*This blog post was written by my friend Anggi. If you're looking for a freelance writer to write SEO-friendly blog posts for you, check out anggipradhini.com. You will not find a better copywriter out there (just read this post for proof).
What is the first thing you’ll do when you have a question?
You pick up your phone, open your browser and type your question to Google.
Then you fall into the rabbit hole learning the answer to your question. Then scrolling some more. Hoping from one blog to another.
Does it sound familiar?
That’s people’s behavior in the online world. Including your ideal clients. As a life coach, you need to design your content so that your ideal clients will find you when they browse on Google.
According to Hubspot, blogging is the third most common content marketing strategy. On average, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month.
That’s impressive, isn’t it?
That’s why using a blog for marketing purposes is so useful to scale your coaching business. But do not write a random article on your website. You need to have blogging ninja tips to get coaching clients from your blog.
In this article, we’ll discuss 10 steps to get life-coaching clients from blogging. Let’s dig deeper.
1. Get Clarity on Your Ideal Clients
Who are your ideal clients?
My ideal client is an entrepreneur.
If that’s your answer, you need to get back to the drawing board. Because you’re not clear on your target audience. An entrepreneur is a very broad category.
As a life coach, early-stage entrepreneurs and 7 figures entrepreneurs will need different types of help from you.
In the 7 figures entrepreneurs’ realm, it will be very different if the entrepreneur is a mom. Or a single man who’s struggling to find dates because he’s so busy.
Do you see the difference?
That’s why before you start your blogging journey as a life coach, you need to have clarity on who’s your target audience. If you know them, you can tailor your blog post topic to their needs.
Finding the right ideal clients for your business is also quite a trial and error. If you don't get it right from the get-go, that's ok.
What you need to do is giving a try. Work with different kinds of people so you know what type of clients you like to work with.
Also, remember that your ideal clients can change over time. Your ideal clients will change alongside your business growth. And that’s ok. That’s a very natural process for a business owner.
The main point is: to pick your ideal client and work for it. Don’t need to overthink it. It’s ok to change your mind later on.
2. Get Clarity on Your Offer
Once you pick your ideal client, the next question is, "What are you going to offer them?"
Talk to your ideal clients and let them tell you what they want. The fancy term for this is market research.
In doing market research, you need to understand:
What’s your ideal client struggle on? Find their pain point.
What does your ideal client want to be their ideal condition? Find their dream.
The magic words when you’re doing your market research are, “Tell me more about that.”
This will encourage people to share more about their stories with you.
From doing market research, you can design your offer.
Later on, this story will be very useful because you can use their words in your content or sales material.
3. Get Clarity on Your Lead Magnet
Once you have your offer, now it’s time to find people who are interested in it.
How?
By making the lead magnet align with our paid offer.
Let me explain from the beginning.
A lead magnet is a free resource you give for free to your ideal clients. The popular lead magnet is a checklist, workbook, eBook, or free training. For your first lead magnet, make it as simple but useful as possible.
We can offer our lead magnet in our blog alongside our free content. Those people who want our lead magnet, need to give their email addresses to get it.
People who want to give their email addresses to your lead magnet means they are people who want to know more about you as a life coach. They like your free content, read your blog, and end up giving their email address to you.
Picking your lead magnet can be a trial-and-error process too. This is part of the journey of building your life coaching business. So, if your first lead magnet doesn’t convert well, that’s ok.
Try another lead magnet. If you have several leads magnet, you’ll have your winner soon or later.
4. Brain Dump Your Content Ideas
Writing consistent blog posts can be a dreadful task as a life coach.
That blank cursor blinking at you is the worst feeling ever in the world.
Do you feel me?
But if you have a content calendar, the dreadfulness of writing blog posts can be eliminated. Having a content calendar means you already batch the ideation process. So, what you need to do is write the blog post.
Here are some practical tips on batching your blog post ideas:
Choose the time of the day when you’re most productive. And also, a good mood is a must. Set the vibe that triggers your creative mood.
Sit alone where you don’t get disturbed. You can use blank paper or open simple documents on your laptop.
Think of 50 questions your ideal clients have for you. If you don’t have clients yet, well, put yourself in your client’s shoes and pretend to ask questions.
If you can’t do this exercise, it means you don’t understand your ideal client’s problem yet.
