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As you're getting ready to start your coaching business or while you're building your coaching business. Do you ever find yourself wondering, “Gee, I sure hope this business thing works out?”
Because let's face it. There will come a point in time when it's time to switch from dreaming and scheming about your life coaching business, to actually building, growing your business and getting paying clients. And you've spent a lot of time and money on your life coaching training. And so of course you want it to be successful.
Well, I did a lot of things wrong when I launched my life coaching business so wrong that it failed. So in this video, I'm sharing all of the juicy details so that you don't make the same mistakes in your coaching business.
You already heard that my life coaching business failed. So why am I here handing out advice?
Because my second business was fully booked within just two months. So I'm excited to share what I learned because today I'm a marketing and online business strategist for life coaches.
Here’s the juicy details.
In 2016, I finished life coach training with Martha Beck and I was so excited of course, to get out there and help people. But also I was ready for a new career because I really didn't like my old one. So leaving coach training, I was excited, full of enthusiasm and it didn't take me that long to get my first few paying clients.
And what about you? Where are you at with your client journey? Are you still in the mode where you are practicing and coaching for free, or have you been able to get your first few paying clients? Comment below and let me know.
So for me, I could remember getting that first paying client and literally falling to my knees crying because I was so happy, so excited. And I felt like me being able to get a paying client proved right, proved that I was going to be successful in business.
And then I had a long dry spell, no new clients, and it was way tougher than I imagined to get more. I had chosen a target market. I was working specifically with moms. I also had potential clients right in front of me. And lots of people that knew I had just finished coach training was a life coach and was working specifically with moms.
At that point, I had created a Facebook group, so they were in my Facebook group and they would comment on my posts. They would reply to my emails, thanking me for the inspiration. And I even had a few people show up for my free webinars. But for some reason I couldn't get those people who were followers to convert into paying clients.
And then there became a point where my contact list was just saturated. So I had already reached out to everybody I knew, told them what I was doing, asked them to invite their friends to my Facebook group. So I was also having a problem with getting new people in my audience that could become potential clients.
I was getting pretty frustrated and nearly desperate because I had just gone through almost all of my savings building my business.
And I really did not want to go back to my corporate job or have to get another job. So after working at it for almost a year full time, it was time to do something different. I had to make a decision. I had to find a way to make money right now. Otherwise, I was going to have to go back and get a different job.
So at this point I had been studying copywriting. I learned all about email marketing, uh, loved it. And then I also learned the tech behind setting up landing pages and building email sequences and things like that.
So I started reaching out to some online coach friends, and I made them very simple offers and I was fully booked within two months. I never did go back to marketing my life coaching for mom's business. But I was dying to know what I had done differently the second time that was successful versus the first time that wasn't.
So what did I do wrong the first time and right the second time?
So I went back and compared both businesses and I was able to figure out why the second attempt was successful and the first was not.
The first thing that I had wrong was…
Messaging. Messaging to me means a couple different things. So it could be how you introduce yourself, the copy that's on your website, also what you promote in social media, different things like that. But I'm going to talk about how I introduce myself because that's really where I was at that stage. So I would introduce myself as, hi, I'm a life coach for moms. I help moms get rid of mom guilt. So that message was clear, but not sellable.
The moms I talked to definitely did not enjoy or want to be experiencing mom guilt, but the way I positioned it didn't make it a strong enough or a big enough reason for them to want to spend time and money to solve it.
If I wanted to go back to coaching moms and have my coaching solution include some kind of flavor of alleviating mom guilt, I would position it with something else with a higher, psychological reason that people buy. So for example, I maybe would package it like make partner at your CPA firm and still win mom of a year or something like stop yelling at your kids so you can be a better mom. Those kinds of messages would be way more sellable.
The second thing I went wrong with…
I had chosen a target market, a defined set of people to work with, but they were not a hot target market. So a hot target market is a group of people who already know the problem that they're having and are ready and willing to pay money to solve it right away.
They don't need to be educated or convinced to spend the money on it. So in my coaching scenario, life coaching moms, they were lukewarm at best. They came into my world because yes, they were experiencing mom guilt. And I would help them alleviate that a little bit just by the messages that I was sharing, but they weren't hot and ready to spend money on that.
I'll explain with another example, let's take getting life coach training. At some point you realized you wanted to become a life coach. And once you decide that you would take the next step of going to find a school or a program to join for training. So at that point you were a hot target market for coaching schools because you knew you had a problem and you were ready to pay money to solve it, AKA get your coach training.
So that's a great example of a hot target market. Okay. So the third thing I want to share with you of where I went wrong with my life coaching business was that I just created content - so free downloads, social media posts, free webinars, things like that - based on topics I thought were a good idea to talk about. And although I do very much believe in creating content that aligns with you as a person and as, and as a coach, I also believe in creating content first that your potential clients actually want, because if they don't want or need to see it, then you can't really create a business out of creating content that you just want to create.
I talk more about how to validate your ideas in this blog, Three Ways to Guarantee a Profitable Niche.
Let’s wrap this up so that you can go out there and get yourself a bunch of paying clients for your life coaching business.
Here's what I suggest:
1) Create a sellable message. It has to be a message that somebody's willing to pay money for, for that coaching solution, not just something that they find interesting, and then leave it there.
2) Find yourself a hot target market. So people who already know that they need or want your services to solve a big problem they're having.
3) Create content that people want, not just content that you want to create.
Do you need more guidance on how to creating a message that sells for your life coaching business? Click below to download my free guide 7 STEPS TO GUARANTEE A PROFITABLE MESSAGE & MARKET.
And, if you are in the phase where you’re still trying to figure out your niche or target market, but you’re worried about narrowing it down, check out Three Proven Reasons to Niche as a Life Coach.
FREE GUIDE!
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