Boosting Your Coaching Income

In my experience, coaches are very good at coaching but they tend not to be great marketers and they wrongly believe they can only earn income as long as they are delivering something in person. They think when they are not delivering in person, they are not earning. A lack of knowledge and fear keep too many coaches from achieving the income levels they desire.

I believe that coaches need to develop a range of products and services that they can supply to existing clients and use to entice new clients. These might range from simple 10-minute audio sampler CDs through to 12 DVD sets of workshops and courses with printed transcripts and workbooks. I believe that products like these should complement books and e-books.

Why do coaches need these products? People are reluctant to spend £200, £300 or £400 on a workshop or seminar without getting a feel for what they’re spending the money on. One of the simplest products you can have is a single audio CD, a teaser or taster of the workshop or seminar or the coach’s service. The audio CD can feature the coach or trainer talking about the course and what the format of it is, and what other people who have been on the course have said about it. It’s a very simple and straightforward thing to produce. The coach can send the CDs or DVDs to potential clients, companies or do a mail-out to a large audience.

And then at the other end of the spectrum is the DVD of a course or workshop that coaches can sell at the event or after the event. Most people who go on a course are furiously taking notes and probably not getting all the benefit of the course. If coaches have a CD or DVD set of the entire course or workshop available for purchase, it means the participants can forget about the note taking and focus entirely on the course. It’s true to say that when people have spent £400 or £500 on a course, they are very willing to spend an additional £75 or £100 to have the whole course as a library of CDs or DVDs with a workbook or accompanying printed transcript.

For example, we did an audio recording of Jack Black’s Mindstore course in Glasgow with an audience of 900. We made a 12 audio CD course from that two-day event. Of the 900 people who turned up, 300 were very happy to pay £99 to have the complete course on audio CD forever. We’ve sold another 580 sets to people who didn’t attend the seminar.

It’s a very strong positive way for coaches to earn additional income from the people who turn up to a course or event.

It doesn’t end there. It’s possible to create a 10-minute highlight CD or DVD from the full seminar, featuring the presenter and interviews with course participants. That 10-minute sampler can then be sent out to potential clients.

The cost of using such a service is not as high as some might expect. It’s worth saying that a recording or filming a course for the day costs about £750 and that’s the major part of the investment. Editing that footage down to four or five DVDs and then printing those DVDs to make them look nice is small fry compared with the cost of having the cameraman there in the first place.

So, yes, there is in an initial investment for any or all of these products but so many of them can be ‘repurposed’ so, for example, if you make the investment to record a whole workshop, seminar or course, that film footage can create your marketing teaser, it can create your course product, it can be cut down and re-edited to create a piece of video footage which then sits on your website.

A book is another product that every coach should have in their portfolio. It’s still true to say that the credibility of a coach or trainer or educator is enhanced and their profile is raised if they have a book in print. I find myself being taken far more seriously because people can look up on Amazon and see that I have seven books in print, published by Hodder & Stoughton. If you have a book in print, it means you are bringing in orders while you are not physically standing on a stage.

A lot of people attempt the publishing themselves and there is a danger in that because to enhance your credibility a book needs an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and they are only handed out to publishers. If people go completely down the self-published route, it means their book almost certainly won’t have an ISBN. If it doesn’t have an ISBN, it means Amazon will never know about it, it’s not listed in the Book Data Classification. It means it’s only available from the coach or on the coach’s website as opposed to other outlets. When I publish a book, I don’t actually have to tell anyone about it - it has an ISBN and therefore appears on the book data listing and bookshop orders will start to come through for it.