web 2.0'd up. It's so much more a magnet for my clients — coaches — than my membersite. So I definitely advocate the same for coaches. Thanks so much for your take on this. I'm sharing this with my members and putting your blog on my roll.