Make Money as a Coach Online / 5 Ways to Earn Cash as a Coach (Even If You're a Beginner)

Hello, bonjour, Mary here. Let's dive into the first way that you can make money as a coach. And this is something that I have done since literally day one of my coaching business back in 2016. Back then, I started as a life coach, and I didn't want to do things in really what I saw as the traditional way. To be fair, I hadn't had any coach training at that point, and I still haven't, but I saw that other coaches were adopting almost a therapy model where they would meet with someone once a week, and that just didn't sit right with me. I didn't want to coach people like that, so I decided that I would offer unlimited sessions. Unlimited sessions. And at that time I was coaching people on Zoom for whatever the duration was that we were working together, whether it was 1 month or 3 months. I think 3 months was the longest at that time that I would commit to with someone. I said they could have as many calls with me as they wanted on Zoom. All they had to do at that time was send me an email and tell me that they wanted another call and we would set it up. The reason why I decided to do this was, well, there were a few reasons, but the main one was that I didn't want people to be kind of saving everything up for the next call. I figured I'm not a therapist, I'm a coach. I want to be there for someone and I don't wanna have these restrictions around when they speak to me, you know, once a week at this time. That just didn't feel good. And what ended up happening was I had maybe more calls total but fewer minutes. So most of the calls that I would have with people were shorter. They were maybe 15 minutes, sometimes 30 at the most. I could never do an hour-long call. I tried those at various points in my coaching, and I just don't have the bandwidth to focus for that long. So they ended up being more like 15 or 20 minutes each, and they were super productive both when I did life coaching and business coaching. Both. I've done both kinds of coaching and still do off and on. And so I really want to encourage you to think about this type of model for your coaching. One reason that I love it is because it's easy to sell unlimited coaching because It's an amazing word. It's a really powerful word, and people really resonate with it. Second of all, I found that people made more progress and needed me less. So I didn't feel, even though you might think I might feel very kind of bound to my clients, it ended up having the opposite effect. Now, since I started that back in 2016, I have switched the model up a little bit where sometimes I will coach someone only using the free Voxer app. Voxer. That has worked really well. And in that case, I just say you can message me anytime Monday through Friday and I'll respond within one business day. I've done this with both life coaching and business coaching, so it can definitely work for life coaching. People really like that I can leave a voice message for them to listen to. That feels very powerful and very personal. And then when I've done unlimited coaching, not on Voxer. I have changed it to phone calls because I think many of us have screen fatigue, as they call it. And so I have switched over to phone call coaching, still unlimited. I will have them do a homework assignment, and then when they finish the homework assignment, they can message me on Voxer and say, okay, I finished the homework, here's what happened, I'd like another call. So that way they're not just scheduling calls all the time, all the time, all the time. They have some accountability in between and they need to accomplish something. So when it comes to one-to-one coaching, really, you can do this any way you want to. I really love this unlimited model. It has worked very well for me and for my clients. So think about some ways that you might want to incorporate that into your coaching business. Another way you can make money as a coach, and this has worked extraordinarily well for me in my business, is by hosting live group workshops. All of my coaching and all of my workshops and everything has been done online. I've never done anything in person, but live group workshops over a weekend are incredible. Oh my gosh, they're so great. I've done them as a life coach and as a business coach. So it doesn't matter what niche you're in, live group workshops over a weekend are awesome, especially if you are kind of working with them towards a goal. So for example, the way that I would structure this is I would have them do some kind of homework before they got there on Saturday, and then I would host the workshop on Saturday and Sunday for no more than 4 hours with breaks in there. So generally I would work with them for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break. Et cetera, and it depends on the topic, but usually 3 of those total. So that would be 3 hours is plenty of time for me to convey what I need to convey and for them to do the work during the 15-minute breaks. Or sometimes I would do like a half hour of coaching or teaching, allow them to stay on the call for 15 minutes and do some work on their own, and then take a 15-minute break. And then have them come back during the next segment and share what they discovered. I suggest 3 hours Saturday and 3 hours Sunday. And what's so fun about this is that as the weekend progresses, you can teach less and less and less. So I recommend that you do most of the teaching on Saturday and then reserve a lot of Sunday for Q&A. Feedback, extra things that may have come up on Saturday that you didn't get to address. You can address those on Sunday. So it's not an overwhelmingly sort of teachy weekend. It's a lot more about them getting some progress and seeing some strides taken on their part, some steps taken on their part. What's wonderful too about these group workshops over a weekend is that they're a good testing ground to see if it's something you wanted to offer on a larger scale. So maybe you could test it out, your idea, on a weekend workshop and then decide, oh, you know what? I think this would work really well as a 6-week group program or even a 6-month group program or even a membership program. So I always advise people to test an idea in a smaller way like this. And then see how it's received before you jump into offering something super long-term. And