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Recent studies have found that the internet marketplace has grown a staggering seven times faster than traditional GDP over the last four years, and has created over 7 million jobs in that same time frame. This represents an incredible and exciting opportunity for anyone looking to make money and start a business, from selling art or music, to advertising, an online coaching business, and many more areas.
Before the internet, you would be largely limited to your local area and the people near you. Now, we can access millions of people around the globe, cast our advertising net far and wide, and offer our services to people we would never have met before. If you’re looking to start an online coaching business, you couldn’t have picked a better time to do it, as social media and the internet are exploding and influencing society in new ways every single day.
What is Online Coaching?
Many people today have solid goals and the drive to succeed, but they lack some of the soft social skills, like public speaking or how to give an interview, along with hard skills like writing a book or how to market themselves effectively.
Online coaching is the art of building people up to be the best that they can be. This includes their self-esteem, their appearance, and helping them to fully realize their potential. Online coaching is a partnership, where each other’s success contributes to a positive feedback loop of greater success for all, and is never a zero-sum game where one person succeeds and the other fails.
Online coaching is frequently conducted through video calls, but can also take place through emails, instant messaging, or audio calls. There should be a two-fold process of learning/development, where the skills are built, and reflection/implementation, where the skills are put into practice.
Why Online Coaching?
Before starting, you should always ask yourself why you want to get into online coaching. The main reason should be that you feel you have a gift for bringing out the best in people and getting results.
On top of that, there are several other reasons why online coaching is an excellent business idea:
- It’s profitable – you will make money
- It’s flexible – you will set your own schedule
- It’s in demand – life coaching, business coaching, and online coaching are all growing in demand
- It’s easy to reach global clients – you can reach stronger markets
- It’s scalable – you can work up to coaching groups of people
- It’s a key to passive income – eventually, you can simply sell videos or classes you made
Steps to Take
- Build Your Skills
You’ll need a range of soft skills to be an effective coach, so work on your ability to make connections, empathize with people, and help them succeed.
- Create a business plan
One of the first steps towards starting any business is drafting a business plan. This will help you find partners and funding, as well as remain focused. Define your target demographic and the specific niche you will fill.
- Build your material
Next, you’ll want to create a comprehensive, scaffolded coaching framework. Don’t offer everything all at once, try to focus on getting people hooked and offer some solid advice, but make sure they will come back for more.
- Branding, marketing, and SEO
You’ll want to come up with a brand name, a logo, and look into advertising services. For online businesses, SEO (search engine optimization) is critical, so don’t neglect this.
- Specific deliverables
It’s time to figure out the specifics of how you will deliver content. Maybe you’ll create a website, make courses to sell, or create a video series. Look into what your competitors are doing and work from there to customize it.
- Pricing
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, CEO or Executive Coaches can make up to several thousand dollars an hour. While you’ll need to build up your credibility and experience to reach these levels of coaching, it shows an important aspect of coaching, which is that the sky’s the limit.
Don’t sell yourself short, but also when starting out it’s smart to offer tiered packages, some at a lower price and some higher. Try to focus on repeat customers and use market research in your area and niche to figure out what your competitors charge.
- Find customers
Now, you need the most important part: the customer. Look into conversion funnels, which is the process of turning a browsing or interested potential customer into one that is actually clicking through and spending money on your product. Familiarizing yourself with common sales terminology like this will help you build and streamline a process to find customers.
If you follow these steps, you’re well on your way to online coaching success! It’s an exciting and rewarding job that anyone with the right skills and motivation can do, and you’ll find that helping people succeed will lead to success in your own life as well.