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

this episode’s about what tech is required to create a group coaching program. And if there’s one thing that I want you to walk away with from this episode is that never, don’t add a feature to your coaching business because of a tech constraint. Everything is figureoutable when it comes to tech. I get it.

That, that. Advice is coming from a tech savvy person, and I know that some things come [00:01:00] easier to some people than others. If you were to ask me to Rev to write a review of a movie or a play, I could do it, but it’s not what I wanna be spending my time doing, so I get it. If you just wanna stay away from any tech stuff required to get your group coaching program going, you just want to focus on the coaching.

And that is totally possible. My client started group coaching program with a sales page, PayPal buy button, emails, and a zoom link. That’s it. And she made a, she had a 40, 000 launch on her first launch and her clients, they had a great experience. It’s possible. They didn’t know that they weren’t what they weren’t getting that would be created and released in the future.

They, now she has a fancy student portal that had all the homework assignments, teaching videos, [00:02:00] session recordings, and so on. They just knew that they were getting the help that they needed and going through the transformation that was promised. So what tech do you need to launch a group coaching program, a webpage, A way to buy, a way to send emails, and a zoom link.

Sound doable? If you find yourself not doing something in your business because the tech side of things sounds overwhelming, email me. Seriously, just email me. Ask me. I will either reply back with some guidance, or maybe make a podcast episode about it, or maybe offer some other sort of training. Because I’m sure you won’t be the only one going through that issue.

And at the end of the day, don’t not add a feature to your business because tech is a constraint. Now, if you need help figuring out how to get started creating a [00:03:00] web page, buy button, emails, or zoom link, that really is worth dedicating your time and effort to figuring out People don’t start coaching, don’t go into online business knowing those things.

You have to learn them. But those basic skills you, you will use for the rest of your career. That is just the bread and butter of running an online coaching business. In fact, this is a really good idea for some training that I will create. I’ll create a set of instructions on how to do that. I don’t know when, I’m not promising it right now, but I can remember being back in that situation of trying to figure it out.

Okay, how do I create a web page? We all start there because I can think of off the top of my head at least five big names that have multiple products that will help you create a sales page. I’m sure I could come up with at least 15 more and that’s, that’s just a lot of [00:04:00] options. I’ll create a separate episode on how to choose a web page host and builder.

There are lots of ways to go about that, all of which will work for our purposes of creating a sales page and a way to buy something, aka give you money. But right now I’m talking about just how do we get by with just the sales page and writing emails to deliver the content. There’s a few features you may want to add to your group coaching program that are possible even with this simple setup.

So first feature is homework, follow up activities, whatever they’re supposed to go do after the coaching session to help cement their learning, cement the coaching. I used to just put this in an email format for multiple launches, so it totally works. I would keep track of every homework item and what to bring to class, the topic to be discussed, and I would keep it in a Google Doc.

Well, actually, I think this was even before Google Docs were popular enough for me to be using. I had them in a Word doc. I could look at the whole program at once [00:05:00] versus looking through email by email. So I would have it all on one page where I could review with my client, is this what you want your emails to look like?

Versus having to look through each email in the email service provider. I would then copy and paste from the Word doc, which is this master source of information, and then copy that into an email. There were primarily two emails that I would always send out each week, you know, for my client. There was an email scheduled to send out the morning of the coaching session.

It served as a reminder with the time that they would meet in the Zoom link. It was always the same link and I would tell them that, but I wouldn’t expect them to bookmark it. They know that it would just show up in their email inbox the day of. I would include the topic that they would be discussing that day, and if they needed to have anything open in front of them for class.

The second email that would go out every week is the session recording. [00:06:00] I would have the email drafted up as it was being sent from the Life Coach that I was doing work for. I would copy and paste the recording into it, and then press send. So that brings me to the second feature that goes into most group coaching programs, and that’s the recordings.

And, I forgot a piece of tech. I did use Vimeo some way to play the session recording. You could also use YouTube. I prefer Vimeo as there’s less clutter in the interface when you’re trying to watch. YouTube is always trying to get you to go to the YouTube site to watch more of their videos. I wanted them just to focus on the video recording that I was showing them.

I would download the recording from Zoom and then upload it to Vimeo. I would copy that link and paste it into the email that would go out after each session. In this email, this particular coach would have me include a link to recommended reading or any other source of [00:07:00] content that she wanted her class to have access to.

It would go into this email that I call the recording email that would go out after each class. The third feature that you will probably want to put in your group coaching program, even the simplest ones, might end up needing a list of resources. At first I just included a few links to what started out as just a few resources.

