Ultimate life coach business book marketing getting clients careers

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

Meet the authors and your coaches: Topher Morrison - For over 20 years, Topher has traveled the world as a professional speaker. He is a best-selling author, and has been featured in 3 movies as an expert in his field. Known as “The motivational speaker for people who are sick & tired of motivational speakers,” Topher‘s shockingly honest and irresistibly down-to-earth approach is surprisingly infectious. His personality and straightforward manner are endearing to audiences who are tired of fleeting success in self-help sinkholes. You will be on the edge of your seat as Topher gives you a proven, step-by-step system to become a highly-paid and highlyrespected professional fitness speaker and seminar leader. http://www.tophermorrison.com

John Spencer Ellis - John has helped tens of thousands of fitness pros to earn more money and live their dreams. During this same time, he made an award-winning personal development movie (and appeared in a second), co-authored 3 books, quoted in 40 magazines, founded 3 new fitness associations and the Spencer Institute for Life Coach Training, appeared several times on one of the highest rated reality shows in history, produced, hosted and appeared on many TV programs, hosted two fitness infomercials, and has created fitness trends used in over 50 countries. He was also nominated for induction into the Fitness Hall of Fame. Each week, over 1 million people around the world use a fitness program he created. John operates all of this from a laptop on an antique desk from his home he shares with his wife and two teen daughters. http://www.johnspencerellis.com

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

INTRODUCTION

John:

Hi, this is John Spencer Ellis and welcome to the Ultimate Life Coach Business book. My partner for this interview is Topher Morrison. He is a faculty member of the Spencer Institute, a friend, and a mentor, so welcome, Topher.

Topher:

Thank you, John. How are you today?

John:

I‘m doing fantastic and I am so excited that we get to help new and aspiring – and even seasoned – coaching professionals get more out of their business to where they are able to live the life they want as they help others live an inspiring and exciting life as well, and certainly one that is more fulfilling.

First of all Topher, I am going to have you give a little bit of your background and then I will do the same. Then, we are going to get right into it, so go ahead and tell the readers, who is Topher Morrison?

Topher:

Well, for the past 20 years, I have had an amazing life getting to travel all over the world sharing with people techniques and strategies on everything from mental health and wellness to successful speaking presentation skills.

I‘ve been a

professional speaker for over 20 years. I have survived two recessions and my expertise is really in sharing with people how to maximize their business through presentation skills, because no matter what business you're in, if you ever speak in front of more than two or three people at a time, you are a professional speaker.

So my company shares with people how to take advantage of that opportunity to speak in front of a group of prospects—whether it be a formal presentation or a

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

casual marketing or networking meeting—we share with them how to capitalize on that and really maximize their sales in whatever industry they might be in.

John:

My background in coaching and personal development and fitness is complex, unique, and eclectic. I‘ve been very, very fortunate to have a wide range of educational experiences, practical experiences, and occupations within the health, fitness, wellness, personal development, and coaching industries and I termed that an umbrella term of the ―helping field‖ and that coaches are essentially helpers so we have called that the ―Helping field‖……… or at least, I do.

My background is in education, business, health science, medicine, and a wide range of personal development systems. And of course, Topher, I have learned from you as well. You have been one of my valued instructors and I appreciate that.

Topher:

You mentioned at the very beginning of this dialogue what type of coaches would be getting value from this program, whether they be new people, people trying to reinvent themselves, or even a seasoned professional coach and the irony is that probably the seasoned professional coach is going to benefit from this maybe even more than the new people and the reason for that is because if you are what we refer to as a ―seasoned‖ coach—maybe you have been in the business for more than, say, five years—the strategies that you used five years ago to succeed as a coach

are

going

to

fail

you

as

a

coach

in

the

modern

era.

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

Often times, what you will discover is that the seasoned coaches are the ones that need the most powerful and effective techniques because they're using techniques that are out of date.

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

EDUCATION

John:

That leads us into the first topic of this book and that is education. obviously, there is formal and informal.

Now

There are degrees; there are

certifications… there are workshops, and so on. Before I get into any specifics, I want to emphasize that education is critical.

You cannot be a noteworthy

expert if you have no expertise. Now, that being said, there are as many opinions as to an educational track or path for a coach as there are coaches for people who coach.

No matter what path a coach may take, one thing we can all agree on is that, with very few exceptions, all education is good. The only time education would be bad is if it was taught under a pretense of not being ethically sound, morally appropriate, or teaching you things that are illegal. Even though it is educational, there are times when it is inappropriate. Aside from that, I think basically all education

is

good

–

formal

educations,

degrees,

and

so

on.

Certifications are essential as well. And then, of course, workshops and reading books (like you are right now), listening to audios, doing different types of coaching programs – all those sorts of things really matter.

Now there are a lot of different beliefs as to what type of degree, for example, if someone were to have a degree, is the best choice. Through all of our experience,

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

through all of the years and literally working with tens of thousands of people that have wide-ranging careers in coaching and personal development, the truth is that not any one single degree program is any more advantageous than the others. In some cases, the most successful coaches – the ones who have the most influence, who make the biggest change, who have the most expansive global reach – don't have a formal degree and far fewer have any sort of advanced degree.

Topher:

So when you look at education, there are really two types of education that coaches are primarily going to be interested in. There is the academic education and then there's the entrepreneurial education.

You mentioned how often times, some of the most successful coaches don't have a formal degree or a formal education, and yet they are massively successful coaches.

The reason for that is because those types of coaches have an

entrepreneurial education, not an academic education. What is the difference?

Typically, an academic education – one which you would get from a traditional university, has a mentality in it that you need to learn everything before you do anything and so the whole idea is don't go out into the working field, don't get a career until you‘ve got our degree. Learn everything you need to learn first, then go get the job and take the action, whereas, entrepreneurial education works just the opposite.

Academic people need to learn everything in order to do something.

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

Entrepreneurial people and entrepreneurial education follow the mindset that in order to know anything, you have got to do everything, so what we will find is the people who really succeed as coaches have an entrepreneurial mentality for their education, meaning they are not trying to get their education so they can finally go out and become a coach. They are going out and becoming a coach to get their biggest amounts of education, and while they do that they are getting the training necessary in order to utilize what they are learning in the real world.

I think if

our coaches reading this book can realize that they should not wait until they have read this book, or wait until they have purchased all of the resources that we are going to share with them in this book in order to get started.

HELPFUL HINTS: Here are some educational resources for the coaching profession that we fully endorse and highly recommend…

Spencer Institute for Life Coaching (over 10 specialty certifications) http://www.spencerinstitute.com NESTA (National Exercise & Sport Trainers Association) Education and certification for coaches who emphasize fitness in their practice. http://www.nestacertified.com Online Hypnotherapy Certification Training, by Topher Morrison – http://www.hypnotherapycertifications.com The Death of Coaching, by Dan Bradbury - Free report reveals the 5 'daggers of death' killing most coaching businesses and how to avoid them: http://bit.ly/h5gyQt

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

The Top Secret Business Building System for Coaches, by Dan Bradbury - http://bit.ly/dNy6Fc Create the Ultimate Coaching Business, by Dan Bradbury http://bit.ly/hTRMs8 The

DANAMIC

Coaching

System,

by

Dan

Bradbury

-

http://bit.ly/gRs5lJ The Achiever’s Edge – By Peter Thomson (This guy is my personal mentor on business and in my opinion, he‘s a genius. If he tells you to do something, just do it. That‘s how much faith I have in him! This monthly educational program has been invaluable to my company and I love it! – Topher)

By the way, many of the helpful hints we are going to share with you in this book, you will need one way or the other - we are just going to save you a lot of time, a lot of heartache, and a lot of money by recommending the resources we have spent painstakingly long hours in finding, to help save you that time and that money.

John:

Very well said.

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

CERTIFICATIONS

John:

I want to move on and talk about certifications for life coaches. At the Spencer Institute, our main coaching designation is the Life Strategies Coach Certification.

It is what we call your baseline, your primary, your fundamental education and training specific to the field of coaching.

In a minute, we are going to talk about breaking out into different niches in the coaching industry. You need specialized training whether it is a certification, or a workshop, or other means of acquiring additional education. I believe that all coaches need a primary designation that gives them the foundational tools to learn how to communicate effectively, how to act responsibly as a coach, and to learn how to elicit the excellence that is inside of your clients – your students.

Topher:

You know, a lot of the specialized or ―niche‖ coaching programs that are out there don't focus on the fundamental principles that a life coaching program does; and as long as people realize that the life coaching programs are designed to give you that foundation to where you have the skill set necessary to go out and then find your niche, then you are going to be on the right track. But if people look at a life coaching program as the end-all be-all, then they might get into trouble because they will think, ―Well, now I've learned it and now I am ready to go out,‖ but the challenge with that is that we are becoming more and more of an niched society

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

more so than ever and if you don't have a specific niche in your coaching business, you most likely are going to go broke.

The majority of the successful people that I know who started out as life coaches have now moved into a specific niche. When you think about it, John, it just makes sense because if you have a specialty in one area, it will save you a lot of time because you will already be able to anticipate all of the questions, all of the challenges, and all of the obstacles that those people in that specific niche will incur; whereas, if you are a generalized life coach - while you will have the skills of communication - you may not have the specific expertise necessary to help them move to the next level in whatever area that they are looking for.

John:

Well, let‘s talk about a niche a little bit more. It is possible to be ―to nichey‖ as well. In other words, if you drill down into a niche too far, you may find too few people available at any one time to utilize your service.

Let me give you an example of being too broad and then too narrow. If you are too broad, you would say that you are a ―life coach.‖ That is kind of like being a general practitioner as a medical doctor, as an example. If you think about a general practitioner as compared to a neurosurgeon, a neurosurgeon makes far more money, is in higher regard, and in higher demand for more important challenges. That‘s just one example.

If you are a fitness coach, for example, and you just say, I am ―a personal trainer,‖

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

that is very, very general and that is not much of a specific niche. However, if you are a coaching professional who has drilled down into your niche so much that you are specialization is women who have recently gone through divorce that are going through a midlife crisis that live within two miles of your home that are available on Monday and Wednesday nights for a group meeting, who want to develop bigger biceps using only the shake weight that‘s clearly being ―too nichey.‖

I would like for you to give me your thoughts on this, Topher.

