Coaches often spend hours every week writing articles, posting to social media, shooting videos, and recording podcasts. If you feel like you’re on a hamster wheel of creating your coaching blog content on top of all your other marketing and business responsibilities, it might feel like content marketing isn’t worth the time. Is having a coaching blog really worth the effort?
Here’s the thing: coaches that use strategic content marketing and marketing strategies get more coaching clients with less effort.
Smart coaches know that successful content marketing is not about the frequency of blog postings but about the overall content strategy behind what you’re creating and how it leads to sales.
How Coaching Articles Attract New Clients
Coaching businesses that get content marketing right get a flow of leads without constant blogging. Instead, they focus on the process of how coaching articles attract new clients and spend their time on creating that process.
The best coaching articles do four things to attract new clients:
- Helps potential clients identify that they have a problem
- Helps potential clients understand options for solutions
- Shows you’re the right person to help clients solve their problem
- Sets potential clients up to take action, like signing up for your list or contacting you
There was a time when Google and other search engines cared that you dripped content out over a period of time. That’s why you’ll see many content marketing experts advise that you stay consistent in your content creation to get the most benefits.
But times have changed! Today, Google and other search engines look for the answer to someone’s search right now, not which website posts new content consistently.
Successfully using content marketing in your coaching business is more about creating articles that help answer your ideal client’s most pressing questions, showing up in search engines, and repurposing that content across your marketing to create a cohesive content marketing strategy.
For most coaching blogs, there’s really only a limited number of posts that are worth creating, both from an SEO standpoint as well as a standpoint of actually leading to new clients. If the content you’re creating doesn’t do the above four things, blogging won’t help you grow your coaching business.
How to Start a Coaching Blog
The best coaching blogs use a content marketing process that centers on four main steps: topic selection, content creation, conversion optimization, and repurposing & promotion. Each of these steps work together to produce an effective coaching blog that produces clients.
It doesn’t really matter a whole lot what website platform you’re using for your life coach blog as long as it’s easy for you to use and takes care of basic technical SEO elements. I recommend a self-hosted Wordpress site or Squarespace site to start your life coach blog with your own domain. The same goes for any kind of coaching blog too!
Using the below steps, you’ll be able to create cornerstone blog posts that you can reuse for other marketing purposes, allowing you to spend less time creating content for all of your marketing and have a more effective online presence.
1. Choose Your Coaching Blog Topics
The first step to successful content marketing for your coaching business is picking the right topics to cover. You shouldn’t be writing about what interests you—but about what interests your target audience about your coaching services or programs.
Blog topics for life coaches and other coaching niches should focus on the most common problems and questions your ideal clients have at the early stages of coaching or before they become a client because these types of topics often lead to sales.
If you’ve been a coach for a few years, you already know what these topics are—I’m sure you can write down a list of the most important topics to cover in an hour and have a list of content to create ready to go!
If you’re a new coach, finding life coach blog topics can be a little bit more difficult because you don’t have your experience to rely on. Instead, you’ll want to conduct audience surveys, discovery calls, and use social media listening to figure out what your ideal clients are asking.
Once you have your list of topics, following SEO best practices for coaches can help you identify if these topics are good candidates for search engine optimization techniques or if your focus should be on other marketing strategies. Keyword research can also help you identify which topics are most pressing to create content for first, helping you prioritize your content marketing plans.
I’ve found that most coaches only need between 20 and 50 blog posts total using this method. While that seems like a lot of content, writing 1-2 blog posts a week for 6 months is a small investment to make in your business that allows you to focus more on getting new clients than creating new content.
2. Write Your Coaching Articles
A lot of coaches are concerned about giving away too much in content marketing. If you’ve thought “why would someone hire me when they can just read all my posts?” you’re in a trap of thinking that you should include everything in your content marketing that you do in your coaching sessions.
You want to think about your coaching articles as a teaser of what someone can achieve with you as their coach rather than giving away free coaching through your blog.
Instead of telling your audience how to solve their problems, the idea is to show them the what and the why so they acknowledge they have a problem and see coaching as a solution to solving that problem.
Once your audience understands the what and why, it’s easy for them to come to you for the how.
When creating your coaching blog articles, you should focus on a few things:
- Using a great hook to keep your audience reading
- Easy to skim sections and bullet points
- Keyword optimization to get free traffic from search engines
- Creating multiple Pinterest graphics and queuing them up in your scheduler
- Adding a next step at the end that leads to a conversion
Even if you’re not a super skilled writer, you can use other mediums to create content. Don’t forget that video and audio are great for content creation styles that don’t involve writing. Podcasts are great for SEO too!
3. Optimize Your Articles for Conversions
The last step in creating your coaching articles focuses on how to get conversions—which is the key part to creating an effective coaching blog strategy that helps you get new clients.