This included some of her tools, extra PDFs, We got to the point where the emails had a lot of these links and it became harder to actually find what you needed To find in the recording email. So I created a web page that had a list of all the resources That way in every recording email I could include just one link to this page that had this longer list of all the resources that that they could possibly be looking for, but it really cleaned up that recording email.

If [00:08:00] they did want to look for something, they could go find it. I’d have more space to organize it on a web page. The fourth feature that doesn’t go into every group coaching program, and it didn’t go into ours until later on after we launched it multiple times, but it’s just an additional piece of video content that goes out once a week.

It was a snippet of a free masterclass past. She, she had recordings of old masterclasses, like multiple of the masterclasses, and I was sliced them up into more like five, 10 minute videos. And those five to 10 minute videos would go out in once a week with a message in the email. And the coaching was just very helpful, very relevant.

And if you edit it down into bite sized pieces, it’s It can provide a nice pick me up in the middle of the day. That was the feedback that we received from her group coaching clients. Again, that’s a Vimeo link in an email. This was a third email [00:09:00] that would go out throughout the week, but we didn’t add this feature until we had multiple launches under our belt.

It’s not necessary. But my point is that there’s other features that you can add that are just combinations of emails and links.

I think that’s it for broad categories of types of content that you would likely add to your group coaching program. I’m sure there’s more, but at the end of the day, whatever you have in mind, I’m sure it can be boiled down into a link that you can paste into an email. Now, if you’re looking to build a more robust coaching program, it’s also really not that hard.

I went through the simplest example of landing page, checkout, emails, Zoom link, and then Vimeo for the recordings. In fact, with some extra preparation, building a student portal and a digital course platform, like Kajabi, Teachable, Udemy, Thinkific, etc., that it can [00:10:00] actually mean less work in other parts of your business.

Thanks. I’ve built multiple digital courses in Kajabi. It is utterly simple. They even have web page design, build, and checkout capabilities. So if you don’t have a website yet, that could be an all in one solution for you. Their plans do start at about 70 a month, so it’s not cheap, but they do a lot of the work for you, so the price really is very fair.

The benefit of using a digital course platform is that your reminder email becomes just a reminder email of the time and the Zoom link. The recording email becomes just a link to the digital course platform. You can put the recording there, the homework is there, any extra content, teaching, PDFs. It’s all in Zoom.

In the, in the digital course platform, Kajabi, whatever it is. For most group coaching programs, a digital course platform will work [00:11:00] great. The client I was working for, she uses Ontraport and included in her pricing plan was membership sites. So, so I ended up building this, her student portal there. The very much significant aspect of this decision was that I had to design and build every webpage myself.

In Kajabi, you just upload the content that goes under a title. And they organize it based on a standard structure that all of their customers use. You can make subtle changes using their interface like color and very, very basic things. But to make anything drastic takes coding and is not always possible.

Which I don’t always, I don’t usually dedicate the time to figure out coding. In Ontraport, I designed a webpage for each coaching session. It had the training video there, the homework, the PDF downloads, the recommended [00:12:00] reading, and so on. If I wanted, the downside is that if I wanted to make a change to all the pages, I had to make the change one by one.

That’s a lot of webpages just to make a simple change to. So it was much more time consuming to set up an Entreport where I was building every page, but it is a very attractive student portal now, especially compared to what I’ve created in Kajabi. Like, yeah, you can go slap some content out there in Kajabi very quickly, but it will look a little more clunky.

Now, when you add your branding and your colors, it looks better, but it will never look as beautiful as if you designed the pages yourself. I also looked at using some plugins for WordPress, which would have done the trick. Whichever platform you go with, you’ll want to make sure it supports a checkout process, which just about everyone does.

Now, when I was doing this back in 2020, I [00:13:00] was looking at options where I had to piece things together. So I had to piece. A landing page, the content, like where to store the digital course, and the checkout page, it was all separate. And that’s really just not necessary, just four years later. Well, that’s about it.

That answers the question, what tech is required to start a group coaching program? Of course my answer is, not much. But I know that when you get into the weeds of it, it can feel like a lot. If you’d like some help setting up or making an improvement to your group coaching program, set up a free mini session on my website, bjbutler.

com. I work with clients in two ways. I coach them through how to build their coaching business to be how they want it. Or I also do done for you services. With your input, I can design and build whatever you and your clients need. Chances are I’ve done what you’re trying to do. Let’s work [00:14:00] together. This is my last podcast before we go to Japan for three weeks.

You can check my Facebook and Instagram for how that’s going with three young kids in tow. I have episodes pre recorded, so you’ll still hear from me while we’re out exploring. I’ll talk to you next week.