Topher:

Yeah, you know, any time you want to develop a niche in your business, there are really fundamentally two questions I think you should ask yourself and I got these two questions from the branding guru in America, Peter Montoya. What he says is that any time you are developing a niche, ask yourself two questions: (1) Who do you like? Because ultimately, if you pick a niche which consists of people that you don't enjoy working with, you are not going to be happy no matter how much money you make. That‘s the first question. Who do you like? (2) Who makes money? When you have a list of all of the types of people you like and a list of all the types of people who make a lot of money, find the commonalities in those two columns and there is going to be an indication with where your niche will lie because if you work with people that you really like but don't make a lot of money, you are going to have a hard time making business.

If you wanted to become the life coach for surfers, you might like surfing, but

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

how many surfers are really committed to hiring a life coach and have the money to do so? Unless they are pro surfers, they probably are not going to even have the money to afford a coach so it wouldn't be a good niche. Likewise, if you pick people that you know make a lot of money but you don‘t like, for example, let‘s say you know that defense attorneys make a lot of money but you ultimately do not like defense attorneys, no matter how much money you make with them, you are not going to feel fulfilled. You are going to go through burn-out, you are going to hate your job. It is not going to be enjoyable for you. Find people that you like and make a lot of money. That is your niche. Find that and there you are going to find your wealth.

Here are some great resourcesThe Logo Company will design your coaching logo for you. http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-4361017-10529948 99 Designs is another logo design company that offers great service at a low price. http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-4361017-0792263?cm_mmc=CJ_-3234932-_-4361017-_-99Designs.com HELPFUL HINT: Why not pick up either of Peter‘s books? There really is no one in the business of branding who knows more about the subject. Which one should you buy? That‘s a bit like asking me if you should get a back rub or a foot massage… I say get them both!

The

Personal

Branding

http://amzn.to/e6ffzW

Phenomenon,

by

Peter

Montoya

-

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

The Brand Called You, by Peter Montoya - http://amzn.to/hGm1oT

John:

I want you to repeat those two things and I‘m going to add two more—the two questions you have to ask when developing your niche or your brand.

Topher:

Who do I like? And, who makes a lot of money? The answer to those two questions will be your niche.

John:

I would like to add two more for your consideration. One, is this a group that can be easily accessed? In other words, do these groups of people that you want to reach, do they already exist in groups? Can you easily access them? And the other thing goes along with what Topher said in regards to do you like them. I‘m going to go one step further. Would you like to hang out with them? Because that will let you know if you really like them. If you wouldn‘t want these kinds of people in your home, or to enjoy a dinner with, then they are probably not the right match.

Topher:

Agreed. In fact, we can even go one step further with that because what you said sparked another thought in my mind which is to realize this: I can see how a lot of people reading this document might think ―Okay, well I like everybody and everybody has the money if they are committed‖. That is a very naïve notion that a lot of start-up coaches think, and it is going to be the path to failure and the path to poverty.

The reality is that you will know you have identified your niche when you know

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison where they are. Always ask yourself, ‗Do I know where these people hang out?....

Do I know where they are?‘ If you don‘t have an exact answer for that, you are probably not niched specifically enough.

A great example of this would be somebody who says ―My niche is business people.‖ Okay, but if I were to ask you where do business people hang out? That is too broad. You would not really be able to give me a specific answer of where business people hang out. However, if you were to say that your niche is working with recovering alcoholics, you would know that they meet at AA meetings. So all of a sudden, you know where they are located. If you were to sit there and say, ‗My niche is women,‘ women are everywhere. Where do women hang out?

Well, they don't hang out. They are everywhere. They exist in all places. But you could sit there and say ‗My niche would be soccer moms.‘

Okay, do you know where soccer moms hang out? Yes, you know what? There is that deli down the road that they all take their kids to for lunch. There is that playground that they all go to in the afternoon. If you know where they are, you know you've got a niche. If you don‘t know where they are, you are probably not specifically niched enough.

John:

We are going to go head and move on to branding. We will probably say this as we go through each of these categories—I will say it now. This is probably one of the most important things you can do for your coaching career and your coaching business. Let‘s first define branding. I will give my definition and then

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

I will have Topher give his.

In my opinion, branding is the unique attributes that make you, your company, or your product identifiable to your potential customer. Topher, what do you say?

Topher:

Agreed 100%. I will rephrase it slightly in a way that might grab a different audience, but we are already in 100% agreement there.

Before I even give my definition of branding, I am going to take two steps back and give my definition of sales and marketing because a lot of people think that they are branding when, in fact, they are actually selling. What is the difference between the three? Let‘s talk about selling.

Selling is what you do to convince people to give you money and that is it in its purest, simplest form. How do you know when you are selling? Usually, if your lips are moving or if your prospects are on your website where it says, ―Buy now‖ or ―Click Here to Purchase,‖ or, ―Add to Shopping Car‖, then you are selling.

That‘s it. Those are the only two times when you are typically selling somebody something. Remember, selling is what you do to convince people to give you money.

What is marketing? That is what you do to get people to know who you are. So that also can be selling because when you are selling, you are also marketing. But when you are marketing, you may not necessarily be selling. Marketing could be things like your website, your brochures, your business cards, your networking,

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

your community service, and your charitable contributions, anything where somebody might find out about you; that is a marketing channel.

Branding is even more specific. Branding, like you talked about, is the unique attribute; the phrase that I would use here would be emotional connection.

Branding is the emotional connection that people associate to you and your product and the benefit it provides for them.

John:

Those are some clear distinctions and well put.

One of the challenges that I have noted with new – primarily new – life coaches is that branding, to them, seems too self-serving and I have to pause and think about what they are saying. They think, in general—I am generalizing however, this has happened many more times than I ever would have expected before this step in the topics. They think somehow that is too self-serving and they don't want to ―promote themselves‖.

Though, in essence, what I say is that if you don‘t promote yourself and build your brand, it is very unlikely that anyone else will.

Topher:

I would have to say that it is almost 100% guaranteed nobody else will unless you have done some great sales incentive with them, the fact is, you have to brand yourself nowadays. If not, you are going to become guilty of falling into a sea of mediocrity and you are going to be just like every other struggling life coach that is out there.

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

The problem with branding is this: When you brand yourself, you have to start excluding people and especially life coaches which, generally speaking, most life coaches get into the business because they love people, they love helping people, they know they have a gift and a knack and a talent for helping people to find their talents and their resources, and they want to get that message out to as many people as possible. So the moment we sit down with them and say, ―Okay, you have to develop a brand identity and that brand identity is going to appeal to some and not the others,‖ they immediately shut down and they think, ―Well, but I don't want to exclude this to anybody. I want to make sure that anybody who reads my marketing material will feel connected and know that I can work with them.‖ So they will sit down with their friends which they think are marketing or ad copy people—and by the way, we are going to give you some great resources in this book for you to take and really make sure you save a lot of time and save a lot of money. One of those resources we are going to share with you is where do you go to have your ad copy written.

I can tell you right now you do not go to your friends to have your ad copy written. You probably don‘t even write ad copy yourself. You hire people who are powerful and skilled in ad copywriting because if you don‘t, what happens is you will sit down and you will think, ―Okay, I want to design a website or I want to write a brochure that if anybody reads it, they will feel like I am speaking to them. The problem with that is that you‘ve deluded yourself. You have tried to become a jack of all trades and a master to none and it is going to be ineffective.

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

The fundamental rule in developing a brand identity is this: If your branding is not powerful enough to repel the audience that you do not want, it will never be attractive enough to attract the audience that you do want. You can gauge the power of your brand by how well it offends the people who are not in your brand identity. Here are some great examples of this outside of the coaching business:

Oprah Winfrey has a very, very powerful brand and yet, people hate her just as much as some people love her. Very few people have no feelings or opinions about Oprah Winfrey. They either love her or they hate her.

Let‘s go to the opposite side of the spectrum. Howard Stern, shock jock DJ – people either love him or they hate him, but they rarely have no opinion of him, and when people have no opinion of you, you have not developed a powerful enough brand. When people either love you or hate you, then you know you have created a brand.

Now, immediately life coaches say, ―But I don‘t want anyone to hate me.‖ I get that. I do. I don‘t like to have anybody hate me as well, but what is even more important for me and I hope it is more important for you, is to make sure that the people who are attracted to your message listen to it and respond to it and actually live by it. That will never happen if you have such a watered-down, generic

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison business identity that doesn‘t appeal to or repel anyone. You have got to make sure that you do have some exclusionary, some divisive marketing copy that turns people off. If it turns some people off, you know it is going to be powerful enough to turn other people on. Ironically, the people that it turns on happen to be in your niche and they are the ones you want to work with anyway.

John:

I want to shift this a little bit and talk about your logo for your business because you do need your logo as part of your brand, but there is a distinction. Many people confuse a logo with a brand. They think it is one in the same. That is not the case. However, your logo is an integral part of your brand because it is a visual representation of what your brand is and it helps people identify with you and your brand, but your logo is not your brand. Even though a logo can evoke emotion, it is not the same emphasis of the overall emotional attachment or sensation that someone has associated with your or your brand.

Do you want to talk about a few things about a logo?

Topher:

A logo primarily – for a life coach, at least – will consist of three components.

The components for a logo will consist of an icon – that is going to be some type of a graphic image which symbolizes your personality, your brand identity or something like that. I will give you examples in a moment. So the first thing will be your icon. The second element will be your company name which, for many life coaches, will probably be their name, themselves, because they are the company. Then the third thing will be the slogan. The slogan is going to identify exactly who their niche market is.

So you have your icon, you have your

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

company name, and you have your slogan. All three of those things combined will create your logo.

So for example, with myself, my icon is an image of a man with his two arms up into the air in victory of the Rocky pose. The reason why I have chosen that as my icon is because that symbolizes my identity. My whole moniker for life is to make each day an epic adventure and you don‘t see people living an epic life with their head hanging low and their arms dragging down on the side. They have their arms up, their chest is out, and it is a bold comment. So that is my icon.

My company name is my name. It is Topher Morrison, Incorporated. It seems to me, if you want to have a company, you want to make sure that the company name is the most familiar and easily recognizable name that is out there. It always boggles my mind when I see some life coaches out there, they have their personal name, then they have a company name, then they have a coaching name that they use for their product, and then they have a different website name and they have convoluted it and made it really hard. But when you think about it, look at some of the best brands that are there.

If you want to have a soft drink filled with sugar and fizz, you are going to drink either Pepsi or Coke. No matter what type of coke you buy, it always has the name ―Coke‖ on it. If you want to go to their website, you go to coke.com. If you want to call their phone, it is 1-800-GET-COKE.

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

Generally speaking, most people in a coaching business, their company name should probably be their own name.

