My Essay Blog

What we want changes overnight; what makes us want it hasn’t changed in thousands of years, nor will it change in thousands more. The serious student of marketing can learn much from early analysts of motivation. Here is a bit of George French’s “The Art and Science of

“A great title is a work of genius,” said E. Haldeman-Julius in the 1920s.

Haldeman-Julius sold 200 million (really) of his “Little Blue Books.” His headlines were his product, because he sold his books by the title. About halfway through his brilliant marketing career he wrote a book called “The First Hundred Million,” in which he shared some of his secrets…

EHJ had a system.

Making a character out of the advertiser brings the message alive. Maxwell Sackheim is most famous for inventing the Book-of-the-Month Club. But before that, he invented some dramatic, and dramatically successful, advertising.

One of his patented techniques was to make a character out of the advertiser, writing ads as if the clients themselves were actually talking. One Sackheim client was Frank E. Davis, “The Gloucester Fisherman”.

There’s only one way to know if your advertising copy is any good. It’s the same way that your customer knows it&ndashit sells!

We are not all born copywriters, but we are all born customers. As a natural born customer, you can recognize good copy…

Step outside yourself and read the copy fresh: does it reach out and connect with you, does it hold your interest, does it promise something real that you really want, does it convince you?

“It has been said that advertising space without good copy is like the wooden Indian in

front of a cigar store:

Word of mouth is one of the most effective ways to grow your coaching business. It’s free, or at most costs very little, yet very few coaches use it to anywhere near it’s potential!

Consider this: if you got just one referral from each one of your clients, over the next 60 days you’d double your client base! What would that mean to your potential income and how many more people would you be helping in supportive and uplifting ways?

So, how do you maximize word of mouth? Here are 5 Steps you can take now…

1. Really appreciate your clients and let them know consistently you value them

This is the most important, yet overlooked element of creating endless referrals. Many businesses focus more on profits than on people. Focusing on profits alone can be detrimental to success and ‘Word of Mouth’ success comes from looking beyond just profit into how you can enrich your customer’s lives.

Action: At least once a month, take the time to communicate to each of your clients and show them you appreciate them. Send them something of value, something unexpected, a bonus report, a special piece of news you just found. Make it relevant to them and do it regularly.

2. Create an exceptional experience each time they deal with you or your company

If you can make doing business with you an exceptional experience, your clients will want to tell a lot of people. People want amazing experiences!

Here is an example: There is a Life Coach in Brisbane who has a special relationship with a city coffee shop. Once every 8 weeks he invites his clients to a ‘brains trust’ meeting and the coffee and cake is on the house. Every client that attends gets a card and a voucher from the coffee shop owner to say ‘Thank you for joining us today, we would love to see you again soon’. The voucher is a ‘buy one get one free’ coffee voucher. So they are encouraged to come back again. And because the coffee shop owner is exposing his business to potential new clients the coach pays just cost price on the coffee and cake his clients eat. Normally about 8 clients attend and the cost is around $30. Just a little extra touch can make dealing with your business that much more of an exceptional experience!

Action: What can you do now to add little things that make an exceptional experience? Perhaps you can use the above example or something similar. Remember, start creating exceptional experiences today.

3. Give your customers incentives for giving you referrals

If you’re being passive about referrals then you’re sitting on a gold-mine. Come up with ways of rewarding your clients for referring business to you. They could receive free gifts, such as a 30 minute back massage voucher for referring a friend or a free Style Cut from an award winning beauty salon. The businesses involved would welcome the opportunity to have new clients come their way and would be happy to give that first style cut or treatment for free if they understand the potential value of a new customer.

Action: Reward your clients for referring people to you. Come up with rewards that will be beneficial to your clients. If you worked with executive clients perhaps a free 30 minute health check at a trusted health centre would be valuable or a voucher to use at an upmarket clothing boutique.

4. Make it easy for clients to give you referrals

If you want to get lots of referrals, you must make it incredibly easy for your clients to tell their friends. Don’t expect them to go way out of the way to help you grow your business. Make it as simple as possible.

