The pursuit of knowledge is one of humanity’s defining traits, and people all over the world are constantly looking to learn new things. Formal education not only can’t keep up with the demand, but many of today’s learners aren’t looking for the traditional experience.
Enter online coaching.
Thanks to the always-on nature of the internet and the multitude of tools available, often for free, it’s easier than ever to transfer expertise and skills. In this guide, we’re going to find out how you can get into this fast-growing realm and set yourself up for success as an online coach.
Jump ahead to:
- Why Become an Online Coach?
- The Keys to a Successful Online Coaching Business
- Starting an Online Coaching Business in 8 Steps
- Group vs. Individual Coaching: Which is Best?
- Launch Your Online Coaching Career with Whop
- FAQs
Why Become an Online Coach?
Online coaching has been a rapidly growing industry for a few years now. It’s projected that there’ll be more than a billion consumers in the online learning market in five years’ time, and non-regulated, non-degree online instruction will make up a market of close to a trillion dollars.
By becoming an online coach, you can set yourself on this same trajectory, taking advantage of a market that’s booming. Revenue and profit are the core drivers of any real business model, and they’re good reasons to want to be an online coach.
Beyond that, there are several excellent reasons for someone to want to take up online coaching. A few include:
- Global reach: If you were to offer offline, in-person coaching, there’s every chance you’d do very well for yourself. Online coaching however removes those geographical boundaries, massively multiplying the size of your potential customer base. You’re no longer limited to working with people near you—people from just about every imaginable place can start looking to you for coaching. You can also work from just about anywhere with a stable internet connection, whether that’s your own home, a coffee shop, or a beach.
- Flexibility: In addition to the borderless aspect of online coaching, it also allows flexibility. You can choose to carry out your online coaching whenever it works for you—whereas in-person coaching needs to work with your local students’ schedules. By going online, you can pick and choose your hours first and then work with whoever matches up. Alternatively, if you yourself are free to work at all hours, you can schedule online sessions with clients who need the flexibility of odd hours due to their own personal situations.
- Low costs: Compared to in-person coaching, online coaching isn’t a very expensive business to get into. As an in-person coach you would need to rent a space in a convenient area, but an online coach just needs a computer and a good internet connection to get started.
- Scalability: In-person coaching can be pretty hard to scale given the challenge of accommodating big groups of people in one place, but it’s far easier to do bigger group sessions online. You can also create in-demand coaching content that you just need to record once but people continue to pay for, creating a passive income stream.
- Versatility of digital media: Beyond the option to create on-demand coaching content, there’s just so much you can do digitally. One big advantage of the digital medium is the ability to create an online community. Learning can be a lonely journey, and a community of like-minded people allow students to connect with while retaining the freedom of relative online anonymity.
- Analytics and marketing. It’s easy to integrate extremely powerful analytics tools into your online coaching business if you’re working with the right platform, meaning that you can make data-driven decisions pertaining to your business. This goes for your marketing activities as well, and it’s just generally a lot easier to advertise online as well.
The Keys to a Successful Online Coaching Business
Before setting up your online coaching business, it’s worth looking at what truly separates the wheat from the chaff in the online coaching world. Here’s what you need to focus on to give yourself the best possible chance for success:
- Expertise: This is one of the biggest ones, because if you aren’t really an expert in any domain, what exactly are you going to teach? Granted, there are certainly a number of coaches in the space who really don’t have much to add, but they don’t last. If you want to become an online coach, you’ll need to have or develop, a certain amount of expertise that, at the very least, puts you above the layman. You don’t need to have a PhD in your given subject or any sort of formal qualification (although those help) but you do need a certain level of knowledge or skill in your area so that you’ve got something to impart to your students.
- Coaching skill: With your expertise in place, coaching skill is all about being able to communicate and transfer your skills along to your students. Some people are naturally brilliant teachers and communicators, but even if you aren’t, this is something that can be acquired—it often boils down to listening to and understanding your students, and being able to communicate to them in ways that make sense.
- Value proposition: Your expertise and ability to transfer it to a student is all the value proposition that’s really needed, but you need to look at this from the student’s perspective. Do they look at your online coaching course and go “Yes, I want to learn how to do that from this person!” or something to that effect? If not, you need to work on how you present your USP—we’ll dive more into that later.
- Niche: Your niche informs a lot when it comes to online coaching, from acquisition strategy to pricing. If you already have some expertise in a certain area, such as fitness, then you probably don’t need to think about your niche too much, but if you’re here just wanting to start online coaching and don’t care what you teach, then your niche could be everything. Pick an area that’s in-demand and has potential going forward, look at market trends and the general zeitgeist—if you think that working from home is going to become a staple of every job, you could zoom in on that and teach something that people can do on the side while working, like day trading, task automation, or AI prompt engineering.
- Acquisition strategy: Without customer acquisition you won’t have any revenue or a business to speak of, so you’ll need to work this one out—how exactly are you going to make students aware of the fact that you exist and can help them? Social media is a great way to start, ease your way into the online communities of your chosen niche and take it from there. Starting a YouTube channel is always a good way to go since it offers something of a demo of your style and skill, and is easy to start with. A lot of YouTubers actually started like this, using their channels as a marketing tool for their online coaching—so who knows where your future might lie?
