For centuries, coaching has shaped people’s personal and professional growth worldwide. Today, online coaching emerges as a modern iteration of this age-old practice, and it’s poised for unprecedented growth. Allied Market Research projects that the online coaching industry will reach an impressive $250.7 billion by 2032—a valuation 17 times larger than its size in 2022.
With the coaching industry at the cusp of exponential growth, there’s never been a better time to become an online coach. In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of starting an online coaching business in just 6 easy steps, helping you to set a firm foundation for coaching success. Let’s get started!
Skip ahead:
- Why become an online coach?
- What qualifications do I need to become an online coach?
- How to Become an Online Coach in 6 Steps
- Get started today
Why become an online coach?
Creating, launching, and growing your own online coaching business is no small task. But before diving into the step-by-step process of doing exactly that, let’s look at what makes online coaching so rewarding. Here are a few benefits:
- Professional autonomy – As an online coach, you control every facet of your business. From your training programs to how you manage clients, your business reflects your own coaching philosophy.
- Flexibility – Online coaching allows you to set your own schedule, working as much or as little as you’d like. As a bonus, you can work from anywhere in the world.
- Global reach – While you can work from anywhere, coaching online also means your clients can engage with you from anywhere, giving you access to clients across the globe.
- Cost-effectiveness – Unlike in-person coaches, online coaches aren’t restricted by the size of their gym, leases, insurance, and other overhead.
- Scalability – You can sell digital products like ebooks, guides, webinars, and courses without additional work. And because things like gym size don’t restrict your business, the sky’s the limit.
What qualifications do I need to become an online coach?
Qualifications and skills required for online coaching vary significantly from niche to niche. Some online coaches won’t need special qualifications or certifications so they can rely entirely on their experience and passion. Others will need advanced education and certifications.
For example, a career coach is someone who helps others achieve specific goals in their career. These coaches can help with milestones like finding a job, earning a promotion, or navigating a transition. In most cases, experience and credibility are more than enough to start as a career coach.
In contrast, a marriage counselor will require at least a bachelor’s degree and a License for Marriage and Family Therapists (LMFT).
Situated between career and marriage coaches are online fitness coaches. Online fitness coaches can get started with nothing more than experience in fitness and a passion for coaching. Still, certifications and degrees may help them market their services and establish credibility.
Regardless of your niche, all online coaches will require a working knowledge of how to create and grow their online business—thankfully, this article will take you a long way.
How to Become an Online Coach in 6 Steps
Embarking on your journey to become an online coach is a journey we’ve boiled down to six simple steps. Here they are:
The first step in becoming an online coach is defining your niche. And chances are, you already know what this is. For example, a certified nutritionist would most likely choose nutrition as their niche. However, there’s always an opportunity to define your target audience even more.
Defining your target audience
Defining your target audience will impact every decision you make for your business moving forward. The goal is to design a product or service for your client rather than the other way around. (I.e., create a product for your client, don’t find a client for your product.)
To define your own audience, consider their demographics. These include:
- Age
- Income
- Gender
- Sexuality
- Relationship status
- Educational background
- Career stage
- Field or industry
- Geographical location
Start gathering information on your target audience by consulting your current clients or analyzing the audience of your competitors. Then, conduct even more research to understand their challenges and pain points.
Here are some questions you can ask to understand your target audience’s needs better:
- What do you hope to accomplish by seeking an online coach?
- What specific challenges are you currently facing in your personal/professional life?
- Have you tried to address these challenges before? And if so, how?
- What are the biggest challenges preventing you from reaching your goals?
- What kind of support would be most helpful in your life right now?
- What are your expectations from the coaching process?
- What concerns do you have about taking on an online coach?
By answering these questions, you can better understand your client’s pain points and tailor your products or services to fit their needs.
Creating your coaching business model
With your niche and target audience defined, it’s time to complete your coaching business model. Your model will include key partners, activities and resources, customer relationships, customer segments, channels, revenue streams, cost structure, and your value proposition.