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

this episode’s about what tech is required to create a group coaching program. And if there’s one thing that I want you to walk away with from this episode is that never, don’t add a feature to your coaching business because of a tech constraint. Everything is figureoutable when it comes to tech. I get it.

That, that. Advice is coming from a tech savvy person, and I know that some things come [00:01:00] easier to some people than others. If you were to ask me to Rev to write a review of a movie or a play, I could do it, but it’s not what I wanna be spending my time doing, so I get it. If you just wanna stay away from any tech stuff required to get your group coaching program going, you just want to focus on the coaching.

And that is totally possible. My client started group coaching program with a sales page, PayPal buy button, emails, and a zoom link. That’s it. And she made a, she had a 40, 000 launch on her first launch and her clients, they had a great experience. It’s possible. They didn’t know that they weren’t what they weren’t getting that would be created and released in the future.

They, now she has a fancy student portal that had all the homework assignments, teaching videos, [00:02:00] session recordings, and so on. They just knew that they were getting the help that they needed and going through the transformation that was promised. So what tech do you need to launch a group coaching program, a webpage, A way to buy, a way to send emails, and a zoom link.

Sound doable? If you find yourself not doing something in your business because the tech side of things sounds overwhelming, email me. Seriously, just email me. Ask me. I will either reply back with some guidance, or maybe make a podcast episode about it, or maybe offer some other sort of training. Because I’m sure you won’t be the only one going through that issue.

And at the end of the day, don’t not add a feature to your business because tech is a constraint. Now, if you need help figuring out how to get started creating a [00:03:00] web page, buy button, emails, or zoom link, that really is worth dedicating your time and effort to figuring out People don’t start coaching, don’t go into online business knowing those things.

You have to learn them. But those basic skills you, you will use for the rest of your career. That is just the bread and butter of running an online coaching business. In fact, this is a really good idea for some training that I will create. I’ll create a set of instructions on how to do that. I don’t know when, I’m not promising it right now, but I can remember being back in that situation of trying to figure it out.

Okay, how do I create a web page? We all start there because I can think of off the top of my head at least five big names that have multiple products that will help you create a sales page. I’m sure I could come up with at least 15 more and that’s, that’s just a lot of [00:04:00] options. I’ll create a separate episode on how to choose a web page host and builder.

There are lots of ways to go about that, all of which will work for our purposes of creating a sales page and a way to buy something, aka give you money. But right now I’m talking about just how do we get by with just the sales page and writing emails to deliver the content. There’s a few features you may want to add to your group coaching program that are possible even with this simple setup.

So first feature is homework, follow up activities, whatever they’re supposed to go do after the coaching session to help cement their learning, cement the coaching. I used to just put this in an email format for multiple launches, so it totally works. I would keep track of every homework item and what to bring to class, the topic to be discussed, and I would keep it in a Google Doc.

Well, actually, I think this was even before Google Docs were popular enough for me to be using. I had them in a Word doc. I could look at the whole program at once [00:05:00] versus looking through email by email. So I would have it all on one page where I could review with my client, is this what you want your emails to look like?

Versus having to look through each email in the email service provider. I would then copy and paste from the Word doc, which is this master source of information, and then copy that into an email. There were primarily two emails that I would always send out each week, you know, for my client. There was an email scheduled to send out the morning of the coaching session.

It served as a reminder with the time that they would meet in the Zoom link. It was always the same link and I would tell them that, but I wouldn’t expect them to bookmark it. They know that it would just show up in their email inbox the day of. I would include the topic that they would be discussing that day, and if they needed to have anything open in front of them for class.

The second email that would go out every week is the session recording. [00:06:00] I would have the email drafted up as it was being sent from the Life Coach that I was doing work for. I would copy and paste the recording into it, and then press send. So that brings me to the second feature that goes into most group coaching programs, and that’s the recordings.

And, I forgot a piece of tech. I did use Vimeo some way to play the session recording. You could also use YouTube. I prefer Vimeo as there’s less clutter in the interface when you’re trying to watch. YouTube is always trying to get you to go to the YouTube site to watch more of their videos. I wanted them just to focus on the video recording that I was showing them.

I would download the recording from Zoom and then upload it to Vimeo. I would copy that link and paste it into the email that would go out after each session. In this email, this particular coach would have me include a link to recommended reading or any other source of [00:07:00] content that she wanted her class to have access to.

It would go into this email that I call the recording email that would go out after each class. The third feature that you will probably want to put in your group coaching program, even the simplest ones, might end up needing a list of resources. At first I just included a few links to what started out as just a few resources.

