Five Marketing Benefits Every Life Coach Should Know on How to Benefit From Writing A Book
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ToggleBenefits of writing a book
In the era of social media, finding your audience as a life coach has never been easier. That being said, it’s still fairly difficult considering just how competitive the field has become. This is why so many coaches don’t solely rely on social media but instead use a variety of tactics to promote themselves.
One of such popular tactics involves writing your own book on life coaching. Not only will this help you promote your services, but it will also create new opportunities for you. Hence, here’s why life coaches can benefit from writing a book and how you can do it yourself.
#1 Get Ready Before Writing Your Book
First and foremost, you need to get ready before you start writing your book. Here are the three steps you should take beforehand:
- Prep Your Website: Prepare your website by setting it up and filling it with all the relevant information about yourself and your services. Create all the essential pages, write a life coaching bio for your blog posts, list your credentials and experience, etc. If you already have a website, make sure that everything is right on it. All of this is necessary so that once you start promoting yourself with your book, potential customers can easily check out your website, learn more about you, and purchase your services.
- Set Up Social Media: In addition to your website, you also need to set up your social media accounts. These will help you establish yourself online as an authority and find and gradually grow your audience. Moreover, this is where you can interact with current and potential customers to create a sense of community. This is also where you will be promoting your book and, on the contrary, you will also promote your profiles in your book.
- Do Your Research: No matter how good you are of an expert and how much experience you have, it’s still worth doing your research on the subjects you plan to cover in your book. Furthermore, it’s also worth researching the market to see what your competitors have done already (e.g. which topics they covered in their books, which techniques they used to promote their books, etc.)
#2 Understand Your Goals for the Book
Now that you have done some basic preparation, you need to understand your goals for the book as well as the reasons why you are writing it in the first place. Here are the main things you need to consider:
- Establish Yourself as an Authority: Writing a book will help you establish yourself as an authority and an expert in your field. In other words, it gives you more credibility and shows that you really do know what you are doing and talking about.
- Reach Wider Audiences and Get More Exposure: With the help of your own book, you can reach wider audiences and get more exposure which will help you get more new clients who could potentially turn into returning customers. This is especially true if you find a way to promote your book with social proof (e.g. use reviews rated by students as the first reviews for your book to post online and attract attention to it).
- Grow Your Online Community: Speaking of finding new clients, you will also be able to grow your online community this way. More people will follow you on your social media and you can also incentivize readers to subscribe to your mailing list to receive content from you regularly.
- Get a New Source of Income: You are probably already earning money from different sources as a life coach. Luckily, your new book can become yet another source of income for you if you decide to sell it instead of giving it away for free (more on this later). On the other hand, even if you give it away for free, it will still be indirectly related to your income.
- Gain a Competitive Advantage: Not every life coach out there has written a book, so even if you write a single one, you will already be able to gain a competitive advantage over those who have not written a single book.
- Make Your Services More Affordable: Not everyone is able to afford your services and that’s the harsh truth. This is why you might be losing quite a few potential customers who see your prices and decide to pass on your offer. Fortunately for such customers, you can offer them a more affordable option now – your book.
- Realize What Your Own Abilities Are: Writing a book will be a journey for you as well because it will help you realize what your own abilities are. Once you better know yourself, you can utilize your strengths more effectively in the future and achieve become a more successful life coach.
#3 Consider Alternatives Before You Proceed
Though you may be already set to write your book, you might still have some second thoughts about the endeavor. After all, who reads books in the digital era? Well, quite a few people do, especially those who are looking for self-improvement and seeking out services like yours. This is precisely why you’d want to write a book as a life coach – it’s something your audience will find useful and will be interested in.
That being said, you still need to consider alternatives before you proceed. What if you aren’t a good writer? Your poor writing skills could become an issue, indeed. However, they won’t be that big of an issue unless you make critical mistakes that could affect the overall quality of your book. Moreover, you don’t necessarily have to write the book yourself if you don’t want to (but more on that later).
As mentioned earlier, your book can become an alternative, more affordable option for those customers who can’t afford your usual services. On the other hand, there are alternatives for your book itself. You could publish articles on your blog, upload videos on your channel, and make social media posts all covering the same topics you would have talked about in your book. The only difference is that those types of content wouldn’t work the same your book would – which means your marketing goals and techniques for them would differ vastly.
You should also keep in mind that books are much better at explaining complex topics with many nuances and details. A video or article can only do so much to inform and educate your audience on a specific topic. A book can fully teach them about this topic, just like your courses or individual classes do. As you can see, it’s definitely worth writing a book just because it’s so different from anything else and because of the opportunities you get with it.
#4 Write Your Life Coaching Book
If you are ready to write your own book on life coaching, here are the four main steps you should follow to do so:
- List The Topics You Want to Talk About: Firstly, sit down and list all the topics you want to talk about in your book. Think back on the research you’ve done and what you discovered. What have your competitors covered in their own books? What is your audience interested in? Your book could be very specific and could focus on a niche set of topics or you could be more general with the advice you give in your book. It all depends on your own preferences and goals for the book.
- Make an Outline Before You Start Writing: Once you have a list of topics ready, you will need to organize them in a logical way and create an outline for your book before you actually start writing it. When you have an outline, you will know how to structure your book better and how to deliver information in a more comprehensive and natural way. Otherwise, you could end up confusing your audience.
- Write The First Draft and Only Then Edit It: Now, use your outline to write the first draft of your book before you start editing it. It’s important to focus on writing – if you keep going back to edit your sentences, you will progress at a very slow pace. As mentioned earlier, you don’t need to write the book yourself if you aren’t a good writer. Just hire a professional writer from the top writing reviews site and provide them with the details of what you want your book to be. They will do the job for you.
- Polish Your Final Draft and Check Grammar: Once you have gone through several drafts and you are happy with the overall look of your book, you can polish your final draft and check its grammar. Make sure that there are no linguistic mistakes and no factual errors that could make your book look low-quality and could make you seem unprofessional.
#5 Distribute Your Book to Your Audience
Now that your book is ready, you have several options for how you can distribute it to your audience:
- Give It Away for Free: Use it as promotional material and give it away for free on social media. You can also give it to people for free after asking them to subscribe to your mailing list or follow you on social media. If you choose this option, you will probably want to only have a digital copy of your book.
- Sell It Online or Offline: Another option is to sell it either online or offline. In this case, you will need to invest in marketing (e.g. PPC ads) and either self-publish the book yourself or find an agent to publish it traditionally.
- Award It to Your Students: If you want to make something special of the book, you can choose to award it to your past students as a prize for completing your courses. It’s a great way to show you value them and develop relationships with them.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, writing your own book as a life coach might be somewhat time-consuming and even scary at first, but it will definitely be worth it in the end. Use the tips in this article to help you get started and successfully create and market your own book on life coaching.
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