The slogan is a tricky one. If there is one area where I see most life coaches making a huge mistake, it is clearly going to be in their slogan. Their slogans are what I call ―empty slogans.‖ An empty slogan is something that doesn‘t say anything at all, but it just sounds nice. Something like ―Tom Smith Coaching – we make the difference,‖ or ―Tom Smith Coaching – committed to excellence,‖ or ―Tom Smith Coaching – Excellence, committed to superiority,‖ or something that sounds really nice, but at the end of the day it really doesn‘t say anything.

The slogan should zoom right into your target market and say one of two things: (1) Who are you and what do you do? or (2) Who are you and what is the benefit?

So for example, my slogan is ―The Professional Speaking Experts‖. Okay, so what does that imply? It implies that if you want to become a professional speaker, you go to Topher Morrison, Incorporated because they are the experts at creating professional speakers. We don‘t say, ―Topher Morrison, Incorporated – Committed to Excellence Beyond Belief,‖ because that is not going to speak to my niche. The slogan needs to speak to your niche. In fact, the slogan really needs to alienate anyone and everyone else who doesn‘t fit into your niche program.

So people, for example, who have no desire to be a professional

23

Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison speaker, will look at my company and they will think, ―I don‘t want to do business with him.‖ And do you know what? I don‘t want them to do business with me because they are just going to clutter up my mailing list, waste my time, and ask me questions about things that I am not an expert in. Look, I‘m an expert in one thing – creating professional speakers. That is it, so that is what my slogan is going to convey.

John, I think it is maybe at a time we should let people know or give them some resources. If there is one resource I could recommend, I am really blessed to have a dear friend of mine by the name of Peter Montoya who is considered the personal branding guru in America.

He has been featured on CNBC, Wolf

Blitzer‘s The Situation Room, you see him on TV all of the time giving his opinions and his strategies for how to create powerful brand imagery.

One of the things that was really interesting was several years ago when he created his business, he was an expert in branding, but not an expert in speaking.

He hired me to help him develop his branding seminars because I have a unique gift where I can take the most complicated bits of information and transform it into an easy to understand format. So I actually had to learn the concepts of branding through Peter Montoya and through that it got to such a degree to where even when he got too busy or he was sick, he would call me and I would become his pinch hitter and I would go in and actually do his seminars for him.

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

We actually videotaped, one time, an entire branding program for specifically hypnotherapists, but it doesn‘t matter if you are a hypnotherapist or not, if you are selling an intangible service where people are listening to your advice, it is all the same thing. I think if you really want to learn the facets of creating a powerful personal brand much more, you would be really wise to invest the minimal investment of only $69.95 for the branding program. It is a home-study video course, on-line streaming video, quick and simple.

It will blow you away with all of the great information.

It‘s at

http://www.hypnotherapycertifications.com and as much as I would love to say I created it, I did not. All of the information comes to you from Peter Montoya, who is the author of The Brand Called You and The Personal Branding Phenomenon.

If this excites you or if this intrigued you or if it has created questions inside of you, going ―I‘m not exactly sure how to create the slogan,‖ or ―What type of an icon to create,‖ or ―How do I develop the right brochures or the right websites?‖ all of that stuff is covered inside this video tutorial and I think you would really be wise to spend a moment and invest the $69.95 for the branding program.

John:

One thing I want to emphasize when we are talking about branding, although it goes into marketing and advertising and campaigning, and future topics which we are going to into about creating reciprocity and so on… When you are creating your brand and your slogan or your catch phrase, whatever you would like to call it, you have to answer one question and that question is, ―What problem am I

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison

solving for this individual? What problem have I created the solution for with my business?‖ Topher:

I agree. You know what is really interesting is I speak with people all of the time that want to get into the business of speaking or coaching or mentoring, and I ask them, ―Why should people listen to you?‖ and one of the most common answers I hear is they say, ―Because I have a unique gift of helping people tap into their full potential,‖ and they get almost offended with me when I say that is not a unique gift.

That is an inherent skill that just about anybody with an ounce of

compassion in their brain and their heart has available to them. There are loads of people out there that are great at helping people to tap into their true potential.

Anybody can do it simply because they are not that person and it is easier to coach from the sidelines. So what I always tell people is that is not a unique skill.

What is your unique skill? What is it that you can do? In terms of potential, where do you specialize in helping people to tap into that potential?

So for example, with myself, my expertise and the problem that I solve is that there are loads of people out there who want to become professional speakers, but they don‘t have a clue how to make a six-figure to seven-figure income as a professional speaker that I do. So what is the problem that I solve? I help people who make less than six figures make six, and I help people who make less than seven, make seven. It is real simple. And then immediately my target audience knows whether or not I can solve their problem because if they don‘t have a

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison problem making less than six figures, they don‘t want to hire me to help them become a professional speaker.

John:

Yeah, and we are going to talk a lot more about professional speaking as we continue on through the material here. I just want to leave people with this.

Regardless if you decide to add professional speaking to your coaching business, learning how to speak effectively and being an effective communicator in small groups, one-on-one, for on-line video or whatever it is, will enhance you personally and professionally and will give you more credibility more so than just about anything else you can do.

Topher, do you have any other thoughts?

Topher:

Yeah, one last thing about branding, I will share with the readers is this: As soon as you decide what your niche is going to be, as soon as you decide who you want to work with, I need to prepare you for the dangers ahead and there is one thing that I can promise you right now. I guarantee you that the moment you make the statement to the universe, ―This is my brand. This is my niche and I don‘t work with anybody else,‖ I can promise you this one thing. Immediately you will have everybody else who is not in that niche wanting to do business with you.

Just the other day I was working with a person who wanted to specialize in weight loss for women over 40. That is a great brand. It is specific and so unique. It speaks to women that are over 40 who have battled with weight their whole life.

The moment he made that claim, the moment he created his slogan and his icon

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and everything which was weight loss for women over 40, guess what he had?

His first client – a man.

It is so easy when you have developed your brand identity and you become an exclusionist and you say ―I‘m not going to work with these types of people,‖ the universe has this funny sense of humor and they will give you those people and that is where you really have to decide if you are serious about your niche or not.

Are you going to tell those people, ―I am sorry, I don‘t specialize in your need. I only work with these types of people,‖ or are you going to buckle, cave in, and say, ―Well, I will just work with this person until my niche finally comes along?‖ That is a strategy for failure. Get clear on who you want to work with. Get equally clear on who you don‘t want to work with and just be prepared to know that the people who you don‘t want to work with will come to you first and that is the universe‘s way of testing you to see if you are really serious about the people you want to work with. They won‘t give you the people you want to work with until you say ―no‖ to the people who you don‘t want to work with.

John:

Okay, we are going to move on to coaching format options.

So, what do I mean by that? I mean that there are many, many ways – and even far more than we will discuss here – but these are the fundamental ways in which you can operate your coaching business. They are one-on-one, small group, specialty group, doing a retreat, a timed program (such as a 30-day life makeover), etc.

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First, let‘s talk about one-on-one coaching. This is the death of your life coach business. I will repeat this. One-on-one coaching is the death of your coaching business. If that bursts your bubble, I apologize. However, my job is to give you advice and information and business strategies that will allow you to reach the most number of people, provide the best-quality service, while freeing up more of your time and getting you the greatest opportunity for financial abundance.

Working with people one-on-one can be very rewarding. You can definitely achieve great results.

There are people who will want to have one-on-one

coaching and maybe that one-on-one coaching is over the phone. It might be in person. You may go to their home. They may come to your house. You may meet at a neutral place like in the middle of the day at your local coffee house.

However, there is no leveraging of your time and if you think about it, doing back-to-back, 1-hour coaching sessions is emotionally and physically exhausting because you are giving so much of yourself to the people. There is actually a fatigue factor involved. But also, there are only so many hours in the day and you also need a little bit of a break to use the restroom, to grab some food, and to take care of your life as well. So the reality is if you work with six one-on-one clients a day, which would be a lot, that is probably still about an 8-hour day. So even though it is rewarding, even though you feel good, even though they might be asking for it, my suggestion is to not do one-on-one coaching.

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If you are emphatic that you must do one-on-one coaching, I would keep it to maybe just one session a day for a very qualified and high-paying client. I am going to have Topher speak on this before we go to the next one.

Topher:

Exactly. If you do want to go the one-on-one route – and that is fine if you want to - it is going to be a painful future for you, but if you do, remember this: Your rates will ultimately determine your wealth, so what type of rates do you want to charge? When you are dealing one-on-one, you are still trading dollars for time and it is linear and there is no way to leverage that powerfully.

It is interesting. I can‘t tell you how many people I have met who actually do the one-on-one coaching model and they are busy 7 days a week, 8 hours a day, chock full of clients, and they are exhausted and I ask them, ―Why don‘t you just raise your rates?‖ And they say, ―I can‘t raise my rates. If I raise my rates, I will lose my clients.‖ So let‘s just talk about the purpose of raising your rates. Are you ready?

The purpose for raising your rates is to lose clients! You want to do that. Think about it. That is the point. If you are working 40 hours a week at a $100 an hour, you are making $4,000 a week. You are doing okay. If you raise your rates to $200 an hour and half of your clients say, ―Screw you, I‘m not paying that‖ and they leave you, now you are only working 20 hours a week but you are making the same amount of money. In fact, if you raise your rates and your clients don‘t leave you, you didn‘t raise your rates enough. The whole point of raising your

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rate is to lose your clients so that you can get new clients who will pay you more.

Once you are working full-time again, that is the time to raise your rates again.

In fact, there are actually two times when you should raise your rates. The two times that you should raise your rates are one, when you are working full-time because that means you need to leverage your time better. You charge more money, you lose clients, you make the same amount but you work less. Then you will start building up a base again, you will start working full-time again, you raise you rates, you lose your clients, you still make the same amount of money, but you work less, and so on and so on.

The second time that you should raise your rates are the days that you wake up – like when you finally get to a point where you wake up and you go, ―Ugh, I‘ve got clients today,‖ that is the time for you to raise your rates because you never, ever want to get into a coaching session when you don‘t want to be there. And the only reason you probably wouldn‘t want to be there is if you realize that it is not worth the money. And if it is not worth the money, you have two choices – get out of the business or raise your rates to make it worthwhile. That is what I did when I used to do coaching a long, long time ago.

I got to the point where I hated working with people and I was charging, I think, $150 an hour, but I really can‘t remember the exact amount, and I was sitting there going, ―God, I would rather go ride my Harley than make $150 in this

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison hour.‖ So I asked myself what would make me be happy to be here again? At the time, I think I said, ―$350 an hour would make me happy to be here again,‖ so I raised my rates to $350 an hour and all of a sudden I was happy to be doing my one-on-one coaching again. So raise your rates when you don‘t want to be with your clientele or when you are working full-time. When you do that, at least then you will be able to consistently graduate your income up, although ultimately it is still probably the worst business model for massive leverage of wealth.