All the work you’ve done: making the offer and lead magnet might not work because you don’t understand your ideal client.
Get back to the drawing board. No need to push yourself to write the blog post. With clarity on your ideal client’s problem, your blog post will be in vain.
If you find yourself can write 50 blog post topics in one sit, that means you understand your ideal clients pretty well. Your ideas are worth trying. You can set the time to write the blog post. Or hire a professional to write it for you.
The point is: you’re ready to move forward in your blogging game.
Oh, and did I tell you that you already have blog post ideas for a year? Assuming you upload one blog post a week.
Now, you don’t need to worry about finding ideas for your blog post.
5. Post Your First Blog Post. And Keep Posting Regularly.
The journey of 3000 miles starts with the first step.
Your journey of blogging also starts with the first blog post.
Uploading your blog post is the most important milestone in your blogging game as a life coach.
Be prepared that:
Your first blog post will be the worst blog post you’ve ever written.
You want to disappear from the earth once you hit publish.
You wonder what your family and friends will think about your blog post.
Weeks will go by until you realize: hey, nothing happens. You’re fine and life will go on.
The sarcastic part is: nobody cares about your blog post. At least for a while until your blog post starts to get attention.
So, you worry about nothing at all.
One tip I can give you if you’re writing your blog post is: to write 3-5 blog posts at the same time.
Write them all before you hit publish.
After you write them, schedule your blog post according to your upload schedule and call it a day.
Why?
Because when your first blog post publishes, you’ll get overwhelmed. If you only write a blog post and then hit publish, it will be so difficult mentally for you to write another one next week.
It will be easier for you to have several blog posts scheduled. So, by the time your first blog post publishes, you already have the next blog post scheduled.
You can take your time dealing with your overwhelmed.
Having several blog post schedules also guarantees your consistency in blogging. It’s so easy to get trapped in a slump or overwhelm, then you end up missing your upload schedule.
And in the beginning, it will be so easy to lose momentum when you miss one upload.
So, for your own good, please write several blog posts, scheduled them, and take your time dealing with your first blog post fever.
6. Optimize your post for Google SEO
One of the reasons blogging will help your life coaching business is it will boost your SEO game right. Your ideal client will find you from Google.
So, understanding SEO is mandatory if you want your blog to generate leads for your life coach business.
In this section, let’s discuss SEO and how you as a life coach can take advantage of it.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is a set of rules used by Google to understand our article. Once Google understands our article, it will determine whether our article will show up when a user searches for a certain topic.
Our target is designing our blog post to be SEO friendly. I expect that Google will see our content as good content and show it on the first page of Google.
That’s the way your ideal client finds your life coaching business.
The way Google checks on our content is by looking at specific keywords on H1, H2, and H3. For note, H stands for heading.
These are the details you need to pay attention to when you optimized your blog post:
Pick your blog post title rich in keywords. The SEO term is H1 (Heading 1). Every post only has one H1.
In the first 100 words of the introduction of your blog post, mention your keywords.
Design your post as bullet points. If you can (don’t force it), put your keywords in your H2.
If you still have some detail, you can make them as H3.
Warning: please don’t keywords stuff your blog post. Always write for humans first algorithm second.
Once our reader finds our blog post, our goal is to make them stay longer on our website. We want them to read our blog post, click on another post, or even sign up for our newsletter. That will be a big win.
7. Focus on Content Production for the First Year
This is the unsexy fact of using blog posts for building your life coaching business.
In the first year of blogging as a life coach, you need to focus to make valuable content. Don’t miss an upload schedule. Learn as much as you can about SEO for your blog.
At least for the first 50-100 blog posts, you need to be ruthless maintain your upload schedule.
This is a lonely journey. It's normal if you want to give up several times. Because nothing happens after you hit publish.
The worse part? It happens again, again and again.
Do you still want to blog after learning about this fact?
If you do, admire your determination.
To help you win on this lonely journey, let’s talk about a metric you need to pay attention to on your blog.
It’s called domain authority.
8. Build Your Domain Authority (DA)
Domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. It predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engines.
In plain English, the higher your domain authority, the more Google like and trust your website. And the more Google trusts your website, the more it will show your blog post in the search result.
