How to Attract Clients to Your Coaching Program
It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to put together a good coaching program that clients will benefit from. But where do you get the clients? With all the time and effort you put into creating a coaching program, you’ll need to spend even more time to attract new clients and fill up that program.
Get Your Name Out There
People aren’t going to be interested in signing up for a coaching program from a nobody. You’ll need to establish a reputation for having a great deal of knowledge in your subject area in order to have any credibility.
You can demonstrate your authority in your niche by using some of the most popular marketing tactics. Writing quality articles that address typical problems in your market will demonstrate your knowledge. You’ll need to post those articles in places where your market will see them. This could include top article directories, related guest blogs, and niche publications. It could even include offline publications.
Social media is one of your biggest potential arenas for establishing your reputation. Find where your market generally hangs out and then begin interacting with them. Create your own social profiles in those channels so that people can interact with you directly as well. This might include Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn, depending on your market.
Show What You Have to Offer
Don’t keep all your good content hidden away or people won’t know what you really have to offer. Create free reports, ecourses, webinars and teleseminars that address specific problems your prospects face. Invite them to sign up for your freebie so that they can benefit from your knowledge.
In the free offer, be sure to solve or partially solve at least one of their problems. If people find your information helpful, they will want to learn more about you.
Use Scarcity and Time Limits
When you get to the point of actually pitching your coaching program, don’t leave it open-ended. If people don’t feel a sense of urgency, they are likely to put off signing up for your offer until tomorrow or the next day. After that, they are likely to forget about it completely.
You can avoid this by limiting the number of people who can sign up for your program and the timeframe in which sign-ups will occur. Set a deadline and tell people that you don’t know when it will be opening up again due to your own time commitments. Stick to your limits or people will never believe them again in the future.
You are asking your prospects to put both their time and their personal growth in your hands. In addition, coaching programs usually cost more than other products people have purchased. With both these factors in mind, you’ll need to make a bigger effort than usual to establish trust and credibility in order to attract clients.
How to Decide What to Put in Your Coaching Membership Site
A coaching membership site can be the center of your program or just a place to put some support materials. In both cases, what you put on your site will determine how well your customers learn and whether you have provided the value that they expected from you.
Questions to Ask Yourself First
Before you pick which direction you want to go in, think about the following questions:
• What are your strongest skills? You should play to your strengths and use them to create materials for your site. For example, if you’re great at making videos then you should definitely consider creating a series of videos as part of the membership materials.
• How much time can you commit? Determine just how much time you’ll be able to dedicate both to the creation and upkeep of the site. Don’t commit to adding new materials each month if you won’t have time to put them together.
• What do people want? Think about what people are signing up for in the first place. If they are looking for step-by-step tutorials, then make sure you provide them in your site. Put them into different formats for different learning styles.
• What do people need? People may know what they want without knowing what they really need. Add content to your site that you know they will need. Then introduce these to your members in a logical order, explaining why they need them.
10 Ideas for Content for Your Membership Site
While you’ll need to decide what to put in your coaching site based on your strengths and members’ needs, here are 10 ideas you can draw from:
1. Recordings from webinars. Doing any webinars as part of your coaching, or from previous training? Include those recordings in one area of your site.
2. Recordings from Q&A sessions. You can hold regular question and answer sessions with your coaching members. Make sure you record those and put them on your site for all members, new and old, to listen to.
3. Audio recordings of training, motivational talks, etc. Just as with webinars, include the audio recordings of any training or motivational talks you have done. People sometimes like to listen to recordings on their mp3 players
4. Video tutorials, examples and case studies. Both visual tutorials and case study examples are very effective ways to learn. They can make a mediocre membership site much more robust and valuable.
5. Written reports, tutorials and transcripts. Not everyone wants to watch a video. Give people the option to read all of your materials.
6. Worksheets, checklists, templates. Anything that your members can download and use to apply what they’ve learned is a great addition to your site.
7. Plugins, software, tools. If you already have, or can quickly create, any software or online tools that will make life easier for your members, include those as well.
8. Lists of resources. You can’t provide everything, so tell your members where else to go for more information. You can even include your affiliate links where relevant.
9. Forum access. Having a members-only forum is always a great addition to a site. Just be sure to moderate it or hire someone who can moderate for you.
10. Recordings of interviews with experts. Everyone wants to know what the “experts” do. You can conduct periodic interviews that people listen to live. Then put the recordings on your site.
The more content you provide on your site, the more perceived value it will have. However, sheer quantity is not enough. It’s even more important to be sure your membership site’s content serves a purpose.
Tags: coaching membership site
