Here is my secret blueprint for building and growing any kind of coaching or training business. You can download it in pdf or xmind mindmap versions, and I created 5 short videos to talk you through it.
I hope that you find it useful, and that more importantly you take action, as this whole blueprint is worthless otherwise.
Hi there, Keith here. This is my secret blueprint to either start or grow massively an online coaching or training business. There are 10 steps. Let's get to it. The first step is mindset. This is where most people go wrong. I know people go on about mindset and it can get quite boring sometimes, but the truth is this is probably the most important step because if you don't believe you can do it, you're not going to do it. You're going to make a half-hearted attempt and then you're going to give up. You have to really believe it is possible. Just look around, just look at other people doing it. You probably know more than a lot of these people, you probably have a lot of skills that they don't have, yet they are succeeding and probably the reason is that they believe they can do it, whereas you don't, which is why you probably haven't attempted to do it or if you have, you've done it in a very half-hearted or haphazard manner. You have to believe you can do it. Some people find it helps to do affirmations or something just to, first thing in the morning or something, just to really visualise that they are successful doing this. That can give you a really boost to your confidence. You can do it. You can definitely do it. I'm sure you can. It's just a question of really believing that with every fibre of your being. Step two is to just be yourself. Now, I wish I'd have known this going back years. I've done so many jobs in the past, worked in offices where I've thought, "Oh well, how do people want me to be? How does my boss want me to be? Have to sort of try and fit myself into that role and pretend to be something I'm not. Or if I've tried to sell something, I've tried to pretend to have this image of what does customer might want me to be. A, it's exhausting, B, it just looks a bit fake, and C, people don't really connect with that. They won't really believe you or believe what you say or like you. Just be yourself. It's not about pretending, it's about showing your personality. Some people will love it, some people will hate it, so it doesn't matter. Just focus on the people that love it and connect with them emotionally. It's a lot more relaxing. Also, when you're yourself, you can just put a lot of energy and emotion into it, and that's what builds your brand, if it's a brand based on your personality, and that's how you're going to attract people to your coaching or training services. |
Thirdly, contribution. Now, so many people think, Oh, it's just about trying to make money on the internet. How can I persuade people to give me money? What's the secret words I have to use? Or how do I structure it? That does have some importance, but really it's not about ripping people off or manipulating them or selling them things or getting people to do things they don't want to.
Don't look at it that way at all and just look at it as though you're giving. You're giving every ounce of your knowledge, your skill, your energy. You're really trying to help people. You're really trying to help your customer or your client with everything you have. If you start thinking that way, they will respond to that. They will see that and it will... Also, it's a lot more pleasant for you because there's nothing better in this world than to actually feel that you've made a difference, that you've helped people, you've contributed. And I'm sure you can contribute.
Then, obviously, you structure it in a way where, as well as you helping people, they pay you money because you've created value in their lives. You've helped them, so it's natural that they would want to pay you and support you for doing this. Obviously, you can make money, a lot of money doing this, but that's not what your sort of primary goal that you are getting in touch with, so it's more about contributing and serving people. And if you start to make this shift in your attitude, you will see incredible results.
Fourthly, you have to decide on the avatar you want to serve. This means you have this image in your mind whenever you're creating content, whenever you're producing a video or writing something, you're talking to... In your mind's eye, you feel that there's one specific person that you're speaking to. This person is known as your avatar. By doing that, it makes sure that your message is just very focused. It's not all over the place. If you start to think, Oh, well, there's maybe thousands of people watching this. They might want me to... be interested in that. They might be interested in that. Then it just gets very unfocused, and you're not really... it's very hard to really give your personality that.
But maybe you know someone who you can help, who fits into your target demographic, or maybe you think of an earlier version of you, but find someone like that. And then it also makes it a lot easier to speak because really just connected with one person. The old way of looking at it was, Oh, well, you created a product and tried to sell it. This way of looking at it is, you find an avatar, someone you connect with, they connect with you, and it's more about helping them through the entire journey of... from where they are now to where they want to be. So then you can use this to just create many different products and services over the years.
The next step is to funnelhack your competitors. Obviously, this does not mean copying, but instead it means just looking at what's working, looking at what is selling. Maybe go to Udemys or courses on selling, or maybe just look and see who's really successful. Look who's ranking YouTube or whatever. Look who's got a lot of likes on Facebook, who really seems to be crushing it, and just see what they're doing, seeing how they're structuring their message, their content, their ads. Buy their products. Go through their funnels, see how they're doing the products, seeing what language they're using, the messaging and so on. This is good to inspire you and also look at the hooks they're using, the hook that grabs the attention of people. Then look at the stories that they're selling, look at the offers they're producing, and the price points.