John:

Basically, it comes down to this: You never want to develop a business that has a ceiling on earning on potential. I will repeat this because this is important. You never want to start or grow a business that has a ceiling on your earning or income potential. If it is based on the hour, unless you learn how to bend time and add more hours in the day, you will reach a ceiling actually fairly quickly and, therefore, your growth – your personal growth, your personal income and your business opportunities – will likely reach a ceiling – a plateau – in a short amount of time.

If you think you will still earn a lot more than you are, that is understandable that you think, ―Well, no, I might earn 50% or 100% more than I am now,‖ but once you get there and you realize, ―Oh, my gosh, this is it,‖ it can be a little disheartening. So start with the end in mind. And this goes into a whole other topic, but I will touch on it here briefly.

Imagine your perfect average day. How do you want to live your life? Your

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perfect average day. When do you want to wake up? Who do you want to work with? What do you want to eat? How much do you want to exercise? Did you take vitamins? Imagine your perfect average day and what will it take to get there, then work backwards. If your perfect day is sleeping in and just working a few hours but making a big change in the world, then having one-on-one clients is not the road, it is not the path to live your ideal average day.

I want to move on now. We are going to talk about small group training. Really, small group training ties in with specialty groups because you are not going to have a group of 10 people and one is a retired plumber, the other one is an Iraqi war veteran, the other one is a recently-divorced 25-year-old mom who has two small children, and the other person is trying to train for the Iron Man Triathlon.

It is unlikely that these people will have enough commonality to where you can have them altogether in one group focusing on a common goal. However, just as we spoke of earlier, developing the proper niche by emphasizing a strong brand with the appropriate call to action for the right segment of the population will allow you to do effective small group coaching. Let me give you some examples.

Of all of the life coaches that I have worked with over the last many years, one of the most effective small group coaching practices is for mothers, new moms, recently-married, recently-divorced, or women going through transition, or also women who are new or aspiring entrepreneurs. It doesn‘t mean that small group coaching for men doesn‘t work. It just may be a bit more challenging and I think

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the very smoothed-over, glossed-over general answer is men often are not as willing to express their emotions or thoughts or personal endeavors in a group such as women are because that is part of our makeup – part of our DNA.

Topher, I want your thoughts.

Topher:

Agreed. You know, the interesting thing about women is that even when you were using those examples, you were still hitting on niches of women. You weren‘t just saying, ―Let‘s have women get together for a coaching program,‖ you were saying, ―Let‘s have single moms get together for a coaching program,‖ or ―Let‘s have women who are experiencing post-partum depression get together for a coaching program,‖ and it is going to be much more successful, much easier the more niched you are because they will be sharing the same questions. This is where small group coaching can work even if you are working with men because you don‘t need to have a bunch of men that want to express their emotions. You just simply have to have one person in that group who is willing to ask the question because if you have niched it effectively, that one question will apply to all of them. So while you might have more of a dialogue with the female group than you would a male group, you don‘t have to have a huge dialog in order for it to work. But the key is getting them out of the identity of ―just a man.‖

So for example, if you were to get a group of guys together for a coaching program that is not niched, you are going to have a real hard time succeeding with that. However, if you were to get together a group of small business owners with

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison less than 5 employees, they won‘t be thinking that it‘s ―a bunch of guys,‖ they‘ll think it‘s a group of small business owners, and those small business owners all share similar ambitions and fears.

John:

Okay, I have an idea. Often times, for men, it has to do with their religious background – Christian men‘s group or Catholic men‘s group. Now, I‘m not sure if you, as a coach, take more of a spiritual path or more religious path or agnostic or whatever it is, but under a certain guise of a religious or spiritual philosophy tends to be a good group for men.

Topher:

Absolutely; and the thing is that it has now gotten them out of the identity of being a man and it has got them into the identity of being a Christian or got them into the identity of being a single dad, or getting them into the identity of being a mid-level manager, something like that. And that all goes back to – and we are going to say this throughout the entire program here – it goes back to having a niche. If you don‘t have a niche, you don‘t have a successful format for having a tremendous, powerful life-coaching program.

John:

I want to talk now about doing retreats. This is something that is done, again, sometimes with religious organizations. And again, where we talk about these sorts of things because religion and spirituality and things like that are highly personalized, we are not interjecting our personal opinion. We want you to know that. We are just saying that these are often very good niches because there is a common bond that pulls these people together that often supersedes everything else in their life. So that is why we are saying that. But we are not interjecting any of our personal beliefs or values. That is totally up to you; I just wanted to

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emphasize that.

In saying that, a lot of these types of groups have retreats. They will have a men‘s retreat or in Yoga often times, if you are a yoga teacher – I know we have a lot of coaches that are in the fitness and wellness industries as well that are students of the Spencer Institute, and so yoga retreats often include some sort of ―spiritual awakening,‖ or they have a life coaching segment or a way to manage stress or to deal with someone who is pushing your buttons, but there is a lot of different ways to do retreats.

For a period of time, I did retreats at my facility up in the mountains of Big Bear, just outside of Los Angeles. Here is what I can tell you from my experience doing retreats: (1) It is probably more work than any other type of coaching business that you can imagine. It can be lucrative, but you have to do it correctly.

It depends if you own the facility, if you lease the facility, if you are coming as guests but then have an opportunity to use certain rooms or invest special classes within that facility. It depends if you get certain parts ―comped.‖ It depends if it is a destination.

So, for example, the people that came to my program about 100 miles from Los Angeles, people just drove up for the weekend. But if it is a spiritual yoga rebirthing type of thing in Jamaica, there is an inherent cost just to get there, aside from the cost of your training or your retreat.

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You also want to make sure that – talk about a niche, this is when it is really important – if you have people in an enclosed environment in some site – it‘s almost a microcosm, but people within a microcosm generally are within the same niche or subscribe to a particular type of philosophy that stay within that microcosm.

So imagine you don‘t have the right niche and then you have

everyone come together and then you encapsulate them in some regards in some sort of retreat, it may have unrest.

I remember – and this is a very unique situation – I remember one of the retreats that we did, it was just for women, and there was kind of a life coaching but skill building and we did the ropes course and the rock wall, we zip lined, and things that challenged them mentally and physically and had them overcome fears that they had. But there was one woman who was a little older, very conservative, ultra-republican, and then there was a younger woman who was very liberal, very democratic, had a totally different perspective of the world—and I‘m not saying who is right or wrong. What I am saying is that, in itself, was enough to have a serious discussion which actually interrupted into a pretty heated argument over the campfire when we should have been singing something like Kum Ba Yah. So you have to—this is a true story—you have to take all of these things into consideration because it is not just that you are working with them over the phone or online or for an hour. This is a group of people who may be sleeping in a room next to someone else or sleeping all under the same roof or having breakfast,

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lunch and dinner together, so they need to be of a similar mindset and goal and ambition, and often times, if it is possible, to also be in a similar place as far as their progression and their goals.

This is very hypothetical. Let‘s just say you are doing a retreat for entrepreneurs.

If people are brand new, like freshly hatched, as an entrepreneur, they are going to have different skills, ambitions, ideas, goals, and resources than someone who is a serial entrepreneur who has already made $1million dollars, who already has an established web presence, and already understands the technology and the resources and the networking that is necessary because also your lesson plan for that weekend, that week, those 10 days has to be geared towards those people, not just a matter of the psychology and sociology and the interaction between the people, but also for that big of a group, you also need to make sure that your curriculum is appropriate for the proper niche. So once again, it goes back to niche.

Topher?

Topher:

Agreed. In fact, I can give you a real-life example of this. I‘ll leave the speaker‘s name out, but basically there was a gentleman who had a week-long intensive entrepreneur‘s out on a tropical island about three months ago and it was really geared toward heavy-hitting entrepreneurs who are in the 7-figure revenue range and they want to take it up even higher. The marketing wasn‘t very clear. The sales were kind of open to anybody who could get there and it was meant to be a

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very intimate group with just about 10 or 15 people.

Well, two of the people were self-made millionaires. All of the other people who attended were struggling financially, and the speaker designed the entire curriculum for people who are already in the 7-figure revenue range. What happened was all of a sudden he shows up that day, he starts speaking, and 80% of his audience can‘t relate to or understand any of his coaching whatsoever and he literally had to reinvent his program on the fly to satisfy those 8 people, which then inherently left the other 2 people feeling a bit disenfranchised because they were not getting what they had thought they wanted. It really turned out to be a bit of a disaster for him.

John:

And these are all, once again, all related to developing your niche and having a clearly-defined path. I can tell you that this has been a personal challenge of my own and was certainly a bigger challenge when I was establishing my business, and only recently have I gotten the necessary clarity to do this correctly and I will tell you that it is an ongoing refinement.

We talked at the beginning at the book about the importance of education and continuing education. The most stifling time of my life was when I thought I had all of the answers.

It‘s kind of like when you are a teenager.

Well, I

unfortunately repeated that in my mid-20‘s and thought I had all of the answers and didn‘t need any education and thought I had a clearly-defined path. Sadly, I learned that I wasn‘t even close the truth. So only after I was able to have many

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison more mentors – many more coaches – and really dive into the second round of my education (which hasn‘t stopped now), that I learned that much of what I was doing was not optimal. So I would like for you to avoid those mistakes and challenges and do things right from the beginning and that is exactly why you are reading this book.

Topher:

I‘ll give you another example of what you are talking about there. The interesting thing about retreat type coaching where you are speaking with a group of individuals at a special unique place, what I really want the readers to do right now is go to the link below and download my free report on how to negotiate the best rates and venues. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people who are professional speakers but they want to get into the avenue of doing some sort of workshop retreat and they don‘t have the experience of booking hotel venues and they think they know everything there is to know about booking a venue.

How hard can it be? You go online, you look at the pictures of the hotel, you call them up, you ask them the rates, and you book the venue. Nothing can be further from the truth.

I have a free report called ―How to negotiate the best rates with venues.‖ http://www.tophermorrison.com (look under the FREE TMI PRODUCTS) It will save you time and it will save you thousands upon thousands of dollars that you will most likely lose. I will give you one quick example how.

There is an inherent problem with all life coaches. That inherent problem is that

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they are optimistic. Normally that optimism serves you in your life. When it comes to booking a venue, it becomes your saboteur. Here is why. As a positive, optimistic individual, you foolishly believe that you are going to sell out your retreat the very first time. Why? Because you know the value of your material and most coaches fall under this category of selling to people like they like to be sold themselves.

