I Tried 21 Ways to Get Coaching Clients, These Are the Best

I've been running my coaching business for over 10 years, and during that time, I've tried every strategy under the sun to get clients. I've tried Facebook ads, I've tried webinar funnels, I've tried blogging. And I'll tell you this, most of the strategies didn't work. They just pissed me off. But a few of them made me a lot of money. In fact, they made me over one and a half million dollars. One million of that was before I turned 30. If you're wondering who is this guy in this weird furry jacket? This is my therapy jacket. Thank you very much. My name is Greg Faxson, and in this video, I'm going to go through the 21 strategies, tried to get coaching clients, which one worked, which ones didn't work, and I'm going to rank them on a list for you so that you can skip all of the heartache and the struggle that I had. So let's start with this posting to social media. I think social media can be really good, really valuable, especially when you start out and you don't have an email list, you don't have an audience. Your audience is the warm network that you've built over the years. Your colleagues, your friends, all of those people. And starting out by putting a post out, launching your business, saying, hey, I'm looking for clients in this niche can get you your first batch of clients. There's also folks that I've worked with and clients I've had who have made social media work very well for them. For example, Ryan Roy, one of my clients, has used primarily Instagram, and He's made over $100,000 per month and a million dollars a year. So social media can absolutely work. I would put it in proceed with caution. For me, personally, I don't enjoy using social media. So I went off of it in 2020. I quit it altogether. And I was actually relying on a strategy that we're going to talk about in a second instead of social media, but starting with social media and really evaluating what. Which are the platforms that I enjoy using and choosing one to really get good at. Next is interviewing others for a podcast. So I'm going to put this in waste of time. You know, it's not that people don't have very successful interview podcasts, but interviewing others. The thing about that is you still have to build that audience. It's not necessarily going to get you a lot of, you know, new clients new awareness, because podcasts aren't searchable. In the same way, something like Blogging is, and it doesn't have the same algorithm behind it like YouTube. So it's harder for your interviews to be found compared to getting interviewed on other people's podcasts where you're getting in front of a new audience that they've already built. So I really like getting interviewed on podcasts. I'm going to put that in Moneymaker. But interviewing others, you know, even when I got the opportunity to interview Seth Godin, when I started out for my podcast and it got a bunch of views on YouTube, but it didn't really send me a lot of clients. And one of the reasons I think is because you're really showcasing someone else's expertise. And yes, you get some credibility by association, but it's not the same thing as these strategies that make you the expert and give you that authority, which is getting interviewed on podcasts. And that's why there's such a big difference between these two. You're getting in front of someone else's audience and you're positioned as the authority. How about low end offerings? Okay, so let's say you want to do a course or a class for $100 to $1,000. These are not higher end one on one clients you're working with or group coaching clients, but you can upsell those folks into coaching. I really like low end offerings as a way to get higher end clients, but I'm going to put it in proceed with caution. And that's because it can take quite a bit to actually build and then launch those lower end offerings. And it's a different skill set than what you're used to doing. For selling higher end coaching, you're not doing it on the phone. Typically you're doing it on sales page with emails. And you need a big enough audience to actually get enough people to make that worth your time. But if you do it right, then those folks are getting to interact with you, especially if you do your course live. And those people are sort of prime candidates to move up to your one on one coaching. I'm going to put that in proceed with caution. What about paid ads? I've run some paid ads over the years. When I left social media, I stopped running paid ads as well. I could never really make it work for us in terms of getting cold people who'd never heard of me to go become clients in a way that was profitable. Obviously you can get clients from it, you can get course students from it, but you have to make sure that you're spending less than you're actually making on the back end. You have to be very diligent about tracking those stats. If you're not naturally analytic and wanting to test and spend money to find the ads that work, it's gonna be an uphill battle and you're probably gonna lose. I will say I was able to make paid ads work when it came to targeting people who are already aware of me. For example, people on my email list and then just having another place for me to be more visible to them and create this sense that I'm sort of everywhere. Have those people book a strategy session or a free consult with me. So it worked to nurture the audience I already had, but not as well for getting in front of cold audiences. That said, I've had clients who have made this work really well. So I'm going to put it in. Proceed with caution. You know, you could lose a little bit of money while you're figuring this out. You do have to know what