While that probably sounds overwhelming, we walk you through it step-by-step in our how-to guide on designing your coaching business model. Check that out before moving on to step 2.
You may have noticed we didn’t mention branding, color palettes, or logos in Step 1. That’s because, while these things are a part of your business, they actually aren’t critical to your foundation.
But, as you begin to create online courses, ebooks, and emails (which happens in Step 3), having an established list of tools, a defined brand, and a pricing structure is essential. So, let’s start with your tools.
Select a coaching platform
The obvious first decision in setting up your online coaching business is selecting a coaching platform.
To choose a platform that fits your business, you must first determine what kind of content you’ll offer. Will you offer synchronous 1-on-1 coaching or group sessions? Will email and social media marketing play a role in your business? And will you offer courses or downloadable content in addition to or instead of 1-on-1 coaching?
The best online coaching platforms will cover all of your needs, while others will only focus on aspects like online courses or client management. A platform like Thinkific will allow you to create courses, enroll individuals or groups, and meet with clients one-on-one, in a group setting, or not at all.
Even if you don’t plan on providing downloadable workbooks or building an exclusive community, we recommend finding a platform to do it all. So when you eventually grow your business, you aren’t limited by the abilities of your platform.
Establish your pricing model
Next, you’ll need to consider pricing. Thankfully, you’ve actually already done most of the research and thinking for this step. To begin defining your prices, consult your coaching business model. (If you didn’t complete your business model template at the end of Step 1, do that now.)
Taking your key resources, key partners, and cost structure, determine how much revenue you need to generate from your product or service to break even. Then, compare that to the market rate for your product or service.
For example, say your online course took 40 hours to create. Billed at $20 per hour, the cost of that course is roughly $800 (solely based on labor). This means you could sell one course at $800, eight courses at $100, or even 16 courses at $50 to break even.
Consider your competitor’s pricing as you determine the final price. If your competitor offers a similar course for only $50, entering that market at $400 may set you up for failure. Aim to remain competitive while ideally earning a profit.
Once you’ve followed this process for one product or service, do it for the rest of your offerings until you have a full breakdown of pricing for everything you offer.
Design your brand
As the final step in setting up your online coaching business, it’s time to design your brand. Here, you can create a logo, select your fonts, and pick your brand’s colors. The goal is to create a brand kit you can consult when making digital resources. This will help you maintain consistency from platform to platform and resource to resource, establishing a solid brand identity for your clients.
Here’s what you should consider as you design your brand:
- Mission and values: Write your brand’s mission statement and core values.
- Logo design: Your logo is often the first visual people see from your business. As an online coach, it needs to reflect your niche, be memorable, and reflect the overall feel of your brand.
- Color Palette: More than just a set of colors, your palette has to reflect the feel of your brand and be functional. This means it needs to work in digital and physical environments and allow for visual contrast.
- Typography: Choose fonts that are visually appealing and functional. And remember, they’ll need to work on desktop and mobile devices.
- Brand voice and messaging: Define a consistent brand voice. This describes how you’ll communicate, whether it’s in a blog post, email, or Instagram post. Will you be business formal or casual and conversational? Humorous or straightforward?
It’s finally time to start creating your digital content! This third step in starting an online coaching business is the culmination of all the hard work you’ve already put in. As you create content, you’ll need to have your business model, tools, pricing model, and brand kit on standby.
Like we’ve discussed, online content can include ebooks, webinars, YouTube videos, emails, online courses, cohort programs, 1-on-1 training programs, and much more. And while we can’t walk you through how to create each of these, we can give you five tips that will apply for most content.
Tip 1. Set clear objectives
Think back to when you first defined your audience. Your goal was to put them at the center of your business. Now that it’s time to create content, you must focus on their wants and needs.
Let’s consider the objectives of your digital content. Say you’re an online fitness coach looking to help busy single moms train for a 5K. Their goal of completing a 5K becomes your primary objective. Knowing this allows you to strategically design a program that takes them from their starting point to accomplishing their goal.
Here’s another example.
