Helping Hands For Coaches

This is a must-read for all you future and current bloggers! In the blog I’d Rather Be Writing, Tom Johnson gives the top 20 usability tips for your blog.

Here’s the short list:
1. Pick a topic for your blog. Makes (more…)

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our host for May 22nd call, is a Business & Marketing Coach whose style breaks through the limitations of traditional, outdated, cut and paste marketing programs by offering her own unique, simple, creative and highly personal approach.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

Friday is quickly approaching, and we are super excited to have our Blogging Success Forum! Below are the bios of our two panelists. I’m sure this will be a popular class, so please make sure to save the date: This Friday, May 15th, from 10-11am PST / 1-2pm EST.

Rick Burnes is Inbound Marketing Manager at HubSpot, a leader in marketing software for small- and medium-sized businesses. He is the editor of HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Blog, which is consistently featured on the AdAge Power 150 top media marketing blogs. In addition to his work on the blog, Rick develops videos, research, case studies and webinars on new approaches to online marketing. Prior to HubSpot, Rick was co-founder of Faneuil Media, a startup that provided inbound marketing solutions for local businesses. From 2001-2004 Rick worked at NYTimes.com, where he managed the launch of new sections, including search and theater. He started at The Times two months before 9/11 and spent his first year working on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Nation Challenged section. He has also worked at Google, The Moscow Times and The New Bedford Standard Times. Rick is active on Twitter and occasionally posts on his personal blog. He resides in Cambridge, MA.

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Roger Matus is a well-known commentator on the use of email, IM, and messaging technologies. He was CEO and founder of the email archiving company, InBoxer, which he recently sold to Safecore, Inc. At Safecore, Roger is now the Executive Vice President. He has been in the software business for about 25 years, and worked on the development of an email product back in 1983. Since February 2007, he has been the author of the blog Death By Email, which Roger says was essential to growth and successful sale of his company.

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Cindi Schmitzer is the married mother of four who lives in Sparta, New Jersey. She is the co-owner of LTDchix, a company who created a line of funny tees targeted specifically toward moms. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended Penn State University where she received a bachelor’s degree in accounting. She eventually married and has moved around quite a bit with her husband’s job. In fact, they brought their four kids home to four different addresses. Her and her business partner founded LTDchix about three years ago. In the past few months, they have started a blog relating to their business. On the blog, they share funny tales about motherhood and news about their business. The blog web address for LTDchix is www.blog.ltdchix.com.
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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.

We briefly reviewed Chuck Hester’s call last week, as well as answered a lot of your questions about LinkedIn and Internet marketing, such as getting your profile to 100% complete and search engine optimization of your LinkedIn profile. Take a listen below, and be sure to have your LinkedIn profile open for the interactive teleclass. This Friday, March 6th, we’ll be going over some of the new programs on LinkedIn, as well as adding your own Events, and creating buzz with articles on LinkedIn. Hope you can join us! Next week we’ll be discussing Twitter!

Don’t think your target market is on Twitter? Think again!

I just received a great email regarding a coach that works with women in career transition – is Twitter a marketing tool for her? Where are her prospects and clients? Well, let’s take a look at a quick Twitter search and see if some might be hiding there: Looking for a Job & Career Transition. While I wrote that sentence, 5 more people tweeted they’re looking for a job. Wow – that’s a lot of potential clients for a career transition coach!

As the job market becomes full with more and more people looking for work, job seekers may see Twitter as a way to network and connect with possible employers – one that is not being fully utilized yet. Sure, LinkedIn, eCademy, and even Facebook are being utilized by people looking for a new career – but Twitter can also be used in this way. Why? Because it’s a way to have a real conversation, just like you would in a networking meeting.

Why else should you use Twitter: Search Engines. It’s completely indexed by Google – so any keywords you put into your twitter posts could have a pretty high ranking in Google and other search engines. This is great for those ‘long tail keywords’ that might be hard to fit in your website.

You don’t have to spend all your time on Twitter, you can spend just a few minutes each day checking-in with new followers, joining a conversation, making useful connections – and then log-off – so it doesn’t eat away at your time.

Time is precious – and can easily be taken away by New Media Marketing, such as Facebook and Twitter. But, if you go on with a purpose and goal, a time limit, search keywords, and a sense of wanting to connect with others authentically, it can be very rewarding.

By the way – in the 15 minutes it took to write and edit this post, 21 more people tweeted that they are looking for a job. Even if you’re not a career transition coach, go and give some encouragement to these people – they need it.

What a fabulous class on search engine optimization and internet marketing! I hope all you life and business coaches found some of the SEO techniques I shared useful – and hopefully not overwhelming. I know I covered a lot in this class:

-The basics of SEO
-How to find good Keywords and Keyphrases relating to your coaching business
-8 SEO techniques you can use to increase your Internet exposure for your coaching practice
-and Black Hat techniques that can get your coaching website banned from search engines

At the end of the class, I mentioned that there is a 9 week course that all of you can take in order to help you understand SEO more extensively! To learn more about the class, which starts September 5th, please click here: http://helpinghandsforcoaches.com/workshops/ (**PS: There is only room for 10 students! So, if you want to learn more, make sure to click the link and sign-up today!)

To listen to the class, click the below audio:

What a great class today! We went over the Basics of setting-up and editing your profile, creating a group, creating an event, and how to quickly grow your ‘Friends’ list on Facebook. Facebook is a great way for you to promote coaching groups, teleclasses, and your coaching business! Listen in on this Facinating, content rich class, on how Facebook can grow your Coaching Business!

Links we used:
http://www.facebook.com
http://www.shrinkpictures.com
http://share.yuuguu.com/ (we used this software during the class so that you could follow along live – it’s a free screen share software!)

Part 1 of Facebook for Coaches:

Part 2 of Facebook for Coaches:

Part 1 of Search Engine Optimization for Coaches:

Part 2 of Search Engine Optimization for Coaches:

Highlights of Search Engine Optimization for Coaches: