June Mailbag: Your Coaching Business Questions ANSWERED.

Email lists, marketing to two niches, and using AI, we cover a LOT!

It’s JUNE.

I feel like each month I’m surprised that time has passed. Is it just me?

I feel slightly crazy. (Am I crazy? Let me know!)

But I digress, it’s QUESTION TIME.

So, with that, let’s get into your questions!

❤️(HELP: Can you heart and restack this post if you find it helpful? THANK YOU!)❤️

This month we are covering:

🍰 Email lists - how to start them and if you should let people from an old list join the new one?

🍰 Niches and marketing yourself to more than one! (I have THOUGHTS)

🍰 Using your address as a business owner (should you?)

🍰 Photo shoots (do you need one?)

🍰 How we use AI at Coach Pony (so many pitfalls)

🍰 Books for building community!

Let’s dig in!

🍰 QUESTION: Let’s talk email lists. They take a lot of work. 2 questions: 1. Best tips to start one.

That’s more of a statement than a question, but I love it and am here for it all!

The poster also added this: “2. I have an email list of people from my previous social enterprise. Thinking of contacting them as a coach with the chance to opt out if not interested. It’s about 400 people (most of them my target) and it took me a lot of work to get them in!”

Yes, it takes work to build an email list. But, it’s work worth doing as email has yet to die (despite so many predictions that it will), and it’s still a great way to keep in touch with people *and sell* coaching.

So, to start an email list you need to bribe people, and I mean that literally. But not a weird under-the-bathroom stall kind of bribe. Nope, what I mean is give people a reason to join your email list.

People often do this with a freebie - a really cool helpful thing that they know their niche wants, and they offer it for free. It can be a PDF, a video series, a private podcast series, or an email series - it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I want it enough to give you my email address!

If you want two very different freebie ideas, here are two from Coach Pony.

Example #1:

Example #2:

To get to these freebies: I thought about what questions new coaches have, they they know they need help to answer, and then created content to give them the answer. Simple!

Next step: Once you build your freebie, you need to market it using your marketing platform. Otherwise your email list won’t grow.

If you want to get more details on a marketing platform and how to do this, I recommend watching freebie #2 that I listed above, it’s super useful.

🚨 Here’s the link to all things marketing.

And if you have another list already, definitely send at least 3 emails inviting them to join your new list. You can ask them to opt-in (that’ll be lower numbers but more committed) or opt-out (you’ll get more people but many won’t be paying attention and will unsub when you start emailing them on the new topic). Up to you!

🍰 QUESTION: I notice a lot of coaches have big photo shoots and fancy images of themselves on their websites, do I need that?

Nope, not at all.

When I first started I had only one photo of my on my website, and it was taken by my sister in a random field (we took 100 photos, and like 2 of them turned out okay, so I picked one of those - I’d insert one here but I can’t find any! So here’s one I took outside about 2 years into my business with a regular camera).

And today, with the amazing free access we all have to stock imagery and cool photos, you can do a lot with that - think photos that people in your niche would like to see - a happy baby if you are a parenting coach, or a loving older couple if you help couples navigate retirement. You get the idea! (Here’s an example of stock footage from a date coach website).

So I wouldn’t worry too much about photos right from the start. Good lighting (you can step outside to get great lighting if you don’t have enough lighting in your house), and taking tons of images using an iPhone will result in some decent photos for your About Page and maybe your Homepage if you want to include a photo of yourself there (you do not have to).

Then, as you grow and evolve as a coach, you can consider investing in better quality photos of yourself. Like so!

Now let’s talk about niching…

🍰 QUESTION: As someone who has 2 separate niches (although connected), how do you market yourself for each of them?

Interesting question!

And first, I want to be super clear: I have two niches *now.*

I did not start with two niches.