Marketing is Not the First Step of Starting a Life Coaching Business

The most important step of starting your own coaching program is to understand yourself, the exact level of your knowledge and expertise, your communication skill, and the types of people that you have already been helpful to as a coach.  If these are hazy in your own mind, then you will have trouble having the confidence that you need to build a coaching practice that people can sink their teeth into.

Marketing steps to promote your coaching program can come later.  For example, it will be important early on to compile various products that are at different price points all leading up to the most expensive coaching program you can offer which is, naturally, one-on-one coaching with you.  But you  will likely get bogged down in these marketing steps if you are not crystal clear about who you are, what you have to offer, and the patterns of how people in the past have responded to you personally and benefited from your expertise.

But Marketing Your Life Coaching Offerings Begins Early On

Once your vision is clear, it’s crucial that you zero in on building relationships with people and follow your progress in this by watching your email list grow.   To grow your list you need to start with the simplest tasks and marketing vehicles and progress to the more challenging.  A good way to begin is to begin creating products to truly benefit people (as opposed to simply making a sale).  How can your particular communication skill be used most effectively?

Some examples of relationship-building products that you can offer are:

• Blogs with useful, thought-provoking content
• Articles with practical steps
• Newsletter that inspires and motivates
• eBooks that people will want to read and refer back to again and again
• Print Books (as in Print-On-Demand)
• eCourses as simple as a set of autoresponder  message all the way to substantial, paid online courses
• Group webinars
• Group phone calls
• One-on-one coaching
• One-on-one coaching via email
• One-on-one coaching via Skype or phone

Let’s take a moment to analyze these items.  The first thing you should notice about the list above is that the first one, blogs, is your simplest and easiest item to create and the last item, one-on-one coaching via Skype or telephone is your most difficult due to the scarcity of time. So in your marketing endeavors consider how you can maximize your offerings at the top of the list, the middle of the list, and at the bottom of the list.

This means that you will need to charge less for the easiest to create for your own communication skill, offering it to more people, and charge more for your most time intensive products and coaching services creating to match the greater value for your client. So it’s important to develop a few simple products with broad appeal and get started promoting them in a way that is consistent with:

1. Your personality and strengths
2. The real needs of your potential clients
3. The perceived needs of your potential clients

Now that you have some ideas about what type of products you can compile and offer in your coaching program, you can think carefully about the media that you will use.  Here are nine ways to use your communication skill to market your coaching products and services in a way that will increase your profits. Notice that the first five tips are also products. They’re products that you can earn revenue from, but they are also marketing for your coaching practice.

Five Potential Products to Your Communication Skill Profitable

1. Blog — Create a blog that is attached to and part of your website. Try to write something useful on the blog daily. Do not over stress about what goes on the blog. It should be in your niche, it should be relevant, and not too aggressive in terms of asking for  sale, although it should have a call to action of some kind.
2. Article Marketing — Even with the new Google algorithm article marketing is not dead. As normal you need to put out quality, original, relevant, and useful content to your article marketing directories of choice. Use only the most reliable directories that are picky about content that they accept.
3. Newsletters — Create a newsletter that everyone who signs up receives something useful at least weekly in their email in box. If you do not send out something regularly they will forget about you and think that you are spamming them when you finally send something. Don’t forget that you can use automation features within your newsletter software to automatically update subscribers to your blog posts, your sales, and events.  But this type of product requires a particular type of communication skill if it is going to get the attention of online readers who are already saturated in information.
4. eBooks & eReports — Make full use of your eBooks and eReports. Realize that even when you ask people not to, they’re probably going to share them. So, make it worthwhile by including links to your other offerings, affiliate links, and anything that can bring more people to your coaching practice.  Think of each short report as a teaser and preview of related ebook.
5. Print books –Believe it or not you can easily create a print book by updating and compiling all your other information into one book. Then you can use a self publishing service such as create space or lulu.com to create a wonderful book available for both print and eBook download on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble . Having your own book and being a published author can give you tremendous credibility within your niche whether you find a publisher or you self publish.

