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Professional coaches, you now have a new income resource.

ClickBank, the Internet’s leading retailer of digital products, is now accepting recurring payments.

This is great news for anyone who sells digital (down-loadable) products.

Here are some examples of what this can mean for you …

If you sell ebooks, you can now offer an upsell that includes monthly coaching. ClickBank will process the initial sale and then automatically bill your client for each month’s coaching fees.

If you have a membership site or a mastermind group, you can now use ClickBank to automatically handle your monthly billing.

Of course, the ways you can use this are only limited by your imagination, but hopefully this will give you some ideas on ways you can grow your coaching practice.

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

Amazon.com has just launched a new service called Askville.com.

Askville.com is a place where you can asks questions on any topic and get real answers from real people.

As a professional coach, it’s also a place where you can demonstrate your expertise and deftly promote your coaching practice by answering other people’s questions.

Askville.com can also be used as a barometer of what’s on your market’s mind. You can monitor the questions and use them as the basis for your next information product.

Check it out. It’s brand new and it’s free!

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

If you’re like most professional coaches, you’re always looking for ways to maximize your effectiveness. If that’s true for you, you’ll find this post really valuable.

Would you like to speed up your writing by 300%? I know … silly question, but I had to ask.

Have you heard about voice recognition (or speech recognition) software? As you dictate into a headset mic, the software transcribes your words into a document on your computer.

What makes this so exciting is that most people speak three times faster than they type. So instead of slowly, laboriously typing words onto a page, you simply dictate them.

I first heard about this software years ago. It sounded amazing, but after researching it, I felt it wasn’t quite “ready for prime-time.”

The two biggest issues seemed to be …

1. You had to spend lots of time “training” the software to recognize your voice and pronunciation.

2. There were numerous transcribing errors.

That sounded like more trouble than it was worth, so I forgot about it and I never gave it another thought.

Then a few days ago, I stumbled upon a discussion in one of my favorite forums about about a voice recognition program called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The feedback was really positive.

Apparently the technology is significantly improved, and no longer requires extensive training. Users raved about its ease of use and their improved productivity.

What’s great about this is you can use the software for all of your writing, including email, letters, reports, articles, info products, forum posts, and even live online chat and discussions.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking comes in several versions. Unless you frequently use medical or legal terms, you should be fine with the standard (least expensive) version. It retails for just under a $100, but I found it online for around $85, with free shipping!

That’s a pretty good deal and you can check it out by clicking this link …

http://visitors2clients.com/recommends/voicerecognition

I’ve just begun using this software and I’m tremendously excited by the productivity gains I expect to achieve.

This is a sensational tool and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

Today, affiliate marketing superstar Rosalind Gardner really set me straight!

Here’s how it happened.

While reading Rosalind’s always informative blog, I learned something new.

Over the last several months I’ve seen numerous references to the demise of the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, that’s the free online resource many marketers use to research keyword popularity.

But my experience was different. Every time I used the tool it worked for me, so I just assumed these were only temporary outages. (BTW, I access Overture’s results through a keyword software program, so I rarely visit their site.)

Anyway, I discovered that while the Overture Keyword Selector Tool may still be online, the search information isn’t current. It’s showing old results from searches in January of 2007.

Yahoo! recently acquired Overture and is obviously not supporting the service at this time. Hopefully, it will return one day, perhaps as the Yahoo! Selector Tool.

I’ll keep you updated when I hear something new, or the next time Roz sets me straight.

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

As a coaching professional, you surely appreciate the concept, “knowledge is power” — and it truly is.

It’s the power to make better, more informed decisions about everything affecting your coaching practice.

Having access to this knowledge allows you to “keep score” on your business. Once you know your “baseline,” you can work to continually improve your performance in every single area of your coaching practice.

When it comes to the online part of your coaching business, there’s a great resource that can help you track your metrics.

I’m talking about Google Analytics, a free resource from our friends at the big “G.”

Even small, minor improvements to your coaching business add up. Tiny changes that may not seem all that significant at the moment, compound and build, and ultimately lead to significant growth.

If you haven’t signed up yet, be sure and check it out. You’ll be glad you did.

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

As a coach with your own coaching practice, it’s critical that you know what’s being said about you, your coaching practice, and even your competition.

You absolutely have to know what’s being said in the marketplace (the world wide web and the blogosphere).

This isn’t an issue of vanity (well, it could be about vanity ). This is about market awareness and competitive intelligence.

