The world of busines, marketing and social media changes rapidly.

You already know that, as a business coach, you need to be at the very least one step ahead of your clients!

So in an information-rich, time-poor world, how do you keep up to date easily?

Well, of course, there’s RSS or Really Simple Syndication.

This allows you to have all the latest posts from industry blogs you find useful in one simple place.

I use Google Reader and although I can’t honestly say I’ve checked out its competition, it’s never given me reason to.  It works.

If you’re new to RSS and your reader, then you’ll have a blank page – which let’s face it, is not going to inspire you!

So how do you find good blogs?

1. Search a blog directory such as Technorati using your core areas of interest, eg. “marketing”, “social media” etc
2. Similarly, Google your industry terms and add “blog” to them.  So for instance, search “online marketing blog”, “business blog”, “sem marketing blog”.
3. Whilst visiting each blog, look out for blogrolls.  These are lists of other useful blogs recommended by the blog author.
4. Read a book and liked it? Search the author’s name and see if they have a blog. They almost certainly will.
5. Look for blogs from people you follow on social media platforms. These will usually have more comprehensive content than their social postings.

Firstly, I have to apologise for the big gap between this post and the previous.  I have been in the throes of launching the Rapid Results Business Coaching Programme and must admit my focus was taken off the blog!

As I was working with my new business-coaches-in-training, I got to thinking about the fact that, whilst each of them will learn the core skills and all the approaches that can be used to work with a business owner, they will also each have their own unique qualities that make them more or less suited to a particular kind of client.

Take me.  I am great at getting things started and I can carry that skill across to clients who are either just starting off or who have a business that is stuck.

I have a real knack for helping find a number of key strategies and tactics that bring results quickly and seed-fund further growth and the motivation to stick with it.

But I am less interested and therefore less good at taking a long established business and systematising it.  It’s just not my thing.  Nor have I have ever dealt with a franchise.  Or sold a company.

That doesn’t mean I can’t help a client who has these needs by using all the small-business coaching tools, processes and structures at my disposal.  I could!  But I don’t believe I would be as good as, or as confident as, someone who has made this their “thing”.

Now here’s the great thing.  Anything can be learned.  The question is, as a business coach, what interests you?  What excites you?  What makes you feel great about what you do?

For me, it’s helping people get results that get them on their way and time and again I have helped business people kick start from scratch or move from a position of stuckness.

What is it for you?

Perhaps you excel at making teams get brilliant results.  Maybe you can number crunch metrics and help the owner get stunning clarity on their financial position and needs.  Maybe you understand how to launch onto the global stage, or how to use social media for real results, or how to buy a company.

Answer this question and you’ll start to stand out from the crowd and be a truly sought-after business coach.

Business coaches have taken a step that many coaches never do.  They have decided to specialise.  Small business coaches are specialising further and small business coaches working with the hospitality industry yet further.

Now, it’s a well worn question but if you were a hotelier, who would choose here if all else was equal?  The generic coach, the business coach, the small business coach or the hospitality coach?  It’s a no brainer if the last coach has results to back up their specialism.

And who would you choose if the last of these was considerably dearer?  Well, the choice certainly gets more complicated but if you really feel that the specialism allows you to get the results you’re after, you’ll pay for it, right?

I was inspired to write this post because I’m looking for a specialist in social media marketing right now, specifically someone who can help spread the great content that my course heads are creating on their blogs.

What fascinates me is that, from the huge list of respondents, I’ll have people who have one core skill such as social media marketing (which, by the way, is getting ever harder to call a single core skill as the each platform get individually more complex and demanding of knowledge) and I’ll have people who claim to be experts in social media, data entry, SEO, SEM, craiglist…in fact. don’t just take my word for it.  Have a look:

Now look what they’re charging! $2.22 per hour.  I have to say my heart goes out to them!

If they became true experts at one thing, they’d have more business and charge more money.

It’s like going to a pub and you open up the menu and every kind of food type is there! Yep! We’ve all seen them.  Faux leather covers, laminated inner pages covered in sticky stuff and salt and a who’s who of culinary cliche!  Indian, Thai, Chinese, English, Italian; burgers, pasta, curries and fish vie for attention….it’s just a list of every recognisable food type you can imagine.