The reality is, if you are reading this book and you are a coach, you probably fall into the same category that John and I do, which is we are an easy sale. We don‘t think twice about spending money on a program, a seminar, a retreat, a home study program, a CD, a book or any type of development that we think will help our business out. It is a fairly slam dunk situation. We see the value, we buy it.

We foolishly think that that is how everybody in the world buys, so we foolishly think, ―Well, gosh, I‘ve got this great program. Everybody is going to want it,‖ and then there is the harsh reality that maybe, in fact, not as many people sign up as easily as we think they do.

So what happens is, this positive optimism shows up and they book a venue because, let‘s say, for example, they want to do a retreat with 100 people, so they immediately go out and find a venue that can hold 100 people when, in fact, they should have found a venue that could hold 10 with the capability of growing a bigger room up to 100 and then reserve the room that holds 10 so if, in fact, just in case, they don‘t do as good as they thought they would on their sales, they have

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison only paid for a room that holds 10. They haven‘t lost a lot of money.

Venues tend to be one of the quickest ways to lose all of your profits for doing a retreat, but only if you are booking a venue that is bigger than the amount of people you received. So one of the things that we have inside this free report are specific strategies on how to negotiate the best rates for the right size room which has the ability to grow as your sales increase. If you follow my lead on that, I can promise you this – It will save you thousands upon thousands of dollars. Again, here is the link, just click this link to receive the free report, ―How to Negotiate the Best Rates at Venues.‖ http://www.tophermorrison.com

(look under the

FREE TMI PRODUCTS) HELPFUL HINT: Promoting events can be tricky, my good friend Dan Bradbury consistently sells out his events, and he has a great home-study program that lays out specifically how you can do it as well. Check it out this link: Seminar Success Secrets, by Dan Bradbury - http://bit.ly/igCZ78

John:

Sounds like a good deal to me.

We are going to talk about one more business model right now and that is, for example, a timed program such as a 30-day life makeover. Now, we are going to talk about continuity income models in a little bit, different membership sites and teleclass series and so on in a little bit. Right now we are going to talk about a

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timed program.

Now, this is most often done for the fitness coaches – 30 days to a new body.

However, if you can all remember back to someone who pioneered kind of the coaching personal development industry, it is Tony Robbins. What was his program and how long did it take? It was a 30-day program, right? And then later he came out with one that was a 7-day program because he learned that some people just don‘t want to wait a month to get the results. They want the quick and easy way so he came up with the 7-day program. So it has been done in the personal development and coaching industry and it is done all of the time in the fitness industry.

For example, our worldwide program, Adventure Boot Camp, the program is 30 days long. It is Monday thru Friday for four weeks. Essentially, it is 20 days of class, but it is a month-long program, so to speak. People will return again and again, however it is one month on and then a very short break and then another month on, and so on.

Why do you do this kind of program? Because people can see the end…. They see the light at the end of the tunnel before they actually even begin. What I am going to say now and that really has something to do with Neuro Linguistic Programming (―NLP‖), but it is easy for you to market that 30-day program because you can do what is called ―future pacing,‖ which is essentially having

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them imagine how their life will be different, better; how their body will be firmer; how they will be more attractive to their mates or potential mates simply because they did X, Y and Z and signed up for this program and they can imagine themselves 30 days, 60 days from now.

You can do the same thing with a personal development or emotional or psychological coaching program as well. You can take them to the end and have them imagine what it would be like.

So basically, it is attainable. It is a way of chunking down the information into a quantity of time that we all know very well – the week and the month—7 days to the new you, 30 days to overcoming the struggles of divorce, 28 days to stop smoking, 14 day quick-start guide to optimal health and a better relationship with food. There are a lot of different ways of doing it, but people like numbers and times.

I‘m sure Topher has an opinion on this and it is okay if we actually have a different opinion because we also have had different experiences, which brought us to this point.

My experience tells me that if something isn‘t quite uniform in number, it tends to work better. For example, if I say 28 days rather than 30, 30 – even though it is something that is identifiable, it is roughly a month, right? – it can seem too

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contrived, even though people know exactly what a month is. So if you say 28 days, they tend to like that. Of if you are giving away a certain number of secrets or tactics or strategies within a week or 28 days or a month, having an uneven number of strategies or techniques like one of the programs I did with the 7 secrets to a new body in 28 days or less. They know that there is a process. They know that there is a framework because there are a given number of steps, and the period of time is identifiable but it isn‘t so exact.

If you say 31 days, it is almost like, ―Really? 31? That is exactly a month. That almost seems a little too cookie cutter, even though I identify with it.

Topher, I want your thoughts on this.

Topher:

One hundred percent agreed. Whenever you have something generalized to a week or a month, or a year, or something like that, it is a generalization. Where you have something specific like 28 days, 27 days – hell you can even go 26 ½ days. That is not accidental. Thirty days seems almost accidental. A specific number seems very intentional and so people immediately think, well, there must be something very specific to the claim and also, the benefit about that, by the way, is that what we are really talking about here is tangibility. Any time you are selling any sort of intangible product like coaching, you need to create some level of tangibility with it for two reasons: Number one, because you want to let the person know when the finish line is there so they have something to work toward, but also – and this is something that a lot of coaches don‘t realize – you also need

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to know if there is a time to get done or to have an exit.

Let‘s say, for example, you are a business coach for solopreneurs who want to generate $20,000 in revenues a month in 28 days or less. What happen is, at the 28th day, the client can then say, ―Have I increased my revenues by $20,000?‖ If the answer to that question is, ‗yes,‘ they are going to be more inclined to want to continue to do business with you.

If they get to that 28th day and they realize that they have not increased their revenues by the $20,000 implied promise, then all of a sudden they realize, ―This isn‘t for me.‖

One of the things that I think is important as a coach is to realize that you cannot be the solution to everyone. Even if somebody is in your niche, you are still not going to hit them all. It would be better for you to find a timeframe where you can both agree, ―Hey, this isn‘t working out for you. It is time for you to leave,‖ and all of a sudden they realize they have made their time commitment, it didn‘t work out, now it is time to go on and try something new. They will depart and leave you feeling much better about you as a coach and your professionalism and your quality knowing that you are giving them the consent to say, ―Look, this strategy is not working for you. Maybe it is not the strategy, it‘s not me and it‘s not you, but it is a combination of all three and it is not working and I think you would be better to go out and find somebody else. They are going to walk away

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feeling so much better about who you are as a professional coach than if they were to give up and go, ―Well, it‘s not working,‖ or continue to take their money for six months and then have them build up a massive resentment. Sometimes there is a benefit to cutting bait.

John:

All right, we are going to move on to product development. Now literally, this could be its own book – there is that much information. However, we are going to go over some fundamentals here. Let me start by saying what a product actually is.

A product is anything that you create that is associated and branded with your business likeness and offers a value to your customer, provides a solution to their problems or challenges, and gives you some sort of revenue for it. However, in some cases, products can be zero cost, just as this book, and there are reasons for that as well. We will actually explain all of that to you.

Let‘s first talk about a book. And again, this could be a book – no joke – unto itself. There are a couple of different things that you need to know fundamentally about writing a book.

1.

It makes you an instant authority. You could write the worst book in the

world, but if it is on a bookshelf or someone knows you wrote a book or you give someone a book as a gift, instantly you are an authority. Instantly you have credibility. And the truth is many of the books that make the New York Times

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Best Seller List are not always fantastic books, but the marketing and the promotion and the campaigning behind it have been brilliant and that is what allows it to be a bestseller. So just know that content is important because you want to give value to someone, but that doesn't necessarily mean you will have a bestselling book.

With a physical book, whether it is a paperback or a hardcover book, there are two routes you can go. You can self-publish, or you can work with a major publishing house. A couple of things you need to know right off the bat: If you self-publish first, you better do really well or it is going to be really tough to later get a published book deal. So in other words, if you self-publish and you sold 50 copies of your book and then you write a book and they know about your selfpublished book, you will likely not get an advance and it may even be hard to get picked up to be published. So you may want to decide before hand, am I going to have a major publisher publish and distribute this because distribution is king, or am I just going to go the self-publishing route and do print-on-demand, for example—which our many resources will give you also at the end of the book for print-on-demand and publishing-on-demand. But you have to think these things out beforehand.

Also there is an eBook which is what you are reading right now.

It is an

electronic book. In this case, Topher and I had a conversation, it was recorded, it was transcribed, it was edited, and it was put into the format you are enjoying

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right now. However, an eBook can be simply a digital copy of a written book just as you have seen it on the bookshelf you can have it in a digital format, generally a PDF. And of course, within these digital formats we also have Kindle, and Ereader and iPad, and all of the different digital formats as well.

Before we go onto some of the other things, I am going to have Topher talk about books. We both have written books, we both have published, and we both have contributed to other books, so we have a lot of experience with this. It is a very complex topic, but there are some fundamentals you need to know before you get started.

Topher:

You know, writing a book – even though I have no right to say this is the way it is – is a lot like having a baby. It is very time-consuming, it is very painful, it makes you sick sometimes, but in the end it is worth it. It really does require a great deal of discipline to get done. I want to give you some strategies right now that, had I used these during the first publication of my book, would have saved me years and years of headaches.

I have an eBook right now called ―The Professional Speaking Secrets of Topher Morrison.‖ http://www.bulletproofspeaking.com It is a great eBook. We have sold thousands of these things—and by ―sold,‖ it is a free eBook so I‘m not really selling anything although the reason we did it as a giveaway in the initial beginnings was because we created what we call a ―living eBook,‖ and this is one thing I really want you guys to figure out. How could you create a living eBook?

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What is a living eBook?

A living eBook is a book that gives the reader a new chapter at a set interval of time. For me, for example, they got a new chapter every other week for one full year. By the end of the year, they had 25 or 26 or 27 some odd chapters in this professional speaking eBook. Why did I decide to deliver it to them in a drip format over an entire year versus just giving them the entire eBook right away?

One very simple reason – I didn‘t have the book written yet.

By setting up a living eBook, you can immediately advertise your book the moment you have your first chapter written.

That is all I had in the very

beginning and I advertised the eBook telling them that they would get a new chapter every other week and what happened was, the moment I had one person download that eBook, I was immediately held accountable.

Now, you, as a life coach, know the power of accountability so apply the skills of accountability to your profession and have your customers hold you accountable.

By immediately setting up and ―selling‖ an eBook which is a living format, as soon as you have a few people download that first chapter, you now have people holding you accountable to make sure that you get your next chapter written before the due date.

