I am going to tell you all the absolute truth about how I started out online and how difficult it was for me to learn all there was to learn and how confused I was. I was looking for some information online to help me start my coaching business and I found very little but I did find some and what I found helped me a great deal.

I want to tell you this so you will consider joining me for 12 weeks as we work our way through Dr. Jeanette Cates' "Online Success Incubator". I will be guiding and coaching you through each module for FREE! The way I will get paid is from the commission I make as an affiliate for Jeanette. The classes begin 7/19 at 8p ET.

I don't remember who's list it was but I signed up in someone's opt-in box and began to observe the process of online marketing and soon found myself as interested in the online marketing process as I was the information that I was getting. The next thing I knew I could not get enough of this whole idea of being able to market my coaching business to people all over the world! WOW! Imagine the possibilities…if I only knew more about this whole online marketing thing. I was bit by the online bug and I was off to find out as much as I could about this new form of marketing.

I spent months reading all the free material anyone offered. Soon I found myself on dozens of peoples lists and my mail box was flooded with more than I could possibly read. I would listen to free audio mp3's while I was exercising just soaking up every bit of information I could get. Only one problem with this idea….everyone said something slightly different so I could not determine who was correct. Soon I became confused and overwhelmed. In fact, I almost just gave up.

Then I came across Dr. Jeanette Cates and her "Online Success Incubator". It was amazing! She had tons of information, videos, how to's, PDF, audios on every topic you could ever want to know about. I found the gold mine of Internet marketing information but there was so much there!

I noticed that Jeanette lived in Austin…in fact she lived very close to me and I decided I was going to meet her. Long story short after practically stalking her she granted me a lunch meeting and we hit it off very well. I volunteered to do anything to help her in her business if she would just give me a little direction as I got started on the Internet.

Well, she took me up on my offer and suggested that I catalogue her videos in the Incubator for her….little did I know that there were over 300 videos. The result was that I had to make my way through the video content in the Incubator and boy did I learn a lot. I also become friends with this wonderful and brilliant woman.

Please consider joining me for this 12 week learning experience that will change your business completely! I will guide you each week on a webinar and you will have email access to me as well. http://www.jeanettecatesincubator.com

So many coaches are busy trading time for money and limiting their income potential in the process. It is great to have a full schedule of coaching clients and you can certainly earn a great living just coaching but doesn't is sound better to have multiple streams of income? Imagine having products for sale on the Internet and those products bring you income each month without you having to do a thing once the product is created and marketed.

Information product can come in several forms. You can write and ebook, produce an audio course, produce a video course, or any combination of these. The beautiful thing about creating information products is that they can be done very easily and inexpensively. If you can write a 400-500 word article then you can create information products. You can learn everything you need to know to create your own information products with my course "Content Creation Made Simple"

Become an Authority in Your Niche
How would you like to be known as a top authority in your niche? When you produce information products and conduct online classes you can quickly rise to become known as an authority in your niche. This will present other income generating opportunities like speaking engagements. You can become known as a top authority in your niche by writing and submitting articles then turning those articles into information products.

Information Products Create Additional Revenue Streams
When you are coaching one on one you are simply trading time for money therefore you are limited

Marketing your coaching services is a coaching session in a slightly different form. Think about what your goal is when you write a sales letter or something to attract clients. You are helping potential clients see and define a problem then you are facillitating their finding a solution. That is coaching so keep that in mind as you write your marketing materials.

Our job as coaches is to get clients and potential clients to take action. Nothing happens until someone chooses to take action. Scarcity, properly used, is a tool to help motivate people to take action. It is not a trick or a ploy rather a motivator that encourages people to take action.

Scarcity
There are sever way to create scarcity and they are all effective. Time based scarcity and quantity based scarcity are the two most commonly used types of scarcity in marketing.

When you use scarcity in your sales letter it must be believable and it will backfire if it is not. Some reasons that scarcity would exist are special offer, testing the market, collecting testimonials. Be genuine when you use scarcity and understand that you are increasing your client’s chance for success when they take the steps necessary to begin coaching.

Story
Tell the story of how you came to create the product you are offering. Tell them about the problems that you found and how you understand they are the same problems that your clients are experiencing right now.

Tell them about the pain that you felt and how that affected you. Tell them how you decided to overcome the challenge and how you went about doing that. Describe the results you got by applying your solution and why the same solutions will work for others with the same problems.

Show them how this led you to create the product or service you are offering. Explain that you know it will help them just as it helped you.

Benefits
What is in it for me? This is the question everyone has when you approach them with an offer of a service or product. It is human nature to want to know how a service or product is going to help or benefit you.

