#055 How To Start a Coaching Business With the Resources You Have Now
Not everyone has money to invest when they start their coaching business.
It is possible to make it no matter how little money you have to start with. You just need to be realistic and plan accordingly.
I actually started off my coaching business with zero budget.
In this episode, we talk about how to start your coaching business now, with the resources you have:
1. Find a tool that would allow you to receive money, so people can pay you for your
delivery. You can begin by using PayPal or a similar tool.
2. Find a tool to deliver your service with. Say you’re an online coach. In that case, you
can use Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, or the like to interact with your clients. To share
files, you can use Google Drive or similar tools. You don’t really need anything more.
3. Marketing.
● Choose organic forms of marketing that will help you gain the visibility you
need to sell your packages. You can start with blogging, spending time making
valuable interactions on social media, and getting to know your community.
● Offer something for free. Freebies, free coaching sessions, live training for
people in your group, etc. will help you get more traffic. Your first goal is to get
on as many discovery calls as possible.
● My favorite marketing tip is SEO. 98% of my traffic and leads still come from
search engine optimization and blogging.
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How to start a coaching business with the resources you have.(00:00):
In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about how to start a coaching business with the resources you have. And I can already see that this episode is gonna be very unpopular with online gurus who’ll tell you that you don’t have what it takes. You need to learn more stuff, you need to buy more courses, you need to get more qualifications, you need to have more money, you need to save, you need to invest. And the truth is that if you want to really create a coaching business, you can no matter what your starting point is. I actually started off my coaching business with debt. Basically. I did not take out debt to start my coaching business. I do not recommend taking out debt to start any business, but I did already have debt from previous entrepreneurial activities, so you wanna call them that had gone wrong.
Resources to start a coaching business (00:56):
And basically I started off a step-down. So I didn’t have a lot of money to invest because I was using my business to as quickly as possible pay off the debts that I had from before. So a lot of people are going to tell you that you need resources to start a coaching business, but that really depends on the kind of marketing system that they’re selling you. So the first thing is that when you set up your coaching business, you need to have simple tools. You need to have the tools to take money. So people need to be able to pay you, you need to have tools to deliver your service. And all of these tools can actually start off for free in the beginning. So for instance by registering for PayPal or a similar tool, you actually don’t pay anything until you actually make money.
Delivering your coaching packages (01:51):
So that is possibly the best way to go. Another thing is for your delivery. So if you’re an online coach, you can actually get Zoom, which does not have a time limit for one-to-one calls. So when you start off and you’re doing one to one calls, you actually don’t need to pay anything to use the tool if Zoom is not the right thing for you, maybe you’re doing groups. You can also explore other tools. There are tools like teams, Skype, Google Meet, These are all tools that can replace Zoom. And in order to share resources with your clients, you can just use Google Drive. So as a start, in fact, it’s one of those things that I have found it really hard to replace over time because it works and it’s such a simple system and you really don’t need much more than that to share documents with your clients. The next thing you’re gonna need is of course marketing and marketing can feel notoriously expensive, but it doesn’t have to be in the beginning of your
Organic Marketing for Coaches (02:59):
Business. You’re going to have more time than money. So one of the things you wanna do is choose organic forms of marketing that are going to help you start getting the visibility you need in order to sell your packages. So the first thing you wanna do is take a look at what organic marketing strategies you can do. So if you know how to write, that’s a massive asset. You definitely wanna do that. So you want to blog so that you can show people that you know your topic and you know your expertise. If you like to be on social media, you can also spend time on social media, engaging with people in groups, finding the right kind of communities, getting known helping people, and also why not trying to sell directly on the social media channels. And that’s important. A lot of new coaches do not spend enough time selling, so that’s very important.
Another free or cheap way to start reaching more people in the beginning to market your services is also to offer something for free. And this works much better, of course if you have a budget to send traffic to this freebie. But you can also get free traffic with other strategies like trying to find partners who are already talking to the audience that you wanna speak to, maybe get in their podcast, do live with them on social media, teach in their communities do a free training for the people in their group coaching. So whatever you can do to get in front of a new audience is gonna help you get more traffic. If you have friends in high places, like people in business chambers maybe they own businesses, maybe they run networking events. Anybody that has an audience that is similar or very specifically the kind of audience you want to target is gonna be fair game in the beginning.
You want to make sure that you’re using your content in the form of a free guide or a blog post on your website to tell people what you do and help them get engaged with your topic matter when they actually come to your site. So there is always gonna be that something that you need to send people to. And this can be a great webinar. It can be simply a recorded video. It can be a great guide or blog posts that you either put on your website or you ask people for an email address. In exchange for if you don’t really have a budget to invest, you may also not have a website yet in which case you can use platforms like Medium or wordpress.com where you can go and register and literally start blogging right away. You can create a website on these platforms and you’re just good to go.
Budgeting (05:50):
If you have a small budget instead of no budget, it really helps because then you can get on say the wordpress.com platform and upgrade for about $99 a year. And that is gonna allow you to have a blog that does not have advertising on it. Because wordpress.com and a lot of these free tools, do tend to put advertising on your sites. So what you want to do is you want to make sure as well that you get yourself a calendar. You’re gonna need this link that you can drop in your blogs, on your social media and wherever you’re engaging with people so that they can go to your page and book a call with you. Your discovery calls are gonna be very important. I have actually a great article about learning how to do your discovery calls and designing your own script. And I will drop that in the show notes cuz that’s very important because your first goal is gonna be to get on as many discovery calls as possible. So your content should have the goal of getting people on these calls because these goals are gonna do two things. They’re gonna get you clients and they’re also gonna teach you what people are specifically looking for, what words they are using. And this is information that is absolutely priceless is the information that your business is going to be built on.
Okay, so those are all the tips I have for you today. We talked about starting your business with the resources that you have. It is perfectly possible. I did it. I have a lot of clients who did it. It’s all about getting really familiar with the best organic marketing strategies out there. My favorite one being SEO. In fact, 98% of my traffic and my leads still come from search engine optimization. Blogging and SEO alone will actually take you from zero to your first six-figure year in your coaching business.
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About the Show
In the Profitable Online Coaching podcast, Stephanie and her expert guests answer the most common online coaching and coach marketing questions to help you unravel the facts and take the right next step for your coaching business.
On solo episodes and with guests, she talks about popular topics such as marketing for coaches, blogging, digital marketing strategies, pricing, mindset, and how coaches build successful businesses.
Stephanie is an experienced SEO Content Marketing Strategist as well as a Marketing Coach for Coaches. She talks about online marketing strategies, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing tools, books, and much more.
She learned programming as a fresh graduate and has worked as a trainer, programmer, and web consultant for over 15 years before becoming an online coach. For the last 6 years, she has offered 1:1 coaching and Online Programmes designed for coaches, therapists, and online service providers. She also offers Content strategy sessions and SEO Content Consultancy services to 6, 7 & 8 figure coaches. Contact her on hello@stephaniefiteni.com.