Action: Develop a ‘referral package’ that you give to your clients. Ask your clients to be an ambassador for your business as you wish to work with people similar to them. The package would include a letter explaining why referrals are important to you, and a series of referral cards that your client can give out to others. Present it professionally and it will hold more value, more worth.

5. Ask at the right time!

When is the best time to ask for referrals? Any time! If you have followed the steps listed above…you’ve let clients know they are appreciated, you’ve made dealing with you an exceptional experience, you give them an incentive to share your message with friends and you make it easy for them to do so…you can ask for referrals at any time.

Action: The key is to do something now. Draft up a letter or e-mail today and just send it off to your clients letting them know how much you value them, who much you have enjoyed working with them in the past and include something that is going to be helpful, useful for them to use, read or understand. Then over the next 4 to 6 weeks develop your ‘referral package’ and start to use it. Take yourself out of your comfort zone and take action….because if you don’t someone will and what will that mean to your business in the years to come.

This is one of the most frequently asked questions, particularly by new coaches. Of course, there is no single correct answer. You should do what’s right for you and for your vision of your coaching business. As such it’s critical to stay mindful of your objectives.

There are generally 4 reasons why as a coach you would undertake pro bono work:

1. You are a new coach and want to build your confidence and coaching hours.

2. You are a coach that has been practicing for some time and perform pro bono work for benevolent reasons.

3. You use a free session as part of your sales process.

4. You are a practicing coach that performs pro bono work as a strategy to build your business.

Here are our thoughts on the above:

1. As a new coach it’s very important to build your confidence. Your confidence (or lack thereof) will play an integral role in your success or otherwise. With this in mind, offering pro bono sessions in the early stages of your business can be worthwhile.

2. Offering free coaching sessions for benevolent reasons is simply a matter of personal choice. As a coach you should have a clear vision of what you want to achieve. If delivering free sessions for benevolent reasons fits into your vision, then go for it.

3. Many coaches offer free introductory sessions as part of their sales process. Their reasoning is that a free session upfront assists the potential client understand the coaching process and builds rapport. Whilst we strongly advocate testing different strategies to improve your business, this may be a dangerous practice. Offering free introductory sessions can devalue your service and attract a lot of ‘tyre kickers.’ We suggest that you try a twist to this strategy. If you want to offer a free introductory session, you do so as part of a longer term contract with a guarantee. IE You get your prospect to sign up for a 3 or 6-month coaching contract, and as part of that contract you provide a free introductory session. This will ensure the prospect is serious, and upsells them into a larger contract that may otherwise be difficult to achieve later. This strategy can work well when used in conjunction with a guarantee. You simply say to your prospect that if they enter into the contract, you will provide them a free introductory session, and if they feel for whatever reason that coaching will not assist them achieve their goals, they can opt out of the contract at any point.

4. Many coaches provide pro bono sessions to assist them build their business. They achieve this by very carefully selecting their pro bono clients. A pro bono client can assist build your business if they are well networked within your niche and willing to provide referrals or can assist you in other business building aspects of your business. IE They can assist you get public speaking arrangements; are willing to be a ‘specialist’ on your tele-class session; will provide a testimonial etc.

If you decide that you want to deliver free sessions for whatever reason, here are 6 important things to keep in mind:

1. Treat all pro bono clients as paying clients. There is nothing worse for word of mouth than undervaluing the coaching relationship with a pro bono client. Remember, word of poor service spreads 10 times as far as word of good service!

2. Find them, don’t let them find you.

3. Get testimonials. Testimonials are a very powerful endorsement of your service. When prospects consider contracting your services they can be dramatically influenced by testimonials. Even more so if the testimonial is from a recognised leader, expert or acknowledged person within your niche.

4. Get clients from your niche, and preferably someone that can help you into a network. If you can do this, it will be a powerful leverage for your business.

5. Get paying referrals. Always get referrals from pro bono clients. And don’t offer pro bono work to referrals of pro bono clients.

6. Don’t overload. This stands to reason. Your time is your commodity. If you spend all your time providing services for free, you’ll have no time left for paying clients.

