The Ultimate Life Coach Website Strategy
We briefly touched on your website in chapter one, now it’s time to further develop this strategy into a working model for your business. All the positioning, branding, elevator speeches and vision statements in the world will not take your life coaching business to its full potential without an effective website. It is the single most effective marketing tool you can have for your life coaching business. These days, most people will ‘Google’ you before they do business with you, so make sure you have a strong online presence. Not only that, if you do it right, you can extend your reach and possibly open up new revenue streams by selling products online. Through the design and content provided on your website, you will begin to build trust among your prospects and reach the masses.
Be goal-driven in creating your website. Develop social media presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter. It can also help to have other blogs on some free sites. However, the most important online presence that will communicate your professionalism is your own website. Take care that your site is designed and developed specifically for your practice. Establish your goals in having your website created by knowing the answers to these questions:
What do you want your website to produce for your practice? (i.e. leads, qualitfy prospects, sell products)
How can you cater to your prospects’ specific needs through your website?
How can you use your website for the benefit of your clients?
You should plan what you want in a website before you begin. Research your goals and the resources required to make it happen. There are so many options with websites these days, it is important to start out with the end in mind.
Define and prioritise your goals for your website.
Once you have your goals in place, the next thing you need to do is study your niche and analyse your competition. Make sure your website will answer your customers’ or prospects’ needs. Look into what your competitors are doing, so you will know how you can improve on their efforts. It is usually best to structure and design your website in a way that will allow for growth and further development you may need in the future. There may be a small additional cost involved in this, however you will save on the cost of maintenance and upgrades down the track.
How could you have your website tailored so it meets the needs of your niche?
What is it about your competitors’ site that you like?
What is it that you can do better than your competitors?
How much are you willing to spend to have your site designed, so that it is adaptable for the future?
Website Content for Life Coaches
Information is what people are searching for when it comes to life coaching. Make sure you provide this content on your site in a logical, easy-to-find structure, so people can locate the specific information they are looking for. Use simple and user-friendly navigation models that come with descriptive navigation labels. Pertinent and relevant content will not only be interesting and informative to your audience, it should help attract larger volumes of search engine traffic.
What content will you include on your website?
How can you structure the content on your website?
Are you likely to outgrow the structure of content you have developed? If so, how can you fix it?
Once you have an efficient website for your life coaching business, you are ready to apply further online marketing strategies that you can create to support your site. Although we discussed newsletters in chapter one, you should also consider social media, RSS feeds, pay-per-click advertising, link building and search engine optimisation (SEO). Your web programmer should be able to explain these aspects of websites to you, if he or she can’t, find someone who can.
What online marketing strategies will you have implemented on your website?
What online presence do you currently have or will setup? (Website, Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)
How can you use your current online presence to drive traffic your new business website?