Yet, if you decide to go out for an Indian, do you think, let’s go that pub that does everything?  No, of course not!

At best, you’ll go there for convenience or because of a different aspect to the experience – live sports, it’s your local or you want to see your mates for a drink, etc.

So I’m calling on you to ask yourself, who are you? The specialist who charges what you’re worth or the jack of all trades who charges what you can get?

Do you agree? Let me know your thoughts below.

A lot of people are lazy!

They do the same old things in the same old ways and wonder why results don’t change.

Many small business coaches are no different.

They attend the same old networking events and meet the same old people.  Leads dry up and their daily tweet and Facebook post produce no discernible interest!  Then they complain times are tough!

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

As a local coach you can take control of how you find clients.

Yes, I said, find clients.

For all the hype around attraction marketing and inbound marketing, the reality is these strategies take time.  They’re vital for the long haul but they’re not going to work overnight.

You need to go out looking if you want success!

Here’s how you can take control of how you find clients.  I call it Local Market Mapping.

You’re going to get to know your local area inside out.  And it’s easy.

To do this you need an open mind and a determination to follow this through without questioning the results as you go.  You see, too often we pre-judge who might work with us and simply miss a whole group of businesses who need are help AND can afford it.

So here’s what you need to do.

1. Take a walk.  Walk down your high street and make a note of every single small business you come across.  Notice the B&Bs, the hotels, the shops, the garages, the dentists, solicitors, the cafes and restaurants, the hairdressers and tanning shops, the health shops and pawnshops.  Notice them all and write them in a notebook.  Take as much factual information as possible – name, address, website, phone number.  Don’t judge just write.  Make it fun and treat yourself to a coffee in a future’s client’s coffee shop!
2. Now find your local business parks.  I don’t mean the ones with McDonalds, Currys and the hypermarket.  I mean the hidden away ones.  The ones that have affordable commercial space for garages, serviced offices, private storage facilities, call centres and more.  Walk around it.  Discover what businesses are there and write it all down.  You’ll be amazed at businesses you couldn’t even have conceived of nevermind approached!  Write it all down!
3. Now search online for local business networks.  Visit their sites and see who their members are and, you guessed it, write it all down.
4. Now make a list of all the small business types you can think of – anything and everything.  Brain storm til your eyes are popping out and your brain is melting.  Don’t edit  the list or try to judge if they’re useful business types.  Just write, write, write.  And with this list (and this might be a bit tedious but nothing worth having is free of some hard work) type them into Google one at a time adding your town name to produce information on each of those business types in your area.  And of course write it all down.
5. Finally collate all this information in a way that makes sense to you.  You could try ordering it by industry type, location, size, priority to secure or whatever approach suits you.

And that’s it! You’re done.

Well, OK, that’s the first step at least! You now have a thorough, personally constructed map of your local small business landscape.

“OK, now what?” you might be thinking.  “I could have got that from a Thomson Local!”

No you couldn’t!  You might have got the names and addresses but you wouldn’t have immersed yourself in the discovery process, you wouldn’t have personally realised how much you had been missing out on by going to the one weekly network event.  You wouldn’t have discovered the things you found surprisingly intriguing.  You wouldn’t have made the comparisons between companies that you naturally made as you went.  You wouldn’t have both consciously and unconsciously been noticing things: what the companies are doing well or doing badly; where they ranked on search engines; how they actually look; and so so much more.

This is YOUR map not just a list of people in a directory. And from this you can begin to plot your way forward.  Maybe you’ll take one sector at a time such as restaurants and look at how they’re marketing themselves.  Or maybe you’ll go with what jumped out at you.  Maybe you’ll use direct mail which clearly reflects your new-found understanding of the local landscape or maybe you’ll create a local workshop that suits the needs that you have uncovered as you went along.

The map is just the start but it one of the very best ways to truly get to know your landscape and find your small business coaching clients.

Has this helped?  Do you have any questions?

