Yesterday we did a 30-minute phone consultation with a prospective client – Susan. Susan is a personal coach who helps business executives find balance in between personal needs, family, and work. And going by her stories and the testimonials she share with us, she’s pretty good at what she does.

Yet, while her clients think Susan’s a remarkable coach, she still struggles to have enough clients to sustain her business. Like many coaches she suffers from being really good at her work but not so good at finding and reaching her ideal client. So she left with taking less than ideal clients, and often for lower fees than she wants to charge.

Can you relate?

She wanted to consult with us because she figured that if she got a new website her business might pickup.

Now, that could be true. A new website could make a huge difference in her business. Certainly having a clean, professional design that’s organized well with content that’s easy to find is what every coach should want. And as we looked at her current website, it was obviously dated, the content was stale, the navigation was difficult to figure out and she couldn’t do any content edits herself.

So we talked a bit about design updates and a cleaner visual design to her site. We showed her pages that were likely not doing well on her website and gave her specific directions on how she could fix them. We even made some suggestions about how her new site could integrate social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

But the one area that we felt Susan needed the most help was with her content. She had done a wonderful job describing who she is, what she does and where she trained. She even had a pretty detailed explanation of her coaching process and a nifty 12 question self-assessment.

What she didn’t have was her audience. No where in her content had she identified the needs and wants of her audience. And no where had she made it clear that she could help them where they are. The site, really, was all about her and not at all about the people she could help.

Now this is pretty common. So few people are ever told how to write content that gets clients interested in their coaching service. And those that are taught, often seem to get lost in some marketing program’s process rather than thinking about how they could best communicate with the individuals that make up their audience.

You see, it’s this perspective that all successful coaching websites have – they have the perspective of the individuals you want to land as coaching clients. They speak to people in language they understand and where the prospective coaching clients are at. Ultimately, the best website are far more about the coaching clients and far less about the coach.

One of the ways we help coaches understand this is helping them define their coaching practice as terms of what problem(s) the coach helps his/her clients solve. When you, as a coach, write about the problems – and then the solutions – your clients face, it changes the focus of your coaching website from being about you and being for your target audience.

Below are the 7 critical steps we cover when helping coaches better define their offer and how they’ll market their offer to their target audience. Consider your website’s copy from this perspective and you will find that you get more inquires into your coaching services – and more clients:

1. Identify your ideal client and claim your niche.
2. Pinpoint their pain.
3. Understand what their customers really want.
4. Get clear about what makes you different from your competition.
5. Create a compelling values proposition
6. Develop a powerful message.
7. Position yourself as an expert problem-solver.

Use these 7 steps as a question and development process for more completely identifying who you’d like to coach. Write (and talk) about the problems first, then position yourself as your client’s problem solver.

And if you need help with this process, we’re always just a phone call away.