2020 is a blessing in disguise for entrepreneurs, trainers, coaches and freelancers to start their online coaching business.

The e learning world is exploding to an unimaginable range resulting in the need of various training programs under every possible niche. What matters most to the online learning community is a wide variety of knowledge banks at a micro niche level.The biggest challenge for coaches and trainers is to identify and build a brand at a micro niche level and serve a very specific target audience.

Are you struggling to figure out how to start your online coaching business?

Then this study material is for you…

I have researched in-depth a lot of experts in the online coaching industry and put together a step by step guide for you to launch your online coaching business and taste your first success through it.

So why wait?

Let us figure out how this works!

1. Finding a Niche

This is the crucial step in starting your online coaching business.

Finding a niche that is meaningful to you as well as useful to your target audience is the key to success.

The challenging part for most of the trainers is knowing how to find a niche?

Coaching is a wide ocean with various segments, Let us see few of them with examples.

1. Life Coaching – A life coach helps clients to achieve goals in different aspects of life. Few examples – Personal development, Motivation, Self Improvement and Life Mastery etc.

2. Skill/Executive Coaching – A skill coach is someone who helps clients in improving their thinking, behavior and emotional skills. Examples include – Critical thinking, Decision Making, Communication, Thought Leadership, Emotional Intelligence etc..

3. Business Coaching – A business coach helps clients to flourish in entrepreneurship, work delegation, business automation, workforce management etc..

4. Digital Coaching – A digital coach helps the clients to achieve success in online business through building digital assets, internet marketing, e marketing and e marketing strategies.

5. Financial Coaching – A financial coach helps clients in Wealth mastery, Asset management and Investments.

6. Performance Coaching – A peak performance coach helps clients in achieving ROI at work by improving productivity, delegation etc..

7. Wellness Coaching – A wellness coach helps clients to achieve a holistic well being through mastering mind, body and spirit.

8. Career Coaching – A career guidance coach helps you in choosing the right profession, cracking job interviews etc.

9. Spiritual Coaching – A spiritual coach helps clients to grow in higher levels of consciousness through meditation and spiritual practices.

10. Sales Coaching – A sales coach helps in closing deals and getting new clients in business.

Like this, we have happiness coach; start up coach and much more new niche added to coaching business every year. In each of these categories, you should focus on a sub-category to build your micro niche.

Today, if you say I am a Sales Trainer, it does not mean anything to anybody. Referring yourself as Sales Trainer/ Business Coach etc. is pretty vague in the online world to communicate and reach out to your target audience.

You should be precise in your sub/micro niche. If you say “I help companies to increase their product sales with content, creative script and closing strategies online”, then it is specific and people who struggle to close a deal online, automatically become your target audience.

First of all, pick a problem of a specific audience and provide solution to convert them into your clients. This is the key in identifying your micro niche.

2.  Who can become a Coach?

Anybody with confidence, good communication, skillset in a subject matter and excellent people skills can get into online coaching.

Do you need a certification?

This is a tricky question…. It is good to be certified as a coach, but it is not mandatory. A lot of expert coaches you see today are not exactly certified by any institution rather they gained that authority position by adding value with their true knowledge and by living as an example in their niche.

What is trending in the coaching world today and how to become an online coach?

Today most of the experts conduct group coaching online and charge a premium when it comes to one on one coaching offline.

Furthermore, when I say group coaching, it means training your learners in a specific skill and when you do that in the online world, you become an online coach. Offline coaching or classroom training is more of a traditional approach where you meet participants face to face and conduct sessions with live interaction.

Online coaching involves both pre-recorded session as well as LIVE online classroom sessions. The main focus of Online coaching business is to sell your valuable courses to your target audience. A lot of free resources like live webinars, on demand and automated webinars, podcasts, videos, eBooks can be used to promote and sell your courses online. To achieve good success, one must strike a balance between both online and offline coaching.

3. Why most trainers don’t get into online coaching?

There are so many false beliefs that are associated with online course creation and coaching. Few of them are:

1. Lack of expertise in technology –

A lot of trainers feel online coaching is not their cup of tea only because of technical interventions.