Domain authority has ranged from 1-100. When you have a new domain, it will have a DA of 1. And with a DA of 1, whatever you write will not rank on Google no matter how good your blog post is.
When we’re on a lonely journey of blogging, checking your DA from time to time will boost your confidence that something is happening.
Let me explain more about this.
If you blog consistently for 3 months, you don’t get a medal for the best blogger this year. Nothing will happen. You don't get millions of dollars or hundreds of followers.
What makes you keep going is a metric that shows that you're doing something. In this case, this metric is domain authority.
If you see your DA increase from 1 to 3, you know something is happening. Google sees you're doing something.
And that means a lot to make you keep going.
Ok, the big question is: ok, what should I do to increase my DA?
There are several ways to increase your DA. Some of the tips I recommend are:
Write a good valuable blog post at least weekly.
Guest posting consistently generates backlinks.
Networking with another blogger to exchange links in your article.
Let’s talk about backlinks too. Because it’s very important for you to understand. A backlink is when another website includes the link in your article. The more respectable the website that refers to your website the better.
That will boost your authority in front of Google.
Can you imagine how respectable your website is if a website like entrepreneur.com links your article to its blog post?
That will be big dream come true.
But we need to work our way up. Before aiming for a big publication, you better start networking with your peers.
Connect with people who are in the beginning stage as you are. Guest posting each other and exchanging links.
Do it naturally. Don’t spam Google with backlinks to your website. If you spam Google with backlinks, Google will hate your website for sure.
9. Follow the 6 months rule
At this point, you should see the big plan of using a blog to generate clients for your life coaching business. It’s definitely not for the faint heart.
Blogging is a long-term game. You need to give enough time for something to work before you start changing anything.
What usually happens in new bloggers is, they make several blog posts, and then decide nothing happens. Then they say: blogging is dead!
The fact is: they don’t give enough time for the blog to work for them.
From a business perspective, it’s very understandable that you want to make money as soon as possible. That’s the point of building a business, right? But if you want to make money right away from blogging, you’ll end up disappointed.
Before you make a change to your blogging strategy, you need to give yourself at least 6 months' time to see whether a certain strategy is working or not.
I tell you once again: you need to blog consistently for at least 6 months before you change a thing.
And moreover, you not only have to write content consistently in your blog, but you also need to generate backlinks from to time. Let’s say once every month or every 2 months. Then see in 6 months if something happens to your website.
How do you know if something is happening? Well, you guessed it right: check your domain authority.
If you blog and create backlinks for 6 months and nothing happens, then you need to evaluate what needs to be changed in your blogging game.
10. Nurture your email list.
If you’re at this stage, it means your lead magnet start converting.
Congrats! You’re building your tiny email list. It will grow over time.
But you know what, you need to start nurturing your email list now. Even if your granny is the only one who’s subscribed to your email list.
Why?
Because you need the practice to speak to your email list. And you need to build a habit to communicate with your email list.
I’ll send emails consistently to my list if my list is big enough.
First of all, big enough is relative. What’s big for you might be small for others.
Second of all, you better practice emailing your list when it is still small. You’ll make mistakes.
You better make your first mistake in front of your 10 people. When you make your first mistake in front of 10,000 people in your email list, the stake will be higher.
Ok. But what should I email my list about?
Ugh, I thought you’ll never ask.
Here’s the guideline for you on how to nurture your email list:
Send your new blog post every week.
If you have time, re-make your blog post as a newsletter. Remember, your reader doesn’t read all your content. It’s ok to reuse your blog post as a newsletter.
I said reuse it. I don’t say merely copy and paste your blog post as a newsletter. Use your best judgment.
Don’t forget to sell to your list. Just like nurturing your email list takes practice, so is selling to your list. Be ready to hear cricket when you sell to your list, let’s say once every quarter. But you to sell anyway. You’ll learn along the way while your audience grows.
Final Thoughts
If you read to this point, you’re a champ! I can see that you really dedicated to learning about getting life coaching clients from your blog.
All these 10 steps can easily overwhelm you. That’s so normal.
One piece of advice I can give you is: to focus only on your next step.
This force your brain to focus on only one problem and find the best solution.
Surely other problems will show up. And you will deal with it when it really already become a problem. Not imagine the problem before it’s standing in front of you.
Where are you now in these 10 steps? Share your story in the comments below.
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