Hey, welcome back to the Life coach launchpad. My name’s BJ and I’m here every week talking to you about all the online business things that, as it turns out, need to happen in order to have a successful life coaching business. I’m a business coach. I love to help life coaches make more money, get more clients, have more fun, and to do what they love to do what they’re meant to do. And that’s coaching. So let’s dive right in. Today I’m talking about three copywriting strategies that most life coaches just don’t know or ignore. And this is the most background noise that I’ve ever had in a podcast episode.

But I’m going to let it go because I’m really going to push the limits on. I use Mac and there’s voice isolation automatically built in. And it’s amazing, by the way. I record in quick time and then do my editing in final cut pro. It’s like $300. So if you’re using iMovie, that does exactly the same thing. That’s an amazing software, too. I use that for many years, but I want to see how effective this voice isolation is.

And so far, it sounds amazing. It is so loud because it’s spring break. Our three kids are home. There’s a nanny upstairs. My wife is working from home as always, but I hear her running around trying to get something together. If you don’t hear anything, it’s because of the miracle of voice isolation technology that’s built into this Mac. I’m even using a blue yeti, which is kind of like your standard podcasting microphone, and it picks up everything very clearly. But let me jump into what we’re talking about today.

The first copywriting strategy that really all online business owners should be using. But it’s even more important for life coaches. Because of the nuanced approach, it can be really hard to describe what you do. The first point is explain your potential clients challenges and dreams as good or better than they can. So, challenges are pain points, what’s going on in their life that they need help with. And dreams, of course, is the result that they want, because at the end of the day, you are selling a result. And in order to sell the result, you have to acknowledge what’s not working for them. Today, people aren’t buying twelve coaching sessions, they’re buying the result.

And in fact, twelve coaching sessions sounds like work. If you could deliver the same result in one session, well, that would be better. You would be breaking a world records. You would have a line out the door, the proverbial door. You’d be killing it. But it’s this challenge of communicating their challenges and dreams. That’s the reason why many business coaches, or you’ll hear the recommendation out there, say that you have to niche down. It’s so that you can more accurately and precisely state your potential clients pain points and what they truly want to achieve.

The wording for more niched coaching, the more niche down you are, the more specific the wording is going to be. It can be easier to write as someone newer to the business of coaching, while the benefits that come from general life coaching, they can be harder to describe. But the challenge is the same. I don’t mean to make it sound like you’re screwed if you are a general life coach. I don’t recommend you niching down if you don’t have a reason to. The challenge is the same and you just need to figure out how to communicate the pain points and hopes of your potential clients. Because it’s totally possible as a general life coach to say what you do. It can just take some more fleshing out.

I was giving a consultation one time. I was going through a past example of how I helped a client and I saw her eyes go wide and a big smile on her face and she leaned forward. We were at a table in a restaurant and her elbows hit the table. Her chin was resting in her palm and she was leaning as far forward as you possibly could. And I remember exactly what I said that made her do it. I walked her through the process of how I helped a client create a group coaching program and my client got paid to make it. She made like an online there was a student portal, there was an online training aspect of this group program and that was clearly I knew, but it was very clearly what this person on the other end of this table wanted. And it really was an amazing story.

I’ll tell you more about it in a later episode. But the point is that when I described exactly what she wanted, she wanted what I was selling. I’m also reminded of a section of Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people. This section looks at the power of understanding another person’s perspective. The example that the author gives is two separate proposal presentations, like sales presentations looking to sell to an outside company. I’ve been looking for this section. I can’t find it, so I’m going off of memory from what I read years ago and I pictured it in a conference room. One presenter highlights all the reasons why his idea is amazing.