So the concepts behind NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) sound interesting to you and you’re wondering where to get started with implementing such strategies. You will probably face the question as to whether it might be beneficial to your life and business to hire an NLP coach. Each year there are thousands of people who benefit from scientifically based coaching programs, and a coach can help you design a specific plan of action using proven techniques. Sure you might be able to pull together a plan on your own, but this article will share how a coach might have the expertise and experience to help you shape your future and live life more fully, and right now.

Coaching has become a widely popular service and is familiar both to big business through corporate coaches and to television audiences through the popular show “Starting Over”. Coaches who utilize NLP concepts believe every person has the potential and ability to realize their dreams. An NLP coach can help you understand what you want from your life and what you will do to get it. A coach can help you clarify your goals and remain focused until you achieve them. While you build your confidence, improve your skills and achieve your goals a coach can guide, encourage and instruct using proven neuro-linguistic practices.

An NLP coach isn’t going to do the work for you, but will help you design a plan to achieve your own success. As you already can guess, a professional coach is likely to have an arsenal of proven techniques, tested and perfected through their own practice. Aside from that, a coach is going to have the advantage of being a neutral third party who has no emotional attachment to your past failures or successes. The observations of a coach are more likely to be clear, and the insights could possibly be more accurate, because they are in a position to view your behaviors more objectively than you, a friend or a member of your family could ever do. A coach is also more likely to be up on the latest techniques and advancements in NLP practices. All of these advantages can be combined to help you fully realize your potential, achieve higher levels of personal effectiveness and self mastery.

Since the premise behind NLP technique is that you can recreate success by doing what the successful people do, why not consider following what thousands of other successful people have done and get the outside assistance of a trained and professional NLP coach?

Just about everyone has heard, and most people agree to some extent, that goal setting is a great way to get yourself where you want to go in life. If you feel you can’t seem to reach the life you know you were born to lead, then effective goals can be a great motivating force.

As you begin to set and achieve goals your self confidence will grow astronomically. But where do you start and what will make your goals worthwhile? This article will help you to start setting effective goals which will lead you where you want to go in life.

An excellent place to start when you’re considering the goals you want to pursue is taking some time to consider whether or not the goal that comes to mind is really your own goal.

It is easy to give credence to goals you feel you should make, even though these may not be the real things which motivate you. Well meaning parents, friends, family and employers might have ideas or even suggestions about goals you could pursue.

Only you will know what is truly important to you, and only that which is truly important to you will give you the motivation you will need if the going gets tough.

If you want your goals to be truly worthwhile, then focus on performance goals and not outcome oriented goals.

Performance goals ensure that the success or failure of your goal comes entirely from within you.

Outcome goals depend on factors outside of yourself over which you have no control. If you say you are going to do a particular thing, you can either do it or not. But if you focus on an outcome like “I will make a million dollars” then you have to depend on others to make your goal happen, in this case you have to depend on others giving you money for some reason.

Outcome goals are cheap because you can walk away saying it wasn’t your fault, but performance goals leave the responsibility with you. In the end you’ll cherish the completed goals you were fully responsible for much more than any other kind.

Goals can help you focus on your acquisition of knowledge. They can help you organize your time and resources to get what you want out of life. Take responsibility for your life by setting goals and watch how you begin to feel empowered. You can truly be the designer of your own life.

Most coaches get involved in coaching for one extremely compelling and valuable purpose &ndash because they want to make a positive impact to the lives of others.

As a coach, the extent to which you are able to fulfil that objective is contingent upon two factors. Firstly, your skill and effectiveness as a coach; and secondly, on the number of clients you are able to affect through the application of your services. The purpose of this article is to focus on the second factor.

In the process of assisting people, it’s also possible for coaches to develop a fruitful lifestyle for themselves along the way. In fact, these objectives are entirely complimentary.

Many business people, including coaches, fail to recognise the important ethical role that marketing plays in their business. In doing so they develop a mindset that is self defeating to themselves, their business, and their clients.

As a coach, you are in business. How effectively you operate your business is entirely contingent on you. There are enormously successful coaches (in terms of client numbers, income and coaching outcomes), and coaches that are barely able to etch out a living. The difference between these extremes is not their coaching competency, but rather their mindset. You may be an incredibly skilful coach, but unless you have people willing to use your services, your skills are of little to no value.

