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Copyright: 2007 Coaching Club

Welcome to IQ, the official CoachIQ Coaching Club member eZine. Each week you receive the latest CoachIQ news, resources, professional development tips and industry information. IQ is your ally in developing your flourishing coaching business.

This edition's highlights

Highlights in this edition include a quick overview of UCBBP; how to create good first impressions with your clients; getting the traffic your need to test your website; this week's IQ book selection; and tips on how to write journals (for you and your clients).

We welcome IQ readers to forward this publication to friends, colleagues, family and anyone you think will benefit from the eZine’s content. Make YOUR community part of OUR community.

Not Yet A Member? Don't fall behind.

Take at a look at some of the resources hundreds

of your peers already have access to...

• The industry leading 104-week eCourse (UCBBP) that steps you in detail through every process required to build a flourishing coaching business.
• Dozens of 'fill-in-your-business-name' marketing and operational templates.
• Audios and Podcasts by some of Australia's leading Business Leaders and Master Coaches, discussing their most intimate business and coaching secrets.
• Access to the country's most exclusive coaching networks, previously only open to the coaching elite.
• A Bookclub with over 75 world-renowned publications.
• Videos, life tips and strategies, interviews, plus much more.

CoachIQ Coaching Club is a resource rich community for practising and aspiring coaches. It contains ALL the necessary information, resources, templates, networks and intellectual property you need to avoid costly pitfalls and implement powerfully effective strategies to build a flourishing coaching business.

Latest Additions

UCBBP x23

Early UCBBP subscribers have already received their 23^rd lesson. This is likely the most comprehensive business-development resource for coaches on the web. The first 20 lessons of this eCourse focused on introductory concepts of a small business and the strategic components of business development; with a specific focus on marketing, an area that many coaches overlook and fail to capitalise on.

The latest and upcoming few lessons have begun to tackle marketing techniques that coaches can utilise to acquire more clients, sell more, generate more revenue from sales, leverage resources, and more.

Each UCBBP lesson offers high quality content, complemented by a variety of resources including: self-assessment and action sheets; supporting audio material; related articles; tables, images and diagrams; and more. So if you're not subscribed yet, do not wait any longer!

URL: www.coachingclub.com.au/ucbbp

Coming Soon

More Resources

CoachIQ's Resources is packed with practical templates for your business. There are already well over 50 templates designed by our team of coaches and entrepreneurs - and more templates are being produced, reviewed and uploaded weekly.

Keeping an eye on this section will help you start your business on the right foot - or augment your established business from a marketing, financial and operational perspective.

Good Impressions, Lucrative Relationships

"First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or studied actions. A man's look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily." (William Hazlitt)

The success of your business is vastly dictated by how good your relationships with clients are; particularly in the early stages where clients have just bought one of your products and are still assessing the quality of the overall service.

As they say, you never forget your first time. Following are three strategies that may positively influence a client's initial appraisal of your services (and highly affect his or her enthusiasm to buy more from your business):

-         Provide accurate information: Express your services in a clear and unambiguous way. If your marketing message is confusing your prospects, you are not doing a good job. First, you must always deliver what you are promising. There is nothing more damaging to your business than promising something you can't deliver!

Secondly, be courteous in letting your clients know about your intentions. For example, if you are asking for their email address in an eZine subscription box, make sure you write a note "I will never sell, distribute, share or trade your email address to anyone..." Your prospects shouldn't have to guess what you are going to "do" with them; that should be clearly conveyed in your marketing communications.

-         Under-promise, over-deliver: Over-delivering is providing a level of service over and above that expected or anticipated for the service provided. Over-delivery is providing a level of service beyond what you've promised your client in your marketing message. An example of service over-delivery would be to provide your client with a surprise complimentary gift after the first session. The gift may be in the form of a tele-coaching session, a seminar, a book, or perhaps a voucher to the movies or a massage session.

Many astute coaches actually provide services of other business professionals in order to provide their over-delivery. For example, in the case of a free massage above, you may be able to do a deal with a health spa that is willing to provide a complimentary session to your clients in the anticipation that your client will continue to use their service in the future.

This type of arrangement is positive to all parties. You are able to provide your client with an added benefit, the health spa gets a potential long term client for low cost, and your client gets a free massage. The intention of service over-delivery is to build goodwill with your clients. It's intended that this goodwill will translate into business benefits for you. Those benefits may be longer client contracts, increased referral and stronger product endorsement.

-         Educate people, don't be a pushy salesman: If your prospects see you as a salesman only trying to sell your services, they are highly likely to develop a negative image of you. Most people are sensitive to the "sales speech" after a life of exposure to all sorts of advertisements trying to get them to buy. By becoming one of them, you automatically lose the rapport necessary to develop a constructive coaching relationship.

Instead, you should educate prospects. To educate prospects, you can invite them for a one-on-one session to inform them about your services and the coaching process; give them a free report; chat to them about their most common challenges and what strategies they have been using to cope with them; and more.

Get the Traffic You Need to Test Your Website, Fast!

This is step 1 of the IQ series "8 Steps to Generate Prospects". In the previous edition (available on the eZine Archive) we introduced you to a common problem amongst internet businesses: lack of website traffic. Now that we have read the introduction, let's roll to the step #1.

As you may already know, there are an infinite number of things you can test on your website to increase sales. From layout to copy to design, there are limitless combinations of changes that may improve your visitor-to-sale conversion rate.

But what's "enough" when you're just starting out?

What elements should you focus on testing before rolling out your traffic campaign?