Khalid Ismail’s academy caters to martial arts enthusiasts of any skill level. Focusing on his Kickboxing Fundamentals course, we see a clear objective: to bring a novice in kickboxing to proficiency.
Khalid achieves this by structuring the course into well-defined units, each focusing on a category of kickboxing maneuvers. This approach keeps the course goal-oriented, but it also helps him and his students track their progress as they learn.
Tip 2. Include interactive content
Online coaches regularly struggle with student completion and progress. Low completion and stalled progress rates can occur for many reasons, but they ultimately indicate that students are less likely to return or refer others to your content.
Including interactive content is an excellent way to both engage students and track their progress. Consider adding elements like games, interactive quizzes, group discussions, forums, and journal entries to your online coaching program.
If your platform has limitations, then you can also consider downloadable elements like journal pages, workbooks, diagrams, charts, and other visual exercises. These will help get your clients actively engaged with the learning process.
Tip 3. Use multiple forms of media
Along with interactive content, using multiple forms of media is another must-have as an online coach. Multimedia includes text, images, videos, and audio.
At its core, a multimedia approach is highly accessible. Students of all abilities and preferences should be able to access your content in a way that suits their needs.
Additionally, a multimedia approach is more engaging. No one wants to read huge columns of text on performing an unassisted squat in the gym. So, while text may be helpful, your clients will want a mix of text, photos, and videos.
Tip 4. Develop actionable content
“Actionable content” is a huge buzzword, and chances are you’ve already encountered it. Actionable content refers to content that provides information and shows the audience how to apply that knowledge.
Let’s use this tip as an example of actionable content. Non-actionable content would stop at the last paragraph. But to be actionable, it needs to go beyond a simple definition or explanation. You, the reader, need to understand how to apply this information in your own life.
The first step in doing this is creating goal-oriented material. You’re already ahead of the game because the first step in creating your content was creating objectives.
Using your learning objectives to drive goal-oriented material, follow these tips to make your content truly actionable:
- Create step-by-step guidance: Break complex or lengthy processes into smaller, manageable chunks. Those chunks can be as small as a short paragraph or as long as multiple courses in a course bundle.
- Refer to real-life examples or case studies: These make it easy to “show” rather than “tell,” by giving your clients a practical example of what it looks like to apply your instruction to their own lives.
- Incorporate interactive elements: Elements like quizzes and workbooks require active participation and reinforce student learning.
- Use measurable outcomes: While using measurable outcomes won’t make your content actionable on its own, it will help ensure your clients can apply their learning. If they achieve the intended outcome, then your content is actionable. If not, then you need to determine where your clients struggled to take theory and make it their reality.
Tip 5. Update content regularly
Science advances, technology changes, and new things happen daily. Featuring old content, outdated trends, or, even worse, inaccurate facts can really hurt your credibility and appearance.
It’s essential to revisit and update your content regularly. Your content should reflect the growth you experience as a living and learning online, human coach.
Set a reminder or mark your calendar to revisit your content at regular intervals, whether quarterly, yearly, or something else. Update things like broken links, old statistics, and outdated examples.
As an online coach, your online presence is your chance to build credibility and create a solid first impression with potential clients.
Establish a social media presence
For many online coaches, social media is where they build most of their following and generate the most awareness for their business.
Determine which platforms your target audience spends time on and focus your efforts there. Social media marketing is a career on its own, so don’t overextend yourself by trying to be on every platform at once.
As you build a following and steady engagement, you can begin to drive your followers toward your website or digital products. Just remember to keep your content focused on value. If you over-focus on your digital products, your followers will see your social content as just another ad in their feed.
Develop a professional website
At some point, all your clients will land on your website. And in 2023, people expect a website to align with your brand and look polished and professional, regardless of your niche.
Like social media, building a website is no small task. So consider outsourcing all or some of the building to experienced professionals. We recommend using platforms like Fiverr and Upwork to find affordable professionals to help.
