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IQ: The eZine
for Intelligent Coaches.
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Editor: Sandra Poletto
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Copyright:
2007 Coaching Club
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| IQ Corner |
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 review of IQ's Forum Debates; how using sales-based marketing can damage your business; getting free traffic from search engines; this week's IQ book selection; and tips to identify (and modify) problematic patterns.
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...
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The industry leading 104-week eCourse (UCBBP) that steps you in detail through every process required to build a flourishing coaching business.
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Dozens of 'fill-in-your-business-name' marketing and operational templates.
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Audios and Podcasts by some of Australia's leading Business Leaders and Master Coaches, discussing their most intimate business and coaching secrets.
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Access to the country's most exclusive coaching networks, previously only open to the coaching elite.
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A Bookclub with over 75 world-renowned publications.
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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.
Don't miss out! Take advantage of our 60-day free offer to IQ readers! Visit www.coachingclub.com.au today and become a member. |
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| IQ Review |
Latest Additions
Forum Debates
At Coaching Club's Forum, you can be personally coached by some of the best marketing minds in the industry. The forum keeps its doors opened to member queries, comments, ideas and opinions.
Via the Forum you can receive personal coaching on any aspect of your business. You simply start a thread on the topic you'd like to discuss and our experienced club team will respond with succinct advice.
Discussions, new threads and comments have already kick-started in the forum. We highly recommend this resource to members. Don't hesitate to pose your business queries and challenges at the forum; it is a unique opportunity to obtain relevant biz advice from experienced mentors, and the best part, at no additional cost.
Coming Soon
Life Mastery Series
The Life Mastery Series are audios packed with 60-75 minutes of life enhancing strategies, and presented by one of Australia's leading Master Coaches, Noel Posus. These audios focus on topics such as self-confidence, health and wellness, and life balance, providing great insights on life effectiveness to IQ members.
The Life Mastery Series audios will soon be available from IQ's Audio Library. Keep an eye on this eZine for further updates. |
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| IQ Biz |
Mistake 1: Use Sales-Based Marketing
Learn the "10 Biggest Mistakes Coaches Make" and how you can avoid them to create the lifestyle you desire in the 3rd fastest growth industry in the world!
There are numerous coaches in the market earning over $100,000.00 per annum. And yet, there are also coaches struggling to etch out a living. Why is that? That's the purpose of this Special Series. In the following ten editions of IQ, we identify the most common mistakes made by coaches, and provide you with strategies to avoid them and get your business on the right track.
In this edition, we tackle the use of sales-based marketing as one of the biggest mistakes made by coaches.
Coaches using Sales-based marketing as their primary marketing strategy are practically doomed to failure before they begin.
Nearly all coaches use a marketing methodology that's a sales-based marketing methodology. This is understandable as most traditional marketing methods are sales-based. We're all impacted by sales-based marketing at every turn - on TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio - everywhere.
And when coaches research marketing methods, they are most likely to learn about traditional sales-based marketing methodologies - print ads (in newspapers, yellow pages, journals, magazines etc), direct telephone calls, radio, flyers, direct mail letters, etc.
But there are several extremely powerful forces at play against coaches employing a sales-based marketing methodology.
- Most coaches invariably feel uncomfortable delivering a 'sales pitch.' Coaches generally have better technical skills than marketing skills. They're therefore uncomfortable talking about themselves and endorsing the quality of their product. This means they don't close, which comes across to prospects as a general lack of confidence in themselves, and their product and service.
- Sales marketing is extremely expensive - narrowing your net margin on your service. The more you spend to get a client the less net profit you'll retain at the end.
- Generally people are very sceptical and defensive against sales approaches. This exponentially increases the barrier of making a sale. When you employ a sales-based marketing method, most prospects have already closed themselves off to learning about your services due to their natural tendency to put up a defence against sales-based marketing.
- There is no trust and rapport built through a sales-based marketing approach. For a prospect to buy from you, there needs to be an element of trust. Your prospect needs to trust that you can deliver on your promises and that they'll gain a positive return on their investment. This level of trust is extremely difficult to build through a sales-based marketing approach.
- You build no reciprocal obligation on the prospect to investigate your offer or purchase from you. It's a natural human tendency to reciprocate in kind what's been given to you. You can not build reciprocal obligation through sales-based marketing.
- You attract price sensitive shoppers and 'tyre kickers' that take up a lot of your time and result in extremely low conversion.
- It's difficult to maintain contact with prospects for long enough to build rapport and trust - it generally takes 4 to 6 contacts before a prospect will buy from you.
Biz Tip: Employ education-based marketing principles and build a low barrier sales process around your education products and services. Education-based marketing is simply the process by which you attract and convert highly-qualified clients by giving them what they want - valuable information and advice that solves their problems - and removing what they don't want, a sales pitch.
