How Building Online Courses Can Boost Your Coaching Business

It seems like “new normals” almost force every business and industry to work hard to build a much stronger presence online. And the power of online business operations does work well for embracing new talents and expanding the pool of customers. Well, the coaching industry is no exception.

Today, we see that a number of online coaches from different backgrounds only continues to grow. This proves the fact that online coaching has been recognized as a great work opportunity, especially during these vulnerable times. In the long run, the chances are great that consulting and coaching services that stick to a pre-pandemic “working-out-of-the office” model will seem rather archaic. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

Even with all the benefits that come with remote online work, the main challenges of engaging the audience, converting users into customers, and generating leads still remain. And these business goals demand using new marketing approaches and developing innovative solutions. One of such effective solutions - creating online courses on eLearning platforms. So, give this post a quick look if you want to know how to scale your coaching service with online courses and generate more leads for your business.

Coaching experiences that you can easily transform into an online course

Today, the coaching business has come out from being mostly a home-based coaching practice to a well-run online industry. Coaching is a great way to contribute to society by improving and enhancing the life/professional skills of others. And since everything moves online including businesses, online coaching gains popularity with each passing day.

If you’re completely new to the online courses business, here is a list of coaching experiences that can be easily converted into online courses:

Life coaching: online courses should focus on clients’ decisions and self-fulfillment and can cover all aspects of life: personal, mental wellbeing, spirituality, relationships, etc.

Career coaching: courses should be helpful for those folks who look for a job, want to change a career field (but are not sure where to start on that), or are in the process of moving back into the job market.

Executive coaching: courses are usually created for executive professionals to help them improve their decision-making and leadership abilities.

Business coaching: courses in this field should guide and support business professionals on a career path.

Sports and Fitness coaching: guide and motivate people on their way to success in sports and a healthy lifestyle. The main focus of such courses is on the physical fitness, dieting, exercise, sporty lifestyle of their clients.

Team Coaching: these courses specialize in guiding/mentoring business teams and provide effective tips on how to make teamwork run smoothly/efficiently.

Confidence coaching: courses help to boost self-esteem and confidence, recognize blocks and other possible reasons that hold people back from achieving success in life.

Parent coaching: the main goal is to provide support and guidance to parents/caregivers with all the challenges of raising healthy and happy kids.

Before you actually begin drafting your course, start off by reviewing all your past jobs and life experience. Then decide what your best area of expertise is, stick to the following guidelines, and proceed strategically:

• Research and discover your unique value proposition.
• Determine who your ideal client is.
• Develop a curriculum that would support your expertise and attract your target audience.
• Create an online course. But make sure that it won’t be about selling your time but about selling your knowledge in topics that you are an expert in.

Benefits of combining online courses business with a coaching business

What are the top benefits of combining coaching business with selling courses online? Well, let’s go into this and talk about how this approach can really grow a coaching business.

Here are some great benefits that you can get as a coach after becoming a course builder:

Build Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). The creative process of building a course can help you find other values that can be added to your coaching services. By doing this, you can rethink how you are going to be different from other coaches. In other words, coming up with the defined USP goals (as a result of building an online course) can help you scale your online coaching business.

Expand Networking. Building an online course can be very encouraging in terms of reaching out to other people in your niche. Especially to those who already have experience in the online course business. Find more people from your niche and ask them for advice! Reach out to folks on different platforms, show them your vision, ask what motivates them. You never know when you will get connected with your potential clients.

Build Your Own Content Library. It is beneficial to build an online library and offer pre-existing content to users on the web. You can drive the attention by showing your personal touch. However, be aware that you’ll need to put some effort into preparing your own high-quality presentations, notes, chapters, lectures, etc.

Receive More Feedback. Once you start sharing your knowledge with your audience via an online course, they’ll reach you back via comments and reviews. This is a great chance to collect their opinions and feedback for future improvements of your own business.

Build a Stronger Connection with Clients. You can do it by solving their queries through comments. If you reply in your course’s comment section on a regular basis, you can establish better connections with your learners and boost recognition for your coaching business.

Get More Recognition with 1-1 Consultations. Some eLearning platforms (like Grinfer) provide course authors with all the tools that are necessary for carrying out 1-1 consultations. This gives more chances to spread the word out about your expertise, as well as about your own coaching service too.

Testimonials. When you show testimonials from people who were happy with your course, this builds greater trust towards you as a coach.

Moreover, online courses are a good chance to use promotional offers, advertisements, referrals, surprise quizzes, etc. for engaging students. This works well for boosting a client base too!

Can an Online Course Generate More Leads for Coaching Business?

Every industry, service, or business out there faces the same problem at one point or another, which is getting more clients and keeping them as dedicated customers. Yes, driving new clients in is a tough challenge but it’s a huge and most important part of any business. And undoubtedly this is crucial for coaching services since this is the way how they stay afloat. Even though your calendar is filled up with clientele, embracing new methods for growing your coaching business is a smart way to go.