Debbie Weil, who’s always on-point and has an excellent blog, gives you the scoop Have you RSS’d yourself? A must-learn (easy) trick for 2007.

Check it outl

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

This is a followup to my last post, Coaches, Here Are 5 Ways To Get Your Coaching Site Indexed Quickly!.

Here’s one of my favorite tips and it involves s website you may be familiar with, CraigsList.org.

CraigsList is essentially a classified advertising site. It started out several years ago in San Francisco, but has now branched out to other cities across the U.S.

Once you’re at CraigsList, simply post a classified ad. I typically use the Services category, and then place my ad in the most relevant sub-category. You can post your classified ad for free!

Do not SPAM and do not abuse this service. Just post a legitimate ad one time, and one time only. Because the content of CraigsList.com is ever changing, the Google bots spider in on a regular basis.

Typically, your ad will get your site indexed pretty quickly.

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

I’m often asked by fellow coaches, “How can I get my coaching site indexed quickly?”

Here are the top 5 ways I recommend.

1. Submit your site to the MSN.com (Microsoft) search engine. Go to www.msn.com and do a search for your site. If your site doesn’t come up you’ll receive a message saying, “We did not find any results for yoursite.com. At the bottom of the page you’ll see this, “If you cannot find a page that you know exists, send the address to us.” Simply enter your address and MSN will index you.” Check back in a week. If you’re still not indexed, resubmit.

2. If you don’t already have an account for My.Yahoo.com, create one. Then go to your My.Yahoo page and in the upper left hand corner, just below “Search,” you’ll see a “Add Content” link. Click it. On the new page you’ll see a large “Add Content” text box. To the right of that is a “Find” button. Right next to that is a “Add RSS by URL” link. Click that link and add your URL. If Yahoo can’t find your page, you may do better by submitting your RSS feed URL.

3. Create a blog and begin posting regularly. The two options for blogs are Blogger.com and WordPress.org. Each option has its own advantages and disadvantages. Check ‘em out and see which option is best for you. Register your blog with Technorati.com. Also, be sure and ping your blog each time you add a new post (this lets Technorati and other sites know that new content has been posted.)

4. Submit a “Google Sitemap” to Google. Note: This is different than a regular sitemap. The most important issue is making sure that your links are descriptive and written in complete sentences.

5. Make a post on a popular forum that allows the use of “forum signatures.” (Don’t just post anything, make a valuable contribution to the forum.) Since the search engine bots regularly visit forums, your post will get indexed with your URL.

So there you are, 5 ways to get your coaching site indexed quickly.

Of course, getting indexed is only dipping your big toe in the water. That gets you in the game (barely!), now you have to start building links back to your site to increase your rankings.

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

If you’ve been a professional coach for any length of time, you probably know you can enhance your professional coaching reputation by being an active participant in your niche’s online forums.

Regardless of your coaching specialty, whether you’re a career coach, parent coach, personal performance coach, or any kind of personal coach at all, there are likely Internet forums or discussion groups on your specialty.

But, before posting use caution.

It’s critical that you get familiar with a forum before you post. Be sure and read the rules for each forum (every forum has its own policies.) You might also want to read the forum for a few days before posting to gain a sense of the community and how it operates.

So, how do you find a forum on your niche?

The best way to find a forum (well actually, just about the best way to find almost anything!) is to do a Google search. You can search for the name of your niche plus the keywords “forum,” “discussion group,” or “bulletin board.”

Being an active forum member helps you gain visibility, make contacts, and demonstrate your expertise and helpfulness to your niche. It also gives the other forum members a chance to get to know you as a real person.

In addition to your forum posts, many forums allow posters to add a forum signature as a part of their post. A forum signature is typically two to six lines of advertising or promotional text with a clickable link that is displayed at the bottom of your post. Forum signatures are a reward forums give their members for contributing meaningful information.

Typically, you can use your forum signature to sell your products, services, or promote your website or blog. However, every forum is different. Some forums allow you to post any kind of signature you like, while other forums may let you promote your own products and services, but not affiliate products or services. Some forums prohibit commercial plugs all together.

Forum signatures are a great way to market to fellow forum members. Many forum threads are viewed by dozens of people and all it takes is one person to see your signature, click on your link, and you’ve made make a sale! Best of all, sigs are typically free.

Are you taking advantage of forum posting? If not, what’s stopping you?

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™