If you look at several of these, it just gives you a lot of knowledge about what is working in the current market. Then after you've done all that, just decide on the initial service or product you will sell. This could be an info product or it could be your time. Maybe you're selling your time, which you can set up using a calendar software, like Acuity Scheduling or Calendly, and then you sell your time. It could be you set a time of a block of four hours or six hours for X amount of money. You get them to transfer the money and then they can set up Zoom calls with you using a calendar system. That would be a way of setting the time. Or maybe you have recorded videos that you want to sell. You can deliver those using Teachable or something like that.
So anyways, so look at what other people are doing. Obviously, someone who's incredibly successful would probably not be selling their time on an hourly rate. But to start off with, you might want to do that at first and then later on started creating products and stuff. Or you might be doing group coaching. But anyway, just decide on something, because you need to monetize things to get money in and also to start testing things, testing a funnel.
So once you've decided what you want to sell, then you build a lead magnet and then you can create an opt-in form. I think ClickFunnels is a very good way of doing this. There's other ways of doing it, like Thrive themes, which I've also used, but I think ClickFunnels is simpler. If you're starting out though, it is more expensive.
Build an email sequence and then so set it all up and then just start buying advertisements on maybe a social media platform just to take people through your funnel, see how much you spend on each ad to convert. So you start to get a baseline of data and then then after that, you can just tweak things, change things, split test everything to try and improve everything till at some point you will break even and then at some point you'll go into profit, especially as you add more products, more emails, to move them up your value ladder.
So the paid ads was really just to test it. Once you've got a funnel that work, that is profitable, then you can start driving traffic to it. This means creating content. You can find out what content people are using, which really grabs people. You can look at this service called buzz sumo, which is very useful. It shows what bits of content, what headlines have been shared the most using different platforms like Facebook and Twitter and so on. And also you can look at your competitors, you can look at their YouTube videos, you can sort them by most viewed, example, and that shows you which of their videos are the most popular. So that gives you an idea of what people are interested in, which gives you an idea of what sort of content to create.
Then you just film lots of content. You can do that on your iPhone, or you can set up on a webcam and smartphone. That's how I've done it today. A lot of people just use their Android or iPhone or so on. Once you filmed your content, you've got it on video, then you can repurpose that content, post it to different places, and either you could do that or you can hire people to do this. There are many different platforms. Just choose one which is your preferred one, and then you can just boost this content with ads. Maybe every time you post to Facebook, you boost it with $5, and to your target demographic you can see, "Oh this, I boosted them all the same but this post got a lot more interest," and then it gives you a lot more information, and then you can either you can boost that some more and you can also create more content on that theme. You can also create products or services around that content as well. So it's vital information.
So syndicating it, there's so many different places. Once you've created the video, you can post it to YouTube, put it on Facebook, which could be Facebook page and or you could start a Facebook group. Post it to Instagram obviously, and there's different ways. You can split it into 15-second chunks as well for stories. Post it to LinkedIn, post videos or pictures or texts to LinkedIn. Twitter, you can post. For text, you can use a service like rev.com to get it transcribed. And then you can get someone to edit it for you or edit it yourself, and post it to a blog. And then we could also create eBooks from this as well. If you've got the video, you can strip out the audio, and you can use that as a podcast. Also, you can edit it as well.
And then the next step is to fill your value ladder.
So, you've got your initial product or service. You've got your subscriber list. You can retarget to people who have liked or engaged with your content or watched say 50% of your videos. You've got your audience.
And then you can just retarget, you can send emails out, you can produce social media content just to that audience. And you can fill your value ladder, which means creating more products.
Maybe started with one-to-one selling your time. So maybe you create a group coaching products. Maybe you record that and turn that into an info product. And then you can create more info products.
And basically, once you've got an audience of people who like you, who consume your content, it's a lot easier to sell to them than people who've got no connection with you. So you can just produce more and more content and increase the lifetime value of each of your customers.
The next step is to work with the Dream 100. These are people who have a bigger audience than you who work in the same market or a complementary market. And you just try and get to know them. You consume their content, you engage with them on social media, maybe you message them. And at some point, maybe if you've got a show on YouTube or a podcast, you could invite them, you could interview them, for example. Or you could be an affiliate for them.
There's many different ways of working with them, but ultimately what you want to happen is for them to start promoting you to their audience. So maybe they work as an affiliate for you. Maybe you give them money or a share of your profit if they promote a product. So you start to get their audience to become part of your audience, as well.
And another way of working in this way is to, on Facebook, you could target people who are interested in a certain person, for example, if they're above a certain size.
And the final step is to find a mentor. It's very hard to just do all this by yourself. It's a very haphazard approach, doing a bit of that, doing a bit of that. If you work with a mentor, someone who's got a complete system that you can use, it just makes it a lot easier. And you're much more likely to be successful because we've all got blind spots and we can all get stuck somewhere, not realise why it's not working.
That's all for now. Hope you enjoyed the blueprint and wish you the very best of luck with everything.
Bye for now.