KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays Comm, Joel (books for 8th graders txt) 📖

me to find the best way to work. I’ve since hired other coaches who have been able to provide great advice and the benefit of their experience. They’ve been invaluable whenever I’ve moved into an area I’ve never operated in before, and they’ve certainly more than repaid the fees that I paid them for their suggestions.

That’s why once I found that some aspects of Internet marketing were coming easily to me, I was happy to share my knowledge with other entrepreneurs.

Of course, my e-books, my information products, and my web sites were doing that already. But there’s always something a little special about being able to meet with the coach, ask questions, and receive answers focused on your particular problem and your specific goals. It’s special to the person receiving the information, and it’s no less special to the coach. As a coach, I get the satisfaction of being able to interact personally with my audience instead of merely pouring my knowledge onto the page and hoping it’s valuable to someone.

It can pay pretty well, too.

While fees can range widely for coaching—from zero at talks where the main benefit is to lead people to buy your products (which, with the right talk can generate some giant sums) to thousands of dollars for just a few days’ work—coaching is one of the most lucrative ways for a successful entrepreneur to make money out of his or her expertise.

In this chapter, I explain how, once you’ve created a successful Internet business, you can move into coaching. First, I explain what coaching is; then I discuss strategies for branding, because who you are is going to be almost as important as what you know.

Then I talk about using PR to get mass impact for your coaching events and explain how to start a low-end coaching program before ramping it up to the high-dollar stuff.

Coaching isn’t for everyone. If you’re happy building your company by yourself, creating content, marketing products, and forging joint ventures, then that’s fine. It’s a great way to build a prof itable business. But if you do want to give back a little more, then coaching can be both a valuable and a very satisfying way to help others along the path you’ve created and to cash in on your knowledge.

What Is Coaching?

One of the themes of this book is that your knowledge is valuable. Whether that’s professional knowledge built up through years of training and experience or information that you’ve managed to accumulate by doing what you love, you have an asset that people will pay to own themselves. Blogs, information products, and membership sites are just different channels through which you can deliver that expertise online and receive a fee for it.

Once you’ve built a successful Internet business, you even create an additional asset that you can market: expertise in creating an Internet business in your field.

Coaching is another way of delivering that information, and it’s a particularly intensive and valuable way. For the client, it can bring targeted results, and it embeds the information deeper and faster than any other method.

When people listen to a recording of you explaining how to earn money by uploading video clips to YouTube, some of that information will be missed. If they listen to it while driving to work in the morning, they’ll lose concentration every time they have to look at the road. If they’ve bought your e-book, they’ll dip in and out, picking up the information that they think will be the most useful—and leaving plenty of other goodies behind. If they’re reading your blog, it’s inevitable that they’ll miss some of your posts, and besides, blogs aren’t the best platform to teach a course. They provide nuggets of information rather than a clear guide from start to success.

Coaching allows people who want to pick up your knowledge direct access to the source. It’s the most powerful way of helping people achieve their goals using the knowledge that you’ve managed to accumulate.

The coaching itself can be done in all sorts of different ways. We’ve already seen how it’s possible to deliver online coaching, either by using specialized software or by creating videos that can be accessed behind a pay wall or delivered on DVD. But coaching is always at its best in person when it’s done individually, for a set period of time, or in workshops to a group of people.

Just as the effect of coaching is particularly strong, so the importance of that four-step sales process—know me, like me, trust me, pay me—is concentrated, too.

You don’t have to know people very well to start reading their blogs. You need to like them to come back, but if they annoy you occasionally, you can live with it, provided they aren’t asking you to do more than browse their content, clicking occasionally on an ad.

You have to like and trust people before you’ll buy an affiliate product from them online, but everything has to be firmly in place before they’ll hire you as a coach.

You’re going to be telling people what they’re doing wrong. You’re going to be giving them advice related directly to their life, including, perhaps, their personal life, because that’s always an influence on professional success, too. They’re going to be trusting you with personal information—their doubts, their fears, their dreams for the future—and you’re going to have to persuade them that to achieve those dreams they’re going to have to do things that they might not want to do.

After all, if they had wanted to do them before now, they would have achieved their success already.

Before people even think about hiring you as a coach, they have to feel that they know you, like you, and absolutely trust you. It’s something that can happen only after you’ve already used your web sites to broadcast who you are.

That identity is presented as your brand.

Strategies for Branding

How would you describe yourself? If you had to choose three words that best describe your personality, what