You completed your coaching qualification, and with your shiny certificate clutched in your hand, you ventured forth into the world of ‘working for myself as a coach’.

Where Do I Start?

Many coaches start by giving away ‘discovery’ sessions. As you know, these are free sessions that are meant to inspire the potential client into action. Actions (plural) actually, because what we want from these potential clients is both the inspiration to achieve what was discussed and inspiration to pay us to help them get there.

What we quickly find is that this way of marketing our business doesn’t get us income quickly enough. (Unless we’re in the fortunate situation of not needing to live on our coaching income, of course, in which case ‘pin money’ may be enough.)

As self-employed people, we have limited resources and they are time, energy and money. The new coach tends to feel that they have time and energy to spare and a belief that if they spend these resources, that money will follow. However, it doesn’t usually happen like that. 

What happens is that they run out of energy and start to feel like they’re failing and they don’t know why – after all, other coaches make this work, right?

Who Can Help Me?

The next place new coaches end up is trawling the internet to see what others are doing out there and what we find is that there is masses of information on how to build a coaching business. 

Things we might find we are being told we need to understand:

• sales funnels
• lead magnets
• websites
• SEO
• pay-per-click advertising
• long-tail keywords
• Facebook ads

The list is a) technical and b) lengthy c) overwhelming (and this is a tiny percentage of it!).

How is a coach supposed to know who to listen to?

My Thoughts (for what they’re worth)

I believe in the acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid!).

If it’s too technical to understand, I have to wonder if it’s really necessary? After all, these technical solutions to finding clients seems like hard work (or expensive work if someone else has to do it).

Here’s the thing; it’s actually not that hard to find clients, providing you make it as easy as possible for yourself.

Fish With A Rod, Not A Net

How you make is as easy as possible for yourself isn’t the way that logic would suggest because it isn’t to cast your net wide and work with anyone.

The way to make it as easy as possible is to make it easy for clients to find you. How you do that, is to make sure that your marketing is so focused that your ideal client can hear you in the ‘noise’ that surrounds us all, every day.

If you’re fishing for salmon, you use a rod and specific flies. You could use a net, but you’d get loads of other stuff in your net that takes your time, saps your energy dealing with it and you might not get a single salmon.

Marketing your coaching business is the same. Use a rod and the right fly.

Continuing The Fly-Fishing Analogy

The process is simple:

• Know who it is you want to attract (your salmon – ideal client)
• Understand which fly you need to use (or what they need to hear in order to realise the benefit of working with you – your marketing message)
• Be where they are – and fish.

Want to learn how to catch salmon? Why don’t we talk?