How To Start An Online Coaching Business: Step-By-Step Plan (2024)

Online coaching has a lot going for it, and any professional with the right qualifications can practice it. Plenty of coaches love the idea of helping others from the comfort of home, so it’s a tough marketplace to stand out in!

If you’ve ever wondered how to start an online coaching business from scratch, there are a few things you’ll need to plan for. Use this guide as a starting point on your journey toward a successful, profitable business.

How To Start An Online Coaching Business

There are a host of reasons to get your own coaching practice up and running digitally, but you’ll need a strategy or business plan to be successful.

Because different countries and states have different regulations, the specifics of your business plan will depend on where you’re located.

If you’ve got a great idea and the right coaching experience, however, here are 8 general steps you’ll almost certainly need to take:[1][2]

1. Set clear goals. What is your target income? How many working hours a week are you hoping for? What impact will you have on your clients’ lives?
2. Know your target market. What pain points will you help your clients solve, or what goals will you help them achieve?
3. Differentiate your offer. How will your online coaching business stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace? Why should new potential clients choose you over any other coach?
4. Create your signature coaching program. Put together a program or product that’s unique, effective, based on Step 3. This program will ultimately be the key value driver for your business, turning your value proposition into tangible client results.
5. Determine your pricing. Think about your audience – what will your value offer be worth to them, in real terms?
6. Find clients. Pitch your value offer to your network before you consider advertising, focusing on the ideal outcomes of your coaching without diving into the specifics of ‘how.’
7. Develop front-end products or ‘upsells’. These might be shorter, more affordable versions of your signature program or they might be ‘lead magnets’ like an e-book or micro e-course. These programs can add value to your signature online coaching program, or attract new clients that you can later move to your signature course.
8. Scale up your coaching management. Find efficient ways to deliver the same high-caliber client results so that you can grow your business profitably, and sustainably.

Starting Your Online Health & Wellness Coaching Business

While online coaching is fast becoming more popular, health and wellness coaching is a particular booming sector to be in. Much like other niches, it involves

• Collaborative goal-setting and feedback between a coach and coachee, along with
• Knowledge and skills-building to help clients achieve their objectives.

Rather than helping clients to achieve life, business, or career goals, however, the role of a health and wellness coach is to help their coachees build and maintain a healthier lifestyle. This can make it slightly more complex than other coaching types, meaning that special certifications or qualifications may be necessary to practice.

If you’re keen to start an online coaching business in health or wellness fields, e.g. as a personal trainer or nutrition coach, you’ll need to decide:

• Whether you want to practice general health coaching or wellness coaching in a specific setting
• What resources you’ll require, e.g. a personal training app, nutrition software, or health coaching software for your practice, and
• How you’ll run your coaching practice at the back end, i.e. the policies, consent documents, and other forms that you’ll need to practice.

3 Steps For Building A Successful Program

Coaching programs help you map out your client’s journey from A to B, and all the assessments, lessons, tools, and other resources you’ll use to structure that development.

If you’re already decided on your value offer, who you want to help, and how you’ll stand out in your field as a coach, creating your unique signature coaching program is the next step to building a successful business. As a first-time coach or newcomer to online coaching, it can sound like a lot of work!

Luckily, online coaching programs are quite simply digital roadmaps. They give you a way to plan out your client’s journey from where they are now to where they want to be, and all the assessments, lessons, tools, and other resources you’ll use to structure that development.

What To Include In Your Program

Broadly, there are three types of content that help your client get from A to B:

1. Coaching forms – these include intake documents, informed consent forms, client contact forms, and feedback surveys
2. Session Materials – the lessons, activities, videos, exercises, and other coaching tools you’ll use in sessions (or learning modules, if you’re creating an online learning course), and
3. Homework – materials and resources that you’ll share with clients to complete in their own time.

Building Your Program

With your forms, activities, and homework all decided on, building your program is as simple as curating them into a logical sequence of steps that take your client toward their goal.

A health coaching program, for instance, might start with an onboarding process where Steps 1 and 2 are an intake form and informed consent, respectively. Depending on your client’s requirements and capabilities, you might move through various steps for health assessments, lessons, and other tools – it’s up to you and your client!

Using Quenza, you can build your program from start to finish in advance, in 3 simple steps.

1. Designing your resources (Activities)
   
2. Assigning them as steps in a program (Pathway), and
3. Sharing your program with your client.

Use the tips below to help you, or for a full guide to designing your Pathways, check out the video below:

7 Tips and Tricks For Creating Your Program

Quenza is beautifully designed to help you create unique, powerful coaching programs efficiently – so that you can scale up your business.

Whether you’re digitalizing any existing materials you might have in hard-copy, or crafting your online resources from scratch, Quenza’s Activity Builder gives you blank templates to work with alongside an easy-to-use toolkit:

You can easily build an online coaching program one activity at a time, simply by dragging and dropping the elements you’d like to include into a blank Activity builder template. You can also:

• Brand your content to promote your online coaching business using Quenza’s White Label feature
• Make your resources more engaging by uploading custom videos or audio
• Start from a pre-made template from Quenza’s unique Expansion Library, or
• Get creative with your own client assessments using the Wheel of Life coaching tool.

When you’re ready to structure your program, Quenza’s Pathway Builder is the place to do it. Here, you can select your activities as steps within your course, curriculum, or workshop to create a digital roadmap:

Some tips to help you make the most of Quenza’s Pathway builder include:

• Setting custom intervals between steps, to ‘drip feed’ your content to clients automatically
• Editing steps in each Pathway to offer more personalized, relevant resources for your clients, and
• Adding or removing steps from certain Pathways to tailor them to your client’s needs or goals. You can even create steps that are exclusive to each Pathway copy so that each program is unique!

Best Software For Setting Up Your Online Business

Quenza is a state-of-the-art coaching solution for even first-time online coaches, and an efficient, powerful way to design and offer your own programs. With Quenza, you also have all the tools you need to manage, evaluate, and improve your offer over time.

You can:

1. Stay on top of client progress using your in-app live tracking feature
2. Craft all the contracts and agreements you need easily
3. Create and share feedback forms, session rating scales, and satisfaction surveys to evaluate your programs at any point
4. Adapt and refine your programs even while they’re in progress (allowing you to improve your program design with client suggestions)
5. Connect instantly with clients from anywhere using Quenza Chat, and even
6. Run coaching programs with up to 50 participants at once (Quenza Groups).

There are endless ways that Quenza can help you enhance your impact as a coach, regardless of what niche you’re in. If you’re keen to bring your clients better results, learn how Quenza’s toolkit could work for you.

39 Ways To Use Quenza For Life Coaching

Looking for ways to use Quenza as a life coach?

There are a wealth of ways to design, build, and share unique therapy tools with your clients – both throughout and between your sessions.

If you’re searching for inspiration, check out some of our top life coaching resources:

• Virtual Life Coaching Success Guide (Incl. Best Apps)

Final Thoughts

The key to starting a successful online coaching practice is to know your offer and your audience. This knowledge will help you create a truly stand-out product that not only looks good but delivers too.

From here, it’s all about bringing your value proposition to life with the right tools for the job. Use this guide as your starting point and it will all come together seamlessly.

We hope you enjoyed reading this guide. To start your own coaching business and help others, start your $1 Quenza trial, for 30 days of full access to Quenza’s e-coaching tools.

Quenza is specially designed to help you share engaging, inspired, and unique content seamlessly with your clients, and will give you all the tools you need to run your online practice from anywhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

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