If you are looking for to start a business that you can do online, from home, then a niche coaching business could be the business framework that you are looking for. The biggest advantages of starting a coaching business from home are cost and location.
Starting a niche coaching business today can be done for almost next to nothing, compared to other online business ideas and if you choose to start an online coaching business, with the advances in technology the last five years, you could start and run a niche coaching business from anywhere.
What is Coaching?
Coaching is a professional service normally offering training, support and guidance to help an individual or group of people move closer to their desired goals. Coaching comes in various forms today and is actively practiced in almost every niche possible. You don’t have to be a complete expert to do coaching but you do need to know more than the average person about a certain subject and have the capability to coach others to make informed decisions via a framework of suitable coaching methods.
What is Niche coaching?
Niche coaching is when you coach an individual or a group of people to move closer to or achieve their goals within a specific audience by supporting and orientating them with niched guidance, coaching methods, training and resources to reach their goal.
For example, business coaching is not niche coaching. Business coaching could mean anyone within any industry or profession.
Whereas Business coaching for Online English tutors is niche coaching. The difference is the pinpointed, specification of the audience within an industry. Niche coaching only coaches a specific audience type that have the same / similar demographics and that share a similar goal. Niched coaching goes deep into a marketplace to find the hidden crowd.
Niched coaching is really only suitable to people that have a deeper understanding of a common problem within that niche and fundamentally knows how to solve that problem and can help others.
For context, my background is in teaching, writing and tech. Years ago I worked as an online English tutor for Asian companies. Initially they paid very well however over time the pay rate declined to the same as a cashier in a supermarket. This became the common norm and teachers with two and three degrees were struggling to make a decent wage each month, I was one of them.
I decided to go solo and built an incredible educational brand. Later on, I created a coaching program to help other English tutors do the same. This then multiplied into helping tutors from any subject. I identified lots of online tutors knew nothing about tech as most companies and schools did all the tech side of teaching for them, knew nothing about marketing and could not market themselves and when they did they marketed themselves to the wrong audience. They also did now know how create their own online lessons, curriculums, courses and digital products. I knew how to do this as I had done it for my own brand ( and it’s still growing strong), so in short, I was able to solve a burning problem.
How to find a coaching niche?
Finding the right coaching niche can be tricky as it depends on a number of variables. You can use our Free Niche finding tool here to help you.
In addition to that you should be asking yourself the following questions:
How will my coaching help people improve?
How many clients can I successfully coach?
What business model will I use for my niche coaching business?
How will I make my niche coaching business profitable?
What will my coaching services be?
Will I offer a coaching program , course or membership?
Will I create any digital products to support my niche?
Who are my competitors: Are there any niche coaching businesses that are similar to mine?
Ideally who does my niche coaching serve and how can I help them the most?
What Market Research will I need to do?
Who do I think my potential clients are?
Seven benefits of choosing a niche
Finding and defining your coaching niche is imperative if you want to create and sustain a coaching business. Here are seven more reasons why it is neccessary.
- A niched coaching business will be easier to start because you can market a specific area of a marketplace instead of all of it which makes it easier to identify who your ideal client is.
- Your marketing costs will be less because you will be targetting a segment of an audience not all of it.
- You will be able to grow your niche coaching business more quickly because you are serving one niche only.
- You will gain authority quickly, being known as the ‘go-to’ person for that subject.
- You can create niche products to serve your audience.
- You reduce your competition which will increase your growth.
- You are more visible in the marketplace.
What do Coaches do?
Coaches often work with an individual on a one to one basis or in groups. Online coaching is often achieved with a designated coaching program that has been created by the coach themselves, often based around a subject that they know a lot about or are experts/specialists in. An online program is like an online course with the marked difference that an online coaching program often includes a more supportive framework, to assist and supervise students. This can be online meetings, virtual meet-ups and face-to-face seminars.
What is the difference between coaching and teaching?
The difference between teaching and coaching is that teachers teach and students repeat the process until the learned method or subject has been learned. Teaching tends to be more prescriptive than coaching.
Coaching is a supportive process. The objective of a coach, is to lead their student to make informed decisions about certain issues within a suitable framework, supported with resources, tools and guidance. Coaching is focussed more on helping the student grow and develop skills themselves into being confident and competent in the subject area that they are being coached in.
How much can you earn coaching?
Coaches can earn as little or as much as they like today, especially with online coaching. The Income a coach can earn will depend on the coaching business structure they choose, and the coaching products they choose to include in their coaching business.
For example, most online coaches have coaching programs that they offer as either a one-time payment of via membership. In addition to that, coaches also offer private one-to-one sessions. These often tend to be more expensive, but lots of people are willing to pay for private coaching today if it is going to help them achieve their goals.
Online coaches can also sell various digital products such as workbooks and ebooks as a means of passive income, funneling, and marketing.
How to start making money as soon as possible as a coach?
To make money as soon as possible open a Social media store, Stan Store, like this one here.
Create one to one package and link that to your Google calendar. You could also create a low-cost digital product and charge a small amount of money for it, like this one here. This will give people a good idea of what sort of a coach you are, what type of coaching you do and your current available coaching offers.
You can learn more about creating and selling a digital product to support your new coaching business by reading this post here.
The Steps for starting a Niched coaching business
If you have decided that online coaching is for you, before you invest time and energy in creating an online program, it is a good idea to test the waters and do some market research.
Use our FREE niche coaching finder tool here
Define your coaching niche
If you don’t know what niche coaching business you want to create, use our free Niche coaching finder and also get our Teacherpreneurs Digital Business Plan Blueprint. This will help you pinpoint exactly your niche industry and take you through the exact steps to start your online coaching business as well as helping you to plan and create your first digital product.
Name your Coaching business
Whether or not you think you are ready or not, just start by choosing a name for your coaching business. And part of that is realizing your coaching brand and that starts with your domain name. But before you purchase a domain name, check that that same name is available as social media handles and then check out the next point.
Check that your Coaching business name is not trademarked.
Oh yes, coaching is not new and many people have trademarked their coaching programs or coaching business names, so make sure you have checked both the US trademark office as well as the UK one.
Buy a domain name that relates to your chosen Coaching business name.
Whilst this may seem obvious, you should also check how your coaching business name will be affected by Search Engine Optimisation. If you can choose a domain name that also contains relevant search engine optimization to your niche, you will start your coaching business with an unfair advantage.
Create a low-cost digital product to start marketing your coaching business.
This is the ideal way to test your market, get feedback from your coaching niche as well as a way to build and develop your audience whilst earning some income.
Start marketing your coaching business.
Once you have created a digital product and you have your Social Media Stan Store up you can start to market on Social Media platforms such as Tik Tok, Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram.
Once you have started your marketing your coaching business and you start together emails and paying students, it is time to scale up with automated emails, funnels, lead pages and potentially a membership program.
Unless you are a wizz coder this can be very expensive and time-consuming so we recommend Kartra for this, which is an all-in-one digital marketing system. We use it ourselves and it is currently unbeatable on price.
Recommended Reading:
Make Money Online: Our top Free guides – Download now
Save Money: Recommended Kit for Online business owners
Make Money with Digital Educational products: For every niche
How to choose the right name for your Online Digital Store
How to use Tik Tok to make Digital Online sales
What software do Online Coaches use to create their online coaching business?