The life coaching industry is projected to grow to a staggering $1.34 billion by 2022. And when you consider the possibilities of providing coaching online, the opportunity to become an online life coach becomes even more appealing.
And then there’s the fact that when you become an online life coach, you are not only entering a lucrative field but also embarking on a gratifying career. You get to help people crystalize their goals and change their lives, which is one of the best feelings in the world.
But what is online coaching, anyway? And how can you build a successful online life coaching career?
Let’s explore the essentials you need to know about the subject below.
What is Online Coaching?
Online coaching is a type of coaching that is provided through digital tools. Whether it’s a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer, online life coaching simulates the in-person experience through visual means and communication apps that can be just as effective as live coaching.
In fact, with the help of digital learning resources and coaching platforms, coaches that embrace digital technology can enhance their services, providing a more immersive and comprehensive experience.
And as a coach, you also have the opportunity to help many more people. If you implement a practical group coaching framework, you can work with hundreds or even thousands of people at once, creating a lucrative business that would not be virtually possible if you were to work in person only.
The way your typical day as an online life coach looks can be significantly different as well. Instead of having to host people in your office or drive to meet them at various locations, you can handle the entire coaching process from a single place that can even be your home.
You get to use every minute you work more productively, setting up digital tools that serve you and save you time as you grow and improve your business. This way, you can set up a lifestyle that you want, where work revolves around your schedule and not the other way around.
With the pandemic changing people’s habits and allowing more people to embrace digital communication, online coaching is set to become even more popular in the future, making it an excellent time to embrace the digital coaching technology available today.
Best Life Coaching Niches You Can Start Today
Even though online life coaching is one of the most lucrative fields you could enter, success is by no means guaranteed. Making it as a life coach requires commitment, willingness to learn, and the ability to choose a niche that both resonates with you and offers enough opportunities to prosper.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the top life coaching niches you could get started with as soon as today and which look to be on an upward trend.
Career
Figuring out what to strive for in life is one of the hardest decisions a person has to make. In fact, many people struggle with narrowing down the focus of what they should pursue, which can cause a lot of anxiety and frustration.
As a career life coach, you could help people find their path and identify what they want to accomplish.
Wellness at Work
The pandemic has changed how people work forever. Even after it will be over, many companies will have adopted a more flexible approach to work, offering the opportunity to work remotely and at more flexible hours. But while that does come with many benefits, some people have found the transition to come with its own challenges.
And that’s why work wellness coaching is one of the most promising niches you could consider. As a coach, you could help people find a balance between work and their personal life, even when the lines have become blurred and it’s harder to leave work at the office (since the office can be the home).
Relationships
Connecting with others isn’t easy. And that’s especially true when talking about relationships with the people closest to us, such as family, friends, coworkers, or even partners.
People want more fulfilling relationships, and a relationship coach can help them figure out how to become better at connecting with people, move past challenging relationship crises, and come ahead with new skills that help them build stronger and better relationships with those that matter to them.
Health Coaching
There’s never a shortage of demand when it comes to health coaching. People want to be healthy, feel great, and achieve their fitness goals, and a coach can be incredibly valuable for making that happen.
Sure, this niche can be competitive, but if you build a comprehensive online coaching business strategy and identify the type of person you want to help, you can create a loyal following and never run out of new clients that you can work with.
Spirituality
Finally, if you are a spiritual person and feel like you can connect with a deeper purpose in life, perhaps a career in spirituality coaching is the right choice for you.
Everyone is always looking for a spiritual path that’s right for them, and a life coach can be the perfect person to guide them through that journey.
How to Become an Online Life Coach
If you want to become a successful online life coach, you need to have a clear plan of action and treat the career as a business. But the good news is that if you’re willing to put in the work, there’s actually a structured process you can follow that will significantly increase your chances of building a profitable career.
Let’s go over a few of the main steps you’ll need to go through.
Find Your Niche
In the previous section, we went through a few of the online life coach niches that are sure to have plenty of prospective clients for you to work with. Before moving forward with becoming a coach, you’ll need to go through these and other options and really think about which one might suit you best.
