Content Marketing for Coaches: Where, How, and How Often to Post

Content marketing is a crucial and necessary part of most coaches’ business strategy - even more so than in most other industries. Many potential clients will see a relationship between someone’s ability to produce high-quality content and that person’s ability to help them achieve a goal.

In part I of this content marketing series, we explored the question of “what” to post. Here, in this part II, we cover the other common questions from our marketing mentorship program about content marketing: where, how, and how often to post.

Where to Post

Most of the time your content marketing will start on social media. Many coaches and instructors ask whether they should be posting content on all of the major channels, or whether they should focus on one. In our experience, the best answer is to do both.

Start by picking the channel that shows you and your services in the best light, and one where your potential customers might be interested in engaging with your content. For example, as a very general rule, wellness instructors might gravitate more toward video on Instagram and Facebook, while business coaches might mix video with written content and also engage with potential clients through LinkedIn. Focus on one channel and master it.

At the same time, don’t ignore the other channels - just don’t focus on meaningful effort at them until you’ve turned the first into a working sales funnel for your business. How do you do this?  Through repurposing - taking existing content (in this case, created for one channel) and repurpose it for others, even if it’s not necessarily optimized for that channel.  As Aiden Angeli of Ripe Marketing explains, if you, for example, run live calls with your customers, you can repurpose the content by “dissecting each live call into 30 second - 3 minute video chunks and repurpose your content across your website, newsletter, social media platforms, text messaging, etc.”  Another example: a video can easily be transcribed into a blog post, have the audio stripped out as a podcast, have images and quotes pulled for social media, and so on.

As Jon, the Marketing Introvert, summarizes: “master content repurposing. Creating new content is difficult, but repurposing is easier.”        

How To Post (and Get Links Back)

Interestingly enough, there are two schools of thought on this as well. Some experts, like sales coach Adrienne Weimer suggests that coaches use

“batch processing” and “save hours of time by batching content and use an app like LATER to automatically publish your content so you don't have to. Block out 2 hours and create 30 days of content at once.”

On the other hand, some other experts have concluded that social media algorithms like Facebook’s or Instagram’s tend to put lower weight on content posted by software such as the above. It appears to be a tradeoff between efficiently using your time vs. maximizing the value of the algorithm, and the answer will depend on your priorities and resources (as well as if you believe that social media algorithms prefer ‘native’ to ‘scheduled’ posts).

Perhaps even more interesting than the question of “how to post” is “how to get links back from your posts." The concept of “don’t ask, don’t get” applies to many worlds, but to few as appropriate as it does the world of sales and marketing. The best way to get links is to ask for them.  Of course, you can’t just start broadly asking the world for links to your content, so who, specifically can you target?

First, it’s absolutely okay to ask your engaged audience to link to and share your content. Expert Norhanie Pangulima summarizes this idea by stating:

“if you want your clients to share your videos or posts, say it! For instance, a fitness coach could tag a post with something like, ‘let’s get healthy and fit together share this video to your friends and loved ones’“          

Second, as Katie Holmes of Outwittrade explains, coaches and wellness instructors can solicit links from sites who have linked to similar content in the past by:

"Reaching out to people who have linked to existing pieces and asking if they'd like to link to our article as well (you can find links to any given URL using ahrefs). This would work better in the wellness industry than for business and marketing content, though, as in my experience it's tough to get people to voluntarily link to content in industries where most of the blogs are trying to make money. In health and wellness, it's easier to find hobbyist blogs and people running sites because they have a passion for the topic, and these people are much more likely to link to you without asking for money."

Finally, get valuable links from being part of other people’s stories, particular for “high domain authority” news sites. Daniel Sarath of Click Consult suggests that coaches and wellness instructors “follow journalists [who are interested in their field] on Twitter and keep an eye on the #journorequest hashtag so that you can spot opportunities to collaborate with journalists.”    

How Often To Post

There are two schools of thought about how often to post content. Some say to post on a given channel until you get diminishing returns. Others advise only posting when you have genuinely interesting, new, or timely content to share. What most experts agree on is that, whatever schedule you pick, it should generally be consistent. As Randy Soderman of Soderman Marketing puts it,

“it is VERY important to be consistent. Being consistent will keep you top of mind to your customers, and the algorithm [Google, Social Media, Email Delivery, etc.] will be in your favor if you are consistently producing quality content.”          

Regarding the two schools of thought about how often to post, there is no one correct answer. Examine both approaches and decide which resonates best with you.

On the side of “maximize the platform” is David Morneau of inBeat, who advises coaches to:

"use a one-in-seven rule. Six out of seven items that you use need to engage your audience and entertain them, instead of promoting your business.Your content has to be valuable. Hence, posting at least once a day can help you achieve this goal. If Instagram stories are a part of your marketing strategy - you need to update them two to four times a day. LinkedIn is an exception to this rule. Posting three to four times per week on this platform is enough to keep people engaged."

In contrast, Amit Gami of Laser Eye Surgery Guru advises coaches that:

"I used to post 2-3 times a week on my website blog and then share this across social media platforms. Unfortunately, it meant that I had to post even when I didn't feel like it and so the quality of content was not always up to top standard. Now I post infrequently according to my mood. It guarantees that I can create quality content that my followers engage with much more deeply."

Regardless of which side of the argument you find most compelling, you should not try to “have it both ways” by posting content when you’re inspired but maximizing your presence on different social media channels but regularly reposting old content. As Stacy Caprio, founder of Accelerated Growth Marketing, explains:

"One content marketing tip for business coaches is not to post the same content repeatedly, meaning don't post the same exact long-form post on every channel, and don't repeatedly post the same content multiple times on the same account. Posting the same thing again and again is common among business coaches and wellness and health coaches, but if you do this your audience will get bored, start to look forward to your posts less, follow you less closely, and even start to ignore your posts thinking they're all the same."    

Conclusion

While content marketing is a large topic and many coaches and instructors hire consultants to address this task efficiently and effectively, there is a great deal that you can accomplish with a do-it-yourself approach if you keep focused on where, how, and how often to post and combine these skills with great content directed as a specific, targeted audience. Good luck!