Ever since I started Your Outstanding VA, I’ve looked for effective and results oriented ways to market my services. I began this venture with not much more than an idea of my capabilities and a desire to help others succeed. That’s why I feel such a kinship with coaches. As a coach, you have a dream to bring people closer to prosperity, help them make better career choices, and have breakthroughs in their relationships.
But often the reality of finding clients and making a living from such a pursuit isn’t as ideal as you’d like. That’s why I’ve put together 3 of my favorite effective and affordable (in fact, mostly free!) marketing methods.
#1 - Blogging
Every time I analyze someone’s coaching website, I check to see if they have been blogging at all. There’s a reason it’s become such a popular buzz word over the past few years - a blog can bring you more traffic and clients easily. But like many things, it’s easy to do but difficult to do right. Many coaches lack a blogging schedule and an idea of what people actually want to read.
Have you ever done keyword research?
This is the foundation of your business online. You have to know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish and how you’re going to do it. To start your own keyword research, I recommend a tool like Market Samurai. They offer a free trial and have excellent training videos that explain how to find the “sweet spot” for your keywords.
Once you find the keywords that fit in with your coaching practice, you have to be dedicated to using them in your blog posts.
#2 - Social Media
I do a lot of research on potential keywords for coaches and their websites. Over the past few months, I’ve found that the scope of what people are searching for and the amount of coaches trying to attract clients is limited.
So how does one overcome this difficult situation?
Connecting with people on websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is a great choice.
But the art to this is that you have to approach it as if you’re not marketing at all. Even if you have tons of bills to pay and need the money, you have to close that part of your mind off. All of your interactions should be social with the slightest hint of an offer that you’re making. Any offer you make should be in the form of sharing, not promoting. That’s why one of the first things you’ll want to do (besides making social connections of course!) is to connect your blog to your Twitter account.
I recommend using a service like bit.ly to send a link to your Twitter account so that you can track the amount of clicks you receive over time. This way you can measure if people are interested in what you have to say. This type of research is invaluable as you can create entire coaching programs, books, and etc around your most popular blog posts.
The more you connect and develop the Know, Like, and Trust factor, the more you increase your reach and effectiveness of your blog.
#3 - Article Marketing
Even though article marketing is similar to blogging, there’s one important benefit that is often overlooked. When you submit an article to EzineArticles.com, you’re joining a community of writers who have proven themselves to be experts at bringing visitors to their articles. Once they arrive on the EzineArticles site, there are more opportunities for them to find your article than you might think.
How is this possible?
Well, if you look at the bottom of the page for each article (you can choose one of my articles on the right to see an example!), you’ll notice there are 3 different categories. They are Other Recent EzineArticles, Most Viewed EzineArticles, and Most Published EzineArticles. What happens next is what I like to call The Article Hopping Phenomenon. While other writers might be good at getting visitors to their articles, they may not be skilled at having their readers visit their sites for more information.
But if you make an irresistible offer in your Author Resource box, you can stand out much more than the original author. In essence, you’re getting visitors because of an article you didn’t even write.
What effective but affordable marketing techniques do you use? Even more important, how much of your marketing actually looks like marketing? All 3 of these techniques, while effective for marketing, often don’t look like the marketing we’re used to. Would you agree?
