Discover Your Coaching Niche

We are in the midst of an explosion in the availability of affordable, easy to use web-based technologies. And savvy coaches are beginning to realise what benefits this can have to their coaching practices.

A coach’s website is taken for granted these days, as is their newsletter. If you look at several coaches’ websites you’ll see a remarkable consistency. They no longer differentiate. The area in which to compete has moved on.

So what are the fast-growing areas of web-based technologies for coaches? And where can we differentiate ourselves?

First, let’s identify three concepts coaches should embrace to make the best use of their limited time. These are outsourcing, leveraging of time and automation. Any worthwhile internet technology should use one or more of these.

Let’s just explore what they mean.

1. Outsourcing

Smart coaches outsource low-added value tasks like the transcription of teleseminars or presentations and also higher value activities like design. This allows coaches to concentrate on running their practices.

Two useful outsourcing sites are Elance.com, for a whole manner of services and 99designs.com for design work.

2. The Leveraging of Time

There are a number of technologies that allow the leveraging of a coach’s time.  Instead of always having to deal 1:1 with clients, you can interact 1:many with your clients via teleclasses, autoresponders, blogs and podcasts. In this way you can reach more people at the same time, and still deliver value.

Another way of leveraging time is to repurpose your content. That is, find other purposes, or formats for your previously created content. So you could post articles to you blog, create press releases out of them, record them as an audio or compile them with others into an ebook or physical book.

3. Automation

We’re seeing far more use of internet automation – for taking payments, keeping in touch with prospects via autoresponders and newsletters, online surveys, membership sites… – the list is long and growing.

This means that services that previously required a small admin team can be undertaken by coaches themselves.

If coaches adopt technologies that help them with outsourcing, the leverage of time and automation, they can get far, far more done in the same amount of time.

In our next post, we’ll examine some of the more popular technologies out there today.

coaching, marketing, internet marketing, Alun Richards

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