Are you a business or life coach that is in a slump? Are you looking to grow your business and your income? If so, check out this article on how to grow your life coach business.
Personal coaching is worth more than $1 billion in the United States. Not only can a life coach business be a lucrative career, but you get the satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve truly helped people.
Life coaching can take some serious hustle to get off the ground. The difference between successful life coaches and those who are finding it difficult to pay their bills is often just the way they approach their business.
In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about starting a coaching business and how you can grow your coaching business quickly.
Ready? Let’s get started.
How to Start a Life Coach Business
Are you the type of person who coaches friends, family members, and sometimes perfect strangers through situations? Have you got some serious life experience under your belt or you’ve always been interested in working as a personal coach?
If this sounds like you, a career as a life coach could be for you.
Getting started can seem overwhelming, But it’s not as difficult as you might think. Here are a few tips to get you started:
Find a Niche
Remember that this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stay in a certain niche. But finding a niche you have training or experience with will allow you to get your foot in the door.
Consider the problems you can help your clients with. Life coaches can help with the following:
- Life purpose
- Quarter and mid-life crisis
- Relationships
- Health
- Business
- Career
- Weight loss
- Personal development
- And more
Once you’ve decided where you’d like to get started, you can plan your marketing by establishing yourself as a life coach specializing in those specific issues.
Choose a Name
Deciding on a name for your life coaching business may seem daunting. It may be a good idea to go with your own name or a relevant nickname. This will help establish your brand with you at the center.
This also means you can add products and programs in the future without needing to rebrand.
However, if you don’t want to use your own name, there are plenty of other options. Make sure your business name will grab the attention of your ideal client and position yourself as someone with the solutions to their problems.
Get Online
Even if you choose to coach in person, it’s crucial that you build a solid presence online. That means building your very own coaching website. It has never been easier to create a website, and there are plenty of free tools and advice to help you along the way.
Your best bet is to use WordPress, as it’s completely free (you’ll probably want to pay for hosting and your own domain name though) and there are thousands of free plugins you can use on the site.
The most successful business owners know when to do things themselves and when to outsource. If you have no interest in building your own website, there are many web development firms and freelancers who can do this for you.
The most important thing is that you have your own space to connect with visitors and advertise your services online.
Embrace Social Media
Social media can be an excellent tool for getting the word out about your business. Even if you don’t have much of a marketing budget, a few ad campaigns to increase followers or attract people to your site can be incredibly effective.
This is especially important if you’ll be targeting millennials, who want to get to know you before they sign up.
Remember, social media shouldn’t solely be self-promotion. Use it to establish yourself as an authority in your industry. Post interesting articles from other sources, give your followers free tips and advice and engage with your audience by asking questions and starting conversations.
Growing Your Life Coach Business
Once you’ve established your business, all you have to do is sit and wait for clients to find you and sign up for your services right? Wrong.
Businesses don’t grow themselves, and you’ll need to be constantly marketing and doing other growth activities so you can keep your life coaching business moving forward.
Here are some tips for growing your life coach business:
Build a Community
While it’s great to have followers, it’s much easier to build your business when you’ve created a dedicated community.
Not only do your followers learn from you, but they interact and learn from each other. It’s much easier for people to find you and begin trusting you when you have an active community helping you grow through word of mouth.
To encourage people to join your community, share engaging and helpful content- podcasts, videos, articles, and more. This doesn’t mean you’re overwhelming your audience, just sharing enough to keep them interested.
Attract Your Ideal Clients
There are a few main ways you can market your business when you’re entering growth mode:
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
This includes Google Adwords, LinkedIn ads, and Facebook ads. This is one of the fastest ways to get your content in front of people- especially if you haven’t been a life coach for long.
Facebook makes it easy to pinpoint your target audience, and you can choose people based on their interest, demographic, and behavior. If your website is new and you’re not yet ranking well, you can use Google Adwords to target the keywords your potential visitors will be searching with.
Partnerships
One of the best things about doing business online is how easy it is to connect with other business owners. When you find someone who has a product or service that compliments your own, you can form a strategic partnership.
For example, if you share the same target audience as a mommy blogger, and you offer life coaching to busy moms, you can cross-promote each other to your audiences.
Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is the best advertising there is. When you’re still getting started, talk about your business to everyone you can. Practice your elevator speech until you have it down, and get serious about calling yourself a life coach.
As you take on new clients, be sure to ask them for testimonials and reviews. These are especially helpful if you’re marketing to millennials- with 8 out of 10 admitting that they won’t buy anything if they don’t first read a review online.
It’s also a good idea to consider how effective referrals can be. Consider setting up a referral scheme with discounts for current clients who refer new clients to your services.
Get Certified
You don’t necessarily need to become certified in order to work as a life coach. But it will definitely help you build the skills you need to be successful when it comes to changing your clients’ lives.
A life coach certification will give you the tools you need to be prepared for any situation with your clients. It will help you take your skills to the next level and ensure a greater element of trust with potential clients.
While there are no formal requirements for working as a life coach, certifications and training can make you stand out compared to other life coaches who are only working with life experiences.
Learn to Run a Business
As a life coach, you’ll be joining thousands of self-employed Americans. But it takes a particular skill set to run your own business, and you’ll need to learn fast.
Taxes, accounting, insurance, and marketing are just a few of the things you’ll need to get up to speed with. Since you won’t have a 401k through your employer, you’ll also need to prepare yourself for retirement with your own retirement funds and investments.
While it may seem like these types of activities won’t necessarily be growing your business, you’ll be surprised. Nothing encourages you to raise your rates like paying for your own taxes and expenses.
Network
When you’re growing your life coach business, you’ll quickly learn to always be hustling. And that means constant networking. This can be a fun process, as you’ll often meet many other people in your field and in parallel businesses who you can collaborate with down the line.
Go to conferences and networking events. Take along your business cards, and aim to create long-term relationships with like-minded people.
If you’re an introvert and nothing makes you more uncomfortable than attending networking events, don’t worry. You can do all the networking you need online, and then move those relationships offline once you’ve established a relationship. This will take some of the stress and anxiety out of networking and make it a much better experience.
Wrapping Up
Creating a life coach business is hugely rewarding. After all, you’ll be giving your clients the tools they need to make real change in their lives. And you’ll be along for the ride, cheering them on as they succeed.
By using the above tips, you’ll be able to avoid burnout while still growing your business quickly.
Want to learn more about getting certified as a life coach? Get in touch today.