Our advice is to stick to the basics. Focus on testing:

-         Sales copy (Especially your headline, benefits, guarantee, and call to action.)

-         Order process (Is it simple enough for a novice web user to place an order?)

-         Opt-in offer (Are you successfully capturing visitors' contact information?)

-         Site navigation (How many clicks does it take to buy? Ideally it should take less than three.)

These are the four critical aspects of your sales process that need to be tested before you start driving serious traffic. Later on, once you've generated sales and have some steady traffic, you can move on to testing other parts of your web site.

Of course, all this talk of testing your new website raises one BIG question: How can you test without traffic? If you're just getting started, chances are good that your website doesn't get much traffic yet.

The solution is simple: Buy traffic through PPC search engines.

Pay-per-click search engines are a lot like auctions - they allow you to bid for top-ranking positions under keywords of your choice. For each visitor who searches the keyword(s) you bid on and then clicks through to your web site, you pay whatever you bid. Prices typically range from ten cents to a few dollars per click-through for popular keywords.

There are a ton of PPC search engines out there, but the two best ones to get started with are:

-         Yahoo Search Marketing (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com)

-         Findwhat (www.findwhat.com)

With PPC search engines, you get cheap, instant, qualified traffic, provided you bid on targeted keywords. Not only that, but bidding on traffic in the PPC search engines can help your site get ranked in the free search engines too.

Here are a couple of tips to help you start bidding for traffic without breaking the bank:

In Yahoo Search Marketing, bid to appear in the top three listings whenever possible, since these results are also "pushed" to appear in the search results for MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista, InfoSpace, AlltheWeb and NetZero - reaching 80% of Internet users!

Bid on targeted, descriptive keywords - don’t just bid on "sock", bid on "red wool sock". Not only are targeted keywords and phrases usually cheaper to bid on - they'll also attract more qualified potential buyers. Use a keyword selection tool like Wordtracker (www.WordTracker.com) to research targeted keywords that attract maximum traffic for minimal cost-per-click!

After you've tested and tweaked your web site with a limited amount of purchased traffic, it’s time to start generating qualified traffic for your site on a bigger scale.

Flight of the Buffalo

In Flight of the Buffalo, James Belasco and Ralph C. Stayer combine expertise, insight, and passion to show how the nature of management must change if a company expects to survive in the white-knuckle world of modern business.

Going beyond the quick-fix approach of many of today's business gurus, the authors explain how to avoid being outmaneuvered by the competition; how to become more focused and flexible; how to empower workers and maintain their loyalty; and how to become a manager who goes beyond filling quotas.

Title: Flight of the Buffalo

Author: James Belasco, Ralph Stayer

Vertical Response

VerticalResponse is the easy-to-use, web-based marketing solution that helps you grow your business through email marketing and printed postcards.

VerticalResponse is the one-stop shop for your direct marketing needs. Whether you need to collect email addresses, get your newsletter or email campaign out the door quickly and affordably, or you need to mail a postcard to your customers tomorrow, we’ve got your solution.

Thoughts Down, Ideas Up

"Journaling is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to accelerate your personal development. By getting your thoughts out of your head and putting them down in writing, you gain insights you’d otherwise never see... Here are 3 other powerful benefits of journaling: solve tricky problems; gain clarity and; verify your progress." (Extracted from Steve Pavlina's website)  

Journaling is a common method to solve complex problems, improve self-awareness, deal with feelings and emotions, and much more. Event journaling is a widely used coaching strategy to help clients get more acquainted with their thought processes. It can be particularly useful when clients present barriers to goal achievement and such barriers affect their motivation.

Have you ever had a journal? It is never too late to start, particularly now that Blogs have been made available to anyone with a knack for writing. Here are some IQ tips to engage in event journaling (for you and your clients):

-         Describe an event and how you have responded to it. Use questions such as "what happened?"; "how did I respond?", "what was I thinking at the time?"; etc.

-         Create a "desired" scenario based on the event that occurred. You can use the same type of questions, but posed differently: "what would I like to have happened?"; "how would I like to have responded?"; "what would like to have thought (or felt)?"; etc.

-         Draft an 'Action Plan' to achieve the "desired" scenario you have constructed. You can list down all the actions that you believe will change the "actual" event to the "desired" scenario.

-         Break it down into tasks and sub-tasks as required and set a plan (and seek sources of motivation) to achieve all of these tasks. One way to motivate your clients is to use the "miracle question" technique to help them visualise and feel their "desired" scenario.

Tip: Constantly refer to your journals to grasp how your mindset and perception can change from time-to-time and commit to your writing. To get your clients involved in event journaling, look for the coaching tool at IQ's 'Resources' section.

Be Found With Find A Coach

Marketing is the thorn in the side of most coaches. Particularly coaches just starting off. Getting clients is a skill in its own right. It's time consuming, difficult, and expensive! But does it have to be? Not with Find A Coach - the leading search engine specifically for life coaches.

Find A Coach offers a range of tools for coaches wanting to market their services, or simply who would like to see more return for their marketing investment. If you haven't checked it out yet, don't miss the opportunity to be a step ahead of the rest of the pack.

Your clients are searching for you right now. Make it easy for them to find you.

URL: www.findacoach.net.au

Broadcast Your Brand to the World

Coach Radio is an online broadcaster of Life Coaching specific content. Delivered online via the Coach Radio website (www.coachradio.com.au) and Podcast, Coach Radio content is extremely convenient.

Coach Radio is currently accepting applications from CoachIQ members who would like to become broadcasters of this growing community. If you are interested in finding out more information, email info@coachradio.com.au to request a Coach Radio Prospectus.