Online coaching has come a long way since blogging, email lists, eBook sales, and personal Skype sessions were the most you could offer. In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Chris Badgett show you how to use online courses to get more leads into your coaching business and expand your potential to reach more customers than ever before.
There are 3 basic areas of coaching: Relationships, Business, and Health. You’ve seen so many coaching pitches for dating game alphas, personal fitness trainers, business growth consultants, and health food gurus that you probably ignore all of them by now. If you use the same methods they do to promote yourself as a coach, you’ll be overlooked, too. But if you offer unique, engaging, and personalized services, you will stand out from the crowd. That’s what online courses do.
Capture interest by offering value in advance of the actual sale. A free mini-course is an outstanding way to show customers what you have to offer and make them want to learn more from you. Give them a beginner’s guide or a how-to course that demonstrates your expertise, teaching style, and winning personality. Exciting video and photography paired with conversational dialog allows people to see you as a real, open, and vital person they’ll want to see and interact with regularly.
Your online courses will create positive change in people’s lives. Once they experience benefits through your influence, they’ll be hungry for more and be willing to pay you for even greater results. Start with a free information guide or step-by-step tutorial. Then you can offer in-depth paid courses you build yourself with a development tool like LifterLMS. Beyond that you can offer premium one-on-one coaching. Your happy customers will tell everyone they know about you and your courses.
To differentiate yourself from the competition, you want to be a progressive coach that people can get to know and like. Position yourself as a true authority, and you’ll gain the trust of your followers. Making yourself and your knowledge accessible by offering value-packed courses will accomplish that.
Learn how to use courses to get more leads into your coaching business by using a course development platform like LifterLMS. Get started now with Chris Badgett’s list of 6 free bonus courses that will help you choose your initial courses and show you how to put them together. Just text “coaching1” to 33444 to get the link. You can also try a demo of LifterLMS to see how our course development platform can place you far ahead of the pack.
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And if you’re an already successful expert, teacher or entrepreneur looking to grow, check out the LifterLMS team’s signature service called Boost. It’s a complete done for you set up service where your learning platform goes live in just 5 days.
Episode Transcript
Joshua : Hello, Everyone, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Joshua Millage and I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett. Today we are talking about how to use courses to get more leads and sales for your online coaching business. This is a huge opportunity for people who are in the coaching space, because a lot of times they’re selling nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes. They’re just kind of picking up the phone, selling their coaching, moving on. So today we’re offering an opportunity to scale the sales process and help you get more leads in the cannon, so that you can grow your coaching business without having to sell more.
So, Chris let’s jump in. What are we talking about? What do we mean by courses to help sales and leads? I mean for me, doesn’t a course, don’t I sell a course? Why would I just give that away?
Christopher : Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, the online coaching or remote coaching industry is just booming. I’ve heard people say, everybody’s a coach or everybody is offering their time, they’re just freelancing, consulting on something.
Joshua : Uh-huh
Christopher : To give it some more specifics down around it the three main areas of coaches that you see are the relationship coaches, the business coaches, and the health coaches. Now, that could all be online or through Skype or through some kind of platform, but in order to get people into that funnel, the traditional model was to write a bunch of blog posts about whatever your niche is. Let’s say you’re a Crossfit coach or you’re helping people get more success in dating, dating coach. You’d just write a bunch a blog posts about that kind of thing, sign-up, get my free ebook, and then by the way I also, you can hire me for $200 an hour, and we’ll do a deep dive on your specific situation through Skype.
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Christopher : So, that’s the traditional way, the old-school way of doing it. You’re smiling.
Joshua : Sorry, your hair is cracking me up, dude.
Christopher : Oh, is it going up. Yeah, it does that sometimes.
Joshua : It looked good though. It looked good. Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
Christopher : It’s all good. So, what you can do if you want to stand out from everybody else … If we use this dating thing we can just have fun with this.
Joshua : Yeah.
Christopher : In the dating industry there’s something called peacocking. What’s peacocking, Josh?
Joshua : Peacocking is … It’s sad that I know this, but it’s where you do something kind of extravagant to get attention and to set yourself apart from other people at the club or the bar of wherever you’re at.
Christopher : Yeah, so it could wearing some big, funny hat or …
Joshua : Jewelry or colored hair. Skies the limit.
Christopher : Or you’re at a preppy function and you have on disco outfit or something like that. That’s peacocking. It’s just differentiation. It’s standing out. It’s making it obvious that whoa, there’s something interesting here. That’s the reaction you want someone to have when they see your offer or your brand. Oh, there’s something different here. So, one way to do that is to, in advance of asking for the sale, is to do some free courses on whatever it is. If you’re a Crossfit coach, it’s the cross coach getting or Crossfit getting started course. Here’s what you need to do.
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Christopher : That would be a health example. A relationship example would be the beginner’s guide to blind dating.
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Christopher : Or online dating.
