A life coach helps his clients find out how to be their best selves!
The best thing about becoming a professional life coach is that you make money while helping other people achieve their goals.
Most life coaches don’t have a problem with ambition or motivation. Neither do they lack passion or creativity. Still, they get stuck when it comes to starting a successful coaching business.
Sounds familiar? Then you are at the right place!
In this post, I will share a step-by-step guide on how you can start a life coaching business.
1. Develop the required skill set
As a professional life coach, you are not just an advisor. You are simultaneously a leader, an entrepreneur, a dealer, and a marketer.
You need several skills to run a successful business as a life coach. So, never stop learning new skills. Every bestselling author or the best coach that you have seen started from nowhere. They worked their way up to success with a continuous journey to be better.
So, if you wish to be a successful life coach, develop the required skill set. Some of the skills that will help you progress in the coaching industry include:
- Leadership
- Creativity
- Entrepreneurship
- Active listening
- Networking
- Marketing
- Budgeting
Sit down, take a deep breath and ask yourself if you have these required skills.
If the answer is yes, all of them! Then you are ready to start your journey to becoming a life coach right away. But if you have some of them while you lack others, invest your time, energy, and money to learn them.
2. Decide your coaching niche
Life coaching is a broader term that covers a multitude of smaller segments of life. The first thing you need to do is select the life coaching business you want to excel in.
To decide the niche, know your areas of expertise and list them down. Based on your experience and knowledge, you can choose to be any of these:
- A business coach
- A personal development coach
- A performance coach
- A career coach
- A business coach
- Leadership skills
- A spiritual coach
- A parenting coach
- A relationship coach
Choose one that you think you are best at or have the most experience with. Deciding a niche will help you determine the next steps of the process, like:
- Who do you want to coach
- Your coaching packages
- Your marketing strategy
3. Get certified
While a certificate is not a requirement for becoming an online life coach, it surely will polish your skills and refresh your knowledge. Once you have a certification, you are probably ready to hit the ground running.
Once you have the certification, you will be able to:
- Coach your clients in a better way: As stated above, a certification will enhance your knowledge. You will also get to know the latest trends prevailing in your chosen area of coaching. As a result, you will be able to coach people in a better way.
- Get more clients: In addition, certification validates your knowledge and expertise in your chosen field. It will help convince your potential clients that you could be the right coach for them.
Thus, certification boosts your credibility, especially when you are just starting your career. At this stage, you don’t have dozens of testimonials to convince your prospects. In such a case, a certification will help.
4. Know your ideal client
Now that you have decided on your niche, dig a bit deeper into the coaching market to find your ideal client. There are hundreds of individuals looking for a life coach to help them achieve their goals.
Find out who can be an ideal candidate you can guide and encourage to overcome their fears and struggles to reach their goals. There are several ways to find your ideal candidate:
- Do online research: Do a quick search online to find the right candidate to coach. You can visit relevant forums, social networking groups, and Q&A sites to find if someone needs your help. You can also visit the comments section of popular blog posts related to your niche. See what questions people are asking. Do you think you can help someone?
- Market your coaching service: The second way to find your ideal client is to attract the clients through effective marketing. Market your life coaching business on different platforms, including social media channels. Facebook and Instagram can mainly play a key role in helping you to connect with your potential clients.
5. Decide your services and costs
To be a successful coach in a fast-growing industry, like life coaching, you must stand out in terms of your services as well as costs. When marketing yourself, highlight the areas of expertise that matter the most to your prospective clients.
Remember, people are not hunting for a coach. They are looking for a solution to their problems. So, create your first offer keeping in mind who you are planning to serve.
Create a differentiated offer, making sure it is affordable and serves at least five key concerns of the people you wish to help. This will show your target audience that you understand their problems and care for them.
In your offer, be specific about the outcome you can help your clients achieve. For example:
- Land in your ideal job
- Lose 15 pounds
- Earn 2K followers
- Publish a bestselling book
Based on these details, create attractive programs and packages that are irresistible to your ideal clients.
6. Build your online presence
In this day and age, no business can thrive without a robust online presence. Digital marketing is the most effective tool to find and connect with your target audience.
The first step in building an online presence is creating an engaging website that describes your life coaching niche and credentials.
Your life coaching website must have information about:
- Your credentials, qualifications, and experience
- Your packages and pricing details
- Your customized offers: such as online training, face-to-face sessions, handouts, podcasts, etc.
- Testimonials of happy customers
- Links to your social media pages, if any
- A contact form or online scheduler to let interested clients reach out to you
Also, make sure you include the following pages on your website:
- Home Page – This is the page your visitors first land on.
- About Page – This is the page where you share all the details about yourself necessary to convince prospects that you are the ideal coach they were looking for.
- Services Page – This is a page where you will highlight the life coaching services you offer.
- Contact Page – This is a page that interested clients can use to get in touch with you.
Pro-tip: While you build your website, do not overlook the importance of social media marketing for life coaching business. Have a strong presence on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. You can use these platforms to engage with potential clients and generate leads.
Final Words!
This step-by-step guide covers almost all the key steps you need to start a life coaching business. Follow these steps and see where they take you. But don’t feel like you have to rush through these steps overnight. Becoming a successful professional life coach is a journey that takes time. Follow your path at your own pace. What matters the most is that you keep progressing, and one day you will be able to build your dream coaching business.