You know, when you’re first starting off as a business coach it can feel a little slow.  Results don’t always come easily; clients cancel; networking gets tiring; social media messages seem to slip into a void.

It can feel tempting to look elsewhere for solutions.

We’ve all seen this “shiny, new stuff syndrome” in action.  Either with ourselves or with people around us.  Every business opportunity looks like an oasis in a barren desert.

Create a coaching practice? Of course! That’s what I want to do.  But multi-level-marketing too? Oh yes, please! Internet-marketing? Sounds great! Affiliate marketing? Spread -betting? Forex? E-book fame?  Tweeting your way to millions? Commission-based selling? Let me have it all.

And on it goes!

Now here’s  the thing.  Maybe each and every one of these can provide you with the lifestyle and income you want.  IF you focus!  If you take one and run with it.

But if you constantly look to the next shiny, new thing you’ll never achieve what you want.

And so I was thrilled when I heard a business coach friend say to someone who was insisting that the next MLM scheme was the only way forward: “It’s kind of you to offer but I’ve spent years learning these skills and months planning the business.  Do you really think I’ll drop all that to pick up something new? I actually want the business I run to be a huge success and that’s where my focus is!” No dilly-dallying, no feigning interest.  Just the truth.

So if you find yourself being drawn to the the new, shiny stuff; stop and ask if it’s really going to help you get where you want to be or is it really making up a “perceived” deficit in your existing business results.

I spoke in a previous post about the need for tenacity in small business coaching.  This is one BIG area it’s needed.  Stick to your guns and only diversify when it’s the right time or your existing business just isn’t doing it for you anymore.

 

Sometimes as a small business coach we can gape in awe, fear, horror, wonder and sheer frustration at the amount of changes taking place in our industry.

How on earth can we keep up with every social media site worth knowing, every blog worth reading, every new tool for client acquisition, every new strategy for helping clients.

How do we tweet, post, vodcast, podcast, link and share our way to fame and success?

Perhaps it’s easier just to cling to the old adage that ignorance is bliss! Just stick to a bit of networking, a bit of LinkedIn work and some AdWords.

Right?

Wrong!

You’re a business coach.  That means you need to be on the cutting edge.  But you also need to be a lean-mean client-getting, client-supporting machine.

So keep it simple.  Here’s my FIVE step process to master the overwhelm.

1. Choose an approach which is new to you which you believe will give access to your prospective clients
2. Plan your outcomes from using it – clients, connections, awareness and decide how you’ll measure this
3. Then play with it.  Don’t get stressed.  Don’t expect to be perfect.  Have fun learning how you can use it and even abuse it!
4. Measure your success and tweak your way to improvements
5. Master it then outsource the repetitive parts so you’re left with the stuff where “you” matter.

But don’t try to use all of them at once. Choose one and get started.

If you choose webinars then really get to know how you can use them.  Try different approaches – interviews, presentations, sales webinars, educational webinars.  Measure what works. Adapt and measure again.

If you choose Twitter, then read key books on it, check out blog posts on how to use it, plan your outcomes, check the different support software, try different kinds of tweets, see what works.

They say we overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in a lifetime.  So take it easy and take it one step at a time and you’ll be amazed at how much you can master.

A lot of business coaches make a fatal error when trying to secure a new client.

They try to sell  the whole shebang before the prospect has even seen whether the coach is any good!

And it’s not surprising that coaches often make this mistake.  Many have been taught the art of “thinking big” and “shooting for the stars to reach the moon!”  They believe that if you ask for a lot, you might at least get something.

But in fact, the opposite is true.

The lower your barrier to entry is to working with you, the more likely you are to succeed in securing your client and building a lasting, profitable and growing relationship with them. READ MORE >>

As a business coach, you’re almost certainly going to make your clients money! Right?

So why can it feel so hard to have prospects saying “yes” to working with you?

Well, one big reason is that they don’t know for sure that you’ll be able to deliver on your promise.

And who can blame them? We’ve all experienced plenty of broken promises that make us approach any offer with a suspicious mind!

But there are ways you can help your prospects feel secure enough to become your clients. To move from intrigued to downright committed.

Here are my top three: READ MORE >>