This included some of her tools, extra PDFs, We got to the point where the emails had a lot of these links and it became harder to actually find what you needed To find in the recording email. So I created a web page that had a list of all the resources That way in every recording email I could include just one link to this page that had this longer list of all the resources that that they could possibly be looking for, but it really cleaned up that recording email.

If [00:08:00] they did want to look for something, they could go find it. I’d have more space to organize it on a web page. The fourth feature that doesn’t go into every group coaching program, and it didn’t go into ours until later on after we launched it multiple times, but it’s just an additional piece of video content that goes out once a week.

It was a snippet of a free masterclass past. She, she had recordings of old masterclasses, like multiple of the masterclasses, and I was sliced them up into more like five, 10 minute videos. And those five to 10 minute videos would go out in once a week with a message in the email. And the coaching was just very helpful, very relevant.

And if you edit it down into bite sized pieces, it’s It can provide a nice pick me up in the middle of the day. That was the feedback that we received from her group coaching clients. Again, that’s a Vimeo link in an email. This was a third email [00:09:00] that would go out throughout the week, but we didn’t add this feature until we had multiple launches under our belt.

It’s not necessary. But my point is that there’s other features that you can add that are just combinations of emails and links.

I think that’s it for broad categories of types of content that you would likely add to your group coaching program. I’m sure there’s more, but at the end of the day, whatever you have in mind, I’m sure it can be boiled down into a link that you can paste into an email. Now, if you’re looking to build a more robust coaching program, it’s also really not that hard.

I went through the simplest example of landing page, checkout, emails, Zoom link, and then Vimeo for the recordings. In fact, with some extra preparation, building a student portal and a digital course platform, like Kajabi, Teachable, Udemy, Thinkific, etc., that it can [00:10:00] actually mean less work in other parts of your business.

Thanks. I’ve built multiple digital courses in Kajabi. It is utterly simple. They even have web page design, build, and checkout capabilities. So if you don’t have a website yet, that could be an all in one solution for you. Their plans do start at about 70 a month, so it’s not cheap, but they do a lot of the work for you, so the price really is very fair.

The benefit of using a digital course platform is that your reminder email becomes just a reminder email of the time and the Zoom link. The recording email becomes just a link to the digital course platform. You can put the recording there, the homework is there, any extra content, teaching, PDFs. It’s all in Zoom.

In the, in the digital course platform, Kajabi, whatever it is. For most group coaching programs, a digital course platform will work [00:11:00] great. The client I was working for, she uses Ontraport and included in her pricing plan was membership sites. So, so I ended up building this, her student portal there. The very much significant aspect of this decision was that I had to design and build every webpage myself.

In Kajabi, you just upload the content that goes under a title. And they organize it based on a standard structure that all of their customers use. You can make subtle changes using their interface like color and very, very basic things. But to make anything drastic takes coding and is not always possible.

Which I don’t always, I don’t usually dedicate the time to figure out coding. In Ontraport, I designed a webpage for each coaching session. It had the training video there, the homework, the PDF downloads, the recommended [00:12:00] reading, and so on. If I wanted, the downside is that if I wanted to make a change to all the pages, I had to make the change one by one.

That’s a lot of webpages just to make a simple change to. So it was much more time consuming to set up an Entreport where I was building every page, but it is a very attractive student portal now, especially compared to what I’ve created in Kajabi. Like, yeah, you can go slap some content out there in Kajabi very quickly, but it will look a little more clunky.

Now, when you add your branding and your colors, it looks better, but it will never look as beautiful as if you designed the pages yourself. I also looked at using some plugins for WordPress, which would have done the trick. Whichever platform you go with, you’ll want to make sure it supports a checkout process, which just about everyone does.

Now, when I was doing this back in 2020, I [00:13:00] was looking at options where I had to piece things together. So I had to piece. A landing page, the content, like where to store the digital course, and the checkout page, it was all separate. And that’s really just not necessary, just four years later. Well, that’s about it.

That answers the question, what tech is required to start a group coaching program? Of course my answer is, not much. But I know that when you get into the weeds of it, it can feel like a lot. If you’d like some help setting up or making an improvement to your group coaching program, set up a free mini session on my website, bjbutler.

com. I work with clients in two ways. I coach them through how to build their coaching business to be how they want it. Or I also do done for you services. With your input, I can design and build whatever you and your clients need. Chances are I’ve done what you’re trying to do. Let’s work [00:14:00] together. This is my last podcast before we go to Japan for three weeks.

You can check my Facebook and Instagram for how that’s going with three young kids in tow. I have episodes pre recorded, so you’ll still hear from me while we’re out exploring. I’ll talk to you next week.