Content Marketing for Coaches: 4 Places to Post + Bonus

One of the best ways to get more clients is for people to read or watch your content. If they like your approach, they’ll want to learn more about you.  However, this is easier said than done. How can coaches get their content posted in places where their ideal clients will see it?

Of course, any coach can (and most coaches should) publish content on their blog and on social media. These are channels you own, so publishing on them is easy. If you promote your coaching blog and other channels properly, your audience will grow.

However, creating and growing your channels takes time, and most coaches aren’t able to completely fill their roster from them; and even if your schedule is full as a coach, you can still grow.  It makes sense to post your content on other platforms and expand your audience.  

In this article, we look at the best four channels for coaches to post written or video content.

Content Channel for Coaches #1: Social Media Groups

Posting on social media doesn’t have to mean just posting on your own page.  Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook have groups and communities organized around specific interest groups; Stacy Caprio of Stacy Caprio Inc. recommends, “publishing your content in relevant Facebook groups that already have an audience”.

Look for groups centered around your ideal client. For example, if you specialize in coaching women returning to the workforce after maternity leave, look into maternity groups or ones focused on women with very small children.  

While it’s also a great idea to join coaching groups and network within your industry (which we discuss in section #4 below) those groups will probably not directly produce your ideal clients. Find your target client where he or she is.

What makes these groups even more valuable is that not only are they filled with your ideal clients, but also that these potential clients are more likely to purchase coaching services. After all, as Kyle Elliott of Kyle Elliott Consulting explains, “users join these groups with the purpose of developing themselves.”    

Moreover, the nature of social media platforms make it easy for someone who likes your content to make a couple of clicks and follow you personally. Participating in groups helps you build your own audience.

One word of caution: Most groups on social media do not permit aggressive marketing. Post content, engage in discussions, answer questions and let your work speak for yourself.

Content Channel for Coaches #2: Non-Traditional Social Media

Most coaches on social media focus primarily on LinkedIn and Facebook, for good reasons.  The platforms are massive, full of target clients, and provide many valuable tools for distributing your content.

In contrast, why would any serious coach be posting on Tiktok - the platform best known for teenagers showing off their dance moves?

While most Tiktok users may not be ideal coaching clients, it has a powerful content selection algorithm and enough adults to be a lucrative channel for some coaches. Brian Smith of OutsideHow explains:

Tiktok is an excellent content distribution platform where you don't need to care about getting an audience. You only need to focus on creating quality short videos. Its algorithm will automatically recommend your content to relevant people. If they like it, the platform will recommend your content to more people.

Dancing teens may not need your services, but with some trial and experimentation, Tiktok will help you find those users who do.

Another non-traditional site that can be valuable for many coaches is Quora. You can’t easily publish whole articles there, but you can answer questions. Sometimes your answers can use excerpts from your best (written) content. People who are impressed with your answers will look you up; make sure you have a signature that makes this easy to do. Quora is also very well indexed by search engines so your answers on specific topics can rank well in Google searches.

In addition, Quora is a very useful tool for learning what questions are concerning your ideal client and how they phrase them.  To this end, Sarah Colley of The Write Destination recommends that coaches looking for content ideas “search Quora as well as Google ‘people also search’” for content ideas.

Finally, Twitter has undergone somewhat of renaissance in 2020. It’s very easy to jump into trending conversations that relate to your expertise and to quickly get followers as well as eyeballs on your content.  Not enough coaches are using Twitter effectively, so this represents an opportunity for those who can fill the gap.

Content Channel for Coaches #3: Guest Posting

Guest posting means finding websites that are trafficked by your ideal client and offer to post your content there. It’s easy to see how valuable that would be; someone else did all of the work to build a channel and now you can use it to market yourself.

The catch is that you can spend a lot of time pitching content at websites that aren’t interested. One powerful hack, recommended by Claire Adams of FitSW is to narrow your search at the beginning to your most likely prospects:

“Find sites that are immediately open to guest posts by searching, 'guest post [Topic]’.”  Lorie Anderson of Mom Informed suggests using search terms such as “‘word related to your niche’ + ‘publish with us’ or ‘word related to your niche’ + ‘submissions’.”

Forums - or even well trafficked blogs with active comment sections - provide guest posting opportunities that are similar in some ways to social media groups, discussed above. As with social media groups, it’s important to build provide valuable content as opposed to blatantly marketing yourself, as Simon Dwight Keller of SDK Marketing explains:

Being an active member allows you to start building trust relationships with other like-minded contributors. If your blog has an informative guide relevant to a particular discussion, you can mention it, and a forum's readers are likely to follow your guide to find useful information.

Another form of “guest posting” is to provide content for a podcast. Carmine Mastropierro of Mastro Commerce recommends coaches look for relevant shows on platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts and “pitch shows to become a guest. This exposes them to a larger audience while building relationships in their industry.”  

Content Channel for Coaches #4: Leverage Your Network

As a coach, you probably know other coaches or people in related fields, and you might even be part of coaching communities on social media (see #1 above) or on the Profi platform.  Use this networking to help your content marketing in two ways.

First, watch what successful coaches do. Follow them on social media and search for them on Google. Look where they post content and copy or adapt their approach as appropriate.

Second, as Linda Mueller of The Expat Partner Coach explains, your relationships with other coaches “can lead to cross-promotion through guest blogging and getting interviewed as a podcast guest.” (Cross-promotion means you would both post content on each other’s platforms).

Look for content producers in your network that are overloaded with the production requirements on their own sites. As Christina Kaye of Write Your Best Book explains, “If you offer valuable content for them to post that aligns with their own mission and vision, it saves them time and energy they can spend elsewhere.”  Similarly, cross-promotion helps you develop your own channels with additional quality content that you don’t have to create yourself.

BONUS Content Channel for Coaches: Profi 🚀

By creating your practitioner profile on Profi you gain an important ally - a fully fledged but at the same time constantly evolving tech stack that allows you to streamline your business and have more time for your customers and yourself. Together with that you also get the possibility to publish blog posts or even podcast episodes on the platform, posts that will be cross-linked to your public Profi profile, increasing your discoverability and field authority.

👉 If you are not already taking bene. it of all of this, jump aboard right now.

Conclusion

The internet presents a vast number of outlets in which you can post your content and develop your audience.Test different approaches to see what works best for you, whether it’s social media, guest posting, or leveraging your network. Be conscious, however, that some of these approaches may take more time to bear fruit than others; developing a brand identity with new prospects takes time.

Finally, remember that ultimately the most successful coaching businesses are able to build their own audience. Content marketing is both a tool to that end as well as a supplement, but not usually a replacement. As you seek opportunities to distribute content, continue to post on and develop your own channels.

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