Without a clear direction for your readers to follow to keep working down the path towards resolution and growth, they end your article thinking “Okay, what next?” If you show them the next step to take, not only can you help more people take action but you can also gain some new clients in the process.
Conversions are when your audience takes your desired action. A conversion can be someone who contacts you for a discovery call or when someone shares your post on social media or even when someone visits more than 3 pages on your site. Because you set your own conversion measurements, you can choose to make a conversion just about anything you want.
The most common calls-to-action at the end of a coaching article include:
- Signing up for a resource download
- Signing up for a consultation or discovery call
- Sharing on social media
- Following on social media
- Signing up for blog updates
- Leaving a comment
- Clicking a link to read another article
While all of these have their pros and cons, most of the time I recommend making conversions focused on revenue-producing calls-to-action.
The best call-to-action and conversion in my book is using a resource download that has the potential to convert readers into clients. If your resource aligns well with the reason why someone read your post, you’ll grow your email list and get potential clients in your email funnel.
For example, at the end of this post, you’ll find a call-to-action to sign up to download my traffic building guide that will help you grow your business. When you sign up, you’ll receive the guide in an email and then a few emails after that designed to educate you on the _what _and the why and lead you to sign up for a consultation to discover the how specific to your needs.
You can use this same sales funnel technique for your content marketing to help you get clients through your coaching articles.
Optimizing your coaching blog posts for conversions comes down to matching your content to your download or sign up so you’ll want to not only keep that in mind when deciding which topics to write about but also when you’re creating your resource.
4. Repurpose and Promote Your Coaching Articles
After you’ve published your articles on your website, you’ll want to use them across your marketing to get the most out of your investment in the time it took to create your content.
Instead of writing a handful of posts and then letting them languish, part of being a smart online business owner is using your content across your different platforms and repurposing content to save time.
For each blog post, you can try the following actions to get the most value from your articles:
- Create multiple Pinterest graphics for your post and add them to your scheduler
- Create 10-12 social media posts about your articles and reshare the posts after 6-8 months
- Use the post as the content in your email marketing funnel
- Record an audio version for a solo podcast episode
- Record an IGTV video version
- Do an IG or Facebook Live version
- Do IG or Facebook Stories version and add it to your highlights
- Combine a series of posts in to an ebook
- Record a Youtube video
- Link to the post in other content on your website to keep people on your site longer
- Make pull quotes from your posts to make shareable quote graphics
- Turn the content into a webinar
- Find places to share your post to answer questions, like Quora or message boards
- Find linkups to share your post on
- Ask for links on resource pages
- Share your content in interviews and ask for links on episode pages
- Link to your content in guest posts
There are other ways to repurpose content that aren’t included here—but these are the ones that have worked well for me and my clients in the past.
If you’re thinking that this list of actions is overwhelming, that’s okay! The idea is that you spend most of your time repurposing and promoting your content rather than creating new content on your website.
If you focus on creating 1-2 blog posts a week, you’ll have finished content creation for your coaching blog in a short time and may not have to create new content again in the future. By using the above repurposing actions, you’ll have plenty of ways to get the full value out of your posts, boost your visibility, and gain clients in less time.
What About Done for You Coaching Content?
I’ve come across “done for your content” for health coaches, business coaches, and leadership coaches over the years and it definitely can have your place in your overall content marketing.
If you’ve never heard of done-for-you content, it’s pre-packaged blog posts, download resources, webinar slides, and other content marketing assets that you’re allowed to use to promote your services and customize for your needs. It’s also known as PLR content or whitelabel content. This isn’t the same as working with someone like me to create content on your behalf, which is one of the SEO services I offer, but instead comes pre-written in a content package.
When should you use done-for-you coaching content? Done for you content can help you fast track content marketing by filling in gaps in your content creation but, in my opinion, shouldn’t be a replacement for creating your own content.
What you know as a coach is invaluable to your ability to get new clients and creating content that focuses on issues and problems your clients have works significantly better than canned content that doesn’t.
Done for your content can vary in quality quite a lot so you’ll want to make sure you understand what you’re buying before you purchase and how it can reflect on your brand. Most people believe that you need to put out new content often to attract new clients—but in most cases, repurposing cornerstone posts and creating your core messaging actually works much better!
Next Steps: Start Your Coaching Blog
I have a guide to help you build a sustainable coaching business that can help you dig a bit deeper into the strategy behind using content to attract your best coaching clients. It’s all about how to implement the above steps and get to work building your coaching business with your website.
Planning and figuring out how to create an effective coaching blog is great—but if you don’t take the next step of actually starting, you won’t make any progress!
The key to a successful coaching blog is following the above steps and actually doing the work. If after reading this guide, you feel overwhelmed by the idea of creating content to attract clients, hiring someone to work with you to create and implement a content marketing strategy for your coaching business may be worth it! I offer free initial consultations to help coaches figure out what kind of blog content is right for them and what it will take for them to make a successful coaching blog. Apply for a consultation today!