- Social proof: If you’re deciding between two similar products, one of the big factors that might sway your decision is the review score. This is an example of the power of social proof, and as an online coach, you need to make this work for you. Once you start coaching students, make sure you get them to review your coaching and provide testimonials. These will really help you to nudge other potentially interested students over the dotted line.
- Scaling your coaching: Once you’ve got everything in place, it’s wise to remember that, like any business, your online coaching needs to keep shifting up the gears. Going from individual lessons to group sessions multiplies your revenue, and we’ve already mentioned the possibilities when it comes to alternate or passive income streams from avenues like on-demand coaching and monetized social media. You can create other sorts of digital products based on your expertise, such as ebooks, and eventually recruit other coaches to serve the growing demand for your brand.
Starting an Online Coaching Business in 8 Steps
Now that you’re sold on the benefits of online coaching as a business model and know what the critical factors to your success are, it’s time to look at how you can get started.
1. Outline Your Unique Selling Proposition
We’ve already mentioned the importance of expertise to online coaching as well as the need to develop the requisite coaching skills to be able to give your students the knowledge they’re looking for. These are two of the main factors that build into your unique selling proposition, which we mentioned briefly earlier.
Odds are, you’re probably not going to be the only online coach in your given niche. If you are, great! That’s your USP all locked up—your students have to come to you, because there’s no-one else. Even if that were the case, you won’t be alone in that niche for long, and soon you’ll have to start pointing out that you’re the OG—your USP will have to adapt.
So, when you start offering your coaching services, you’ll have to make clear to your students why they should sign up for your coaching offerings and not those of your competitors. If you’ve got more expertise than the rest? Shout it off the rooftops. If you’re using the latest and greatest in tools and tech? Show them off.
There are certainly other ways to differentiate, and you might pick up customers by using unique advertising strategies, but a well-communicated USP will help you stand out and succeed even in the most crowded of niches.
2. Identify Your Clients
This one goes hand-in-hand with your USP, and in fact the selling proposition you pick might be purely down to a gap in the market. Analysis of the market and trying to understand your niche will help you figure out who wants the coaching you’re providing, and this information can help you make big decisions.
Once you get to know the demographics and attitudes of the people you’re aiming to serve, you can start narrowing your focus. Imagine, for instance, the world of day trading. There are people all the way from retirees down to teenagers wanting to make money off of stock movements, but you’re probably not going to suit all of them.
The older segments of the market might value expertise and experience highly, and need someone of a similar generation to provide the instruction. The youngest might need different online tools and lingo, and acquisition might be easiest on social media. By understanding the different groups of potential customers out there, you can refine your coaching skills, USP and marketing to match.
3. Creating Your Coaching Program
You’re not going to get anywhere without expertise and coaching skills, but now it’s time to execute. One of the most important things to bring in at this stage is a cohesive structure, since your students will need it to learn effectively—it’s up to you to decide on the best way to do things, but every program ought to be goal-oriented. Be up-front about what the aim of the program or even each lesson is, and make the entire course all about hitting one milestone after the other.
It’s difficult to create the perfect coaching program right from the get-go, so self-reflection and analysis of those precious first few courses is vital. Take on any feedback, and learn from any mistakes you’ve made. Consider smaller changes or tweaks here and there to improve the experience for your next batch of students.
4. Develop Your Pricing Model
Remember the research you did into your niche while trying to segment your potential customer base? During the course of that, you probably did a good bit of competitor analysis. Between that and what you’ve understood about the typical spend of your students from all of that research, you should have a good idea of how to go about pricing your course.
This also folds back into your USP. If you have an extremely compelling USP or are the only option in your niche, you can set your prices wherever you want. In a more competitive market, you’ll have to be more careful—you don’t want to price yourself out or appear overpriced (the consumer’s perception of your USP versus how much they have to pay for your coaching) but at the same time, pricing too low runs the risk of framing your services as ‘cheap’.
Nobody ever said pricing was easy, but the more information you have about your competitors and customers, the more informed your pricing decisions can be. You’ve also got to consider your expenditures—if you decide that you need to spend a significant amount on acquisition, then you need to model your pricing in such a way as to build those costs in and still give you a profit at the end of the day.
5. Find the Right Platform
While you can be an online coach without a platform, it’s actually pretty hard to do. You’ll need a landing page and a website for marketing and sales, some way to process payments, a system that encompasses various softwares to establish contact with customers, take orders, record all of their information—it’s a crazy amount of work if you’re planning on using basic software and tools like Excel, email, DMs, and so on.
A good platform can do all of that for you with a minimal amount of fuss. When you sign up, you should expect to be able to build your landing page or digital store page without any web development expertise, and you shouldn’t have to pay for hosting. Payment processing will be taken care of, and so will digital fulfillment—the best platforms will even have applications such as video conferencing and course builders that’ll make being an online coach a breeze. Just upload your stuff, and show up in time to teach.
The very best platforms for online coaching will also allow you to get set up and trial their services at no cost, so you should definitely shop around and find the right one for you and your new online coaching business.