So what mindset does it take to be a successful coach?

A successful coaching mindset:

- Puts the needs of prospects and clients first;

- Actively seeks to assist clients attain their objectives;

- Is empathetic to the needs of clients and prospects;

- Doesn’t limit the service offered to clients, and

- Acts as an ethical adviser.

It takes a Marketing Mindset to be a successful coach.

We regularly hear of coaches that feel as though marketing is ‘leading’ and ‘unethical.’ They feel as though it’s too ‘salesy’ and don’t feel comfortable with it. For those coaches, we’re going to explain why marketing is both ethically valid and commercially crucial.

Ethical Validity

There is an enormous (and growing) volume of people in society that would benefit from coaching services. Let’s call these people prospective coaching clients, or prospects. These prospects have specific goals they’d like to achieve, or challenges they’d like to overcome, with a view to leading a better and more fulfilling life.

As a coach you have a certain duty of care to assist these people. You can only begin to assist them once they’re utilising your services. Marketing is the link between the prospects desire and your ability to assist them fulfil their desire.

Marketing only becomes unethical in the circumstance that you are not able to fulfil your marketing promise to your client. In this instance you’ve misled your client, either knowingly or unknowingly, and have acted unethically.

On the premise that prospects will seek a coach to assist them attain their specific goals, it’s the ethical obligation of coaches to help prospects select a coach that will best be able to assist them. To do this coaches should fully, comprehensively and transparently disclose to prospects what services they offer; where their specialties lie; what experience they have; how they’ve assisted people with similar desires in the past; and how using their services will benefit them. Or to state it more simply, to undertake marketing.

Commercially Crucial

Marketing is commercially crucial because it links prospects that desire a certain outcome with skilled professionals trained to assist them achieve that outcome. It identifies you as someone that may be able to assist prospects with their pre-qualified needs. By seeking out information on coaching services, prospects have already identified for themselves:

1. That there are certain things in their life they’d like to attain or challenges they’d like to overcome.

2. That a coach is a person with the requisite skills and experience to assist them.

3. That they are willing to invest financially in the process.

The above is an extremely important point, and one that coaches need to accept.

As we explained earlier, coaches generally come from one of two schools of thought with respect to marketing.

The first school of thought perceives marketing to be ‘leading’ and ‘salesy.’ They come from the paradigm that by marketing you are proactively influencing someone in their decisions. Or specifically that you may make someone do something they would not otherwise do. We call this train of thought the Influencing Paradigm.

The second school of thought accepts that prospects are people that have identified for themselves their need to invoke change. And they’ve identified that a coach will assist them make that change. They recognise that the prospect has made the intellectual link between their needs and how they want those needs to be fulfilled. We call this train of thought the Service Paradigm.

The thought processes of these two perspectives are entirely dipolar. One positions the prospect as someone reluctantly influenced into utilising a service, and the other positions the prospect as a proactive individual capable of determining their needs that has actively sought out coaching services.

As a coach, it’s critical that you put yourself in the second paradigm of thinking. Only then will you be able to ethically fulfil your objective of assisting your clients. And only then will you be able to fulfil your symbiotic goal of building a successful coaching business.

By putting yourself in the Service Paradigm of thought you will recognise that to assist clients meet their objectives, you should:

a) Actively promote your services through compelling advertising that clearly describes what you can offer clients.

b) Understand that as a coach and a trusted advisor you are often in a better position of knowledge to ascertain your client needs to assist them attain their goals.

c) Be empathetic to the needs of your clients and actively offer solutions to them through various products and services.

d) Value your client’s intellect and decision making ability.

e) Do not pre-empt your client’s wants and hence limit the range and scope of products and services you offer them.

f) Always acts as an ethical adviser.

Once you embrace the Service Paradigm to marketing, you’ll realise that marketing provides you with a much greater opportunity to fulfil your primary objectives &ndash to assist your clients, and to build a successful coaching business. These objectives become complimentary and you create a truly win-win situation between the desires of your clients and your own desires.

In the second part of this article we’ll provide you with further information on how to develop your Marketing Mindset and a Service Paradigm.

