How important is a web site for coaching professionals?
According to Carol Solomon, developing an effective, professional web presence should be your #1 priority.
In her post, Attracting Your Perfect Clients Online she writes:
Your potential clients are looking to find someone with your skills online. They EXPECT to find you online. They expect you to answer certain questions on your website, such as “Can you help me?” before they contact you. It’s a bit of a screening process. They can search for and evaluate several practitioners in minutes. It’s easier, more efficient and less risky for your potential client to search the web than to call you right away. If they resonate with what’s on your website, and they are ready to take an action step, then they contact you.
Your website is the front door of your business. It has a big job to do. It needs to reach off the page and speak clearly to the needs of your potential clients. You need to communicate a professional image through your site, and you need to do it quickly. Why? Consumers make decisions in a matter of seconds. If you don’t have a compelling web presence, your potential clients will be gone in 1 click.
However, just having a web site may not be enough.
Kathleen Gage writes:
Making money on the Internet can be like baking a cake. If you don’t have all the right ingredients in the correct order you could have a total flop on your hands. On the other hand, when your systems are in place you can be extremely successful and have a very tasty outcome.
Patsi Krakoff over at writing on the web has added her 2 cents to the subject:
The process of article writing and distribution is a tool for credibility and positioning. So is blog posting. And newsletter publishing. But if you don’t have these 8 critical elements in place, well, you are writing to the wind. And you probably won’t make money.
Yes, a well designed professional web site (or blog) is essential to your coaching business. As a coaching professional, your web site’s goal MUST be to establish trust with potential clients. Trust is established on many different levels and through many different avenues. Two of the most common are:
- The design of the web site…. the colors and images used and how they are presented, will make a HUGE impact on first time visitors. Your business web site is NOT a job to be entrusted to Uncle Harry’s neighbor’s son who plays in a garage band, wears and multicolored mohawk and dabbles in web development using his pirated copy of Dreamweaver.
- The content of the web site is also crucial to building trust. Because you can’t build trust with a single web page or article, many coaching professionals are turning to blogs for their web presence. Shonnie Lavender shares some essential tips on building trust with your business blog.
In the end, like it or not, your coaching web site is literally the FACE of your business. In many cases, it’s the first (and sometimes last) thing your potential clients see. It’s the most important investment you’ll make in your business.