What your product does is a feature and how that changes your customers life is a benefit. Write down everything your service or product does and then write down how each of those things benefits the client.

Organize those benefits from greats to least and do the same with the features. Theses will attract your clients to you and your solution. Your solution is the answer they have been seeking. People don’t want things what they want is the feeling those things will bring them. So ask yourself how does this feature change the life of my potential client and how will they feel when it does.

When you include these elements in your promotional material you will communicate with your clients in a way that resonates with their deepest thoughts and desires. You will be able to motivate them to take the action that they have not been able to take previously.

Sitting down to write a sales letter often strikes fear in the heart of many coaches and information product producers. Even many savvy marketers dread the process of writing a sales letter. Well, just stop it because writing a sales letter can be fun and easy when you break the process down into steps.

Any task that seem large or difficult can be conquered by breaking it down and working on one step at a time. This is the way I suggest you approach a sales letter. If you just work on one step at a time to the best of your ability you will soon have a completed product with all the necessary components done to you highest capability.

Step 1: Research
People are more motivated to avoid pain than they are to seek pleasure so to be effective in converting people to coaching clients you must know what their pains are. Far too many marketers seek to tell clients about all the nice things that will happen when they get coaching rather than pointing out the pain that will continue to run their lives if they don’t get coaching.

The first thing you want to research is the pain your target coaching niche endures and is desperate to relieve. You want to know what causes them fear, frustration and anger. Go to groups and forums and observe what the members talk about. What do they complain about, get upset about, get frustrated with and mad about? Take notes on what people in the forums are writing about and what their pains are so that you have real world data to use in your copy.

Put the pains, angers, and frustrations in order according into how important they are to your potential coaching clients. Give each pain, frustration or anger a ranking from highest to lowest for creating pain in the life of your target coaching niche.

When someone is in pain they will desperately seek a solution to that pain. The one thing that is better than having a solution to your client’s pain is painting a picture of what that solution with look like and feels like for the client.

Feeling the pain motivates a person to find a solution and imagining the relief that solution will bring motivates that person to take action. Imagining the relief creates hope in the mind of your client and without hope it is impossible to move forward. 

The process of feeling the feeling that will come with a solution helps to get the subconscious mind working toward that solution because it helps establish the beliefe that a solution is possible. The idea that something is possible and the belief that it can be done is the beginning of all great accomplishment.

What are you doing to market your coaching business? Are you taking three steps to actively market your coaching business each day? If you not then start now. Your marketing is a wonderful way for you to introduce the benefits of coaching to many people that have no idea what coaching is or how it can help them.

The fact is, people can’t coach until they know what coaching is and they can’t coach with you until they know how you can help them. If you don’t tell them these things then how are they going to find out?

You can use your marketin to serve others by offering free information that will be of high value to the people in your target coaching niche. Helping people with an challenge or problem that relates to your target niche is a fundamental way to market your coaching business.

I want to share with you several ways you can market your coaching business and serve others at the same time.

Irresistible Offer- People love you when you give them something they can use and value for free. You can give away special reports, articles, tip sheets, check lists, eBooks, teleclasses or anything else that will help your target coaching niche solve their problems, achieve their goals or overcome their challenges.

Blogging- You blog is your home base on the internet it is where people go to read your content and to find out what you have to offer. Be sure to email the people on your list from time to time and give them a link to one of your posts. People appreciate you letting them know about information that can help them or is important to them.

Video Marketing- Most of us were raised on television so we are a very visual society. Use this to your advantage by creating short two to three minute videos explaining what you have to offer. You can put these videos on your site, blog, sales pages, and You Tube to tell people how they will benefit from what you have to offer.

Testimonials- You can tell people how your products will benefit them but it is even more effective when someone else who has used your product testifies about the benefits. Use testimonials in all your marketing materials. Make sure to include a full name, photograph, and web address if possible. Keep all the nice emails people send you and ask if you can use their words as testimonials. If you get a phone call about how great your product or service is then ask to use those words as a testimonial. Let your customers sell new customers for you.

Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of internet marketing yet it is often overlooked by many people. Many people know what the term keyword means but they do not do the detailed research necessary to find the best keywords and often they do not know how to use the results most effectively.

Keyword Search Tools

There are many keyword search tools available to help you with this task. When you put your keyword into a keyword research tool, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that keyword term or phrase and other important statistical data. Each keyword research tool provides different keyword data possibilities in addition to how many people are searching for that term. Many of the search tools will also suggest other possible keywords and phrases that you would not have otherwise thought of.