Four Tools and Approaches to Use Early On

The rest of the marketing ideas may be simple marketing tactics and not products, but they are very valuable and you can use them to market all the items above, as well as your coaching practice.  As you consider each of these try to determine which type of communication skill is necessary to make the approach effective.  Then, use your self-knowledge to choose 2 or 3 of them that match your communication skill.

6. Press Releases — One often overlooked method of marketing is the tried and true press release. Today you can create a press release and send it to the online places like PR Web, but you should also send it out to a targeted list of offline sources so that you can get your press release in your local, state and national newspapers, magazines and television news spots.
7. Join Social Networks — Join social networks that your target market is joining. Sure you might want to join a few where coaches hang out, but it will be more effective if you join groups that your target market is joining. Then, here is the golden rule: Give away your advice free by answering their questions with nothing more than the knowledge that they can click on your signature line to find out more of what you have to offer. It feels good, and it works.
8. Offline marketing by phone and local participation — Participate in meet-ups where your target market is and again, offer free advice always pointing people toward your products and services without being pushy. After all, you only want highly coachable clients in your lucrative coaching practice and an unwillingness to buy your products means they’re not ready. This is especially true when you’re offering various entry levels to your coaching program in the form of lower priced, mid priced and the ultimate your one-on-one coaching.
9. Create a fan base — If you have an “inner-circle” club you can create a fan base that will create actual cheerleaders for your business. Allow your inner circle to promote your products and services for a referral fee. This is called an affiliate or referral program and is an excellent way to not only attract new clients but to retain the ones that you have.

Getting Started As a Life Coach –  Before Life Coach Certification

So, you want to become a life coach.   Before you go through months or even years of preparation and training to become a certified life coach, it’s important that you know who your target market it is.   Why not wait until after you are certified?  Because it’s not a smart business decision to wait.  Life coaching is as vast as life itself, and you need to have a specialty and a target audience in mind.  It’s important to align your particular life coaching gifts with a training emphasis and contacts with people in your target market.  My approach to life coach training involves getting started as a life coach before you are certified so that your earnings can help pay for your training.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Target Market:  Who Listens to You?

The first thing you could do is to determine who your target market is. Do you want to be a corporate life coach who helps corporate businesses and their employees or do you want to be a life coach for individuals only.  Let’s assume you want to build a private practice of as life coach working from home using the phone and the internet to conduct sessions with clients.  Finding your target market is not as simple as asking yourself, “Which types of people to I connect with?”   You may interested in coaching middle-aged singles and couples, but what evidence do you have that individuals in this group (market) listen to and value what you have to say?

Test the Waters:  Deciding On Your Target Market is Both a Personal and a Business Decision

Your best insurance against failure is to coach various people informally for free.  If you do this with several people, you should start to see a pattern of which types of people resonate with your approach, your perspective, and your coaching tips.  Then, can start to think about what your specialty is.  It may not be what you want it to be.  You have to let the response of people inform you about who you are going to be effective with as a life coach.  Suppose you want to coach young adults and you can’t find clients.  The ones you do find don’t stick and don’t seem to take the ball you give them and run with it.   Well, you better rethink whether or not that is going to be your target market.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t work with young adults eventually, but it is probably a mistake to try to start there.  Perhaps there is some missing piece in your own training or development that needs to be filled in before you can work with the type of client you would most desire to work with.

Next is to determine who you want as are your primary clients. Do you want your clients to be men or women? Age ranging from 25 to 40, 30 to 50, or 200 to 300 years old? These are the decisions that only you can make.  But it is not all about your preferences. You must test your preferences against the market:  who actually responds to you?  You could start out by choosing the gender of clients who you can work comfortably with.   You may be more comfortable with men or women.  Just make sure that you are clear on which gender of clients you are more effective with.

Choosing Your Life Coaching Target Market:  Who Are You Most Confident With?