please do charge for these weekend workshops because they are really amazing and people love the fact that they can start something on Saturday and by Monday they can feel very, very accomplished. I want to drive that point home about charging for your coaching on every video I do like this because too many coaches aren't charging for what they do and you need to. Another way you can make money as a coach is a little off the wall, but I'm sharing it because I did it myself and it was really awesome. And that was, I have in the past developed two different coach training programs. So not me coaching people, but training people to be coaches. So one training I did had to do with a sort of specialized life coaching that I was working in at the time, and the other training was training people to be accountability coaches. And both went really, really well, especially the accountability coach training. I have thought about bringing that back because it was just so fun and exciting to see people make great strides towards creating a coaching business like that. So there are other ways for you to use your knowledge and ability as a coach to help other people who want to come into this wonderful profession. I've said this for years, but I absolutely love the coaching profession. I want to see its stature elevated, its status elevated in the world, because A coach changed my life, literally changed my life, and you may have had the same kind of experience. So I want you to think outside the box, as they say, and ask yourself, you know, what could I train other people to do as a coach based on my experience at this point as a coach or as someone who has gone through training? If you are new to being a coach you might just think about this over time as you work with people. Is there a specific skill that you see that you have in working with people, uh, working with your clients that is really effective that you could then teach other coaches, for example? Like, are you a superb listener and that's a skill that you could teach other people? So really, you know, let yourself go here in terms of ideas and Imagine yourself being the coach trainer. What could you teach other people to do as coaches? A fourth way that you can bring in some cash as a coach is to teach one-time masterclasses, meaning a class that's maybe 60 to 90 minutes, and then you sell the recordings so that way you have passive income possibilities because you have something that you have created once and you can sell it over and over and over again. One way that I did this that was very effective was I invited people to attend the class for free, and then if they wanted to buy the recordings, they were a lower price before I hosted the live class, and then the price went up after the live class so they could get a presale before I gave the talk. I would tell them what I was going to discuss and they could buy the recording at a lower price. And then afterward I sold the recordings at the more normal price. And what was so fun about this was I was creating products that I could sell multiple times, as I mentioned, but not only that, If you do this as sort of a series on related topics, then you can sell all of the recordings as a bundle for even more money, or you could incorporate them sort of into an online course setup. So what I did with mine was I had the video recording that I sold, I had the audio-only version of the masterclass, I also provided a short document that highlighted the main points that I discussed, and then I had some questions for them to answer. So some thought-provoking things based on what I talked about, and that was what I sold. And it was so easy and so much fun. The way that I did this was I hosted the talks in a free Facebook group, but here is an important point I want to make about that. I used Zoom and connected Zoom into the Facebook group, and I'll tell you why I did that. I learned this lesson. So sometimes Facebook will be weird and it won't properly record if you're just doing it in a Facebook group. This was the strangest thing where one time I didn't do the Zoom thing Fortunately, this wasn't one that I had pre-sold. It was just a free one that I did. But Facebook didn't record it. And it said something like there was a copyright infringement of music, even though there was no music playing in the talk. So my lesson there is use Zoom to stream into Facebook. Zoom will tell you how to do this. It's not difficult. And that way you have a backup recording. And also the Zoom recordings are already divided into a video-only version, and an audio-only version. So I highly recommend trying this out. It's an amazing idea. It's worked great for me. Give it a try. The final idea I have for you today is to sell what I have called a practice space. This is a twist on the traditional group coaching program where what I did was for each of these that I hosted, and I hosted many of them, and they brought in a lot of cash and they were really awesome for the participants. I hosted them as one-off Facebook groups, and over a certain number of days, I would go live in the group using Zoom, as I mentioned before, and I would give a talk, and then I would give a homework assignment that they had to complete inside the group. For example, one of the classes that I hosted in this practice space setup was about being visible. So the assignments had to do with people going live in the group and/or posting a video of themselves talking in the group and receiving feedback. So you could use this in any niche at all. And the beautiful thing about this is that because you set it up as a practice space, people know that it's a safe zone for them. They can literally try anything that they need to try in order to break out of the rut that they're in, no matter what niche you're coaching them in. And you can create a beautiful environment for people to try things that they've never tried before, say things in ways that they haven't said them before. Oh my gosh, this is something that is on my radar to do again, because as I'm talking to you about this, I'm getting excited about potentially offering it again. So I hope that these 5 ways of earning cash as a coach have inspired you. I invite you to subscribe to my channel and click the links in the description for more info. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye for now.