The Ultimate Guide to Selling Coaching Services on Your Blog

Why did you start your blog?

For some of you, it was a desire to get your opinions in front of the masses. You have opinions, you have data, you have conclusions and you want them to be heard. You started a blog because, on the internet, anyone can build an audience.

For some of you, it was a means to make money. Blogs can be monetized. You can sell ad space, you can promote affiliate links, you can set up online products or online courses. You can make money if you find the right niche with the right product at the right time.

For some of you, a blog is secondary to your primary business. You’re selling a product or service and a blog helps your website grow and find exposure- it gives you content to share on social media, to bring in to landing pages.

Regardless of why you started your blog, you probably want to make money from it. No matter who you are, your blog costs money- even if it’s just an annual fee for a domain name.

Making money means building an audience and building an audience means engaging on a basic level. The most basic possible way to engage is to talk to them one on one. You can build a relationship- even a friendship. You can make connections and network. And, yes, you can sell products to those, once they feel they know and trust you.

Where does this tie into coaching services? Coaching is a way to engage, either one on one or in small groups. You get to talk to and get to know your audience, while making money because they paid to access your time. Your time is helpful, after all, so even your mere presence is enough to be worth something to your fans.

How You Can Offer Coaching Services

Many of you reading this probably think “but hey, my niche isn’t really compatible with coaching. How can I do it?”

You’re probably right, to a degree. We’ve all heard of lifestyle coaches, or dating/relationship coaches, or consultants for business data analysis, or what have you. But have you ever heard of a graphic design coach, or a travel coach?

No? Are you sure? Maybe you have.

If you’re a travel writer, you can offer coaching services. Coach on what you’ve done to lay the foundations for a travel-based lifestyle. Talk to clients about how they can set up their lives to have a strong foundation before traveling the world. Cover the basics of how you pack and how you travel, how long you stay in different places, how you find deals on travel, how you find cheap lodging, how you find the restaurants that you so love to talk about on your blog. If you’re just getting started, check out these tips on starting a travel blog that makes money.

If you’re a graphic designer, maybe you can be a mentor. You can’t sell a coaching service and become someone’s art teacher, that’s a very different position. But you could coach on refining their style. Coach on how to interpret what clients are going to need and produce the best logos they can. Coach on how to self-market and set up a graphic design profile; what places are worth your time and what aren’t, what tools have become invaluable and anything else.

You can also coach on more practical topics. Your travel writer blog can allow you to basically sell services as a travel consultant. People can buy coaching time with you and you can help them plan their dream vacation. Take their budget, their time availability and their location and help them book the types of places they want to visit. Help them make that trip a special occasion instead of just a vacation.

The trick is, just about every niche has some way you can share your knowledge one on one. I use “a blog about pipe fittings” as the example of something that’s not very glamorous- not very accessible- not very interesting for social media. And yet a plumbing blog can draw DIY users and even other pros in the same niche who could be looking to pick up a trick or two. You can offer coaching on how to fix leaks, or whether or not a particular issue looks like it should have a small fix or a full revamp.

Being a coach just means being able to get across your knowledge and experience in a way that’s helpful to whoever books your time, according to their needs. As long as the user knows what they want to get out of their time - and if you’re charging enough they probably have a strong enough desire already - you’ll be able to deliver according to what they need. Adding effective calls to action on your blog can also help convert readers into paying coaching clients.

Building Confidence

Most who think they know what they’re doing and are confident in themselves tend to collapse under the weight of all they don’t know. How many times have you read about the IT guy that gives an overly elaborate answer to a problem that can be solved with a two-line script? And how many times have you seen someone build some hackneyed DIY answer to a crack in a wall or a leaky pipe that ends up being 10x as much effort to put together as the actual fix?

It’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect- it’s a cognitive bias where a person who knows a little thinks they know quite a bit. In effect, they don’t know what they don’t know, so they feel like they can accomplish anything- even though they never learn about how to appropriately accomplish their tasks or, in reverse, to know their limits.

On the other hand, those who most know what they’re doing feel like they don’t know anything at all. You get called up to speak about your industry at a conference and you think: why did they choose me? What makes me special? I’m just another face in the crowd, I don’t know anything.

