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Smart Budget Planning Tips for Your Coaching Business

One of the pillars of having a successful coaching practice is an effective, well-thought-out business budget. A solid budget plan is a must if you want to allocate funds to particular resources evenly whist maximising your return: towards your online marketing strategy for instance. A budget lets you review and monitor your past and present expenses and revenue. It helps you map out your next moves and plan for the future. When you have a small coaching business with limited capital, smart budget practices will make it possible for you to grow to your full potential.

Unless you’re one of those people who just love crunching numbers, budgeting is often an overwhelming and daunting task for many coaches. It doesn’t need to take serious time and effort away from your core activities, although, creating a budget plan requires you to take a hard, honest look at the state of your coaching practice. Sometimes, the ability to be objective and non-emotional about money in your business can be the toughest thing about budgeting.

To make sure your coaching business runs on solid ground, money-wise, consider the following budget principles:

Make it visual. Write it down on paper or use a whiteboard to map out your goals. Or you can use a spreadsheet or budgeting software. The key is to find a way to make information organised, accessible and easy to understand.

Ask around. You don’t have to start from scratch. Use tested and proven standards to increase accuracy and efficiency but make sure to customise it to suit your business. You can also ask your business owners’ network or peers if they have some tips on tools and systems to use.

Update on a regular basis. Update your figures regularly. It’s best to create a routine and stick to it. This can be hard to input data when you’re dealing with several weeks’ backlog. Aside from entering information, make sure you do a regular review, preferably with your accountant, to detect errors and gaps, see opportunities for improvement, and address any problems or concerns.

Make room for the unexpected. No matter how meticulously and diligently you plan for the future, remember that there will always be risks and surprises in business. Make sure you know how to manage these changes when they happen. Your budget should make allowances for things such as the sudden loss of a client or an increase in business tax. A former colleague of mine who now runs his own consultancy business sets aside 40% of revenue as a contingency plan and then pays himself a “bonus” at the end of the year if he does not have to use it.

Get help from an expert. Bootstrapping is a great way to jumpstart a coaching practice, but you should also be prepared to invest in the services of professionals and specialists if you want to see impactful results. It is hard to go past the advice of an accountant or financial adviser when it comes to the finances.

Many financially challenged coaches continue to allocate $0 of their marketing budget to online marketing; for reasons they don’t really even understand, or for reasons they choose to ignore.

The most successful coaches have more people visiting their website than they get referrals or business card requests. But it’s no accident; it’s because they have built an online presence leveraging their expertise and a platform to enlighten and engage can their audience.

Dying coaches continue focusing their budget on traditional marketing strategies… while consumers flock to the internet, and competitors’ websites. This doesn’t make any sense!?

There is no time to waste, establish your website today, create great and get found on Google content. I will help you enhance your profile, get more clients and grow your business.

15 Email Marketing Tips for A Small Business

There are so many small businesses out there. Cut through the noise with a well thought out online marketing plan to help you reach out and hold on to potential and existing clients. For small businesses, email is a great marketing tool. It’s terrific for building trust, and once it is configured, all the work can be done automatically through an autoresponder. At the same time, it’s also the perfect marketing channel for attracting the right kind of clients and weeding out those who may not be in need of your particular product or services.

If you’re a small business, the following tips can help make your email marketing efforts really effective:

Offer lead magnets or free reports that provide solutions to a common problem. Make sure to place them near relevant content on your website. These are indispensable list-building tools. Good lead magnets usually come in the form of ebooks or checklists that offer real value as well as screen out those who aren’t in need of your brand, products or services.
Be sure to automate. Setting up an autoresponder to create customised emails, for one, is an efficient way to nurture leads long-term. If you find yourself having difficulty coming up with regular newsletters, an autoresponder will make sure that the conversation continues. You can also analyse subscribers’ behaviour through these automation tools.
Welcome new subscribers with links to content that you think may be interesting to them. Start the relationship by asking what they struggle with or what they want to know about. Provide links to your best content and provide real value.
Consider emailing with the offer of a webinar whether it is on your own or with other small businesses. Webinars are said to be the most effective list-building tactic there is, so attract subscribers by demonstrating your expertise. It works to provide potential clients with a sample of the service you can provide. At the same time, you find out how your audience responds.
Optimise your opt-ins. You can do this by adding a name field to your opt-in forms so you can personalise emails and to use double opt-in, customising it so that subscribers are introduced to you in a better way and you end up with a bigger and more engaged list.
Make unsubscribing easy and immediately effective. Knowing this option is readily available to them shows subscribers that you have no intention of being a pest. It’s all about building trust.
Use other media besides text. In your email or newsletter marketing efforts, make sure to include images and even videos to better connect with your subscribers. These make your email so much more personal and allow people to get to know you.
Use appropriate but easy language. It’s painful to read stilted language, so write like you’re talking with people.

