To make a satisfying living as a coach, you’ll want to sell your own coaching products. You see, unless your monthly coaching retainer is in the thousands or you carry dozens of clients at once, you can’t make a six-figure income on private coaching alone. Selling your own products is the best way to build trust with your market while you get off the money for time treadmill. The sooner you launch your own products, the better.
Be a Content Generator for Your Coaching Market
Everyone loves relevant packaged learning. And it’s the fastest way to build your credibility. If you want to have a global coaching business, which is what I recommend, information is what the Internet is all about. Downloadable products, such as ebooks and mp3 audio recordings, are magical lead generation tools. You’ll collect the names and email addresses of people who have already received value from you – so they are already warmed up to the value of your coaching services. It’s challenging to sell coaching services as your first offer.
The #1 mistake most coaches make with their products:
Never getting started. Why? Because the mindset is:
- “I don’t have enough expertise to create a product for my market.”
- “Everything has to be perfect before I put it out there.”
- “Every piece of my product funnel must be complete before I launch the first product.”
Change that mindset now! If you’ve targeted a viable coaching market and found out what makes them tick, you DO have valuable content to offer right now.
4 Quick-to-Market Ideas
- Solve a problem: as I did with Working Websites for Coaches.
- Tell a story – your own and case studies of your clients.
- Interview an expert about one subject of interest to your target market.
- Repurpose/bundle your articles (from blogs or ezines).
Perfection is overrated. In fact, it’s boring! Successful entrepreneurs bake an idea about 60%, then get it into the hands of their market fast, where the idea gets more fully baked. This is as it should be. You’ll need to periodically upgrade your coaching products anyway. The most important thing is to get your supportive content into the hands of your ideal prospects. Then, as you learn more from your market, you’ll update the product – make it better! And perhaps raise the price.
4 Tips to Launch More Coaching Products
To get to the market fast:
- Offer electronic products first, such as ebooks or audio recordings with transcripts.
- Find ways to re-purpose (use again) everything you create.
- Think out of the box.
- Learn from example. Look around at who is marketing to you and how they do it. Model what the best of them are doing.
7 Success Criteria
All your products, whether free or for fee, should:
- Be directed at your target market (this is a who, not a what.)
- Solve at least one very specific and compelling problem that market faces.
- Build your credibility as an expert with your target market.
- Be congruent with your brand.
- Fit in a marketing/product funnel you’ve designed.
- Be leveraged to move quality prospects down your funnel to another product or service that is more expensive and exclusive to you.
- Be cost effective and/or profitable. You might intentionally create a “loss leader” – something that doesn’t generate income but that builds your list and a buzz about your services. Follow that with a product that brings in a solid revenue stream for you.
Next time I’ll cover the steps to create your own money making products.