At a minimum, your website should be secure and feature a user-friendly design. This means it should be easy to navigate from page to page, find menus, load quickly, and function on desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
Utilize SEO
Working in unison with your professional website is an SEO strategy. SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to the process of optimizing content for search engines. This process is threefold: using relevant keywords, creating quality content, and optimizing your website.
- Keywords are words or phrases users type in search engines to find digital content. For example, “become an online coach” is the primary keyword for this blog post. Our goal is for this article to show up when people search for that unique phrase.
- Content must be high-quality. Search engines like Google are a business, and they depend on searchers returning to their engine—it’s how they make money. To deliver the best search results possible, search engines will prioritize high-quality content because this content is more likely to help the search accomplish their goals—whether they’re trying to lose weight, fix their relationship, or learn to paint.
- Your website should be fast and responsive. Searchers want fast, reliable results when they’re browsing the web. This means secure websites that load quickly and provide a great user experience will rank higher in search results than websites that don’t.
Now that you’ve created your online content and started to build your online presence, you’ll need to start connecting with clients. As an online coach and creator, this means connecting with people online.
When communicating online, it’s essential to be clear and concise while maintaining a friendly and approachable tone. Unlike communicating with your friends or even current clients, potential online clients don’t know anything about you. Without things like facial expressions, verbal tone, and volume, it can take some practice to find a way to communicate with clients in a way that strikes a balance between authentic or unique and professional.
While text-based communication is unavoidable, you can explore other communication alternatives , like video calls and customized video messages, to connect with your clients. Establishing these initial connections lays the groundwork for building longer-term relationships, crucial for the sustained success of your coaching business.
Maintaining long-term client connections
Maintaining long-term client relationships is important for three reasons:
- The customer acquisition costs (CAC) for new clients is 5 to 25 times higher than retaining old clients.
- Happy clients are more likely to tell their friends and family about your services, bringing you more referrals. In turn, those referrals are four times more likely to refer even more people to your brand. This lowers CAC and increases your credibility.
- High retention rates indicate a successful product or service.
Understanding these sets the stage for the next crucial phase—actively engaging in strategies that nurture these relationships.
The first step in maintaining long-term client connections is to ensure you deliver a product or service that fits their needs and helps them accomplish their goals. If you’ve done that, you can focus on strategies like progress reviews and feedback loops to keep your clients happy.
Progress reviews may be a part of your “measurable objectives” and can include things like quizzes or weekly checkpoints with your clients. Feedback loops, on the other hand, are often surveys or reports clients fill out that directly relate to their satisfaction with your offering.
Used together, reviews and feedback loops can help you determine the strength of your client relationships and highlight areas for improvement.
The final step in learning how to become an online coach is measuring and improving as you grow—this step, we think, is the easiest of them all.
Here are some metrics you should consider gathering:
Quantitative
- Revenue and profit
- Attendance rates
- Website and social media analytics
- Course completion
- Course engagement
- Client acquisition cost
Qualitative
- Client satisfaction
- Testimonials and reviews
- Referrals
- Client goal achievement
- Personal satisfaction
Gathering these metrics will help you understand where your business stands and where you need to focus for improvement. The next step is to take action and actually revise, pivot, or change your offering. Here are some examples of how you could use these metrics to inform your improvements.
- If you notice a decline in attendance rates, consider adding client check-ins to your program, interactive elements to your online course, or more engaging content.
- If your customer acquisition cost is high with paid search ads but low with social media, you might consider focusing on social media to lower your CAC and increase or maintain your revenue and profit.
Get started today
There you have it! 6 simple steps that will help you take your online coaching business from a daydream to reality. If you haven’t already, it’s time to get started.
With Thinkific, starting an online coaching business has never been easier. Set up your online coaching business using our tried and tested course templates. Create digital products in minutes, for free, with our AI-powered platform. And, integrate with industry-leading tools like MailChimp, Zoom, Google Calendar, ConvertKit, and more, so your email, content, and social media marketing strategies can all work seamlessly with one platform.
Get started for free today, and see how Thinkific’s course creation, marketing, and selling tools will help you grow your business. No tech skills required.