I will tell you that the first book I wrote took me nearly 10 years to complete. The

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison second book I wrote called ―The Professional Speaking Secrets of Topher Morrison‖ http://www.bulletproofspeaking.com took me exactly one year to complete. Why? Because I set it up that way. There were times where I did not have anything ready to go and I had to stay up all night long writing the next chapter for the next delivery because I knew I had 1500 people who were waiting for that next chapter. It is a great way to hold yourself accountable, start building up your mailing list, and get your word out immediately versus waiting forever to have it happen.

If you try waiting until you have got your entire book finished, you are probably looking at least—I know you don‘t think it is going to be this—but it will probably at least be one year from now before you can publish that book. If you set up a living eBook, you can have your eBook immediately selling and getting out there and getting people on your mailing list in as little as seven days.

John:

Great idea. It will definitely hold you accountable and it also allows you to get in the game right away. And as you read earlier, this goes back to what Topher was talking about where you have an academic education and an entrepreneurial education. An academic education would say, ―Don‘t do anything until the whole book is done. Don‘t you dare move.‖ An entrepreneurial education says, ―Write the first chapter, give it to them at predefined intervals and allow yourself to have more time and freedom.‖ And also, you are going to grow and you are going to get feedback along the way which is going to allow for the end product actually being much better.

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Topher:

Now, the other thing is that you might be sitting there thinking, ―But my book is so valuable, Topher, I don‘t want to give it away. They deserve to pay for it.

They are going to get more value out of it if they pay for it. I want to sell it. It is going to be a revenue maker.‖

HELPFUL HINT: If you like my eBook, you will LOVE my first book, ―Stop Chasing Perfection, and Settle for Excellence‖ and it might be just the book you need to let go of some of your perfectionist habits.

Which by the way,

perfectionism is the death of all entrepreneurs! http://www.settleforexcellence.com

By now you are probably wondering, "How will I have the time to do all this stuff?" Well, that's a great question, and the simplest answer is, YOU WON'T! You need to learn how to delegate. One of the best ways to do this is to hire in the beginning a Virtual Assistant. They are like Personal Assistants, but much more cost effective because they are online. It usually works like this. You have one point of contact, that person knows loads of people who specialize in all the things you will need, from payroll, to bookkeeping, to flight reservations, to proofreading, to editing... you name it, they got it. The company I use is Longer Days.... they are very professional, wicked quick on turn around, and most of all, WORTH EVERY PENNY! Longer Days Virtual Assistants - http://bit.ly/dT7Dpd

Well, a couple of things about that – first off, you are a fool if you think that books are a revenue stream. Nowadays, books are really nothing more than very expensive brochures. It is a way of getting your name out. But if you really are committed to making money on your book and you don‘t want a free living eBook, that is fine. Here is what you can do, and you can do what I did. Once the living eBook was completely finished, I actually still maintain and keep the

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format going for new people signing up because what I noticed is that when I was publishing the living eBook, I was getting some people saying, ―I love how you are sending one chapter every other week. It is really nice.‖

I was also getting equally amounts of people saying, ―I hate this once every other week thing. Can‘t I just have the book in its entirety?‖ So what you can do is you can give away the living eBook and then once it is finally finished, you can publish it into either a printed format or an eBook format in its totality and then when people sign up for the free living version, you can give them an option to upgrade to the full book immediately for a cost of $9.95, $19.95, $29.95, whatever price tag you feel is worthwhile.

You can also, believe it or not, sell to people who have already downloaded the entire living eBook, the printed book. Why? Because there is still something to be said about people loving printed books and if they are a big fan of yours, if they have loved the material, you would be surprised how many people have already read your eBook, are willing to purchase the printed version. You can make it even more enticing by having a few bonus chapters in the printed version which is not available in the living version, and then that gives them a reason to purchase it as well. So please realize that just because you are giving it away in the beginning does not mean that you can‘t make money on it in the long run.

John:

Yeah, those are more advanced strategies, which is why this is just one aspect of the education – although it is the last book you will need, you still need to explore

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all of the resources because there is obviously more to learn.

Now we are going to switch gears and talk about audio programs.

Audio programs are fantastic because now, with the Internet and the way different things can work, there is no physical product. Before, we would load a bunch of information on a CD-ROM or you would press an audio lesson and you would make a big binder. I remember, Topher, when you had your binders full of information and they were awesome and they looked beautiful and they certainly have a lot of value and they have a lot of perceived value as well, it is cumbersome and it becomes cost-prohibitive, and now shipping and mailing has become more expensive, so audio lessons are as simple as getting some inexpensive or free audio software for your computer. Actually, Radio Shack has some great headphones and different microphones you can use and you can probably get them from your local office supply as well, and perhaps even Amazon.com. You can create your audio lessons for basically zero to little cost.

Now, there are a couple of different things you can do. You can give away some for free as goodwill, as building up your goodwill bank account so people are excited to see what you have to offer and realize that you are giving out some really good stuff and think that their pay for will be of equal or even greater value.

You can do a whole series with audios or you can do individual audios. For example, Topher has done some to help people lose weight or stop smoking or

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reduce stress and he sells them as a bundle or as an individual program, but you can also do motivation or hypnosis or stress reduction. There is a whole variety of things to do. So again, some can be given away and some can be used after you go through a shopping cart process and then people have access to these audios which, again, should be able to be downloaded or be able to be streamed online, depending on how you choose to do it and what you have learned your customer likes as well.

Topher, tell me about your experience making audios.

Topher:

Well, you know what, it is one of those things where we go back to the very beginning where I said if you are a seasoned professional, you might get more value out of this than even a beginner because seasoned professionals are still holding onto an old business model which is, I need to put things onto a CD, shrink-wrap it, stock it in a shelf, and then sell it and ship it. And while that is still at the time of this publishing, a popular method, it is quickly dying. It is a dinosaur, it has got both legs inside the tar, and it is sinking slowly and eventually it is going to suffocate.

The fact is; the future of educational products is going to be all on online or streaming or downloadable. CDs are virtually going away. Look at the model of iTunes & NetFlix. Basically, iTunes and NetFlix are putting every CD and video rental store out of business.

Businesses like Blockbuster are an antiquated

business model and in many respects, it is actually a good thing that CDs are

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becoming obsolete because if I were to look back at my business and look at some of the biggest headaches and the biggest financial drains that I had, clearly one of them was having to have two full-time employees and a small warehouse filled with product that they were responsible for packaging and shipping all of the time; it was a huge profit waster for me. Where now… like you said… for little to no cost, you can have your product out into the market right away through a lot of online products and programs that are out there.

This program itself is a great example. Even though it is one of our goodwill products that we are giving away, it was created from an audio recording, transcribed, and put into a printed book and it took less than one week to get the entire thing complete. That is brilliant.

If you would look at how long it takes normal CD programs to get to print, it can be months before all of the editing and everything else is done. Now, you might sit there and think, ―Well, but I can‘t afford to have editors and transcribers and things like that. Listen, if you can‘t afford to have things edited because you are just starting out, then talk about that up front and you can have something like John Smith Coaching Program for Mid-Level Management – Unedited. You can even talk about, in the marketing, ―Look, this is raw, unedited information. It is why I am giving it away versus selling it, because the information is so good, I wanted to get it out to the market so quickly, I didn‘t want to edit it. I just wanted to give it to you as is.‖

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There is something to be said for the unedited, raw versions.

It is almost

becoming a socially accepted form of business out there now. You don‘t have to have a huge budget to get this stuff done. You just need to have a microphone and a computer and an entrepreneurial spirit to get it done and not worrying about it trying to be perfect. Don‘t try to be perfect. Just be excellent and you will be doing fine.

So there are some great things you can get – audio blogs, video blogs, we have several links for you to help you also leverage yourself to where you are not just creating one product and putting it on one website, but you are creating one product and getting it out to hundreds of websites, and that is a really important thing. If you look at how you market yourself in the future, how can you get your message out to as many people as possible?

John:

I want to talk about one more product although, believe me, we could go on and on about this. There are many, many different ways to create products, but this will get you started and certainly get your gears turning and your creative juices flowing.

The other product is a special report. This is something that you would very likely give away. Now, why would you give something away? Again, it is goodwill, it shows that you are an expert, and it creates a need for reciprocity, which is something that we will talk about in a little bit. But right now, let‘s talk

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about special reports.

My definition of a special report is a PDF document which was probably created on something like Microsoft Word that was later saved as a locked PDF document so no one can lift or take the information, and within the special report you are giving information that solves a very specific problem to your niche.

For example: the Adventure Boot Camp program. When the certified coaches do a special report, they will do one such as Five Weight Loss Secrets Most Fitness Trainers Won’t Tell You. Well, what is good about that is it is tangible because you know the number of secrets you are going to get and it is more than two so you feel it is worth your while, and you also want to know ―why didn‘t they tell me that?‖

If you think back – some people like this gentleman, some people don‘t, but Kevin Trudeau, who does the book about something they don‘t want you to know about.

Natural Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About, and then there is Debt Cures, and so on. It creates a mentality of us against them, and that way you get people to answer the rally cry. It‘s us against them. They don‘t want us to know about it. Well, darn it, I‘m going to tell you what you actually need to know, regardless if they want you to know about it. So that is always a good title for something like that is I am going to tell you something. You are on the inside

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison now, but now it is us against them and I‘m going to share some information in a special report that other people may not want you to know about.

Now, that is not always want you have to do, but it is just a great example of creating teamwork and the ―us against them‖ mentality and it gets people inspired to take action and get the special report.

The special report can be anything from 3–20 pages. Generally, I would say it is under 10 and it solves a specific problem. It has to be valuable content in bitesized nuggets for chunking down, and also there can be some sort of pitch or promotional angle at the conclusion, or perhaps embedded within, but you have to give value. It can‘t just be a promotional piece or people will realize that very quickly and become disenchanted with you.

Topher:

Agreed. In fact, hopefully this eBook that you are reading right now is a perfect example of that. Do we have resources for you to purchase things in this eBook?

Absolutely. Why? Because you are going to buy them anyway! There is no end–all be-all one product, but what we can do is we can create an end-all be-all resource center for you to make sure that you know where all of those products are at.

In the same vein, while we have resources available for you to purchase inside this eBook, resources that you are going to have to buy if you want to be

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successful anyway. Whether you buy the ones we tell you about or not is up to you. Hopefully, you will because you realize that our 40+ combined years of experience has something of value here. The fact is, even if you don‘t, you are still getting, some value from this program. We are giving you lots of great information, we are peppering it with additional resources, and that allows the reader to realize, ―Hey, these guys know what they are talking about and it is worth investing in the future. The more value you give up front, the more credibility your product or endorsements will have in the long run.

