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Your Marketing Key – The Four Questions
By: Janet Slack
There is a lot of information available about how to market a coaching business and yet many coaches still struggle. How do you know which idea to follow and how to make it work for you? The answer is in what I call the “pre-marketing” work that needs to be done to build a successful coaching business. At the heart of your pre-marketing work are “The Four Questions”. This is the contemplative work that you must be willing to do as you begin your business and again periodically throughout the life of the business. The four questions lead you to know how to market what you do because they are at the core of your business.
First let’s address who you are as a person. This is the “Who Are You?” question. It is a tremendous help to know yourself inside and out in order to succeed in the coaching business. If you know yourself well there is less chance that “your stuff” will get in the way of the client so you will be a better coach. As an entrepreneur, knowing yourself well allows you to get the most out of your abilities and compensate where needed. What are ways to describe your own uniqueness? What is the combination of experiences, personality traits, history and values that makes you who you are? “Who Are You” is the vital piece that makes YOUR coaching business different than the other thousands that exist.
“What do you do?” is the second question. This addresses having the ability to talk about coaching and what it is. If you can describe your work in a genuine, impactful way, you will be seen as attractive by those people who you are trying to reach. The more practice the better in terms of learning to talk about coaching. Make sure to talk about coaching with anyone who will listen, research what others say about coaching, read widely about coaching and get your own coach so you truly understand its impact. What you are doing is collecting knowledge so that you can express the results that your potential clients can expect to get from coaching.
“What do you have to offer?” is the third question. This question delves into who you are as a coach - what are your skills and strengths as a coach? Begin to answer this question by asking for lots of feedback about your coaching. Your clients will have some insights into your style and what is most helpful for them. Remember to ask your coaching partners, supervisor, or peers for feedback on your coaching. Spend time thinking about how your personal beliefs and values impact the work you do as a coach. In particular, consider what you believe about motivation and personal change. Think about how your belief system affects your presence with your coaching clients.
The final question is “What is your passion, purpose, and path?”. The driving force that makes your coaching come authentically from your soul is your passion. This is some of the contemplating you must do in order to find your niche. Your purpose is the spark within you that makes you want to be a coach. Spend time considering all the things that you think are great about coaching. The way that you put all the elements together in a business that is unique to you is your path. This includes knowing what the essential elements are for the business to be authentically yours and how you will measure success. Consider how these two factors will impact the way you run the business.
The pre-marketing work of The Four Questions will build a solid foundation for your business. Make sure to revisit this periodically in order to ensure you’re your business continues to flourish. Spending time on The Four Questions will make your marketing easier, give you a foundation for attracting clients, increase your income and keep you motivated.
About the Author
Janet Slack of Life Adventure Coaching is a specialist in helping new coaches, therapists and consultants create the thriving business of their dreams. Find more business building ideas and learn all the details that you need to know as a coaching entrepreneur at www.biztipsforcoaches.com/blog/. She recently released Mind Your Own Biz: Discover the Secrets to Creating a Successful Coaching Business a step by step guide to starting your coaching business right.
How Can Twitter Help Me Make More Money Online?
Twitter doesn’t sound like much. It suggests that you tell the world what you’re doing in 140 characters or less. So what? How are people using this social marketing tool to make more money online?
What You Need To Know: Follow and Be Followed!
The key to twitter is to follow and be followed. If you’re on the site talking about what you’re doing to nobody and not finding what anyone else is doing, it’s sort of useless and rather boring. Once you get a few followers and start following a person, that’s when the buzz starts. You can update your status on the web, via instant messaging client or via a third party tool like Twhirl that lets you use twitter from your own desktop. You can follow and be followed on your cell phone as well and be plugged in to the Twitterverse on the go.
You have a profile page that lets you manage the tool and lets people look you up to see what you’re all about in a few lines and with a URL. It’s the “What are you doing” section that counts.
Your Twitter friends or peeps (a.k.a your Tweeps) all carry on conversations with or without you and when you pop in and chime into various conversations, it gets rather lively. People ask questions, answer questions and share URLS of what they’re doing, what they find interesting and what they want opinions on.
There’s also the public timeline that tells you what other people are doing and you can search on that for more followers or conversations to eavesdrop on. It’s like a virtual water cooler that you can stop into during the day and check in with your tweeps.
Use Twitter when you:
-Post an update to your blog
-Want answers to a technical question
-Want to vent
-Want to tell people what you’re having for lunch (seriously, that can sparks some very interesting questions)
and more.
You can also send direct private messages as well as respond to people both directly but also publicly. The more interesting of a Tweet you post, the more likely people will follow you and re-tweet. A re-tweet is when you post a URL and someone likes it so they share it by tweeting or re-tweeting it to their followers. Do you see how it can become a benefit to you in an area like affiliate marketing, product launches and technical challenges you need help with?
You can also post Twitter feeds on your website so that people can follow you, read your conversations, see who you’re following and visit their posts or URLS so it becomes a very viral way to share and communicate and even to collaborate.
The downside to Twitter
Not only is the tool currently growing at such a fast rate that it goes down regularly but there is another downside and that’s productivity. Sadly there’s almost always a downside to social networking and bookmarking tools and as with many others, Twitter can be a time waster if you’re not careful so it’s important to use it and have fun but also to set limits for yourself.
About the Author
Matthew Bredel
To learn more about how social marketing tools can help you and your online money making efforts, visit TheWebReviewer; a resource for making money online, affiliate marketing and more.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents.
If you are unable to research and choose keywords or work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with who deals with search engine optimization on a daily basis.
Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.
About the Author
Becki Noles, Visionary of Virtual Accuracy Companies has been at the forefront of stream-lining coaching and entrepreneurial businesses since 1998. Utilizing her background in marketing, publicity, corporate training, advertising and media, Becki custom tailors and implements individualized action plans for taking coaching businesses to the next level. As a Virtual Assistant her business partners with top business and executive coaches in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the world over.
kO′ch VA adj. 1. a highly specialized and niched virtual
assistant who is in tune with their coaching clients and customizes solutions based upon their individual needs and goals 2. differs from a general virtual assistant as they only partner with members of the coaching industry [syn: 
