Marketing for Life Coaches – Key Tips for Success

Life coaching has grown in popularity in recent years as more people are seeing the value of hiring a coach to help them stay more balanced, find more purpose, and lead their lives to a higher level of success. Many people pursue a career in life coaching because they are eager to be involved in a way of life that feels meaningful and fulfilling, one that is making a positive contribution to the world.

As a life coach, there certainly is a tremendous opportunity to have the best of both worlds: rewarding work and financial prosperity. The truth of the matter, however, is that the vast majority of life coaches struggle to build a successful business. Most of the time, this is not because your coaching skills are poor, but is almost entirely due to the fact that your business and marketing skills are poor.

Most life coaches are independent business owners, which means they are 100% responsible for the amount of money they make. If you want to hire as many clients as you can and make a great living, I encourage you to invest in your marketing education. In particular, life coaches have an incredible opportunity to attract clients via the internet, since they are not bound by geographic location (most life coaches can do coaching over the phone).

Here is a basic plan of steps I recommend you take to market your life coaching business:

1. Invest in a highly professional and fully functional website or blog ~ My recommendation is that you use a WordPress blog as your main platform to educate and attract new customers. Blogs are a very powerful way to connect with a huge audience of people who are eager to participate in what you have to offer.

WordPress blogs have many advantages over static HTML websites, especially for trainers. The first advantage is that your blog gives you the ability to engage with your audience in a way that you simply can’t on regular websites. People can comment on your blog and you can build some buzz just by having interesting conversations.

Second, your blog will integrate nicely with social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook (more on that in a bit). Third, you get 100% control over the content on your blog. This means that you can update your information at any time without having to use a web designer. The last main benefit of a WordPress blog is that it is considered to be much more search engine friendly than a regular website. This means that there is a much higher chance of your blog ranking highly on Google and Yahoo than on a static website.

I recommend blogging if you think you can commit to writing at least 1 blog post per week from 4 to 600 words. That is the minimum contribution you will need to make to maintain a good ranking for your blog.

2. Learn to use social media ~ The market for life coaches is truly limitless on websites like Twitter and Facebook. You can use Twitter to generate virtually endless leads. I recommend you learn how to use Twellow and Tweetdeck. Twellow is great for finding a target market to follow on Twitter and Tweetdeck will keep your Twitter marketing organized and efficient.

I also recommend that you use a Bubble Tweet, which is a short video that you use to introduce yourself to new followers. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you can follow me here -> Follow Kevin on Twitter When you follow me, you’ll get a bubble tweet from me and an automated message pointing you to my Facebook fan page. This is a great way to bring your followers from Twitter to Facebook, which is where you can start to develop deeper relationships with leads and prospects.

I think of Twitter as a better resource for mass lead generation, while Facebook is more effective for relationship building. Their goal on these sites is to get people to phone or Skype for free consultations.

If you master the Twitter/Facebook marketing system I’ve been using, you’ll find that you can easily talk to 5-10 people on the phone every day about your business and how you can help them. It’s phenomenal! If you’d like me to teach you my social media marketing strategy, I highly recommend signing up for a business breakthrough session where I can personally help you access an unlimited audience via Twitter and Facebook.

3. Do Marketing Offline Too ~ Now, I’m not that excited about marketing offline for life coaches because the ocean of prospects is so vast on the internet that you really shouldn’t have to do much offline. In addition, much of Internet marketing is automated, which means that your personal investment of time/energy is much less than in typical network environments.

That being said, if you really want to build your business quickly, you should consider joining a referral group for at least a few months. I also recommend that you join your local Chamber of Commerce and attend all of their networking events. Be sure to give a lot of talks in your area as well.

This is just a sample of how you can market your life coaching business. It’s obviously a big topic, but I hope this gives you the feeling that you absolutely can be successful and enjoy a wonderful career IF you learn how to market effectively.