6. Create Your Coaching Business
Now that all of the key pieces are in place and you’ve also chosen a platform, it’s time to get the ball rolling. You’ve probably seen how easy it is to get started with a top coaching platform, so go ahead and set things up—make sure that you’ve finalized all things branding, such as the name of your online coaching business and any graphics or logos you need to use.
The top platforms are so easy to get started with that you could have your business live in mere minutes, so don’t put it off for too long. Make sure to add some SEO copy to any product or business descriptions, use all of your chosen imagery, and underline your USP on your digital store page—and above all, don’t forget to input all of your payment details on your chosen platform so that customer payments can be sent your way without any delay.
7. Build Your Marketing Funnel
With everything ready to go, it's time to put your marketing funnel in place at last. You might even have worked on this previously if coaching isn’t your first digital product—if you have an email newsletter in place, an ebook readership ready for your next work, or an online community in place, all you need to do is open the floodgates.
If not, you’ll need to start executing the strategies you lined up earlier when thinking about acquisition. Use social media channels that line up nicely with your niche—trading and investing work pretty well with Twitter and Reddit, while personal growth or fitness often find a home on Instagram. YouTube works with just about anything, since it’s increasingly becoming an alternative to television—whatever your chosen channel or mix of channels, it’s time to put them into overdrive.
You might also consider online ads, and again lining up with social media is a good idea since just about everyone is on it these days. Google ads are fine too, although you should approach ads with caution—they can get costly, especially if you’re just launching your business.
You’ll also want to ensure that you can convert as many visitors to your landing page as possible. We mentioned social proof earlier—having ratings from satisfied customers as well as reviews or testimonials is a great idea to ensure more interested visitors take the plunge.
8. Start Coaching!
And now, just get on with coaching. With all of the elements of your online coaching business in place, you’ve hopefully got a stream of customers starting to come through. Time to do your thing!
As you go, remember to keep asking your students for feedback—you can learn a lot from what they say, and constantly improve your coaching product and skills. Ask your students if they’re reaching the goals you worked with them to set, and make sure to nudge them to rate and review your coaching.
It’s all about bettering your product and continuing to grow, but also remember what we said about scaling—as such, it’s also a good idea to put your students on an email list for newsletters or build an online community so that you can have an audience ready to spring for your next digital product. If they love your coaching, there’s every chance they’ll take your course, buy your ebook, or sign up for an advanced or expert level class.
Group vs. Individual Coaching: Which is Best?
Many online coaches wrestle with the question of whether to focus on group or one-on-one coaching, and which one is better depends on your circumstances. Individual coaching is excellent if you want to give your students the most hands-on, personalized attention you can.
However, coaching a single person at a time puts a very definite ceiling on revenue, profit, and even long-term scalability. There are only so many hours in the day, so if you dedicate a significant amount of them to one person at a time, you’re only going to be able to fit in a few students every week.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean you’ll have to charge quite a lot for your course. It also means that you’re growing at a slower rate since you’re only serving a few customers. Contrast that with group sessions—you can charge a lot less per head, making your course more attractive, and that’s multiple satisfied customers at the end of the day, meaning more reviews, more word-of-mouth, and more potential customers for your next coaching group, course, or other digital product.
It’s also possible to build an online community more effectively if you run group coaching. Participants in each session will get to know each other naturally, especially if you include group activities or discussion as part of your course structure. The bonds they’ll form there can be easily translated to an online community, whereas individual clients are going to come in cold, not knowing anyone.
So, group coaching can offer you the most benefits, but don’t discount individual coaching completely. You can always sell it as part of a high-ticket package or as a high-ticket item in and of itself.
Launch Your Online Coaching Career with Whop
One of the best things you can do for yourself as an online coach is to partner with Whop, which specializes in meeting the needs of digital entrepreneurs just like you.
You can get set up with your own whop in minutes, giving you an extremely easy-to-use online hub for your business where you can build out your brand and messaging. Simply drag and drop the different apps you want into your whop to empower your coaching business with the different functions it needs.
The courses app pictured above adds a powerful course builder to your whop, allowing you to make courses part of your coaching plan, and you can let your students download any required attachments with the files app.
You might decide to make the video calls app the meat of your coaching business so that you can host live calls, add forums for course participants to share knowledge, and even empower your marketing with giveaways and affiliate links via their own dedicated apps too.
Best of all, you can get set up with your own whop and have all of that functionality good to go in just a few minutes. Simply visit Whop and sign up to give it a try today.
FAQs
What are the advantages of online coaching?
One of the biggest advantages of online coaching is that you can do it from anywhere and at any time, and the same sort of flexibility applies to your students too. It doesn’t cost much to get into, and there’s plenty of potential in the business model if you do it right.
Is group coaching better than individual coaching?
Generally, yes, at least in terms of potential for scaling a business and developing revenue streams such as additional digital products and premium communities. However, individual coaching does have its merits, and some students will pay top dollar for that personalized experience.
How to scale an online coaching business?
It’s always a good idea to build an online community and keep your students engaged, and this becomes a ready-made market for additional products, be it on-demand courses or follow-up coaching sessions.