you're doing doing. It's very hard to just outsource it to an agency if you don't know what you're doing. I did that at first. I just hired an ads person and I didn't understand what was going on. So in order for me to make it work even a little bit, I had to go back and learn about it and run ads myself and then outsource the ads. How about attending paid events? I like this. Okay, so these are, you know, higher end, you know, in person mastermind events or retreats or you know, networking events, conferences. I like paid events because people have already proven that they're willing to spend money to solve this problem. They're already pre qualified and oftentimes at the paid events, those people might want some one on one support afterwards. So you can meet people and then you can follow up, invite them to a consult. So I love paid events. This is a money maker. I attended a paid event called Camp glp. They don't run it anymore. At the beginning of my business it went on for five years and it was a summer camp for adults. It was held at an actual boys summer camp the week or two after the camp closed down. And I did the math one year and I had made over $100,000 worth of you coaching during just from that event, just from the people I met at that event. So attending free events though is kind of a waste of time. So around the same time I was going to free meetups and stuff when I lived in Washington D.C. and I found that everyone there was also just trying to get clients and it was just a very networky feel. Instead of the paid events which I was going to because I wanted to go to the event and then getting clients was a bonus. So I don't think that free events meetups are, you can absolutely meet clients there, but in general they're usually not the best use of your time because those folks aren't necessarily as pre qualified as they are for the paid events. What about networking online? The thing about networking online is it's very similar to the in person networking. If you are doing a paid, you know, networking event, for example, if there's a group or there's a community that's affiliated with a paid offering, those people can actually make great clients. Especially if they're in again like a scaled offering a group where they're not getting as much personal support and you can help them out in the forum or in the group and they can ultimately hire you. So I've gotten clients this way. But you do have to proceed with caution because some of the free groups you, you know, you're not going to get clients doing them. You can waste a lot of time just answering questions or trying to reach out to people where they're just not the best audience for you to get clients from. How about business cards? Business cards are a waste of time. Even if you go to paid events and get clients there, it's better to just exchange contact information. Or even better, if you meet someone who's a good potential client, just say, hey, let's have a conversation next week. Let's get you into my calendar versus a more passive approach with a business card. I put this here because when everyone starts, they always get the fancy business cards. I got these super fancy business cards and like they're, you know, stashed away somewhere in my closet. I don't really use them. I don't even bring them when I go to live events because they don't work as well as just actually following up with the person, following them on social media, sending them an email, getting an appointment booked on the calendar. Okay, hosting live events. This is a tricky one. So I hosted a live event in Washington D.C. it was about $1,000 per ticket and I booked the space at this fancy hotel. I got the room block where you have to commit to, you know, people booking a certain number of rooms who attend your event. I hired an event manage. It was quite expensive to put on, but it was sort of an ego thing. It was my dream to kind of have this event that I put together. People flew out to and then my thought was, well, if I can get some high end clients on the back end, it'll be worth it. We also filmed the event and I now offer it as a course. So I was able to make some of the money back for that. But here's what I would say. Hosting live events is absolutely a proceed with caution. For me, I would say the goal is really to break even on the live event and then to try to make money on the back end with clients. And when I put that event on, I did get high end clients on the back end. And I would say the event ended up paying for itself. But here's the thing, it's so much work to market that event. It was so much harder to get people to buy a, you know, $800 ticket to fly out to D.C. and put it on their calendar. It was so much harder to do that than just to get like a $12,000, $15,000 one on one client. So I would have been better off just marketing, you know, the service that I wanted clients for. And there's a lot of logistics that go with it. Next one is cold outreach. Okay, so cold outreach is just reaching out to people who don't know who you are and trying to get them onto calls. This is actually how I found my video editor who's editing this and you know, it can work for him. He sent a little loom video where he was recording and giving some suggestions on my YouTube channel and we hopped on a call. I could never get called out for each torque, especially if it was like on social media with people who didn't know me. You've probably, if you're on LinkedIn, gotten like spanned with lots of DMS from people trying to sell you stuff. It's a very challenging uphill battle. But if you're willing to do the the numbers and get the reps in and get the volume in and reach out to a hundred people, maybe just to get