By noting the types of clients you are most comfortable with, you are beginning to develop a professional identity as a coach.  This can begin to happen even when you coaching informally without charging.   Once you feel this confidence yourself, you broadcast this to your surroundings, and subliminally, to your prospective clients.

Market Yourself Before and During Life Coach Certification

A life coach is not a coach when who or she has no one to coach. As a beginning life coach, you need to market and make yourself known to other people. There are several ways to market yourself especially over the internet. You can write articles and you can even make your own blog site. Content should be about life coaching and other information related to it.  I am planning to start a special membership website for life coaches who want to learn how to market themselves on the internet.  If you sign up for the free membership at Steps for Change, you will be among the first to be notified when I am ready to launch this premium membership site.

Begin now by writing about yourself.  Go to Tumblr.com and create a free blog.  Before you have your first client you can begin practicing the art of communication.  Where are people stuck in their lives?  Do you have anything to day that might help them get unstuck?

Narcissism is probably most easily understood by starting with the definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder as defined by the diagnostic manual used by nearly every mental health worker.

Why Does This Mental Health Concept Matter for Life Coaches?

Life coaches do the work of helping their clients reach their full potential in one or more area of life.  This almost always involves leading a client through a process in which he or she increases self-awareness in relationships.  Many life coaching clients have as their main goal to improve the quality of a particular relationship.  This means that a client will have to examine why certain confusing or frustrating responses from others are impairing the business or personal relationships.

When you understand narcissism as a life coach, you increase the range of your troubleshooting with clients.  Also, the very nature of personality disorders is that an individual does not see it as a problem.  But if your client has narcissistic tendencies or the full-flown personality disorder, your work together to improve relationships will quickly lead to a discussion of problems of empathy, entitlement, and anger so characteristic of narcissists.

Just How Likely Is it That One of Your Clients Will Prove to Have Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

Although life coaching would not be considered a “clinical setting,”  life coaching clients probably have a little higher percentage of narcissists than the general population.  According to the DSM IV-TR, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is diagnosed in between 2% and 16% of the population in clinical settings (between 0.5-1% of the general population). The DSM-IV-TR proceeds to tell us that most narcissists (50-75% of all patients) are men.

As the narcissist grows old and suffers the inevitable attendant physical, mental, and occupational restrictions, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is exacerbated.   Studies have not demonstrated any ethnic, social, cultural, economic, genetic, or professional predilection or susceptibility to the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

In mental health settings, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is often diagnosed with other mental health disorders (“co-morbidity”), such as mood disorders, eating disorders, and substance-related disorders. Patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) are frequently abusive and prone to impulsive and reckless behaviours (“dual diagnosis”).

In working as a life coach, you need to have some handles for detecting and working with the traits of narcissism.  Your first clue will be that your client seems egotistical to you.  During your coaching sessions you increasingly feel like the client thinks of himself or herself as above others, even when their achievements are not outstanding.  This is the “sniff test” for life coaches who detect narcissistic personality traits.  The next step is to look for two outstanding characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

1. Self-Referencial Conversations:  throughout the coaching sessions, your client always brings comments back to himself or herself and even seems bored to talk more than a few seconds about someone else (unless of course that other person has a lot of status).
2. Empathy Deficiency:  During the coaching sessions, look for a pattern of blindness to other people’s suffering, inconvenience, or objections.  Narcissists do not have a radar for other people’s feelings–only their own.

By keeping these two characteristics in mind, you will be less likely to waste hours trying change the way a client looks at a key relationship in his or her life.  Instead, you will be able work back to the root of the problem and incrementally assist your client in becoming more aware of what he or she cannot see without special effort and tools.

Cognitive Psychology:  The Overlap of Life Coaching and Psychotherapy

One of the ways that life coaching overlaps with therapy is in the area of cognitive psychology.  Cognitive psychology looks at how changing one’s thoughts can change emotions surrounding the thought.  Similarly, changing behavior can influence thoughts to change which in turn bring changes to feelings.  The practical application of this for both psychotherapy and life coaching is almost identical:  feelings usually cannot be changed directly.  Instead, they must be changed indirectly via changed thoughts and/or changed behaviors.