Truly speaking, most of the technology today is way more simple and automated; all you have to know is the software and tools you need to use  to build your online coaching empire and get a little bit hands on to get started.

2.  Experts have occupied the markets –

Most trainers feel the market is overcrowded.

“There are too many experts out there in my niche, I don’t stand a chance”

The missing perspective here is, because you keep attending a lot of webinars and you are constantly learning and exposed to online training you feel that way. The reality is, there is still a very large population existing without any kind of exposure to the online coaching world in your niche.

Also, the online industry demands more coaches on the same micro niche and the target audiences as well expect the same.

Don’t worry about the noise in the market, if you think you have knowledge and expertise that can solve the problem of your target audience you must go ahead.

3. Lack of confidence in Subject Matter expertise –

Another issue is lack of confidence in your knowledge and having thoughts like “I am not good enough” or “I need more knowledge to get started”, or “I am not an expert yet”

Certainly, these mind voices trouble a lot of trainers in taking action and sharing their knowledge.

You must understand: “Excellence has no finishing line”

You might underrate yourself but think of those people who don’t know even the information that you know right now. You can help them to get where you are, isn’t it!

Doesn’t that make sense?

Let me give you my example,

I am not saying I know it all in digital coaching, but I have learnt and implemented something successfully. I have built my website, sold a course, have a subscriber list, have created my first eBook and have successfully hosted and made money online.

I completely know and agree that there is still a lot more to learn, but right now I can definitely help those who are struggling with their first steps. Eventually I will become an expert in online entrepreneurship, but if I wait to become an expert and then write this article, am not fooling the world, am just fooling myself.

Keep this in mind; your knowledge is always useful to someone, who don’t know what you know right now.

Therefore, buckle up and learn to build an online coaching business from scratch. Read further, I have explained the steps involved in running an online business.

4. How to build an online coaching product from scratch?

Once you know your micro niche, you need to create a website. Website is your address in the online world. If you are not having your website, nobody can find you and you cannot think about coaching online.

To create a website, you first need a domain name.

What is a domain name?

A domain name is your website name. My domain name is GoldMage.

To create a domain name you must first decide whether you need to have a personal brand or professional brand.

Refer to this article to know more about personal and professional brand names.

Step 1: Domain Registration and Hosting

Once you have decided your domain name, check its availability and register in Namecheap .You can also host your website in the same service.

If you are wondering what is hosting, today if you go and type www.goldmage.com in your web browser you land in my website. This is possible because my website is hosted by world wide web. I have bought a server space in the web that is allowing you to access my website.

In simple, you host your website for the world to see.

While there are different kinds of hosting like web hosting, cloud  hosting, WordPress hosting etc. to start with, WordPress hosting is what you got to do. Most of the hosting service providers have an offer, if you host your website online through their service, your domain registration becomes free.

Few other players in hosting and domain registration space are Bluehost, GoDaddy ,hostgator etc. I have used Namecheap service, you can compare and pick a hosting service that suits you. Just go and browse these websites, you will understand how to proceed further.

Step 2: Build a WordPress/Teachable website:

I have created a WordPress website. WordPress is very popular, any major brands that you can think of, mostly use WordPress websites only. To create a website, you need a web theme. There are so many free and paid web themes available in www.wordpress.org. I used a free web theme called Astraa to build GoldMage website.

Learning to build a website using word press theme is quite easy. There are thousands of WordPress tutorials available for free in YouTube, just pick one and go through.

I am not a web developer but I was able to design my own website.

If I can do it anybody can do it. Invest some time in learning about creating a WordPress website and you can build one on your own.

You must learn this and I will tell you why?

Imagine you want to post a blog, you want to do email marketing, you want to publish eBook, you cannot keep on working with a web developer for all these simple needs. Moreover for a beginner, all this is additional cost. You must know to edit the web pages, posts and work on them on your own. You don’t have to attend any premium course to learn this. YouTube has sufficient resources to help you with.

You must be willing to learn. That is all you need.

Once you learn WordPress, you will know how to create web pages, how to integrate free plugins (A plugin is nothing but an add-on feature that helps your website to achieve certain functions. For example: Adding shopping cart, Email marketing,etc)

Step 3: What will you do with your website?     