So, is creating online courses an effective strategy for getting more clients? Yes, it is. A big part is referrals. This strategy works well for influencing network channels and differentiating you from your competitors. Since referrals are all about connections, networking, and word-of-mouth, ask your students to help you grow your client base or advertise via referral links on your network channels.

For example, there is a fast and easy way to create referral links in the author’s personal account on the Grinfer platform. Takes a couple of clicks. All Grinfer’s authors/instructors can create an unlimited number of referral links directly in the dashboard of their personal account page. A prolonged lifespan of referral links is up to 30 days from the moment an author places a referral link in his/her network channel(s).

During this period, Grinfer tracks any purchases of subscription plans that took place via these referral links and qualifies authors for the $15 commission for each new student (if he/she purchases a subscription plan after a free trial period). Basically, you get extra profit via commissions and expand a client base via referrals at the same time. Sounds like a win-win situation.

Content is another good reason why creating online courses is a good opportunity to generate leads. Most likely, there is no such thing as ultimate content that will skyrocket leads. However, if you put together different formats that are used today for content creation, you’ll get all the attention that you’re craving. So, convey the information in accordance with the specifics of your niche. Most helpful formats used today for content creation:

• E-Books
• Blog posts
• Video format

E-books can easily advertise your knowledge to a wide range of people. Let students find you on your website or in social media channels that you’ve listed in your downloadable tutorial. This is a great way to convince and convert learners without being potentially boring by breaking out with a standard pitch like email campaigns or something like that.

Writing informative blog posts is also an effective way of convincing prospective clients. Blog posts can be super beneficial since this gives you an opportunity to be strategic with them: make evergreen posts or go with long-form pillar contents. Making snippets out of already published posts or making short clips of them works well for intriguing readers and alluring them into following your blog for getting more info. Contributing efforts to a blog has some mind-boggling benefits like showing expertise, extensive experience, setting up authority. Well, and generating leads, of course.

Educational and life hack videos are extremely popular right now. And the popularity of this type of content doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Even if you’re not a tech geek, you can find plenty of tools that will let you produce short but entertaining videos. In fact, a cool series of educational videos can make an awesome online course!

How coaches can sell courses on eLearning marketplaces

Even if you coach people on how to pack travel bags in the most efficient way, odds are there’re thousands of other folks who search on the web for the same solution. So, why not build a problem-solving course and deliver a solution for people’s most pressing problems with your own successful experience? So, reach out to your audience and ask them what they need the most support in. And then provide a course to encompass these needs. Then you can upload and sell your course on e-learning platforms to a much wider audience.

Today, developing courses for a customized e-learning platform can easily be one man’s job. There are many tech-savvy platforms out there that provide course-building capabilities to anybody who wants to create online courses. Here are some of the popular platforms that have all the tools and resources for uploading online courses and selling them worldwide:

• Kajabi
• Podia
• Teachable
• Grinfer
• Udemy
• Coursera
• Thinkific

What is particularly great about eLearning platforms? Apart from many things, authors really like that they don’t have to worry about course promotions since platforms run course promotions and marketing campaigns for free! For example, Grinfer runs announcements, automation campaigns, email lists, offers some great promo tools, and more. No headaches for authors and they don’t have to fuel their marketing campaigns with money from their own pocket.

Since Grinfer works under the subscription method, this provides a good chance to make any course(s) more visible to a wide range of people. For example, when learners get on the website, they’ll see your brand new course(s) on the main page of the marketplace. If they get hooked on your course, they’ll either spend time on your page viewing your course or purchase access to your course on the marketplace. You get the money from the watch time and more recognition for your own coaching brand!

All in all, every e-learning service provides plenty of valuable resources that will work just right for you and your coaching business. So, give it a try and test a couple of e-learning platforms to see what works well and what doesn’t!

Bottom-line

If you’re a coach or mentor who wants to expand and grow your business on the web, build a course, try course-building services, and give it a go! Of course, be aware of all the potential pitfalls that you can run into at some point or another. For example, the biggest challenge for most course authors is engagement. How to create an engaging course? That’s a million-dollar question and most e-learning services already have a list of effective tips and hints that work well for achieving the goal. Just ask!

Here are just a few tips for you before we wrap up. Check and make sure that:

• An online course platform that you’ve picked is not difficult to use, provides tools for uploading course content fast and easy, supports video uploads, etc.
• You will get help with your course promotions, marketing campaigns, special offers for driving more traffic to your site, etc.
• This e-learning marketplace won’t mess with your pricing and copyrights.

Lastly, don’t hesitate to invest efforts in your online coaching. Improve the quality of your videos, add new learning features for the betterment of the students, improve overall presence, etc. Make a huge difference in the growth of the coaching business!