Have a link that allows subscribers to pose queries and make requests for topics they want covered. You could even offer a prize for the best question of the week. Not only do you get inspiration for content, but the certainty of your subscribers’ interest as well.
Get your subscribers to participate. Ask not only for feedback but for contributions as well. This way, you can share testimonials as well as relevant stories from other people.
Give a heads-up on your newsletter by announcing it in social media. This is a great way to reinforce both your email and social media marketing campaigns.
Share your experiences and sources of inspiration. Content becomes more fascinating when there’s a personal story involved. Subscribers may also be interested in the people and resources that inspire you. You’ll build your content’s value by including these.
Keep the emails coming and offer exclusive content in them every now and then. Your subscribers signed up to hear from you, so don’t disappoint them with sporadic emails. Make sure they keep on paying attention to your emails by offering stuff that’s not available elsewhere.
Use your blog to gain more subscribers. In certain blog posts, offer your readers free ebooks, checklists, pdf guides, etc. in exchange for their email address.
Segment your email list. You can sort your email list based on their status as potential or actual clients, on their location, etc. This way you can provide more fitting content every time.

SEO Website Design Ideas: Putting Copy on Your Home Page

Over the years, the home pages of many websites have taken on a cleaner, minimalist look. You would have noticed them before, uncluttered home pages, with the background of a single colour or image, with a few words grouped together near the centre or bottom, offering a short and sweet description of the service it promises to deliver, call to action (often, to sign up for a free trial or service).

These home pages are structured to work as landing pages, taking a web user through a much simpler process of becoming a client and thus helping to secure an increased number of conversions.

One thing you need to keep in mind when figuring out how to create a website that truly converts, is the need to provide the right amount of copy on the home page. After all, words are essential tools for giving your audience a gentle, encouraging nudge toward the action you aim for them to take. Too much or too little text on your home page and you risk losing your grip audiences’ interest and missing out on valuable opportunities.

The online reading dilemma

A concern that many marketers have is the fact that today’s web users can be quite finicky about the content they wish to read through to the end. With so much information available online, it takes nothing to scan through a web page and quickly leave the site if they don’t immediately find what they need in the midst of thick blocks of text.

In the same manner, web users struggle with a website that is unable to clearly deliver its message or pinpoint its main thought.

A special formula

The best way to grab and hold readers’ attention is an approach that evenly combines the right information architecture, an effective page layout, and good copy.

As for the length of your copy, there’s really only one answer: Make your copy as short or as long as it needs to be. To determine this, you need to study these four important details:

What is your home page’s goal?

Is the page meant to rack up sales for a particular product, or to get people to sign up for a course? The kind of persuasion that your copy needs to present will depend ultimately on your particular goal.

The content you need to share with the readers lists the benefits that your specific course or product can provide, and why it should be the solution that they choose instead of the competition.

Who is your audience and what motivates them?

To effectively sell your product or service, you need to know the people who are most likely to benefit from what you have to offer, and what their key drivers are as a client are. After all, you designed your service/product/workshop to fulfill a specific need. You should have an idea of who needs your offering and what will inspire them to take action on your website. The length and quality of your copy will depend on how you are able to support your audience’s motivations.

Do you understand your audience and how relevant can you be?

Just because you might be working in a niche or micro niche market, does not guarantee he or she will be interested in your services or products. There are three points to consider when talking about relevance.

Relevance can change, especially over time. Let’s say you are a coach specialising in transition. Copy that speaks to someone looking for a start in their career fresh out of university will have different needs than that of an individual looking to finish full time employment and move into retirement.

What is relevant is in the eye of the beholder. A prospective client maybe looking at one of your workshops but feel they are adept with the specific skills you offer within the workshop and may decide that it is completely irrelevant to his or her current needs.

Lastly, different delivery methods or service/product offerings affect relevance. A client may be interested in a particular topic or issue and want to dive deep into that particular subject. In terms of delivery the client may only be interested in learning more via a face-to-face meeting, not a Skype call or over email.

Your copy may include bullet points stating that no prior experience or specific educational backgrounds are required before clicking the button. Other gates such as payment details could be removed; you could also add information about other people or entities that have tried the service before. What you add in the copy will depend on the potential barriers that your clients could face and how easily you are able to remove them.

What does your audience know about you?

Your clients have a problem. You offer the solution. But do your clients know that? The amount of copy you put on your homepage can also correspond to what your clients are currently aware of in terms of your business. Simply put, the less they know or understand about you, or relate to you, the more you will have to persuade them to give your product or service a try. And that can affect the length of your homepage copy.

For instance, your prospective client may already know about your product, but not the specific “deal” you offer in your site. He may be aware of what you’re selling, but may not know its right for his or her requirements. Maybe he knows what results he needs, but doesn’t know that your product can deliver it. Perhaps he knows he has a problem, but can’t identify a proper solution. And maybe he knows nothing about you at all, but has a good idea of his own opinions or identity.

Your homepage copy will need to be based on what your audience knows, as the way you structure your content to convince them that you’re coaching is what they need to get them to the place where they want to be.