You don’t need a huge following.

In fact, whenever I’ve seen behind the scenes of various coach’s businesses, I’ve noticed that the most successful often have a fairly modest online audience, while some of those who look super popular actually really struggle to convert those numbers into high-quality high-paying clients.

When it comes to building a service-based business through content marketing —i.e. using valuable content like blog articles, videos, podcasts and books to provide free information as a way of showcasing your skills and knowledge — the key focus must be on quality, personal connection, and careful measurement.

First, you must choose your preferred style of content creation. Choose just one (for now), and you can add more later. Do you like being in front of camera just ranting away? Then do videos and/or live streaming. Do you like writing? Create a blog or guest-post on places like Medium. Choose any format, so long as it’s something that you love doing and will stick with. No one format is necessarily better than any other, it all depends on how well you deliver value.

Once you’ve chosen your style, you need to choose your niche. Don’t worry about getting this perfectly right — you can and will change it dozens of times throughout your career. Just try to be as specific as possible. I like to use a formula of “this solution for this type of person”, e.g. my one is “confidence building and connection skills for Nice Guys”.

Once you’ve chosen your niche, have a look at the various platforms available, e.g. Medium, instagram, YouTube, Spotify etc. You’re looking for something that suits your chosen style of communication while also having a high likelihood of appealing to your chosen niche.

As you won’t know what this is for now, consider repurposing your content over a spread of platforms. For example, because I do short videos, I can post on instagram, TikTok, YouTube, my blog, Facebook reels, LinkedIn and even more! After doing this for a while, I’ve noticed that instagram and YouTube get the best response, so now I’ll focus in on those and not care so much about the others.

When you are starting out or have a small audience, spread your content wide and far, catching any attention you can find. You’ll be dealing with interest via individual units at first — a single like here, a couple of comments there — so wait until one platform takes off before you restrict yourself. But also make sure the content you create can be easily repurposed so you don’t have to redo or edit content differently for each of your platforms.

When it comes to creating your content, don’t hold back on value. I completely disagree with the marketing tactic of only giving them a taste and leaving them begging for a solution. It feels too manipulative for me.

I prefer to recognise that content will never be as good as my 1:1 coaching, so it’s best that my content delivers surprisingly good value. I want my 1min videos to be better than most peoples 20min videos. And I want my longer videos to be better than most people’s paid courses. I want them thinking, “If his free stuff is THIS good, just imagine what the coaching is like!”

A basic format for a good piece of content goes like this:

a) WHAT — state a specific example of an issue you want to address. E.g. “How to stop being boring at your friends’ parties” is much better than “Communication tips”.

b) WHY — explain what causes this problem; give the audience insight into something they may have never considered. Try to find something that other people have missed. E.g. “Being boring is more rather than less likely to happen when you try really hard to be interesting because people can feel the neediness and it’s repellent.”

c) HOW — give them a practical solution that shows you understand how to solve this problem and gives them a chance to actually try a new behaviour. E.g. “Try being really curious about other people rather than trying to seem interesting.”

No need to keep the solution a secret if you’re in the service industry — you’re not selling content, you’re selling your service! Don’t get this mixed up.

Once you’ve created and published your content on the various platforms, there are few things to consider. I wouldn’t worry overly about SEO and technical tricks right now. All of my most popular content broke all the “rules” of marketing anyway, so I’m not convinced that a perfect title or captivating thumbnail does anything more than attract too many low quality viewers (clickbait suckers who won’t become customers anyway).

Just make sure the title specifically reflects the problem the content addresses. Think of someone searching for this exact solution — make it obvious that this is the piece for them.

In terms of call to action (CTA), in a service business the key is for them to have personal contact with you. Don’t worry about fancier stuff like building an email list or attracting them into some complicated automated funnel. Think: how do I make it as easy as possible for them to start a conversation with me?

The simplest thing I’ve found that I still do to this day on my longer content is just tell them to email me directly for more support and personalised content. You have to assume they won’t guess anything — spell it out for them as clearly and directly as possible.

Once you’ve published, your job is now to start a conversation with ANYONE who reacts in ANY WAY (positively) to your content. Likes, comments, shares, follows — any form of reaction should be met with a personal message where possible.

Your ability to contact people varies on each platform, and it’s important that you don’t spam or breach the platform’s policy. But what I like about only contacting people who have already reacted to your content is that you’re not cold-calling in any way — these people are already at least a little bit warm to your form, so they’re much more welcoming and much less likely to report you!

The first message should just be gratitude. Thank them for supporting your work the way they did, and tell them you hope it was helpful. When the numbers are really low at the beginning, take some time to research whatever info is available about them and give them a genuine compliment on something about them that you’ve noticed.

Then, for the people who get back to you, the conversation will continue to evolve towards potential coaching (or whatever service you do).

All the details of this process are outside the scope of this post, but here’s a summary:

• Always make sure every contact is valuable to them — give them stuff, help them out, explore with them to create insights. Don’t just chat, and don’t ask for more than you’ve given them. They should feel like opening messages from you is Christmas day every time.
• Escalate as you converse. If you like them and consider them someone you can help, then each step of the conversation should move closer to coaching. E.g. first you give them recognition of their strengths, then you send them a survey that helps them explore their situation, then you give them a personalised video based on their survey results, then you invite them to a free introductory session.
• Respect a No. But have a backup — an email list, a Facebook group — something you can offer them as a consolation prize for giving you some time and attention. I give people a free ebook on social connection skills.

Lastly, you need to measure this all as it’s happening.

• Which content topics get the most response?
• Which content is responsible for the most clients?
• Where am I losing people in the communication process? If there’s a big drop off somewhere, you’re either asking too much, asking too little, or the next step simply isn’t appealing to them.
• Whenever you get a paid client, backtrack their entire journey with you. How did they first find out about you? What happened since then to escalate it to coaching? What can you repeat? How does it match other paying clients? This goes double for clients you also love to work with.

I hope that helps you de-mystify content marketing for coaches. Check out my coach-training program if you want to significantly escalate your results this year:

Cheers,

Dan