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Christopher : Or how to set up your internet dating profile or something like that. Then a business one would be … If you’re a business coach you may want to start with a course on how to pick your niche or pick your product.
Joshua : Yeah, I actually got a great example.
Christopher : Yeah.
Joshua : My buddy Steve Gordon has a … It’s a referral system that he gives away.
Christopher : Uh-huh
Joshua : It’s a couple of steps you can take to get more referals from your current customer base and it works really really well. It helped us in the early days Codebox get through year one into year two by using the customers that we had to get more customers. So, I think it’s … Many courses or small courses to help show your expertise through giving a result is huge.
Christopher : Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Joshua : We always … We love … You and I go back to the early days of internet marketing when things were a little bit more wild but there was also in someways a little bit more gold. Ebban Pagans thing about results in advance really applies here.
Christopher : I think that was Frank Kern.
Joshua : Or Frank Kern. Well, someone from that era said that and that was a …
Christopher : Yeah.
Joshua : I’m always thinking about that. How do I provide results in advance and in advance of asking for a sale is what they are referring to. How do you have someone have some sort of change in their life. A change looks differently depending on what industry you’re in. Giving someone that change through your teaching, through a free online course is a great way to then get them to become a paying client, or customer, or student. So, just a little caveat there.
Christopher : Absolutely. If I can give you a specific business model that you can follow, this will not be super advanced but I’m not going to do the absolute beginner method either …
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Christopher : It would start like this … Start with a free, email based mini-course and we did an episode about that here … Go and find that one about mini-course versus WordPress LMS course and you’ll see. Basically it’s just a quick course delivered by email kind of like an autoresponder series on the topic.
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Christopher : Then you can have free courses on your platform.
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Christopher : Then you can have paid courses on your website. So, this is your leveraging the power of the internet and powerful tools like LifterLMS to build an online course where you can scale your knowledge and your wisdom and whatever it is that you are coaching, the topic you are coaching on. Then at the highest level, you can charge your premium for your one-on-one, private coaching.
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Christopher : That would be a basic … This is menu of options you can offer the people who are attracted to you but also generate more leads, by having some free options that people can share, test the water with you, get to know and like, and appreciate you and trust your style and make you’re a good fit before they actually intiate, hey, I’d like to do some private, one-on-one coaching for you, I’m ready. You’ve kind of automated that whole process leading up into that.
Joshua : Mm-hmm (affirmative) Absolutely. Well, Chris you have put together an amazing little bonus for listeners around … Really just helping them think aobut what are the key things, key courses they need to create to kind of create this sales engine. So, tell us a little bit about that.
Christopher : Well, it’s essentially the six courses that you should make if you’re an online coach. So, I’m just trying to make it super easy for you to make these six courses, hire … If you can afford it, hire a professional to get some nice video work or audio work done. If you can’t afford that, it’s okay. Use your computer. Use your phone. Use your camera. I’m going to give you the six courses that you can create, that are going to give you the highest likelihood of attracting more leads into your business.
Joshua : Absolutely. That’s so … It’s amazing. You can get that just by shooting us a text. You’re just going to text the word, coaching and then the number 1 to 33444 and our system will ask you for your email where we can then send you this six courses, outline framework that Chris has created. I’m really excited about it because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of what’s a great lead magnet sort of content. I think there’s just so many questions around … Do I create a free report? If I create a free course, what’s the course on? Do I do something else? These are proven. We’ve seen these over and over, work over and over, not just in coaching but other places. It’s like Novocaine. It always works the same way. Chris has outlined that, these six courses for any coach. Again go to coaching … Just text us the word, coaching1, no spaces, just all together, coaching1 to 33444 and we’ll send that off to you. Chris this is fun because we’re really giving people an outline for success.
So, let’s wrap up this episode with some closing thoughts. What in your mind … If someone actually took the time to do this in the next few months … We’re at the end of 2015. So, if they listen to this episode and start moving through it in the first quarter of next year, what do you think some of the outcomes they can receive are?
Christopher : Well, I think the biggest outcomes come from taking your local coaching practice or just small community whether that’s a small internet group or in your physical community geographically, and take that knowledge you have and scale it up to the global market place. If your coaching is good and provides results and people know … You have the talent and the ability to get people to know I can trust you, you can 10x your business. You can go more than that. That would be my goal for you. Would that be through solid, internet online courses presence to open up your funnel to 10 times you current size.
Joshua : Absolutely. That’s wonderful, wonderful. All right again, you can reach us at LMScast.com, leave us a comment there below this video or you can leave us a comment on YouTube if that’s where you’re watching this video. If you’re listening to the podcast or wherever you’re at and you want that framework that Chris has created for you, the coach, just text us the word, coaching1 to 33444 and we’ll send it right over to you.
All right, well I hope you guys have a wonderful day wherever you’re at in the world and we will speak to you next time.
