Do you have a website strategy to grow your online coaching business?
If not, you are swimming against the tide.
Most people struggle with the following when developing website strategy:
- Not sure exactly why they need a website
- How to wireframe website homepage
- How many pages do they need
- Importance of an email list
- How to promote a website
There are four pillars of a winning coaching website:
- Website strategy
- Website development and regular care
- Website promotion
- Continuous website optimisation
Before you start developing your website, it is critical to have a website strategy before you do it.
The following questions will help you develop a winning website strategy.
1. Why do you need a website?
The first step of a winning website strategy is defining why you need a website. Once you know why you need a website, you can estimate the resources you need to build a website.
Common types of website categories are:
- Brochure website. Your online business card. Easy to build but hard to generate organic traffic.
- Lead generation website. A brochure website along with detailed information pages or a blog. Hard to produce quality content but high chances of building organic traffic if done right.
- Complete online coaching platform. This requires a lot of planning, time and resources.
Choose your option as per available resources.
2. What problem do you solve?
What do you want to be known for? Do you want to be a jack of all trades or master of one?
I’m in the master of one club.
Picking a specific problem you solve will help you:
- Go ten miles deep instead of ten miles wide
- Create better and targted content
- Do well in organic search results
- Figure what your clients wants better
- Create better coaching programs
Defining the problem you solve is the key to developing a better coaching solution for this particular problem.
3. What is your solution?
Your coaching clients have a problem, and your coaching solution should work as medicine for them.
Once you know your customer’s fears and desires, you will be able to create targeted coaching solutions and attract targeted coaching clients.
Several pieces of research confirm that more choices reduce the conversion and make it complex for you to deliver and scale. Try to limit your coaching options and focus on improving the delivery.
What are the top three coaching services you would like to feature on your website home page?
4. Results your customers will get using your coaching services
What should your coaching clients expect after receiving your coaching?
- A clear life plan
- Better leadership
- No more debt
- Improved productivity
- Happy relationships
Defining the outcome will help you work backwards to plan a better coaching solution and manage the expectations of your coaching clients.
5. What must be the goal of your website header?
A goal of your website header is to ignite the curiosity of your prospects to hook them into what you have to offer. You can achieve this by answering the following three questions on your website header:
- How do you make your prospect’s life better?
- What do you offer?
- How can I work with you?
Can your prospects answer these three questions within five seconds of landing on your website? If yes, you have their attention, and you will likely improve your website conversion.
A few examples of a good website header are listed below.
6. What do you do?
Can you explain what you do in one or two sentences?
Do you have an elevator pitch or standard response to this question each time someone asks you this question?
It would be best if you tackled this while developing your website strategy, which you can use on all of your marketing collateral, such as:
- Email signature
- About page
- Social media profiles
Your response to what do you do question must have the following three elements:
- The problem your clients are facing
- Your solution
- And results
For example, our one-liner response at WP Minds is as follows:
“Building an online coaching website is a complicated and time-consuming affair. We help coaches simplify the process of building and maintaining their online home bases by choosing the best website building tools so they can lead in their coaching niche.”
7. What is at stake if customers don’t buy your services?
If there are no stakes, no one buys anything.
Most businesses assume that their prospects know what is at stake if they don’t do business with you. However, as a coach, it is your responsibility to remind your prospects even if they know that there are high states if they don’t do business with you.
This is another must-have section of your home page, which you must tackle at the strategy stage.
Here is an example of the stakes section:
8. What benefits will your customers experience when they buy your product or service?
They say seeing is believing.
There is nothing more powerful than seeing the results of any service or product. I think most of us make our buying decisions, such as on Amazon, by checking the reviews of previous buyers.
Collecting customer reviews and sharing case studies can add tremendous power to your website.
9. How your customers can do business with you?
Our lives are busy, and our attention span is getting shorter.
As a business owner, it is your responsibility to make it super easy for your prospects to work with you. Giving your customers a simple step-by-step plan will increase your conversion rate substantially.
An ideal number of steps for this plan should not be more than three. More than three steps make your prospects confused and decrease the conversion rate.
10. How will you build rapport with your prospects?
Sharing with your prospects that you get their problems can help you big time to connect with your prospects and increase the conversion.
11. How will you collect emails to stay connected with your prospects?
Your self-hosted website or blog and email list are your two highly valuable assets online.
Here are some of the top data-driven reasons to use email to grow your business:
- 91 percent of US adults like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with
- Email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping your business acquire new customers.
- According to 80 percent of professionals, email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention.
- Email marketing is more likely to drive sales than social media marketing.
The best ways to collect emails are by offering valuable lead generators in exchange for an email id of your prospects.
A commonly used lead generators are:
- Guide
- List
- Email course
- Checklist
- Free consultation
What can you create that will be worth leaving an email address by your prospects?
12. How will you nurture your email lists to buy your services?
Collecting emails is hard.
However, the true value of collecting emails for your coaching business lies in staying in touch with your email subscribers on a regular basis, which is even harder.
How will you stay in touch with your email subscribers?
Common ways are starting a weekly or monthly email newsletter or sharing a regular blog post with your subscribers.
The more quality you share through your emails, the better the conversion will be.
13. How many pages do you need for your website?
In my opinion, you should look at your website as your business book. After that, list down your business book’s chapters and create a page for each chapter.
Instead of adding low-quality pages to your website, consider updating and improving your business book chapters to get more value for your investment.
How many pages do you need to explain what you do, why your prospects should work with you, and how they can contact you?
14. How will you optimize your website for SEO?
There are three main ways to promote your website:
- Paid ads
- Social media
- Search engine optimisation (organic traffic)
If you are starting out, you may want to try all three and see what works for you. However, organic traffic is the dream of every business, which is the hardest to build as well.
Conclustion
Website strategy will help you improve your overall marketing. Answering these fourteen questions will help you with website development and promotion as well.
The best website strategy is the one that works for you and your prospects.
Which of the above questions did you find most helpful in creating your website strategy?
Feel free to schedule a call with me if you need help with your website strategy.
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