one call, it can work for you. That's just not my strength. For me, it's a waste of time. Never got a client from cold outreach repeat clients. So this would be, for example, reaching out to a past client, checking in with them, and then re enrolling them. This can work really, really well. This is a money maker. Even just not losing the client in the first place, doing a good enough job where clients stay with you longer. Right. Everyone is always talking about getting more leads for their coaching business, but very few people talk about never losing the client in the first place. It's much easier if you just get your six or seven clients and they stay with you for life and you're done marketing right now, that's an extreme example. But repeat clients, whether you're re enrolling them at the end of your package or you're coming back to them after they've already paused or canceled and bring them back on six months a year later, that is a habit you should absolutely get into. Just sending people an email and saying, hey, just thought of you today. How have you been since, you know, whatever personal detail you can insert and then once they reply, inviting them to hop on a call. YouTube. So this is a new strategy for me within the last six to 12 months. I'm finding it really challenging. It hasn't been my main strategy in the past. I would say proceed with caution. There's a lot that goes into it in terms of, you know, making compelling thumbnails and in terms of having a really tight script and tight edit and then trying to get people off of YouTube and onto your website to download your lead magneto book a call where they don't really want you to leave the platform. Right. YouTube is engineered so people just click on the next video. So YouTube's definitely challenging. I've used it to grow my list. I'm not sure if it's really led to clients at this point. We're still in a bit of a trial phase, but I wouldn't say it's a waste of time because I know of a lot of people who get high end clients on YouTube. How about guest blogging or PR? Years ago, Forbes launched this membership called the Forbes Coaches Council. And I was invited to that. And it was basically they would have different topics they were writing articles about and they would go to you with a quote so that you could get featured on that article on Forbes. And I thought, okay, this sounds good. At the very least I can put the little Forbes badge on my website for credibility. You know, I did it for about six months and it was interesting. I don't think I ever got any clients from it. I didn't even really get website traffic from it. Same thing with guest blogging. Early on I would write posts for other people's sites thinking, well, those people have the audience similar to podcasts. Why don't I just go and tap into that audience? For some reason, guest blogging just never worked very well for me compared to blogging on my own site. So my feeling is if you're going to get featured somewhere, get featured it on your home base when possible. If you're going to put all the work into creating a great article. And that brings us to our next one, which is SEO. So I'm going to put guest blogging and waste of time. It was a waste of time for me, obviously. I'm sure people make PR work. So the next one is SEO blogging. This is a moneymaker. It's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. I know this because I ran a course teaching people my strategy. You know, it's very challenging to teach because there's a lot to it. So this is blogging on your own website, but not just writing articles that no one sees, but actually doing some, some keyword research up front to figure out what are my ideal clients searching for. And then let's make that the topic of the article. Over the years, this has brought me lots of clients. It's grown my email list. It's helped me launch courses with the audience I've created. So highly recommend SEO blogging if you like writing and if you're going to do the work to figure it out. SEO is going to be changing a lot in the next few years. So I'm keeping my eye on that with AI and all of that. But so far it's still been working very, very well. Okay. Guest workshops and speaking. So this would be not holding a workshop yourself, but for example, with a referral partner, someone who has a similar AUD going and being an expert in their paid group, ideally, or their free audience and speaking is a similar thing going and being the speaker at the live event. This is a moneymaker. This is better than attending paid events because you're actually featured as an expert there. I got to tell you, if there's one thing that you just can almost guarantee you'll get clients from if you do a good job, it's going into someone's paid membership or group coaching program or community and talking about the thing that you're best at. And it's complimentary to the leader that brought you in and then inviting people to consult. Guest workshops and speaking can work really well hosting workshops. So this is very different because with guest workshops and speaking, they're assembling the audience for you. You're getting in front of new people. The problem with hosting webinars and workshops is you gotta do the work to actually fill the seats online or in person, all the work that that requires. Sometimes you may as well just bring people into just a strategy session or a consult, which is similar to hosting live events. Right? So if you're hosting a Webinar. I would say that this can work quite well. Converting the people who already know about you into clients. They just need a little bit more nurturing. But you got to be aware that you still need to then go fill the webinar. It's a lot