More information about education-based marketing? Subscribe to the UCBBP (Ultimate Coaching Business Program) to receive your weekly dose of business knowledge and strategic know-how. |
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| IQ Tech |
Get FREE Traffic from Search Engines Like Google
This is step 3 of the IQ series "8 Steps to Generate Prospects". In the previous edition we discussed how to get cheap traffic quickly with PPC advertising. But what about getting your site listed on search engines like Google? Let's roll to the step #3.
Note: Step 2 of this article is available in the eZine Archive page.
Now that you've bid on keywords for a strong showing in the PPC search engines, it's time to tackle the organic search engines and directories!
Search engines (like Google) and directories (like Yahoo) can still be a great source of free traffic for your web site. The trick is getting a competitive ranking for your best keywords.
The first step in getting a top ranking in the search engines is submitting or suggesting your site to them. In other words, you have to provide them with details about your site.
You want to make sure that the "spiders" - automated programs that crawl the Web indexing sites for the search engines - find your site and include it in their search results.
While the spiders DO index sites and pages that have not been submitted, you certainly don't want to leave this to chance. A spider might find your web site and index it next week... or it might be two years before it finally happens. Take the time to submit your site, and you can be sure that you're included. Once your site has been submitted, expect it to take two to six weeks for your listing to appear.
Every engine has a slightly different process for site submission, and it pays to follow their guidelines. For example, there is a fee to list your site in the directory at Yahoo, but Google does not charge for their submission process. If you submit your site exactly as they ask, you stand a better chance of getting a good listing on the first page of search results.
To submit or suggest your site to the major engines, follow the simple instructions they provide:
- For Google: www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
- For Yahoo Directory: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
- For Yahoo Search: http://submit.search.yahoo.com
- For MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
- For AOL, submit your site to the Open Directory Project, which uses ODP data: http://dmoz.org/add.html
And don't bother with companies that offer to submit your web site to the search engines. Since each search engine uses a different set of criteria to rank your site, free submission services can actually end up doing more harm than good, since they submit the same information to all the engines. |
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| IQ Book |
Raving Fans
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
Title: Raving Fans
Author: Kenneth H. Blanchard, Sheldon Bowles
Category: Management |
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| IQ Out |
Six Apart
Six Apart has offices on three continents working to help people everywhere communicate using the Web. They hope they're making it easier for you. Six Apart's Blogging tools and services include the increasingly popular websites Movable Type, Typepad, Vox and LiveJournal.
URL: www.sixapart.com |
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| IQ You |
Identify Patterns, Destroy Problems
"We don't think about problems as things. Instead we think of what people call problems as patterns. Modern physics has told us that the things we see are not quite as solid as they appear. Chairs, tables, desks, even the book you are holding your hand are not quite as fixed as we might imagine.
They are all made up of patterns of energy, of vibrating subatomic particles. If we heat things enough, they change form, becoming gas or some other less solid form. We think of human problems in the same way. They are not as solid and set in form as they initially appear. Of course, they appear solid and set, so we must find a way of thinking of problems as more changeable." (Bertolino & O'Hanlon, 2002*)
To identify problematic patterns, coaches can explore the following key areas:
- How often does the problem occur?
- How long does the problem typically last?
- Where does the problem typically occur?
- What do you do when the problem is happening?
- Who is usually present when the problem occurs?
Example: "I wish I could stop spending my salary every week, as I would love to start an investment portfolio."
A problem that is impeding progress in this regard is... repetitive spending habits in regard to buying home wares.
So, I might answer these questions as follows:
How often does the problem occur?
Weekly – every Saturday morning
How long does the problem typically last?
I shop for about 4 hours
Where does the problem typically occur?
My favourite décor shop
What do you do right before the problem happens?
I usually go for breakfast at a local café before hitting the shops
Who is usually present when the problem occurs?
I am usually on my own
To change the patterning of this problem, you can elect to change any aspect of the problem and see if it makes a difference.
Attempts to change the problematic pattern may include:
- You could chose to go to the shops on a day other than Saturday
- You could decide to shop for a maximum of 2 hours only
- You could choose to go to a different shop – not your favourite
- You could decide to skip breakfast on Saturday and instead go to the gym, or
- You could take your partner shopping with you.
Some of these choices may prove more significant in terms of changing the problematic pattern than others, but the idea, simply, is to change anything about the sequencing of the problem in an attempt to generate change.
*Bertolino, B., & O’Hanlon, B. (2002). Collaborative, competency-based counseling and therapy. Neddham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon (p. 150).
Reminder: Your feedback becomes our teams' development schedule. So please, email your thoughts to info@coachingclub.com.au - let's build our collective CoachIQ together! |
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| IQ Opportunity |
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.
URL: www.coachradio.com.au |
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