Offering Coaching
Coaching is definitely something you can get started offering. Exactly what you do today will depend on the type of coaching you’re offering, who you’re offering it to, what you're charging, what your specialty is, and many other factors.
At the bare minimum, I recommend you create a welcome packet for your new coaching clients. Maybe create a questionnaire that asks them about themselves and what they expect from you as their coach. Create a document that tells them what they’ll be getting, how to contact you, and exactly what the format of the coaching will be.
You may take today to create some worksheets and checklists to help your clients with whatever it is you're helping them with.
As a coach, you want to be as professional and helpful as possible. Today, you're creating your welcome materials and your intro materials to get things started on the right foot.
These welcome and intro materials should set expectations, so that your future clients will know what they’re signing up for in advance. There’s nothing worse than a client expecting help in one way, and a coach not able to provide it in that expected way.
The great thing about offering coaching is that the bulk of the work comes when your clients ask you questions and in your personal interactions with them. So this is a product you can get started with very quickly, and start earning with very quickly. This is a way to create an offer that can do quite well for you without a lot of work at the start of things.
This can also be a way to create future products very quickly. For example, you might hold webinars or teleseminars where your coaching clients can ask you questions, or you can give the “lesson of the week or month”.
You’ll be recording those sessions, and after they’re done you can use the best of the recordings as a future product or products. Just be sure that if you discuss any client-specific details, or you record a client’s voice, that you get permission to use that in the future. You might even include that provision when you take on new clients, giving them a special price in exchange for their permission to use the recordings for future products.
Creating an Audio Product
An audio program is very simple to create. At this point, you should have created your outline already. Yes, that's right – you're creating an outline even for an audio product.
Once you have your outline, go ahead and download a program like Audacity. Audacity is free software that allows you to record your voice and save it as an MP3 file to deliver to your audience. It really can be as simple as that! An hour or two of recording and you’re done.
But, to make your product high quality, it’s important to be organized. You don't want to just talk about whatever's at the top of your mind because that might not make as much sense or be as valuable to your listeners.
Plan ahead and deliver great content. Just be yourself and let your personality shine while you record. Go through your outline to make sure you’re hitting on all of the important points. You’ll also probably get inspired along the way and might share a spur-of-the-moment anecdote or something like that. That's just fine and it can add a lot of value to a product that’s already great.
You might want to consider recording several different audio files where you talk about different topics or make different points. Each recording can be 30 minutes or an hour long or whatever works for the product you’re creating.
Your product can become even more valuable to your audience if you break it up into different sections so people can pick and choose what to listen to at their convenience instead of just putting it all into one audio file. The choice, of course, is up to you.
After you've created your file or files, you'll zip them up to make them easily deliverable to your buyers. Before you do that, you may want to consider creating a short written guide that goes along with it. You can simply detail what’s contained in each audio or even outline important points for each audio. Always consider what people will find most valuable and helpful.
Creating a Video Product
If you're creating a video product, consider what type of video product you want to create. Maybe you want to record a "talking head" video. This is where you appear on the screen detailing something, talking about something, or demonstrating something.
Or, maybe you want to record a screencast video demonstrating something on your computer screen. Typically, this is done for tutorials and things like that.
Another option is to create a PowerPoint presentation to outline all of your important points. You can then record yourself talking through the presentation as you click through the slides.
There are many different ways to do a great video product. Consider what your audience needs. Create an outline ahead of time, as you would with any other product you would create. Make sure you stay on track and hit on all the most important points in your video.
A video product will take up more digital space than other types of products, so you may want to consider hosting your videos on something like Amazon's S3 servers and/or create a sort of membership people can log into after they purchase your product. You can allow the files to be streamed and/or make them available as a downloadable MP4 file, or whatever works for you.
Try to think of ways you can add value easily. For example, if you create a PowerPoint presentation you record as a video, you might also make the PowerPoint presentation itself available for people to download and reference later on. You can save the slides as PDF files – this adds a lot of value for your audience and takes just seconds to do.
When you're creating a video product in just one day, it's important to think about all the different ways you can add value.
Writing a Kindle Book
Another product you can create is a Kindle book. You might consider doing this for many different reasons. For one thing, self-publishing on Kindle can give you great positioning and authority.
Many people, including potential customers and clients, are extremely impressed when someone has a published book. Many people don't realize how simple it is to publish.
We've already talked about the fact that it's easy to write a report or an ebook in one day if you're prepared ahead of time and break down the mindset barriers. Well, you can simply publish your ebook as a Kindle book – it’s a lot easier than you realize.
Make sure you've researched a popular, profitable topic before you get started. Then, create the outline as we've discussed. From there, go ahead and write your Kindle book. You can type it out on something as simple as Microsoft Word or the free Open Office or Libre Office (the more recent version of Open Office, and also free)—you don’t need anything fancy. When you’re finished, you'll save it as a file you can upload to your KDP dashboard.
By the way, Kindle books don't have to be incredibly long. In fact, there are no minimum word requirements. I tend to make mine between 10,000 and 40,000 words or so – which means they take me longer than one day to write.
But, there's nothing saying you can't target a very specific topic and write a 5,000-word book to publish on Kindle today. In fact, there are many successful books and authors on Kindle who’ve done just that.
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