So you want to build a life coaching business, but you have close to nothing to start out with — a very limited budget, limited authority, and no existing audience. If this is your situation, how should you go about building your coaching business? Before I get started, you might be wondering who am I and what do I know? I'm the founder of Advanced Life Coach Marketing, where I help life coach start and build stand out businesses. I've worked as a content marketing manager and marketing consultant for a diverse variety of life-improvement companies including wellness publishers, meditation apps, psychotherapists, and life coaches. When I consult coaching businesses, I treat them as real businesses in the life-improvement industry, not just coaching practices. I'm not just another coach coaching coaches, I'm a life-improvement industry marketing expert.

Jumping in vs. taking a systematic approach

There are two ways to get started when building your business. You either can jump in, and start looking for clients right away or you can approach it systematically and slowly. You may suspect that I disapprove of the jumping in approach, but there's nothing wrong with this method when you're just getting started with your business. Jumping in is way better than over-analyzing your business and taking years to get started.  If you haven't worked with anyone, and are the type of person who over-plans and procrastinates, I recommend taking this approach to get things going.

If you're taking the jump in approach, all you need to start your business is to offer coaching services for free to anyone (even your friends) just to practice your skills and get to know what it's like to work with different clients and start building some testimonials as social proof. You don't need a niche yet, that will come later. Your free clients will eventually lead to referrals for your first paying clients. You won't make a killing this way, but you'll at least build your experience.

There's definitely value in working with anyone, and not over-thinking your coaching business when you're an absolute beginner. But as you progress and work with a handful of people, you'll start to get a sense of your style, who you like working with, and what challenges you like to help people solve. When you reach this point, you're going to want to approach your coaching business more systematically. This is the beginning of treating and operating your business as a serious business. Remember that you're not just trying to fill your practice, you're trying to build a business. A business is a strategic system, and it's much different than just working with anyone you can find.

The first task in creating a serious coaching business: Defining your unique niche

The first task in creating your coaching business is defining your unique niche. Why do you have to define your niche? Well if you don't, your business will be really bland. It won't have a personality or any defining features and worst of all, no one will talk about it. No one will feel like your business is truly for them, and you'll only be able to offer your services for very little. Again, nothing wrong with discounting your services when starting out, but you'll want to evolve from there.

There are tens of thousands of coaches all competing with you in some way, and that's something you have to take into account. For some reasons, coaches often don't factor in the competition, I'm guessing because the idea of competition may be at odds with their coaching values. But competition isn't a bad thing, it pushes us to create stronger businesses. Rather than relating to competition in a dog eat dog way, you can study the competition to learn how to make your business more unique and special. You can learn what your competitors are doing, and apply that to your unique business. On a higher level, this is the exact strategy that Walmart and Amazon used to become the number one companies in the world.

A niche makes it easier to create an audience that really appreciates you, connects with you, and wants to work with you. A niche leads to customers seeking you out, instead of you having to convince people to work with you. It increases your spreadability—how likely your customers are to talk about you, give you good testimonials, and refer you to their friends. Having no niche turns you into a commodity, and makes the clients you do attract take you for granted. Having no niche means your clients will pay you very little.

Many coaches understandably struggle with creating a niche—it’s probably the biggest challenge they have. I suggest when starting to come up with your niche, before using any niche formulas, take a look at your unique experience, interests, and knowledge and start from there.

Niche brainstorming questions:

You want to pick an interesting and unique element of your life and frame your niche around that. And make sure the element of your life that you choose to frame your niche around is important, not trivial (your unique music tastes probably wouldn't be a good starting point).

Below are some questions to get you thinking about what your niche could be:

• Think back to what were you like in High School? How were you different than your peers?
• What did you study and do in college? Did you study or do anything that was different than most people? If you didn't go to college, what did you do instead?
• How did you start your career? What were your early work experiences like? What did you like about your first job or first few jobs? What did you not like? What were you good at? What are you doing now in terms of work? What do you like and dislike about it? How do people value you at work? What are you good when it comes to the work you do now
• What are your hobbies outside of work? Is there anything you do in your free time that's different compared to other people you know?
• What have you done in your life that others would consider unusual?
• Is there a quality you have that people frequently compliment you on ?
• Who are you friends with? What do your friends think of you (especially in regards to how you are different)?
• Is there a particular part of your life history that people are impressed by?
• How would you define who you are? Is there anything about how you define yourself that you can frame your niche around?
• Even if you don't want to identify yourself with an important part of your life history (perhaps because you moved on from it), maybe there's a slice of it that you can use to frame your niche around, like a particularly quality or way of thinking that went along with an important past experience.

Out of everything you've came up with, what's one rough niche idea that you can run with for now? Don't have commitment anxiety about this, you can always change later if you end up not liking it. You'll also refine this niche and get more specific as you go along and do competitive analyses.

