Use Digital Marketing to Boost Your Digital Coaching

In the world today, there is a bit of “coach me” overload. Coach me on my career, coach me on digital marketing, leadership coaching, and of course life coaching. Right? Well there are reasons for this and much of it has to do with the onset of what we term here in the heart of San Francisco as the collaborative economy. The good news for all coaches is that the trend is way, way up. Folks are ready to learn from you and willing to give it a shot. The challenge is how to separate yourself from the millions of others. One clear way is to think about your “Digital Coaching” platform.

Trend 1: Business Economics Work aka Collaborative Economy

Giving consumers direct access to products and expertise is where it’s at. Bypassing the big corporation and going right to the person selling the service or product is where the world is heading in a big way, from eBay to Kickstarter, PopExpert to Craigslist, and then great business-to-business-to-consumer platforms that enable this like Uber, Kickstarter, and even Amazon. It’s all about the path of giving an outlet for those with great product/service to reach the masses. And this will only accelerate in 2015.

Trend 2: Digital Transformation Has Happened and Video Is the Winner

It’s clear – video is where most everyone spends their time. In fact, 70 percent of online time is on video. Not even Facebook can match that. And folks are ready, willing, and able (to pay, too!) to engage with video live or on-demand in a massively adopted way.

Trend 3: The Mass Movement of Entrepreneurial Empowerment Has Taken Hold.

The need to run your own business, control your own destiny, and just have the gumption to do it is here…and in a big way. So with so many offering their knowledge as service on its own, the market has just gotten a lot bigger and a critical mass of options for consumers is now in place.

The question becomes, how do I take advantage of the macro-trends?

As an expert in any discipline, from digital marketing to mindful-life coach, yoga instructor to psychotherapist, it’s simply the cost of doing business to have a good plan to capture and ride this big wave of change. The formula is simple:

1. Have a good digital presence
2. Create a strong credibility
3. Provide compelling ways to engage with your knowledge

Here are the top tactics that you can use to blow out the revenue opportunities.

Capture Google – Blog

This is far and away the most important component to being great. It’s a simple, easy, and highly achievable tactic. It’s having the discipline to write every week and build a great series of posts that demonstrate your knowledge and thought leadership. The key is doing research about the topical pain points you want to help folks with and then building a content publishing calendar for yourself that you stick to.

Capture Apple – Podcast

An incredible amount of traffic comes through iTunes. So if you can create a good podcast series that aligns with your blog calendar, you will build a set of subscribers and followers not found elsewhere. Good audio equipment is a must.

Online Video

This is the secret sauce. Once you have great written content, folks need to get a feel for the power of you. Your personality, your passion, your energy, and only video captures that completely. So create a series of videos (again, get a good camera or partner with someone willing to co-create good video that has a crew) that demonstrate your teachings. Utilize the existing presentations you already give at conferences or to clients and turn it into a video series that someone can actually purchase shows you have high value for your client. Here are four types of video to consider:

1. On-Demand eLearning
2. Studio-Quality Video Teasers
3. Good Ole Webinar (screen share video)
4. Live Video Coaching

Quick note on live video coaching: Be careful to not to get lured into thinking Google Hangouts or Skype is the answer to doing this well and in a scalable professional way. Scheduling, payment systems, and a good interface (my favorite example is still PopExpert’s video coaching platform) will have you stand out from all that say “let’s just get on Skype” and then awkwardly ask for the credit card.

Third-Party Validation (the Online Referral)

Getting folks to talk about you and share their great experiences stories with the world is the final leg in the stool. You need to get folks to rate, review, and write about you and your work. Not just on Facebook and Twitter but across all Web domains.

For example, third-party sites help to create great profiles and drive good ratings and reviews. LinkedIn for the B2B side is critical.

Socially shareable content is a must. The social proof of folks sharing your content, retweeting it, and doing it all on your own profile or own blog/website is key. When people see, say, a blog post for example, and then note the 100 people tweeted it and 30 shared on Facebook, instantly, you get street cred. And more importantly, Google SERPs love this validation and will push you up the rankings.

In summary, get on the front end and top of these macro-societal trends. Build a great online presence with the content marketing tactics detailed above and earn validation for credibility and watch your income and revenue streams soar!

Image via Shutterstock.