Can You Make Money being a Life Coach?
These days it seems to be fashionable to be a life coach - I get numerous visitors to my site from people who want to become a life coach. Hence the reason I have created this Becoming a Life Coach Newsletter - I am happy to provide this information and tips collectively in the form of an email newsletter although I don't have time to deal with queries about becoming a coach on an individual basis.
But how easy is it to make money or earn a living through being a life coach? Many of the advertisements for coach training courses make it sound as if it's simply a matter of learning a few life coaching techniques and attending their course and then clients will come rolling in automatically paying vast sums of money and before you know where you are you will be earning a handsome income purely from life coaching.
In my experience, this is not true. If you intend to set up your own business as a life coach, then you are likely to find it as hard work as anyone else setting up their own business. I would therefore make 3 main points in response to the question Can You Make Money being a Life Coach?
1. If your primary motivation in becoming a life coach is because you want to make a lot of money, then I would suggest you do something else instead. It is unlikely that this motivation will enable you to provide a quality service for your coaching clients (assuming you get some clients) and you may well get discouraged soon when you find out the effort involved in creating a life coaching business. Most people who enter the life coaching profession do so because they want to help people and because they feel they have the potential to be able to do so. That is a much better motivation and much more likely to keep you going as you seek to develop your business.
2. But wanting to help people and believing you have the potential to do so, is not in itself sufficient to be able to set up a life coaching business successfully. You may be potentially the greatest life coach ever but if no one knows about your business or you are unable to persuade people that paying for life coaching sessions from you is going to be a worthwhile investment then you will not get many coaching clients, so your wonderful coaching skills will never be put to good use. So if you want to start a life coaching business, just as with any other business you need to devote some time to considering how you are going to market your business so as to bring it to the attention of potential customers.
There are many ways in which you can market your business, including:
- Internet marketing, through
- Creating a website
- Learning some principles of search engine optimisation so that your website has a change of being found by people when they search on the internet for the kind of service that you provide
- Submitting articles to article directories with links to your website
- Registering your website with online directories where people might look if they want to find a life coach
- Investing in Pay Per Click advertising to promote your service - but if you decide to do this, make sure you do some research about how to do it effectively before you start and be careful - Pay Per Click advertising can bring customers but for many people the cost of it outweighs the profit you make from it so you can end up out of pocket unless you do it in an effective way.
- Word of mouth from people you know
- Recommendations from previous clients
- Advertising off line - however my experience is that magazine marketing in particular is not very effective
- Distributing flyers about your coaching service in places where potential clients might see it
- Speaking at events or on radio shows about relevant topics so that your service gets known and you can demonstrate your knowledge
3. Consider related forms of income which you can generate through your life coaching practice in addition to the income you get from providing life coaching directly to individual clients or to groups. For example, you might generate additional income by:
- Selling your own ebooks or other coaching products (I get a significant proportion of my income from the sale of my Life Coaching Books)
- Selling someone else's coaching products as an affiliate and gaining a commission for doing so
- Featuring advertisements on your site, e.g. by signing up for a Google Adsense account (I have gained some income from this but beware that you may need to attract a large number of visitors to your website in order to earn a significant sum of money from Adsense advertising).
- Entering into joint ventures with other non competing but related businesses whereby you promote each other's services to your own clients - for example, you might promote a health or fitness business to your clients in return for them promoting your life coaching service or selling your life coaching books or other coaching products.
If you really have the desire to help people and you have the commitment and skills necessary for setting up a business, then you can earn a living as a life coach but you will probably need to be patient and determined and you may find that ultimately the sources of income which provide you with a regular income are as much from the kind of related products or services indicated in point 3. above as from the delivery of direct coaching services.
Best of Luck!
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