Now there are common cognitive distortions that seem to run through all the vast variety of human problems and relationships.  These errors of thought are not like mathematical errors or errors of logic.  Rather, they are distortions in ones’ view of things.  In other words, they are like the lens through which your clients see the issues they are dealing with.

We all know that our eyes have lenses through which we see the physical world.  But many people don’t think about the fact that our brain is also a lens through which we interpret the meaning of what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears.  These cognitive distortions function as lens distortions.

15 Common Lens Distortions

1. Perfect or Nothing Often referred to as “all-or-nothing thinking” or “black-and-white thinking” where no gray area or middle ground is acknowledged.  The antidote for this way of thinking is to consciously switch from categorizing things to placing them on a continuum to fit more with reality.  People who indulge in this all-or-nothing, categorical lens distortion attract the symptoms of stress like a magnet.
2. Once = Always or “Twice is a Pattern.” Also called “overgeneralization.“ Seeing patterns when there are not enough instances to make a pattern.
3. What-if Worrying Also called “Preparation Obsession;” “WHAT-Ifs Catastrophizing,” or, “Get-a-sense-of-control-by-thinking-of-everything-that-could-go-wrong.” The assumption that no action can be taken until one is prepared for ALL POSSIBLE negative outcomes.
4. Filter Out the Positives See only the negative aspects of a situation.
5. Jumping to Conclusions Keeping the evidence out of your frame or view.
6. Negative Magnifying Glass Also called “Negative Zoom.”
7. No Good Angle E.g., “There is no point in trying.” Spinning the interpretation of a situation so that it is portrayed to self or others in the most unflattering light and insisting that a better angle to view it simply doesn’t exist.
8. Blurred Background Also called “STATE/TRAIT Twisting:” Background circumstances to something negative don’t matter. The background circumstances don’t represent temporary states (e.g., fatigue), but rather ongoing traits (I’m/You’re stupid). Example 1: If I messed up it was because I was tired (temporary state); if you messed up it’s because you are lazy (permanent trait). Example 2: If I made a mistake then “I couldn’t help it” (temporary state or circumstances), but if you made a mistake, then “you should have known better” and are therefore inconsiderate (permanent flaw/trait).
9. Projector Lens: Your feelings projected like a movie onto someone else as if they were the movie screen. Examples: “f it feels true to me, then it must be true about you;” or, “I feel ashamed, therefore you mush be ashamed of me;” or, “I am angry, therefore you must be angry at me.”
10. Cynical Prediction or “Disappointment Phobia;” one form is ASSUMING THE WORST as in “trust nobody and you won’t be disappointed,” or “ be ready for the worst outcome and you won’t be let down.”
11. Should Bullying “I HAVE to get this turned in on time or I’m sunk;” I’ve GOT to…”
12. Categorizing Dumpster I can re-categorize things or people (e.g., name calling) so that I don’t have any responsibility to do something constructive; one example is “Ridiculous Angle” (re-categorizing something as RIDICULOUS by looking at it from an extreme angle).
13. Trick Photo What I see in the situation that is positive must be a trick, it CAN’T be real. The negative is what is real; evidence of positive doesn’t count (similar to minimization).
14. It’s All About Me “My excuses matter, but not those of other people;” or, “they did this to get back at me;” or, “she’s quiet because she’s judging me” (this would also be Projector Lens). Another example is “he hasn’t called me back because he hates me.” A very common example: “Read My Mind—people should know what I want or need even though I don’t communicate clearly.” “You KNEW that it would make me furious!”
15. Fish-Eye Assuming that you can see everything that needs to be considered with your own perspective. This distortion ignores the fact that even if you did see everything, it would be distorted. This is because you can only see situations from where you are standing. No one can see everything from every perspective at the same time.