Right now, what I am finding is that in the current marketplace, you have got to give about 7 hours worth of free content to people before they feel comfortable in financially investing into any other additional information that you want to provide them, so ask yourself, ―How can I provide 7 hours worth of free content either through audio programs, video programs or printed material which will help build up my credibility toward my prospect to such a degree that they will then realize investing with them is a safe investment?‖ HELPFUL HINT: If you would like some guidance on how to create products in a timely, and quality manner, the king of this is Peter Thomson, I‘ll be recommending him several times throughout this report. The guy is the real deal! Check out this product to explode your product sales in business.

Ultimate Product Creation Program, by Peter Thomson

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John:

Well said. We have a lot more material to go over and so we are going to get right to it; and this next topic, we are just going to go over briefly and it is about shopping carts and transactions.

You obviously need a web presence when you are going to be a successful coaching professional. Regardless of which niche you have, you must have a strong web presence. And again, we have resources for you for this, but just know right now that if you do not have a strong web presence, it is highly unlikely that you will be successful as a coach.

Now, I understand that this is a bold and perhaps harsh prediction. However, after many, many years – and now decades – of doing this, I know that to be the truth.

One of the things that you will need on your website is a shopping cart solution.

What this will be is, if you do a membership site – which we will talk about – or if you do an audio download where they get your eBook, or you may even use your shopping cart for people to buy coaching sessions. I suggest you run everything through your shopping cart because it unifies everything, it is easy to track, it is good for book keeping, it makes it simple; it automates everything.

There are two shopping cart systems that we recommend. I, John, personally use 1shoppingcart.com. You can see the link below. Topher uses Infusionsoft, which

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I will let him talk about.

Each one has its own attributes and unique

characteristics.

I prefer 1shoppingcart.com because I feel it is intuitive and simple to use and for most coaches or personal development professionals, it serves their purpose very well and doesn‘t require much training or intervention from people who have a greater skill set. There is obviously a learning curve. There is with everything.

But when done properly, 1shoppingcart has served us – my company – very, very well.

Topher, do you want to talk about Infusionsoft?

Topher:

Well, before I even talk about Infusionsoft, I am going to echo your sentiment with 1shoppingcart. While I don‘t use 1shoppingcart, I use a privately branded version of that called KickStart Cart, which is the exact same product. It was actually branded by Tom Antion. In fact, if you download the link below to the eBook that we have, or the eReport, written by Tom Antion, he will give you everything you have ever wanted to know about shopping carts before you buy – whether you want to buy 1shoppingcart, KickStart Cart, or Infusionsoft. And it really is a very powerful, educational product. I read it several years back when I was looking for a shopping cart.

Also, I actually have two shopping carts. One is 1shoppingcart, but it‘s the privately branded version by Tom Antion called KickStart Cart. It‘s the exact same cart that John uses and it is an awesome service. I recommend having at

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least two shopping carts and the reason for that is because of redundancy. You never know when one is going to crash or one server is going to go down. You always want to have a backup.

I also use two different shopping carts for two different purposes so, one shopping cart I use for my seminars; the other shopping cart I use for my product. Why would I do that?

I do that because then I can get a better rate, in terms of percentage, on the shopping cart systems because there is a higher level of risk for seminars versus products, so there is no reason why I should give away a percentage of my profits on products when shopping cart considers my percentages, they think, well, if there is a seminar in there as well, we are going to charge him a higher percentage. I just dedicate a specific cart to the seminars versus to the products and I end up making a little bit more money that way.

Whatever shopping cart system you use, I want to recommend that you run everything through it just like John said. Even if it is a free product, run it through your shopping cart because the shopping carts are really a way of capturing accurate data and one thing you will need to realize is that, as a coach, whatever industry you are in, the success of your business is directly proportionate to the accuracy of your database.

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If you have a dirty database, you might as well not have a database at all. When you run everything through you shopping cart, you can immediately produce reports in terms of who has ordered what, who has purchased what, and then you can also retrofit them with what we call ―autoresponders‖ to where once somebody has bought a product, they get on a consistent autoresponder basis.

Here is an example. If you were to go to my professional speaking website called booktopher.com, this is a website specifically dedicated to corporations who are looking for a keynote speaker.

They can go to that website and they can

download my speaker‘s kit. The speaker‘s kit contains demo videos, testimonials, contracts, approved media marketing – everything they need to promote their event with Topher Morrison as their keynote speaker.

The majority of the people who download that speaker kit, however, won‘t hire me. That‘s just odds; that‘s just numbers, and it is okay. But what I have realized is that if I don‘t keep in touch with all of the people who have downloaded my speaker‘s kit, the likelihood of them ever contacting me later is about zero. If I maintain consistent communication with them after they have downloaded my speaker‘s kit, the likelihood of getting booked will jump upwards of maybe 3040%. So what have I done?

I have got a shopping cart! They order the speaker‘s kit. It runs through my shopping cart. My shopping cart triggers an action sequence for them to receive

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison communication from me for the next two years – they will get a very short, brief comical email from me every two weeks which just keeps presence of mind, keeps them aware, and they are just unique facts and figures about life spun in a funny way that they are going to enjoy reading. It takes less than 10 seconds to read, but they will always be hearing from me every two weeks for the next two years so I know that then when they finally do need a speaker, they are going to remember all of these funny little things that they got from me and I have got a higher chance of having them finally take action on that speaker kit versus just forget about it. So run everything through your shopping carts and when you do that, you are going to have a much more accurate database.

HELPFUL HINT: Okay, here are the links to the shopping carts we just mentioned. We are loyal and long-time users of these products: 1Shopping Cart.com http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?pr=1&id=160239 Infusionsoft http://www.anrdoezrs.net/he102shqnhp498B656C465BDB87E Before you buy any shopping cart, definitely check out this free report: How to Pick a Shopping Cart System that Makes You Money, by Tom Antion - http://bit.ly/fg5FWC John:

Okay, we are going to move on to marketing. Once again, this could be a doctoral dissertation. However, we are going to go over it at a very high level and just touch on the aspects that you need to gain knowledge in .

It is funny because people, you – the coach – understand how important it is to

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison have an effective marketing campaign and yet, a lot of people don‘t do what is necessary to learn marketing. Me, personally, I think marketing is fun. It is part mathematical, it is emotional, it is psychological, and there are a lot of different creative factors all put into it. So to me, marketing allows me to use every corner of my brain.

There are some fundamentals in marketing that you have to gain knowledge in.

One of them is online marketing. It is not so much as getting good rank on Google – although that is very, very important – there are many other aspects to your whole online presence and it goes back to your brand as well.

As our world gets smaller because of all of the methods of communication and distribution of content – that‘s really what it is, distribution of content – your marketing has to be more succinct and more strategic. So here is what I mean: In the past, there was print media. You could have your magazine which, for the most part, I don‘t recommend advertising or doing marketing in magazines unless you are giving interviews or something like that. For the most part, it is not costeffective. But you have print magazines, you get a write-up in your local paper as positively affecting the lives of people in his or her community, and then you have online marketing which is basically, in the past, making sure you are on Yahoo! and Google and now Bing, and so on.

Any more, with the convergence of TV, mobile, tablet devices, your basic internet

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structure search engines, social media, social bookmarking, viral videos, all of these cross platforms and integration even in with gaming and all of these different aspects what you need to think about with your marketing is how can I unify it to where any time someone sees something they know it is uniquely me?

I am – I, the coach – my brand is attached to this piece of material.

It is

identifiable and it is unique and you feel engaged and whatever I put out there is available on as many platforms as possible. By platform, I mean digital, social media, video, table, mobile, smart phone – all of these different things.

As you are doing your marketing and you are doing it online, in this case, or a crop of digital platforms, I should say, I want you to think about it like this: Apple.

Topher is converting me to Macintosh as we speak and one of the things that I think is so unique about Mac is that their message is so clear. If you have been to a Mac store, even compared to a Microsoft store, the Mac store is cleaner. It is more simplistic.

I was recently shown an example of two presentations – one by Steve Jobs, who heads Apple, and the other one by Bill Gates, who obviously is the head of Microsoft. It showed what they did, who they are, and how they present their brand in their marketing and their presence. In recent years, Microsoft has lost ground to Google and to Apple. Why is that? It is because Microsoft, in many

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison people‘s eyes, especially in the demographics, seems cumbersome and perhaps, at times, a little nerdy. When, in fact, the opposite is so for the people over at Apple.

If you look at any of their information, there is a lot of blank space, a lot of white, a lot of openness, a lot of cool iconography – using icons to illustrate a point.

Going back to my story, it showed this example of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates doing these presentations.

Bill Gates had a basic PowerPoint presentation with lots of bullets, lots of text, very few, if any, graphics. Steve Jobs had like one word and one picture in a dynamic presentation and he pulls people in.

Now, think about this, too. Of all of the things that you have read and all of the things that Topher and I have spoken about thus far, it is about creating a connection to the brand – your brand. Are Apple people more dedicated to their brand than people with Microsoft? I would say yes.

One of the reasons – and this is just a sidebar – but one of the reasons is because Apple has, to some degree, mastered personal communication far greater than Microsoft has, so you have a personal affinity for Mac simply because you carry these things with you far more easily in the form of an iPad, iTouch, iPod, iPhone, right? So there is a personal connection because it becomes part of your identity

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and part of how you live your life and you look at it every day.

So when you are developing your brand, how can you have people have this tremendous affinity for you, have your message very easy to be heard, and solve the people‘s problems and have them rally to your side when you summon their assistance and they feel part of the family and that is the roundabout way of, again, going back to niche, going back to branding, and doing things with our marketing.

This book literally would be 10,000 pages long if we went into every aspect of online marketing. We are going to go into a little bit more, but those are the fundamentals of what is important in marketing. I am going to have Topher give his two cents, although I think it is going to be more like 500 bucks.

Topher:

Well, really, what John just mentioned there was how you can leverage your marketing material. His example was Apple vs. Microsoft and the way they leverage their marketing efforts. There are two ways you can leverage anything in life. One way, is you can leverage through systems, and the other way is you can leverage through people.