Every website should have a goal. Without a strategy for your website, you are actually wasting your time and money on it.

Online coaching is all about building digital training products. GoldMage is just one month old website and if you look at it, I am using it to sell my pre-recorded online course, bring traffic to my website through articles like this, I have connected it to my YouTube Channel, I have published an eBook to increase my subscriber list, all these things are basically helping me to build my brand GoldMage.

So, Learning to create a website is not the Key. The Key is to have contents that can engage your target audience in your website.

All those audience who visit your site, drive your website traffic and when you share knowledge and skills with them, they become part of your brand.

Step 4: What are digital training products?

When you run a class in a traditional classroom method, you are sharing your knowledge to a group of people in a physical environment. If you can translate the same knowledge to a digital content it becomes your online product.

In traditional method, you provide a service. In the online world, you are delivering a product through which you offering your service.

There are different kinds of digital products. Examples – Books and eBooks, Podcasts and Pre-recorded videos.

Remember, Live sessions are not training products because in Live sessions, you are again trading your time.

Step 5:  Understand the difference between pre-recorded and Live online sessions. Which one is better?

My program on Online Course Creation is a pre-recorded training program that streams online with a life time access to people who buy it.

Imagine you buy that course today, you can learn whenever you want, wherever you want, you can pause in between, you can learn it again and again, so the benefit of a pre-recorded video course is

1. The learner can decide when to learn, how much to learn and get benefited

2. The trainer is not trading his/her time to conduct the sessions.

In a business perspective, You cannot reach out to thousands of people if you just rely on Live training whereas it is possible with pre-recorded programs.

All your Udemy courses, Masterclass, MindValley courses are pre-recorded. They are not Live.

So basically, the first step is to build a training product, create and sell it in your website and use one or many value adds like Blogs, eBooks, Podcasts and YouTube Videos to drive traffic to your website.

If you want to know the steps involved in creating your first online course, try out GoldMage’s Beginner course which will help you to move forward in your online course creation journey.

Step 6:  How to market your online course?

Internet marketing like Facebook and Instagram ads can help to reach out to a lot of audience. Do not advertise to buy your course directly, because the world doesn’t know you yet. You should have a good e marketing strategy to sell your digital product.

Building a trust in your target audience is very important so you have to apply various emarketing strategies and that is where Webinars come into action.

Step 7: How to use Live, On demand and Automated Webinars for marketing?

Webinars are excellent internet marketing tool to promote your online product. Not all webinars are designed only for knowledge sharing purposes. What you see in MindValley website is an example of an automated,on demand webinar.

It means that you can watch a pre-recorded video hosted on a webinar platform (ex: WebinarJam, Blink webinars, ClickMeetings, eztalks etc.) and you can watch it in your convenient time.

Generally, You will see Facebook, Instagram and YouTube ads for FREE Mind Valley masterclass.

Let us imagine, you wish to join the free masterclass, you will be asked to register and the website collects you name and email address. After a successful registration, you can watch the pre-recorded webinar and attend the masterclass.

The objective of such webinars is to sell a product at the end, so the entire webinar is designed to market a valuable product to the target audience. There are also tons of Live Webinars that are available for the same purpose. So once you have created a course, you need to market and promote to a wide audience for conversions. Webinars are great marketing tools in selling your digital assets.

Step 8: How to grow and monetize your online business?

The email list that you collect from your visitors must be put to proper use. Providing free resources builds a trustworthy relationship with your learners. Right now, I am investing my time in creating this article to add value to my community.

You cannot succeed if your learners don’t succeed. Money is always a byproduct of your work. If you put out quality work and market it wisely cash flow will seamlessly happen.Always keep your learner’s success in mind and that is how you build an ethical business.  A good coach focuses on how to add value to the client. All those successful online businesses that you look up to, live and grow with this principle.

5. Conclusion

Thanks for making all the way till here.

On conclusion, its important to invest your time in learning, and your money in software, tools and automation to launch a successful online coaching journey.

Did you find this article useful? If so leave your comments below and feel free to ask any questions, I would love to help you.

Would you like to attend a webinar in detail to learn more? Type “Yes” in the comments section, so that I can create one.