Niche formulas:

After you've taken a good look at your life history and interests, and identified one niche to run with for now, you can start to apply niche formulas. A formula may or may not help you define your niche, but should at least be helpful in understanding how specific you should get.

The niche formula I recommend is: two adjectives to describe your target customer and then two adjectives to describe your offer, which comes from the challenge you're target customer has. Ex. Aspiring fashion entrepreneurs who want to leave their corporate jobs to start a clothing brand.

Once you come up with your niche based on that formula, look for competitors who offer something similar, differentiate from them, and repeat until your niche is truly unique.

The mistake people make when identifying your niche is that they come up with something they think is specific, but is actually very vague. Below are some examples of common life coaching niches that are actually no where near specific enough.

Non-specific life coaching niches

1. “I offer life coaching.”

Saying you offer life coaching may be meaningful for you, but doesn’t mean much for potential clients who aren’t really aware of what life coaching is. If anything, it just confuses potential clients, since most people think that life coaching means giving people advice on what they should do with their lives. Even though that’s not what life coaching is, that’s the public perception of it.

Think of “life coaching” as the skill that you have rather than the thing that you offer. You don’t offer life coaching, you offer leadership skills support, support for helping people find purpose, support for people to connect with dates etc. Talk about what you specifically offer rather than the skill you have.  If you’re a programmer, you wouldn’t say “I offer programming.” Rather, you’d say “I build mobile apps.”

2. “I offer healing.”

Healing from what? If you don’t make it extremely clear what your offer is, people will lose interest in you and your website. If you made one simple adjustment and said “I offer healing from abusive relationships,” your copy would instantly be much better. The reason we don’t like to get specific is because we think if we get more specific, people who don’t fit the description will turn away. But the reality is, if you keep it general and vague, no one’s going to want to work with you.

3. “I help women feel empowered.”

In the process of writing this article, I went through hundreds of life coaching websites. Helping women feel empowered is definitely the most common life coaching offer and it’s pretty vague. There’s a variety of different women out there, and they are obviously not all the same. Which kind of women specifically? Human resource managers? Bored accountants? Retired professional women who want to sell their art? Stressed mothers?

And what kind of empowerment? Empowerment to get a promotion? Quit their job? Turn an artistic hobby into a career?

Since about 50 percent of coaches offer empowerment coaching for women, you must add a unique angle for this offer to stand out.

4. “I offer relationship, business, career, and dating coaching.”

If you really want to get serious about your business, focus on one of these things, not all 4. I get that you might have anxiety about picking one at the expense of others. But you can still help with the other areas as it relates to and supplements your main area of focus. If you’re highlighting all four of these things offers, it’s going to be hard to craft a consistent message and develop deep expertise and authority with your potential clients. That will make it much harder to grow your business.

5. “I help you get balanced and centered”

What’s balance mean specifically? Do you help someone who’s working too much get into shape? Do you help them get into the dating world? Do you help people manage their personal time more effectively? Do you help people develop a well-rounded personal life?

I really don’t know what it means to be centered. I’m guessing that comes from the mindfulness world, but it doesn’t sound valuable and intriguing enough to get me excited.

6. “I offer relationship coaching”

It’s not bad to initially describe yourself this way, and it’s not unspecific. Likewise, it’s okay to describe yourself as a life coach if you’re just introducing yourself to someone and starting a conversation. But when you transition to talking about what you offer, you must communicate outcomes and benefits.  What aspect of relationships do you help people with? Getting better dates? Making good friends? Resolving longstanding marital conflicts? Who in particular do you help ? Intelligent nerdy men who are afraid of the dating world? Independent, artsy women who unintentionally alienate their friends? Get specific.

7. “I help women achieve their goals”

This is the same thing as number 3 “I help women feel empowered”, but said in a different way. Targeting women makes sense as a starting point, but stopping there isn’t nearly enough.  Will a target customer really feel understood and heard if they see that an offer is plainly for all women in general? There are billions of women out there and most of them feel different.  Does a women think of herself as simply a women? Is that her full identify, or is it something much deeper and more complex? And how specifically do you help women achieve their goals? If you’re a coach, it’s given that you help people achieve their goals. You need to talk about what kind of goals you help people achieve, and make it specific.

8. “I will help you reach your health goals”

Health is an extremely general term and includes a million different things. What do you really mean when you say you help people achieve their health goals? If you don’t say it clearly, no one will resonate with your message. They won’t feel like it’s for them unless what you say truly clicks with a specific and real problem they are having.

Rather than saying I will help you reach your health goals, you could say I will help you eat 1600 calories a day or implement a fun workout plan you look forward to or whatever it is you’re really getting at.