It’s imposter syndrome- it’s the opposite effect. You know quite a bit, but you’re keenly aware of how much there is that you don’t know. You underestimate your value and your knowledge, because you compare yourself to the “true masters” when, in effect, you have achieved a level of mastery yourself.

Having the confidence to coach means recognizing imposter syndrome and overcoming it. To a large extent, all you need to do is talk about the deep end. Talk to the person who is willing to pay for coaching. You’ll be surprised at how much you take for granted the absolute basics, the foundation of your knowledge, that isn’t common knowledge. You’ve built up enough experience and knowledge that you no longer recognize what the baseline is. As Derek Sivers says, “what’s obvious to you is amazing to others.”

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is tech support. If you know anything at all about computers, you know how to do basic troubleshooting. You know how to search for an error code, how to sort through forums and communities and find the bits of wisdom amongst the noise. You know when someone has issue X and responds with answer Y they’re talking about a different issue that won’t solve your problem.

Even the ability to search for an answer and filter through the information presented to you is a learned skill- it’s not something they teach in school, it’s a way of critical thinking you have developed over the years. The fact that so many still use paid tech support services is proof enough. How many times have you had to help someone with their password not working, only to toggle Caps Lock to fix it? Why is “is it plugged in” the first step for tech support? If you’ve ever had to diagnose and fix a server error, you know exactly what this feels like.

That’s foundational knowledge that some have and others don’t. What we take for granted as geeks, they view as knowledge worth paying for. Now extend that to your field of expertise. Imagine what you know and what you see as common knowledge and know that so few actually know those facts or would ever see them.

If you’re knowledgeable enough to run a blog and stay motivated, you’re doing something right. People come to your blog to read your wisdom. Coaching is basically a more intimate and personal way of sharing that wisdom.

Your Benefits from Coaching

“But what do I get out of it?” Coaching, after all, takes up time. Why would you want to spend an hour with a client you don’t know, when you could be spending that hour building a new product, writing a new blog post, or just relaxing on the beach?

First, of course, you get money. Coaching services charge by the half hour or by the hour. You put a value on your time and choose if that value is worth it. If they decide it is, you make money - probably more than you would have made normally in that hour - and all you have to do is talk to them.

There are, of course, other benefits.

You gain a look into your audience and industry. It’s one thing to look at the industry in large strokes, or to extrapolate from your personal experiences. The challenges you see may not be the same challenges everyone else faces.

By coaching a handful of people in your audience, you are able to gain a look into what roadblocks they are facing. If you coach five people and four of them come to you with the same issue, you can turn that issue into a more generalized blog post, to help even more of your audience.

You’ve heard the phrase “if you’re good at something, never do it for free.” That’s wisdom for another age. These days, if you’re not demonstrating that you’re good at something then you’ll never be paid. Offering targeted wisdom to your audience is an example of the fact that you’re in touch with their needs and gets them to sign on.

You can validate ideas for products. Say you’re a travel writer and you offer coaching services. If 20 people come to you asking for some validation and a checklist of the pre-trip steps they should take, you can develop a product to provide the same thing. You prove there’s demand for it through coaching and then you develop and release it into the wild.

How To Do It

How do you launch coaching? Really, it’s just like launching any other product. Decide how long a coaching session should be, usually half an hour to an hour. Decide what kinds of topics you’ll cover, or if it’ll be free form consulting. Set a price for your time and put this information on a landing page.

I recommend starting with 5-10 sessions, 30-60 minutes each. Put up a registration page and charge a basic amount of money for those sessions. You could be surprised at how fast they can fill up.

For booking and payments, tools like Calendly, TidyCal, or Acuity Scheduling make it easy to let clients book time directly on your calendar and pay first. For the sessions themselves, video calls through Zoom or Google Meet work well and need no setup on either end.

If you’re not confident in your coaching ability, feel free to offer the first 5 or so sessions for free. Treat them as a trial run for your coaching services. If you aren’t able to improve your readers’ situations, maybe you aren’t ready for coaching. If you’re able to provide value, it can reaffirm your confidence and give you a basic template to build future coaching on.

Really, coaching is as easy as putting up a landing page, advertising it on social media and your blog and contacting clients directly when they book a space. There’s not much more to it.