There are several keyword research tools available some are free and some charge a fee. Google keyword tool, Wordtracker, and Overture Keyword Selector are a few suggested tools. Each tool provides slightly different information and features so check each one out and use the one that works best for you.

Narrow the Field and Make Your Choices

Now that you have a large keyword list it is time to narrow the field and find the keywords that will be most effective for your site. To begin the process of analysis I suggest that you create a spreadsheet to evaluate the search volume, conversion rate, and competition for each keyword term. All of these figures will be provided by the keyword tools mentioned earlier.

Begin by going through the long list of keywords and highlight the words that most closely describe your site, services, and products. These will be some of the terms you will want to hang onto. Get rid of the words that do not fit your site or that you do not have content that is relevant to the keyword term.

Be sure you are using both broad and narrow keyword terms that are relevant to your site. For example if you are a coach that helps women in transition from divorce then you may want to use the term “relationship coach” but you will also want to use a more specific term like “women’s relationship coach” or “divorce coach for women”.

The closer the relevance of your specific keywords to the actual content on your site the more Google will like it and they will see the relevance resulting in a lower advertising rate. Google wants search terms to be as relevant as possible to the actual content on the site. The more relevant the sites content the less Google charges advertisers. Conversely the less relevant the content the more Google charges advertisers. So it actually pays you to do a good job of matching your keywords to the content on your website.

Narrow you list of keywords down to about 10 to 15 keywords that best fit your site content and have adequate search volume. Check these keywords against those you find in the source content of you strongest competitors and make sure you have higher ranking keywords whenever possible.

By doing your keyword research and being diligent in utilizing the results, you will rank far higher than your competitors with the search engines and your site will be found by more potential coaching clients.

Yeah a shopping cart, that's what I need to build my list!

Yikes! This shopping cart thing is easy to sign up for but that is all that is easy about it!  All I can say is holy crap this makes little or no sense and I'm not sure I will ever be able to learn this and there is so much to learn.  All I can do is start the tutorials but I'm not sure if this is stuff is over my head.  Well, I will give it a try and see what happens.  If worse comes to worse, I will hire one of the tech people they say they have for $40 an hour.  At least they can get me started.  This stuff isn't cheap either so I better get to work getting more clients.

Networking around town

So, I joined BNI and have been going to those meetings and they have been Ok but not super great.  I think I need to find other networking groups to go to as well.  It seems that I do better networking for speaking opportunities that networking for referrals.  Each time I am able to do a workshop, I pick up a client or two so I think I will go with it.  I have had great luck speaking at groups that are into new ways of thinking about spirituality.  The local Unity church has been a great place to meet people that I enjoy and to lead workshops.  I have also found that women are more open to Life Coaching than men.  No, that is not exactly correct…women are  more open to

I want my website to work for me

I am thinking that I should be getting clients from my website rather than just having it tell people about me.  I was looking around on the Internet for information and found some sites where there were people selling what I was looking for.  I also noticed that they gave away some "test" information or products that I could get for FREE.  This made me feel like I could "test drive" their information products and get to know how they thought before I invested the rather large sums they were asking for.

I realized that I could modify this idea for my coaching website.  Many people still don't know exactly what coaching is or what it can do for them.  Sure they can read about me and my background on my website but is there a way I can offer them something that speaks to them and helps them in some way?  Can I use my website to collect contact information of the people that express some interest in coaching and give them something of value at the same time?

Give, Give, and then Give Some More!

This idea of giving something of value in exchange for contact information and the opportunity to build a relationship made a great deal of sense to me.  Great!  Another good idea that is going to make me have to figure out what to do next.  Now, I have to figure out what I can give away that is of value to people who visit my website.  I know, I will write about what I know best.  I will give them a free report on how to bring balance back into their lives.  Great, problem solved…only…

How am I Going to Deliver that Information and Collect that Contact Information?

Well, I guess I better figure out how the other guys do it.  After lengthy investigation I find that they use a tool called a shopping cart.  Conveniently available from the same place I got my merchant account from.  Easy, I will get one!  According to the website, I can use this shopping cart to keep track of my contacts, make sales, send out broadcasts emails, newsletters, and these things called auto-responders.  Sounds awesome, sign me up!  I'll just watch a few tutorials and have this thing down in a day or two…no problem!

What I Learned

1)  My website can and should serve me and others.

2)  Marketing on my website can mean giving away things that are helpful and of value to others.

3)  I need to be able to collect contact information from people who visit my website so that I can create relationships with the.

4)  I need to be a giver to establish trust and a relationship on the Internet.

5)  A shopping cart is the best way to manage products, contacts, and deliver information to my customers.