While an individual would like to improve an aspect or certain aspects of their life so they can achieve a specific goal, or set of goals.

In a previous article we discussed the distinction between an Influencing Paradigm, and a Service Paradigm, to marketing your coaching business. We discussed how marketing your business is both ethically valid and commercially crucial, and how marketing is a critical process in achieving your coaching objective of having a positive impact on the lives of others.

To quickly surmise, we explained that people with an Influencing Paradigm mindset perceive marketing to be ‘leading’ and ‘salesy.’ They come from the paradigm that by marketing you are proactively influencing someone in their decisions. Or specifically that you may make someone do something they would not otherwise do.

People from the Service Paradigm school of thought accept that prospects are people that have identified for themselves their need to invoke change. And they’ve identified that a coach will assist them make that change. They recognise that the prospect has made the intellectual link between their needs and how they want those needs to be fulfilled.

To be a successful coach, or in fact successful in any business, it’s critical that you embrace a Service Paradigm mindset toward your marketing.

In this article we’re going to further explore exactly how you can develop a Service Paradigm marketing mindset.

Before we can begin to discuss how you can develop your Service Paradigm mindset, let’s look at some of the characteristics. Coaches with a Service Paradigm recognise that to assist clients meet their objectives, they need to:

- Recognise that everyone in business is in the business of marketing. Without clients they’ll have no one to deliver their services too and hence no one to assist.

- Actively promote their services through compelling advertising that clearly describes what they can offer clients.

- Ethically promote their services with vigilance.

- Recognise the cycle of life of their prospects and regularly promote their services for as long as prospects allow.

- Understand that hey are often in a superior position of knowledge to ascertain what their client needs to assist them attain their goals.

- Be empathic to the needs of clients and actively offer solutions to them through various products and services.

- Value their client’s intellect and decision making ability.

- Not pre-empt their client’s wants and hence limit the range and scope of products and services they offer them.

- Always acts as an ethical adviser.

As a coach, to outwit your competitors you must create a niche; and to build a successful business you must attain a Service Paradigm marketing mindset.

To develop your Service Paradigm marketing mindset:

1. Be determined to succeed. You need to be absolutely determined that you’re going to succeed. If you just want to succeed, but you’re not willing to go the extra mile, you’ll get swept aside by those that are more determined. If you are truly determined, you’ll be confident and this confidence will automatically show in your business and be transparent to prospective clients, peers and the general public. Prospective clients will want to be associated with you, and clients will want to continue their involvement.

2. Persevere. Coaches with a marketing mindset embrace challenges as part of life and part of business. If you perceive challenges as impassable barriers you’ll never develop a marketing mindset. It’s crucial you accept you’re going to confront hurdles as part of business. How you perceive these hurdles, as opportunities or barriers, will drastically influence your level of success. Perseverance is a key ingredient in developing a marketing mindset.

3. Remain positive. Literally nothing destroys a marketing mindset more than a negative attitude. A marketing mindset is a ‘can do’ attitude. Faced with the same challenge, the coach with a positive ‘can do’ marketing mindset will find a way; the coach with a defeatist attitude will submit and fail.

4. Set Goals. As a coach this is something you should know a lot about. Set yourself specific, achievable, stretch goals.

5. Plan a strategy. Establish a specific plan of action to attain your goals. Identify what resources you’ll need and the possible challenges you may confront.

6. Implement your plan. This is the most difficult part. Implementation of your plan. Modify it where required, change your goals as others are attained, modify your plan if flaws are perceived, but always continue implementing. Non-action is the precursor of business failure. If you continue to implement, your business will always sustain forward momentum. If you have momentum, your direction (goals and plans) can always be adjusted.

7. Keep marketing. Your success or failure hinges on your marketing. Always maintain your marketing mindset. Always be focussed on marketing. It’s a common trap to get caught up in the day to day ‘operation’ of your business and put marketing aside. This is a recipe for disaster. How effectively you market will be the most influential determinant on the success (or otherwise) of your business. Marketing is not difficult or confusing, but it does require significant ongoing diligence and attention. The moment you lose focus on marketing your business is the moment your business performance will suffer.