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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” ™

As an independent coaching professional, you (better than anyone) know the profound wisdom contained in that old chestnut, “Time is money.”

Like most clichés, it has been around forever, and because of that, it’s easy to take it at face value, blindly accepting it as being the absolute, gospel truth.

But there’s another side to this coin.

I recall a wonderful blog post a while back from Internet product developer, Marc Quarles.

Marc believes that time is more valuable than money.

Here’s the essence of his position.

The phrase (”time is money”) implies that time is equal to money — and nothing could be further from the truth.

You have a finite amount of time. If you waste an hour, that’s an hour you can never get back. However, if you “waste” $100, you can easily earn another $100 to replace it.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Yet, many of us (including yours truly) struggle with this daily.

We create numerous excuses as to why we should be doing all the stuff that fills up our day, instead of hiring or outsourcing it to others.

We offer such rationalizations as …

- “It takes too much time to train someone else.”
- “It cost too much to hire someone else.”
- “No one does this better than I do.”
- “This is too important for anyone else to do.”
- “It’s so easy, I’ll just do it myself.”
- “I’ll handle this because I enjoy doing it.”

While each of these rationals may or may not be accurate, they overlook the most critical point, and that’s the answer to this question …

“At this moment, what’s the most important thing I can be doing for my business?”

Most of us would be better served following the advice of Michael E. Gerber, best selling author of The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. His counsel to small business owners is: “Spend your time working on your business, not in your business.” *

Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, never worked a day at the grill or even managed one of his restaurants. It was never a consideration. His total focus was on building his business.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why McDonald’s became the biggest restaurant chain in the world.

So, when you think about your coaching practice, are you spending your time — or are you investing it?

What Do You Think?

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

I want to share an all too common mistake made by coaches and consultants virtually every day.

Unfortunately, it’s a mistake that could be costing you lots of money — and you likely don’t even know you’re making it.

In the last month, I’ve witnessed this snafu from a well known career coach, a top executive business coach, and even an inter peace coach (does that cause you to smile, or is it just me?)

Anyway, I cringe every time it happens.

When I heard it again, I knew I had to share this post with you.

It was during a a prominent personal life coach’s teleseminar. After delivering the “pure content” portion of his presentation, he moved into his “irresistible offer.”

That’s where it happened!

He invited his listeners to visit his offer page at “www.yourcoachwebsite.com/specialofferforjohndoeteleseminar.html,” or some similar sounding URL.

Do you see the problem?

Well, here it is …

You want to send your traffic to a simple, easy to remember dot com URL. It’s not wise asking your listeners to remember and navigate their browsers to some complicated URL, especially when domain names are so cheap these days.

Here’s a simple rule: Never send offline website visitors to any site that has a slash after the dot com!

Simply buy a new domain name, it’ll cost you less than $10. Then drive or redirect all your traffic to that site.

Doing this, you’ll dramatically lower the possibility of confusion and lost sales.

What Do You Think?

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

Have you heard about the concept of viral marketing?

If you haven’t, and you have any kind of a professional coaching practice — life coaching, business coaching, executive coaching, or personal coaching, regardless of your practice niche — and you’d like to get more clients, easily and effortlessly, then you need to understand viral marketing.

So, what exactly is viral marketing?

Viral marketing is a term that was coined to describe the process that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message to other people (or their websites).

Viral marketing creates a potentially exponential growth in the visibility and effect of the marketing message. In effect, the marketing message becomes so infectious, it’s passed on like a virus, spreading from one person to another.

As the marketing message continues to be passed on from person-to-person, it’s growth snowballs, getting larger and larger as it builds upon its own self growth.

Viral Marketing is one of the most effective and powerful methods to drive traffic to your website and to grow your subscription opt-in list.

Well, now there’s a new software script that facilitates the process of viral marketing. It puts a system in play that makes it easy for your current website visitors to tell their friends about your site. It also incentivizes their friends to visit your site, sign-up, and then tell their friends too.

So, you have this continuous loop of people visiting your website, then telling other people who visit your website, who then tell other people who visit your website — and on and on and on.

This process causes your website visitors to opt-in to your mailing list. Once they’re on your list, they get to know you and you develop your relationship with them. Over time, that relationship can be extremely valuable to you and your coaching business.

Oh, and by the way, what would you think if I told you the typical website increases its opt-ins by 300%?

That’s not bad, is it?

Best of all, once you set it up, it doesn’t cost you anything to implement — and it doesn’t take any of your valuable time to run either.

So, if you’re not opposed to a system you can put on “auto-pilot,” that you can “set it and forget it,” while it virally builds your list, gets you more clients and grows your coaching practice, you should click on the link below for more information …

http://visitors2clients.com/recommends/viralfriendscript

This is really a very effective marketing tool. Be sure and check it out.

I bet you’ll be glad you did.

What Do You Think?

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

That’s right, as Outlook retrieved today’s email, I was surprised to see I’d received 1500 emails!

Since then, 5 hours later, I’ve received another 500 emails!

When you think about this, what comes to mind?

Do you envision emails from prospective clients who want you to be their personal coach?

Do you imagine affiliate program notifications informing you a sale was made and you’ve earned some moolah?

Do you think of being contacted by the media and they want to “tell the world” about you, your coaching practice and the great results you’re getting for your clients?

Do you envision some organization wanting you to speak at their event — and pay you a handsome sum to do it?

Do you imagine one of your industry’s top organizations telling you you’ve been nominated for a prestigious award?

The truth is, it could have been any of these things … but it wasn’t.

Nope, today it wasn’t anything that exciting.

No, today it was 2000 (and counting!) emails that were sent by spammers using my email address, blocked by ISPs, and returned to me because they thought I was the sender.

Now, here’s the lesson for you.

I’ve had my own website since 1996. Back then we didn’t know what many of us know now, and that is …

Never, ever, ever display your email address on your (on anyone else’s website) unless you disguise it in some way (using java script, spelling it out as “name (AT) domain.com” or some other variation that can’t be scrapped by bots.

In case you don’t know, the “bad guys” comb the web with their bots looking for words that are placed between the @ sign and a domain extension (name@domain.com). When they find them, they know they’ve got an email address.

Not only are they likely to use your email address to spam you, they are also likely to cloak their email address and send out spam that appears to be from your domain name.

Now, if you have AOL or MSN or any other ISP email, that isn’t much of a problem.

It’s unlikely they’ll ban all email from aol.com or msn.com — but you, ah now that’s a different story.

There was a time when I couldn’t use my regular email address to send mail to anyone on AOL because they had me (that’s right, little ‘ol innocent me, as a spammer!)

And, as you might imagine, when you take out all of the AOL uses out of the equation, you eliminate a lot of people you can’t communicate with in the easiest, most natural manner.

Imagine if these people are on your coaching practice mailing list. All those names you’d worked so hard to acquire, now blocked and unavailable to your subscribers who wanted to hear from you.

Now, if it’s your own domain name that gets flagged as a spammer, then that’s really a problem.

For example, my case …

Essentially, my first name is my domain name, so I’m reluctant to want to change email addresses (plus, if truth be know, it’s pretty cool to tell someone my email is “me@me.com”).

So, hopefully you’ll learn from my mistake.

No using your email address on your website, or in a coaching forum, or on Craigslist, eBay or anywhere!

Got it? (BTW, in the time it took to write this post I’ve received another 300 returned emails. Yikes!)

Guard that email address like, well like it’s your life, OK?

‘Cause it is! — and I don’t want you to spend your beautiful Friday afternoon deleting spam emails like someone we know.

What Do You Think?

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