Five Tips for Creating A Coaching Program

One of the best things I learned from my mentor, Adam Urbanski, was the power of offering personal coaching as a way to expand my business and to truly make a difference in people’s lives. Whether you’re a graphic designer, a web developer, an author, or an Internet marketer you can offer coaching to others to teach them to be successful doing exactly what you do. Naturally, something like personal contact with you will be your most expensive service that you offer.

In order to be a successful coach follow these steps:

• Hone your craft – No matter what you are doing right now, learn all you can about it. Become the best at what you’re doing, take classes, sign up for coaching, read books. To be an expert in your niche you must know all there is to know about your niche including the mistakes other people make toward success in your niche.
• Become known — Before launching your coaching program become someone who is known as an expert in your niche. Have webinars, radio shows, and a good mix of avenues to promote yourself. In addition, write articles and blog posts that demonstrate your expertise,  also appear on other people’s blogs, events, shows and webinars as “the” expert for your niche.

• Write a book — Don’t panic, if you’ve been writing for your blog, and writing articles for article marketing you have already written a book. You simply need to compile it, add some information to make it flow, get a cover designed, hire someone to edit your work,  and then you will have a book. You can upload it to Create Space or Lulu.com and it will be for sale on Amazon.com before you know it.

• Take it offline — You can’t overlook offline activities if you want to earn the big money as a coach in your niche. Send out offline press releases and appear on talk shows to promote your book and services. Have an in person book signing event. Additionally, write articles for offline magazines and newspapers. (Bonus tip: You can repurpose chapters and subchapters from your book) Believe it or not, many offline publications are also desperate for content. At first you offer it for free, but as you get better known you can make money from your content too.

• Multiple offers – Create multiple types of coaching at various levels of cost. For instance, create an email coaching program, a group coaching program, a membership site, an inner circle, as well as a very special one-on-one coaching program. Other than the one-on-one coaching everything else can be automated and will require very little work for you once the initial creation process is completed.

Those are the basics.  As you get more clients, you can raise your rates or add different options that allow you to help more people at once.  What kinds of coaching programs could you offer in your business?