The real “Skinny” on a Cost Effective Website that Gets you Clients

Today’s blog covers part 4 of 7 “Ways to Save Time and Money when Starting up Your Coaching business.”

It makes perfect sense. You may or may not be completely confident in how you’re going to market your coaching business, but you do know one thing—you need a website!

So, you spend a significant chunk of money on a nice shiny new site. You don’t intend to, but you wind up spending a couple of months—or longer—doing all the copy, choosing the design, and getting everything just right.

Then you tell everyone about your site, and wait for people to contact you. But your inbox stays curiously empty. What happened?

These days, how the internet works to bring in clients is very different than when it first emerged on the scene. It used to be that people would put up a website with a “brochure style” format, sharing about their business and what it would do for potential clients. Interested parties would contact them.

That was fine when there weren’t a lot of sites. But internet surfers quickly became tired of reading all about how great your service was, because after a while it all sounded the same. How did they really know if you were a good fit for them to work with?

The solution was simple: the only way to know was to experience a sample of your expertise:

Voila! “Content marketing” was born.

The concept of content marketing is to give potential clients a “free taste” of your expertise and “know-how,” so they get valuable information that helps them.

By establishing yourself as an expert and offering them significant value, they have confidence that you really can help them, because they’ve had a taste of what you do.

Instead of wondering if your claims are true, they know you’re the real deal. They know that you know your stuff, and that there’s more where that came from.

This presents a challenge for new coaches, because you haven’t been in business long enough to build up a significant amount of content. So when people land on your shiny new site and see little or no content, they bounce off immediately.

What to do? Well, you could sit down and write up 12 to 15 articles at one time, but I don’t recommend it, for several reasons:

First, that’s very time consuming and as a new coach, and you need to be out there getting clients!

Second, you’re still going to lose a significant amount of future business. Why? Because people are not always ready to hire you when they first come into contact with you. They’ll read your stuff, make a mental note for the future, and leave your site, never to be seen again.

The solution is simple: change your focus. Instead of putting a ton of time and energy into a big splashy site, do a simple one page site, and create a “free taste,” one piece of content that is something your market really wants to know about.

Feature that free taste in a big way (it’s the most important item on your site), and set it up so people sign up to get it. Once you have their email addresses, you can stay in touch, sending them more valuable content on a regular basis.

A percentage of those who sign up and read your stuff will contact you immediately. For those who aren’t ready, their confidence in your expertise continues to grow, you stay “top of mind” for them. When they’re ready, they’ll contact you. That’s content marketing at its best!

Here are five great reasons to put up a site like this when you’re just starting out:

1. It costs much less than a full blown brochure style site.
2. It takes a lot less time to do, so you can be out getting clients instead.
3. As soon as you’ve coached your market for 6 months, you’re going to want to completely change your site anyway, because you’ll have more information and experience.
4. More people will sign up for your free taste (which gets your email list going), because studies show when you emphasize just one action you want people to take, they are much more likely to take it. This is my experience also.
5. You can start up your newsletter and send an article twice a month, then in 6 months you’ll have 12 articles. You’ll also have testimonials from clients. You can then convert to a full-blown site once you have content—and cash—in hand. It works!

Read further for tip #5

If you missed an article – start here.