All the benefits of going with his idea. The other presenter spent about 90% of the presentation going through all the aspects of the potential client’s goals, what they want, why they’re in the room with them and why that’s important to them, and then just briefly outlined how that person’s proposal would accomplish that. The client chose the second proposal. They believed that the presenter fully understood them and whatever their idea to accomplish their goals was, they believed it would work because the presenter had the right end goal in mind. And it’s the same in your coaching business. You can spend way more time than you think you need to showcasing that you understand the challenges that your potential clients face. It will show up first thing on your homepage. You have about 3 seconds for someone viewing your homepage to assess if you can help them or not.

Showing that you understand their problem is the fastest way to let them know they’re in the right place. You do it in your lead magnet on the landing page or registration page or whatever you want to call it. The first section should be about the challenges that they face. You should mention it in your lead magnet. And I don’t mean to say in the first section, there’s a lot of different ways to do a landing page or a sales page. But very early on you need to show that you understand their plight on your sales page. For something you sell, it’s the same thing. You have an opportunity every step of the way to show that you get it.

Maybe you’ve been there, but you know exactly what they’re going through. Copywriting strategy number one is explain their challenges and dreams as good or better than they can. Strategy number two, talk like they do. The biggest mistake I see coaches make when trying to communicate their potential clients pain points and hopes and dreams is using words or concepts that their potential clients just don’t understand yet. They haven’t gotten there yet. Life coaches do amazing work, period. I’m talking about general life coaches, weight loss coaches, grief coaches, business coaches like myself, digital course creators. I have a life coach and I credit coaching.

To me, building the business that I have today, even with having all, I really had all the right skills and knowledge going into trying to create this business. But that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll actually go do it. But even though I know the amazing outcomes that coaches can elicit, I sometimes don’t feel it when I’m reading some coach’s copy. It just doesn’t come through and I get it. It’s hard to explain what you do without venturing into jargon or words that you use every day that you think, or that it’s the first word that comes to your brain. It’s your internal monologue. But when most people don’t understand it, that makes it jargon. It feels very natural for you to use those words.

But as soon as you know what a word means, and many others don’t, that is the definition of jargon. Don’t use it. You’ll lose your audience super quickly. Even if you’re writing your 10th email of your nurture sequence, you’ve explained over and over what a particular specific concept is. Someone who’s reading that email didn’t read the nine before and they’ll just get lost immediately. It’s not worth it. I guess there’s probably a way to segment your audience in a way that some emails are towards people newer to you, some are older than you. Sounds like more work than it’s worth.

Don’t use words or ideas that you wouldn’t be able to explain to a ten year old. How about that? Okay, that was strategy number two. Talk like your potential clients. Use the words, use the ideas that they do. Here’s the third strategy is working with you is simple. It’s totally a trap. Again, you’ve come so far in your own journal, in your own journey, you’ve learned so much. It’s really easy to overwhelm someone just starting out saying something like, well, all you need to do is this, that XYZ and ABC and that’s it.

Well, it sounds like a lot. You need to break it down. Something like, you just need to do these three things or do this thing and then that thing. Because who wants to do even more work to get the results that they want? If there was an option, like I said before, if there was an option to get the result, you’re selling in one coaching session, or heck, even zero, they click the buy button and boom, their life’s problems are fixed. That’s the option that would sell the most. But more realistically, let’s just do these three things. I’ll help you do those three things for me. When I offer done for you services, I call it my show up and coach approach.

My client just has to create a long form piece of content each week, then show up for coaching, whether that’s coaching and consultations or coaching and coaching sessions. Show up and coach. That’s pretty simple. It actually doesn’t get any more simple than that. When I offer coaching, I walk coaches through the process of creating the right offer and putting that offer in front of more people. That’s it. Create the offer. Put it in front of more people.

I can help you do that. It’s simple. In the end, you need to make working with you simple. Your potential clients just haven’t been exposed to the information that you have. That was a third strategy for copy you’re writing. Working with you is simple. Make it sound simple, because it is simple. Break it down.

Make it simple. That’s it for today. If you need help figuring out how to communicate your potential clients challenges and dreams, talking like they do, and showing that working with you is simple, let me know. I’ll see you next week. Bye.