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our host for May 22nd call, is a Business & Marketing Coach whose style breaks through the limitations of traditional, outdated, cut and paste marketing programs by offering her own unique, simple, creative and highly personal approach.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

In this month’s Entrepreneur Magazine, Robert Kiyosaki wrote about how marketing can help those of use feeling the pinch of the recession. As he put it: “I’ll bet money that this business [referring to a full-page ad for a local appliance store] will be here next year. Why? Because this business is advertising more aggressively than its competition.”

Many businesses will cut down on marketing and advertising when the pinch begins – and I think this is especially true for entrepreneurs, including life and business coaches, who shoe-string their marketing efforts. I’m not putting down shoe-string marketing, in fact I’m right there with you! Like many of the clients I help with Internet Marketing, I don’t have a huge budget for my Marketing efforts – and that’s why I utilize my ‘feet’ vs. my wallet. Examples of marketing efforts that cost little* or nothing: blogging, podcasting, online video (if done on your own), social networking,  and utilizing forums. In fact, I only advertise in one magazine, and most of my marketing budget is used in networking (the physical kind with rubber chickens, business cards, and costs a lot more than Facebook or Twitter – but still important to attend).

You can build your business during the recession (or whatever you want to call it) without spending that much.  The good news is: not everyone will work hard to get ahead of the recession. This gives hard workers the advantage. How about you? Are you with us?

*Most of these examples of ‘time vs. money’ marketing ideas are less than $300, and most are even free.

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: