Helping Hands For Coaches

Be on target with your coaching business by developing your niche and target market for your practice. Try it on – see if it fits!

Wendi Liechty, our host for May 22nd call, is a Business & Marketing Coach whose style breaks through the limitations of traditional, outdated, cut and paste marketing programs by offering her own unique, simple, creative and highly personal approach.

Wendi has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs including coaches, wellness professionals, designers and other service providers develop clear and compelling business and marketing strategies and messages that make both dollars and sense! You can find her at www.TheCasualEntrepreneur.com

Most coaches hear that finding and developing your niche is a must to succeed, but that is little comfort if you are just not ready or still feeling unsure and unwilling to settle for something generic and unfulfilling. Listen to this podcast and learn…

**What might be holding you back from finding your “Niche”
**A new perspective and incentive to market the “Niche” Way
**How to find, develop and uncover the best “Niche” for you

**What to do if your just not ready to find your “Niche”

But, you might feel like one – but, don’t worry, it’s really not that difficult. In fact, I would say it’s as easy as baking sugar cookies! It just takes a little attention, following a recipe, and some readers to ‘eat it up’.

This past Friday I walked our class through the marketing and optimization of a Wordpress blog. This included:

- Pingbacks and Trackbacks
- Finding keywords and keyphrases
- Utilizing Social Media Marketing, including Ping.fm and BudURL.com
- Using YouTube to drive traffic to your blog
- Directories – such as Technorati and others

I also gave each of our participants a free editorial calender for their blog to help us organize our thoughts while publishing our blog on a regular basis. But, remember, it’s fun to blog (and eat cookies)!

If you’re a coach or speaker, and you’re new to your business, then a Wordpress.com website/blog would be a great start to building your Internet Marketing presence. We gave a LOT of information on how-to edit your own Wordpress.com blog/website this past Friday – here’s just a sample of what we did:
1. How to create your own header with an image
2. How to add images, video, or HTML to your blog post or page
3. Discussion on Pingbacks

4. Have a ‘traditional’ Home Page for your Wordpress.com website
5. Comment posting
6. Widgets and protecting your blog from SPAM
To learn more, please listen to our podcast below. This Friday, we’ll be discussing how to promote and market your Wordpress.com blog/website. Be sure to sign-up at the Webinar’s page!

We went over the basic steps to working with a blog, such as:

1. Understanding what a blog is: an informative, opinionated, ‘human’ look at a company/business or person. As a coach, this will be the way that your potential clients will get to know the ‘real’ you – not just the one you show for your sales copy. Why do we want to show this human side of a life or business coach? Well, what is the first rule of sales: we buy from people that we know, like and trust – and a blog allows us to build that!

2. Blog styles: we discussed Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org

3. Get involved: before you start your blog, however, you should read and participate in some that are interesting to you, or are in your industry. Make sure to choose ones that are active and popular. In order to find a few blogs that you like, search Technorati. Oh – and the answer between Authority and Ranking is that they’re basically the same: to build authority or ranking within Technorati you need to build links from other blogs to yours. Be aware that links will ‘clear out’ from Technorati if they’re older than 6 months.

4. Have a plan and get started! Your blog should be part of your over-all marketing plan – so before you get started with designing or adding content to your blog, it’s a good idea to have a clear idea of where it’s going.

This week, we’ll be reviewing how to update your blog – design wise and adding multi-media. If you would like to learn how-to customize your Wordpress.com website / blog, click here to be sure to sign-up for our May 1st class!

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Ken Davenport: Recently hailed as the “P.T. Barnum of Off-Broadway” by the New York Times for his unique 21st century marketing strategies, Ken Davenport is becoming widely recognized as one of the most innovative theatre producers today. Ken’s visionary tech-savvy was also recently featured on a national commercial for Apple’s iPhone and he was named one of Crain’s “Forty Under 40” in 2008 as a result of his fresh ideas and unprecedented success. Ken’s impressive Broadway and Off-Broadway production slate includes Speed the Plow, Will Ferrell’s You’re Welcome America, Blithe Spirit, Altar Boyz, The Awesome 80s Prom and My First Time. He is also the creator of broadwayspace.com, a new social networking site for the Broadway community and TheProducersPerspective.com, his popular blog where he gives his opinion on everything relating to Broadway and beyond.
Website: http://www.davenporttheatrical.com/
Ning website: http://www.broadwayspace.com/
Twitter ID: http://twitter.com/kendavenport

Sarah Benner is a Sr. Marketing Manager at VerticalResponse heading up the Retention Marketing team. She manages a team responsible for all customer communications (including social media and community), customer retention, product education/training and other customer programs. She has over 8 years of marketing communications and product marketing experience working at companies like Siebel Systems and CNET Networks.

