Helping Hands For Coaches

Since coaches are mostly solo-entrepreneurs, scheduling or re-scheduling appointments with clients can take a lot of time. For several months, I’ve been recommending Genbook - which has been great for me in scheduling prospects and clients: it integrates with my Outlook calender, I get text messages and automatic updates to my Blackberry, and clients feel a sense of control to be able to easily schedule time with me that fits to their own schedule. Genbook has gotten a lot better with their ‘backend’ usability, with week views, vs. one-day views, and easily see the schedules of multiple employees (great for those coaches that are partnering up on bigger clients).

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You can try out Genbook indefinitely for free (at least, that’s the policy right now), and there’s added capabilities (such as credit card capture, synchronizable appointment notifications, customer history, complete control over appointment times, text message notifications, and the ability to have clients book up to 1 year in advance) for less than $20 a month. A real great deal to give power to your clients, and give back time to you!

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I’ve recently talked to a couple of coaches that I recommended not build a website. (Yes, it’s true that we do turn business away if it’s not a good fit!) This is a bit of a contriversial subject, but I believe not every coach needs website. Before you spit your coffee all over yourself, let me explain. Coaches that are:

1. Already successful and ready to retire: perhaps you are a coach that left a company and then started your coaching business, which related to what you were doing before. You already have the right connections and have more than enough business right from the get-go, and when the business runs out you plan to retire.
2. Coaching is a Hobby: perhaps you are a coach that isn’t looking to have a business, but just wants to be called ‘a coach’. I don’t recommend this as it hurts the coaching industry as a whole, and thus I would recommend not having an online presence. For more on coach credentials, code of ethics for coaches, or coach training, please visit the International Coach Federation website.
3. You don’t think you need one: perhaps you think it’s a waste of time, energy or money. If this is true, you probably will never read this post anyway because you don’t go on the web.

If, however, you’re new to coaching and you’re just launching your company – it might be best to spend your time connecting with individuals, companies and other potential clients than to spend several weeks trying to put a website together. I recommend, however, at least setting-up a little WordPress.com site that at least explains what you do as a coach, some basic contact information and a blog. This will help you to build credibility to your prospects, and start building a presence on the web.

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!

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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Now that Indra Successful Coach Marketing and Blaze Interactive, our two companies, build websites utilizing WordPress, you’ll see some more video tortorials on how to utilize this great software as a content management system. All of our clients have been able to easily pick-up how to use WordPress once their website launched, but I thought it would be helpful if they have some extra support as well.

If you are a life or business coach, or an entrepreneur, on a major shoe-string budget, then I would recommend WordPress as a way for you to quickly and easily build a website. WordPress.com is the free version of WordPress in which you can set-up a blog in minutes. Their free templates aren’t the greatest, but it can easily be customizable. If you want your own URL, and host your own WordPress Website – then I recommend WordPress.org. For hosting the WordPress website, I always recommend BlueHost.

When we build a website utilizing WordPress, we first focus on the design of the site – utilizing our own 6-step design process that really captures the essence of our clients. We then build the site utilizing the WordPress technology, allowing our clients to easily make changes once the site launches. It’s also more Search Engine friendly than basic HTML websites.

This first video is how-to make basic changes in your WordPress website.

The second video is how-to make basic color changes to your WordPress website.

Just a reminder – your ‘Admin’ page to sign-in is your URL (or web address), plus /wp-admin. So, for example, for http://www.helpinghandsforcoaches.com it will be http://www.helpinghandsforcoaches.com/wp-admin.

If we didn’t help you develop your website, and you would like custom HEX colors (the series of numbers/letters that tells browsers what colors to show) – then you can visit this website: www.2CreateAWebsite.com

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:

Are you a new entrepreneur, a life or business coach ready to take the plunge and build your online presence: a website? Then you should listen to “Creating a FAPulous Website” to learn how to do it right the first time!

Creating focus:
http://www.Amazon.com
http://www.adobe.com/

eNewsletter Capture:
http://www.womenwholoveyoungermen.com
http://getknownnow.com/

Blogging:
http://www.Technorati.com: search for blogs that will be similar to yours, and remember to post your blog to Technorati once it’s live!
http://www.sixfiguremomsclub.com/
http://familyofentrepreneurs.com/
http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/

Podcasting:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/
http://odeo.com/

Good use of video: http://www.ardicefarrow.com

We broke-up the eNewsletter into 3 simple sections – so that it’s not overwhelming to the reader. The first section is a personal note from Chrissy, the second portion is an article on planning your vacation – in other words the article that is interesting and informative – and the third section is her call to action in which she asks her readers to use her website to book their next travel. She had over 20% click the link – all because the entire eNewsletter was focused and not overwhelming and ended with a call to action. http://blazeinteractive.com/clients/chrissy/newsletter/jun08_02.html
The eNewsletter service I recommend: http://www.icontact.com/a.pl/56191

Be sure to sign-up for the Search Engine Optimization *FREE* class, for this Friday, July 18th: http://helpinghandsforcoaches.com/live-teleclasses/ 

Hello Coaches and Entrepreneurs! Last Thursday I had the great opportunity to teach a 3-hour class to the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) in Orange County! We discussed how to create a FAPulous website – a website that is promotes strongly what you want to promote, which:

-Makes you more money
-Gets you more eNewsltter sign-ups
-Gets you more Event sign-ups
-and more!

After the class, I received a number of requests to have it again – and so I’m holding the next 1 hour FAPulous class Friday, July 11th at 10am. Go to our “Live Webinars” page to sign-up: http://helpinghandsforcoaches.com/live-teleclasses/ if you’re ready to have your website work the way it was intended to!

You do not need, nor intend to, have a website built by us to benefit from this class! Plus, it’s *FREE*, so there really is nothing to loose! Sign-up now: http://helpinghandsforcoaches.com/live-teleclasses/