The list above is by no means exhaustive, so be sure to do your own research and look into different options before committing. And if you have something you’re passionate about, don’t worry about trends or market size; if you’re a good coach, you will find people to work with.
Choose the Platform
Online coaching offers many advantages, but only if you utilize the right technology to make running successful coaching programs easier.
Luckily, you can utilize an all-in-one coaching platform that provides you with all the tools you could need to manage clients, schedule your time, and scale your coaching business as much as you want.
Important: Choose and Complete a Training Program
The final step that’s essential to mention in this list is online life coach certification. Many coaches are skeptical about credentials since they aren’t always a good reflection of whether someone is a good coach.
However, when you become a life coach, you are not only taking people’s money but their time as well. What’s more, life coaching is very personal, so you must be able to justify that commitment by the client and back it up with the right credentials.
Going through a training program that’s aligned with the type of coach you want to become will ensure you don’t have any blind spots in your knowledge and can effectively help your clients succeed. At the same time, your clients will be more confident working with you when they’ll know you received specific training to do your job.
Build Your Business
The essential part of success as an online life coach is treating it as a business. This is a point that gets repeated often, but many novice coaches don’t have a long-term vision for where their business needs to go, and that can result in them making crucial mistakes in what they focus on.
You need to know where your clients are coming from, what you need to do to increase your online presence, and how you’ll scale your business to increase your revenue. And for any of that to happen, you need to have a clear plan of action.
Set Up a Life Coaching Business Plan
Having a plan can seem scary, especially if you’re more interested in helping people than thinking of your career as a business. But you should consider that if you do have an effective plan, you will be able to take on and help more people in the process, which is something that benefits everyone involved.
What’s more, to stay in the coaching industry, you need to sustain yourself and ensure financial stability. Taking clients on and off is not a practical approach and will make it difficult to quit your regular job.
Here are just some of the things you should do:
- Write down your mission statement and what you want to achieve. This will be the big-picture outlook that will ensure you remain focused and know what the core idea of your life coaching business is.
- Figure out what makes you different. Each coach brings their own unique experiences and knowledge, so you should leverage yours and find the key reasons why people should want to work with you.
- Think about who you want to reach. Another critical aspect of a successful business is knowing who you want to reach. Think about what people could benefit from your coaching the most and try to build a detailed profile.
- Consider how you’ll reach your customers. Whether it’s through social media, public engagements, or direct outreach, you need to have a plan for getting customers.
- Develop a coaching process. When working with clients, you should develop a consistent approach for guiding them from where they are now to where they want to be in every coaching session you lead.
- Map out scaling opportunities. Even if you start with one-on-one coaching, you should have a long-term plan that involves transitioning towards group coaching.
Becoming a successful coach involves more steps than those listed above, but these should make everything else fall into place since they will be the very core of your business you can always fall back on.
Market Your Life Coaching Business and Get a Steady Stream of Clients
Promoting yourself as a life coach is an integral part of the business. Without clients, you won’t have people to work with, which means you won’t have any revenue or means to build a loyal following.
Luckily, there are plenty of effective life coach marketing ideas you can use to become a more prominent figure in your niche and start attracting the right clients.
Once you define your target audience and your unique sales proposition (USP), you should already be on your way to building your own audience. But you should also consider packaging your coaching into a program that’s easier to present, clearly defining how long it will take, what will be involved, and what clients can expect to achieve.
As you develop your brand, you should be seeking out as much personal contact with your clients and prospects as possible. That will allow you to get to know them better, seeing firsthand the most common challenges and objections they have.
This will be an invaluable resource when refining your program and figuring out how to attract only the people you can help the most.
Since a big part of online life coaching is being a public figure people can trust, you should leverage social media and public speaking opportunities as much as possible. This will not only get you in front of more people but will also position you as an authority in the field, allowing you to charge more for your services and leverage that authority into more trust.
Bottom Line
If you want to become an online life coach, now’s an excellent time to get started. The market is growing quickly, as more people discover the powerful benefits that working with a life coach can offer.
However, if you want to succeed long-term, you must take the time to develop a business plan and know precisely what you can offer and where you want to get in the future.
