If you’ve got some experience under your belt online, you can make additional income as a coach. Coaching means teaching less experienced people and helping them to achieve their business goals. You take on clients and meet with them on a regular basis to help them get through problems and obstacles that keep them from getting where they want to go.

It’s All About Expertise

Now I know what some of you are thinking “I’m not knowledgeable enough” but I tell you you’ll be very surprised just how much knowledge you’ll have picked up as you’ve developed your own Internet business. Certainly for Sam and I we’ve found it quite possible to help others, in some cases just to help out and others where we’ve been paid for our services so until you start you’ll never know.

All you need to be a coach is experience. Most of us plug along in our chosen fields and we never realize that after a few short years, you’ve got something extremely valuable – firsthand experience doing what you do. There are lots of people who would love to get a bit of that. When you do coaching, you offer your knowledge and experience and put it to use helping to solve your clients’ problems.

If you spend any time on forums or social media, you probably know that there are always scores of newbies desperate to learn from someone more experienced. You can reach out to these newbies and others who need help.

The best way to become a coach is to specialize. Rather than offering coaching on all things IM, choose a specific sub-category like social media, website design or SEO. Areas of self-improvement such as goal setting, time management, and positivity are all areas where people need help. Even better, zero in on a weakness you know most marketers have such as writing content. Every specific skill you can offer raises the value of your coaching.

 Running Your Sessions

There are a number of things to decide before coaching begins. You need to decide when and how to conduct sessions (over Skype, for example), how long they’ll be, how much to charge, what your coaching service includes, and all the other little details.

For your sessions, create an agenda. This is a loose schedule that you’ll follow. It will start with a greeting and introduction to establish rapport and set the comfort level; then, you might review progress since the last session, evaluating whether or not the right actions have been taken; the meat of the session may focus on a specific problem and generate action steps the client can take to get past it; and finally, you’ll have a wrap-up and questions time.

The most important thing is to always keep the focus on the client. Put yourself in their shoes and imagine how you’d solve their problems.

How to Get Started

If you’re interested in coaching, the absolutely best thing you can do is to take someone else’s coaching sessions. Choose an experience coach in your niche and sign up. This costs money, of course, but what you gain is firsthand experience. You can take their ideas and create a template of your own.

Set your prices by looking at other coaches in your niche for the going rate and setting your own rates accordingly. For example, if all of the coaches you’re looking at have more experience than you, you may want to undercut them a bit. If you have a special skill they don’t have, you may be able to charge more.

Put your coaching service on your site, blog, social media profiles, sig files, and anywhere else people will see it. You can drum up business by offering a free trial session to attract clients. Once they see what you can do and how it gets them results, they’ll be happy to pay for it. They’ll also tell others.

Coaching is great for getting the snowball rolling – you make money and also build your expertise, which leads to more coaching and more money.

Tony

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