Sarah holds a Bachelor’s degree from University of Washington and a Master’s degree from Emerson College.
VerticalResponse: www.verticalresponse.com
Ning website: http://vrlounge.ning.com/forum
Twitter ID: http://twitter.com/VR4SmallBiz

Andrea Anderson and business partner, Barbara Hemphill, author of the Taming the Paper Tiger book series, believe a Productive Environment is a Profitable Environment. They share this vision with their 100+ Productivity Trainer Authorized Consultants around the world through online training and mentorship programs. These programs emphasize Barbara Hemphill’s proprietary processes and methodology for helping clients create and sustain a Productive Environment–”an intentional setting in which everything around you supports who you are and the goals you’re striving to achieve”. Their newest project, the iProductive Environment Platform (iPEP) is the only program that helps clients find their physical files (in filing cabinets and bookshelves) and their electronic files, in one search. Andrea and Barbara enjoy living in NC while serving clients around the world.
Paper Tiger Productivity Institute
Website: www.PaperTigerInstitute.com
Ning website: www.OrganizersPowerUp.ning.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/andrea_ptpi
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As a coach, you’d like to support your clients more in attaining their goals, their aspirations – but sometimes it’s not more of you they need, but a community of like-minded individuals that can support each other. You can create a community for your clients through a simple Ning.com website – a site that’s like your own personal Facebook, with your own design, ability to add and take away features, and even take-off ads, etc.

This past week we took a quick drive-through of Ning.com: creating your Profile, what makes a community popular, how to start building a popular community, and keep it going.

This week, we’ll go into more depth of how to personalize your Ning.com site, including design, features, and management. Be sure to sign-up if you’re not already on our eNewsletter list, as we’ll be using a webinar service so you can ’see’ what we’re doing.

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Thank you to all 7 of our panelists for being a part of a first for Helping Hands for Coaches! We had an amazing group of successful coaches, speakers and a professional digital branding expert discuss why they use Twitter, how they use it, and the success they’ve had. Each used Twitter differently, yet successfully. I hope that each of you that listen to the call will take away that it doesn’t matter how you use it, so long as you do – and do so authentically. Don’t become a Spammer, only there to promote yourself, but realize that Twitter is a way to connect, communicate, and network with others you may not have reached otherwise.
The call was so successful, I will continue to have panelist discussions in the future. Be sure to sign-up for our classes if you wish to have notice of our Friday classes.
Enjoy!

Audio is 60 minutes in length.

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This Friday, and the following 2 Fridays, we’ll be discussing Twitter! Be sure to be on the call 10-11am PST to get your first introduction to Twitter.

Last week’s call was a discussion on LinkedIn - creating Buzz through article marketing, creating and promoting events, creating business pages and the new applications available on LinkedIn. Although there are currently 9 applications, during the call I went over the top 5 that would be applicable to life, business, executive coaches and professional speakers.

Chuck Hester, LinkedIn expert, was on the call this Friday – and what an amazing amount of information! Not only did we learn how to easily gain more connections, but how to be authentic on the web. By simply asking the question, “How may I be of service to you?” we open the conversation and relationship with our potential clients and power partners. We’ll be reviewing some of what Chuck had talked about this Friday, from 10-11am PST. To learn more, please visit our Live Webinars page.
Total time of audio: 58 minutes.

If you liked the class, please leave a comment, and let other coaches know! Thanks!

The ‘Pied Piper’ of Facebook joined us this Friday and gave our coaching communitee some great pointers on how to use Facebook, as well as FriendFeed, Ping.fm, Twitter, and even your website! If you were not able to join us for the call, you can listen to the podcast below, and download the PowerPoint Presentation to follow long.

If you feel a little left-out when we talked about RSS feeds, or using Twitter, don’t worry – we’ll be going over that very soon!

Enjoy!

Also available, the Facebook series by Mari Smith.