of work to put those webinars together and then you got to market them. So can absolutely get you clients. It's gotten me clients over the years, but proceed with caution. How about writing a book? So years ago I wrote a book, I self published it. It's gotten quite good reviews. It's called Don't Let the Fear Win and I have gotten clients from it, but not in the way that you would expect. A lot of people write a book thinking that that will get them in front of new people, that will get them new awareness, or at the top of the funnel. That book will be helpful and it can be if leverage paid ads or you have a good strategy where you're sending people the free book and sort of using it as a business card. For me, I found that the book is better as a nurturing strategy. So people who are already on my list who are aware of me, or even better folks that I'm having a consult with and they're considering becoming a long term high end client, I can send them the book and that helps nurture and move them down the funnel. So unless you're writing a best selling book that's conventionally published and it pops off, obviously if you have one of those books you might just have clients for life and be good to go. But that's not necessarily something you can rely on as a strategy. So I'm putting writing a book as proceed with caution. How about email marketing? Okay, is email marketing dead? You know, with social media and stuff like that? I really don't think that it is. Email marketing has been one of the best ways that I've gotten coaching clients. Especially when I went off social media, my email list became so much more important. I love being able to get in front of people a list that I own, it's not owned by another platform and be able to nurture them with free content like this, but also be able to say, hey, I've got a spot that just opened up on my roster and be able to enroll people or launch a lower end thing, launch a course and have a group of people ready to rock who already know me. So email marketing is definitely a skill to learn. It's absolutely a moneymaker and it pairs really well with SEO blogging, which is what Gets traffic to the website in the first place. So for me, I have a blog, and then I typically have a lead magnet, something free the person can download that's related to the topic of the blog to get on my list, and then I can invite them to consults or to courses from there. All right. Another great thing to use with email marketing is case stuff. So when a client finishes up and as a success story, interviewing them, writing up a case study of the results they got, this becomes your best marketing, because this is the social proof of someone else saying, you know, go work with this person. I got good results. Here's where I was at the beginning, what I was struggling with. Here's what we worked on, and then here's the results I got. So case studies pair really well with email marketing. When you want to invite people to a free consult, you can send the case study out and then say, hey, if you want to be my next success story, go book a call. And then referrals or warm outreach. Okay, so this is our last one. Referrals are interesting because obviously, if you're doing a good job with your coaching, people are getting a ton of value relative to what they pay. They should refer other people to you. Unless it's a niche that's a very private niche. So you're going to get some referrals, and the better job you do, the more referrals you'll get. But there's a way where it can feel a bit out of your control with the clients that work with you. You can ask for referrals, you can do all of that. But I found that it's easier to sort of let the referrals take care of themselves. Naturally. Now, with partnerships, you know, with other people who can send clients your way, this is a really great strategy. So not to people you work with, but the other people who are your colleagues and building those relationships, especially by sending them business, by sending them referrals that can work really well. For example, I know a website designer who works specifically with coaches, and I'm often sending her clients, and I actually get a cut when she gets a client. So it incentivizes me to do it, and then she sends me folks as well. So referral partnerships can work really well and warm outreach right to your network to stay top of mind with those referral partners. This is absolutely a moneymaker, and this is our list. Okay, so under moneymakers, we got all these. We got some proceed with cautions, and we got a few that, for me were a waste of time. Remember, all of these strategies are things that either worked or didn't work for me. You might have more or less success with them, and it partially depends on your personality. So I built this quiz called the Coaching Archetype Quiz, and it goes through the three different types of coaches, the types of strength profiles, and personality. And depending on which one you are, that will determine how well different strength strategies work for you. So you can go through this quiz. I'll put a link in the comments, and it takes about 60 seconds. At the end, it's going to spit out strategies that are going to work better for you, and that way we can personalize the information that you learned in this video. So go click the link in the description and then you can dive into that quiz. And if you want to dive deeper into my personal strategy and learn how I use blogging and things like that to generate over a million dollars without using social media, then go click on this video and I go through each step of my personal funnel so that you can learn a little bit more about what that looks like. Go watch that now.