9. “I’m an empowerment coach”

Empowering people to do what specifically? And which kind of people?  Empowerment and goals are already a given in coaching. So that’s kind of like plainly saying “I’m a coach,” which is extremely bland.

10. “I’m a life coach, life consultant, dating coach/consultant, hypnotist, paranormal consultant, career coach, SEO expert, health coach, business coach, marketing coach, marketing consultant, ghost whisperer, success coach, success consultant, and law of attraction coach serving everyone everywhere globally”

A lot of life coaches are actually describing themselves as 17 different things. But by trying to be everything, you stand out to no one. Pick one specific thing to focus on.

You have to be outstandingly specific and unique when it comes to your niche. The easiest way to come up with something unique is to think about your life history and draw something out of that. After you come up with something, take a look at other businesses with similar niches—and figure out how to make yours different.

Your marketing system & strategy

Once you've defined a niche you feel great about, you just need a marketing strategy and system to reach the people in your niche. At a very basic level a website that describes your niche, you, and your services is a good start. After your website is live, you should start thinking about your marketing funnel. A marketing funnel should consist of a plan for how you will reach your target customers, how you will build a relationship with them, and then how you will sell to them, in that order. Notice, you absolutely do not want to be selling right away, because that won’t work. You must build a relationship before you sell, and that's why thinking in terms of funnels are necessary. You can build a virtual relationship (maybe you're talking to people in Facebook groups) or even an automated one (writing engaging blog articles + email series's + phone follow ups that provide value without selling).

Building social proof & credibility

There’s a common myth in the industry that you need coaching certifications to build your credibility. But the truth of the matter is that your clients don’t care much about certifications. Rather, they care about the results you can help them achieve. Testimonials are the way you can showcase the results you're getting, and that’s what potential clients care about the most. That’s why I recommend working with your first handful of clients for free as a way to test our your services in a safe environment, and start building some testimonials. You can also ask colleagues, friends and family members you've helped for some testimonials to start getting some momentum.

Getting clients through networking

The most basic way, to build your coaching business from scratch is to network your way to a steady client base. That means engaging with people through physical conversation (phone or in-person) without selling, and you could think of this as both the first and second stage of your funnel. I recommend having a good networking system in place before focusing on content marketing & publicity. Interacting with a Facebook group that your target customers hang out in could be a starting point, but you should escalate your conversations from Facebook to a get to know you phone call or Skype session as soon as possible (this is a synergy call, not a sales call). Have genuine conversations with your target customers and keep developing your relationships with them. When you've established a good connection, you can transition to talking about your services and offering free coaching sessions.

Networking requires you and your time and energy to sustain—and if we spend too much time on it, we end up not having time to actually coach clients, and build other marketing assets. So that's why I recommend "maxing out" your networking. By maxing out, I mean have a system in place —and honestly, it can be only 30 minutes a day of reaching out to your target customers and developing relationships if that’s all you need and you're really short on time. Once you have a solid system in place that works for you, you can start thinking about content marketing, publicity, and media to attract clients.

Getting clients through content marketing

Content marketing is attracting customers through interesting content, whether it be video, blogs, or podcasts. Anyone who's tried content marketing knows it's a lot more complicated than simply recording a podcast, putting it up there and waiting for people to find it. There's a lot of nuance to content marketing, and it takes a while to get it right. That's why you don't want to rely on it 100 percent when starting out because it's a challenging long term game. But once you've created a piece of amazing content and published it, you've made an asset that can help your business forever.

Content marketing can get very complicated, but the foundation is to create amazing share-worthy content (this is more important than ever as so many people are creating now—you really have to create something that stands out). One of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to blogging is they don't write long enough. While length isn't everything, it's often a good indicator into how much thought you’ve put into your article. If blogging is your medium, aim for 2000 words or more—which is at least 5 times as long as the articles most life coaches are writing, and will stand out at least 5 times as much.

Once you're created content that's truly amazing the rest is just details and tactics (creating email autoresponders, influencer outreach, promoting across social media channels, social media advertising, etc.). But most coaches actually fail to create amazing content and that's the part of the marketing funnel that they get wrong. They might have all the mechanics of a good content marketing funnel working, and perhaps they’re doing all the best content promotions tactics. But if the content isn't amazing, it won't work, because no one will share it. As media scholar Henry Jenkins says "if it doesn't spread, it's dead."

So there you have, that's how I recommend building your coaching business from scratch. Choose a unique niche, network with target customers, and then creating a content marketing system.

Do you questions about your coaching niche or marketing system? Let me know in the comments!

About Matt Rosenblum

Matt Rosenblum is the owner of Advanced Life Coach Marketing, where he helps life coaches start and build their businesses.