Apple did a very good job of leveraging their products through people, meaning they went to the end user and they said, ―We want this to be so customized for you that you love to work with it, that it is intuitive and it is built for the human

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison being.‖

Microsoft went a completely different route. Microsoft said, ―Let‘s not worry about the people. Let‘s get it into the system.‖ So what happened was, Microsoft took their operating system and they went to the corporation‘s – Big Blue IBM – and they said, ―Here, put our operating system into your computer. We don‘t want to deal with people. We just want to deal with the corporation. We just want to deal with the system.‖ So they did a really good job of leveraging themselves to a system, whereas Mac leveraged themselves to people. Apple created the Apple store where you can go in and you can interact with other Mac Heads. You can go hang out in the genius bar. You can get personal coaching on how you work with your computers.

What they both realize now is that, interestingly enough, Apple realized that IBM had some benefits to leveraging through systems in that they were this huge, wide river that nobody could get out of the way from. The majority of PC users use PCs not because they like them, but because everybody else uses the. Apple users, on the other hand, use Macs because they love them and they don‘t care if anybody else uses them or not.

Microsoft actually realized that Mac had a powerful system of leveraging themselves through people so they started becoming more user-friendly. So now if you look at Microsoft, they are trying to become more user-friendly, more

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people-oriented. They have even created now Microsoft stores that are a pretty sad imitation of the Apple store – especially if you could look at them side-byside. There is no comparison whatsoever. Ultimately thought, both companies have realized that the other‘s strategy for creating leverage is valid. Apple is now leveraging their marketing efforts through systems known as online applications.

So, for example, they have created the open source platform where anybody can now designs programs for Apple, which is the way it was for Microsoft, and now Microsoft is trying to utilize it for people. What is the lesson there?

The lesson there is to realize that if you want to leverage yourself, don‘t go down one path. You don‘t want a very shallow, wide river. You don‘t want a very deep, narrow river. You want a very wide, deep river. And how do you make it wide? How do you make it deep? You leverage yourself through people and through systems.

So systems would be things like automated, generated things like, for example, when somebody downloads my speaker kit they start receiving auto-responders for 2 years. That thing is all system-based because it just reaches out to them, but it doesn‘t require a human being to get on the phone and contact them.

Now, if I really want to maximize my efforts, I now generate a report from my shopping cart and say, who here has downloaded my speaker kit? I look at that

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and then I have one of my assistants do the research on those people who have downloaded to find out what company they work for and if they are in my target audience, then they get a personalized phone call saying, ―Hey, you downloaded Topher‘s speaker‘s kit, do you have any questions? Would you like to speak with Topher directly?‖ And that is the personal approach.

So make sure that when you create your marketing program, you ask yourself ―How can I leverage my marketing through people and through systems to get the depth and the width necessary to make a real powerful impact?‖ HELPFUL HINTS: The Single most important factor in success with online marketing is creating powerful ad copy. It‘s not as easy as just putting some words on a page. The words have to be purposeful and effective. There is no body in the market better in my eyes for creating effective ad copy that Nick James, from London. Here are some valuable resources he has graciously supplied for you: Free copywriting template and tips, by Nick James: Get free and instant

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John:

Well said. I want to move onto a couple of other parts of marketing and again, there are just so many moving parts but there are some fundamental keys that we really need to hit home on and for you, the reader, these are the key things I want you to think about.

Marketing has to be ongoing. It is not something that if you just put out an advertisement in a magazine once, that is an ad.

That is not even really

marketing. If you put out three pieces of marketing, it is just that – marketing.

But when you give a lot, add value, create solutions, and you do it on an ongoing basis, your marketing actually becomes a campaign and that is what it has to be in the new economy. You have to give value. You have to be real. You have to be present. You have to be equal part peer and equal part authority and that is a delicate balance, although it is essential.

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A great platform to do this is with social media and with that, I mean Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, YouTube, Twitter, and so on, and obviously there are many others.

Again, the most important one at the time of we created this product, in my opinion, is Facebook. Why? Because it has the most users, people stay on the site the longest, and it provides the most opportunity for zero cost (in most cases) to reach a huge audience of people who are willing to take the time to learn what you have to say because they are in a different mindset. There is a different psychology when people are on Facebook.

The average Google user, for example, is on Google for maybe 15 seconds. They are on Facebook for an average of an hour a day. That is the average user on Facebook. There are over 500 million users, about 250 million of them are on at least once a week, and the average time that people are logged on each time is one hour.

The difference is, with Google it is a portal.

You are going there to go

somewhere else. But Facebook is a destination and you are also able to catch up with friends and lost acquaintances and business perspectives and so on, but also this is another important benefit of Facebook is that when you get a referral on Facebook or you get a link, most often it is from someone you know, like or trust so you are more willing to follow the link, but also follow through with what the

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proposal is or what the pitch is once they click through. That is one of the beautiful things about social media – you are more likely to take action on something that is suggested by a friend rather than just a random link or a page link on Google.

There is now more referred traffic from Facebook than there is from Google. So in other words, more people click on a link and go somewhere else from Facebook than they do from Google, which is a huge shift in the entire structure of the internet and marketing as we know it.

Topher:

Excellent, John. You know one thing to keep in mind about Facebook – as with any, by the way, social marketing program – is to realize three things with regard to your marketing. The three things are this: environment, action and experience.

Ultimately, the purpose of all marketing is to create an action and that action is moving into a sales process which would be the purchase. What most people fail to realize in the world of marketing – especially in online marketing and social marketing, specifically – is that they need to realize that the action that they want the individual to take has to be conducive with the environment that they are marketing in. I will give you an example of this.

Facebook, at the time of this printing, is clearly the most powerful marketing channel for the free marketing that is out there, but I see a lot of people – I mean, there are thousands of people that are wasting millions of dollars on Facebook

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putting ads trying to sell things in Facebook. There is a problem with selling things in Facebook.

The problem with selling things in Facebook is that when you try to sell somebody something in Facebook is not the action appropriate to the environment of Facebook. What is the environment of Facebook?

The environment in Facebook is free. People don‘t go on Facebook to be sold.

People go on Facebook to be given—free entertainment, free connection, free, free, free. So what I see, is a lot of people going out and putting ads in Facebook trying to sell products. I would venture to say that very few people are making money selling products on Facebook. However, a lot of people are making millions giving away things on Facebook that lead to the purchase of something else.

For example, Facebook‘s environment is an environment of free so any actions that you want them to take should be an action associated with the action of freeness. For example, I have an eBook called The Professional Speaking Secrets of Topher Morrison advertised on Facebook. I spend a certain amount of money every month giving away that book on Facebook. Why do I give it away instead of selling it? I give it away because the environment of Facebook is one of free, so they get a free book.

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If I were to sell my eBook on Facebook, that is not the appropriate action for the right environment. So what would happen is I would probably spend a lot of money and lose a lot of money. I would rather spend the money and give away the book.

Now the book, by the way, since it is free creates an action. That action creates an experience. The experience then creates a new environment. So once I get them out of Facebook and into my eBook, they are now in a new environment.

That environment is now a difference one – one whereby I have to retrain them to stop thinking free and start thinking exchange.

For example, an eBook, the first thing they are given in the first chapter is they are given the ability to continue their learning in exchange for something. Now, it is not an exchange of money, but it is an exchange of information. Why do I do that?... Because I want to change the environment! The environment now is; if you want something from me, you have to give me something first.

Once we have created that environment, they take a new action giving me information (i.e., their name, their address or whatever it might be) and then we given them a new experience. And then that experience would create a new environment again, and everything that you do in your marketing funnel needs to be based on the question, ―How do I change the environment to create a new appropriate action?‖ So remember, before you spend thousands and thousands of

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dollars advertising purchasable products, you might want to make sure and ask yourself the question, ―Is the action I am trying to get my prospect to take appropriate for the environment that they are currently in?‖ John:

Well said, well said—and that goes for everything, not just Facebook—but that is absolutely, 100% true of Facebook.

I heard the example—and this was a great example—when you start talking about too much of your business within the general community of your group of friends which may not all be interested in everything you have to say associated with your coaching business. And the example would be if someone came to a dinner party and tried to get you into Amway while you are all sitting at the dinner table – and it could be any type of program. I just used that as an example because that is a fairly stereotypical of an excited and perhaps overzealous sales representative.

The proper thing would be to say, ―Hey, I have a group (or a fan page) dedicated to [blank]. Why don‘t you come on and we can discuss it, be friends, join our group or ‗Like‘ it, or whatever it is, and then we can talk about it.‖ That‘s much more appropriate than talking about it right at the dinner table, for example, if you are having a dinner party with friends.

The other example was if you are on a date and you are having a cocktail at a bar and you say, ―Hey, come over to my house. I have a bottle of wine,‖ and you want to leave the bar right then. It is too abrupt; rather than getting to know them, adding value, having a discussion, building rapport, giving something of merit

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and then, after a relationship is built, maybe you can go to another lounge and enjoy another glass of wine rather than trying to get them home, for example.

Now, these are just examples or metaphors for being overzealous in a social media or social network environment which does not serve you. All right, so now we are going to move on – much to cover.

Viral video marketing. Why do they call it ―viral‖? It spreads like a virus. At least, that is the intent. There are many different ways of benefitting from video marketing

and

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viralvideomoneymachine.com.

The viral nature can only happen so much if you have your video uploaded to one source. Now, YouTube is, by far, the king – the grand Poobah – of all video marketing and videos on the internet. That is without any questions. However, there are dozens and dozens of other video sites where you can submit your materials. But the truth is, how much time are you willing to spend to do that – to create a username, a password, an account profile and then wait for the uploads to all of these different sites?

It is incredibly time-intensive and cumbersome.

Instead, if you use the product, for example, viralvideomoneymachine, you load everything to that system, you create your template once, and with that system they gave you about 80 custom profiles for all of these different sites – article sites, blogging, social bookmarking, status sites, social networking, and so on, and

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after you set it up you click on a button and it pushes out your videos to all of these different places and does the work for you.

This kind of goes back to what we said before – how much are you going to leverage your time? What are you willing to work for and don‘t work or be willing to accept for anything less than a given dollar amount per hour? This goes into your marketing as well.

What needs to be in a viral video? For your business, it needs to be entertaining, engaging, and informative. In today‘s market, marketing is just training. If you can train people, if you can add value to their life, if you can solve problems, if you can establish yourself as an expert and a friend and a trusty authority – all of those things all rolled into one – then your video-marketing campaigns are incredibly effective.

We are going to get more into speaking on camera and doing that sort of thing in just a moment because Topher is going to talk about the speaking profession and how that actually rolls into videos online and so on.

I am going to touch quickly now on print and traditional marketing. Traditional is just kind of old school. What did they do before the advent of the internet? Some people say it is completely dead. I don‘t think it is dead and I don‘t think you should ignore it, I just think that it should not be your main focus, but if you get

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an opportunity and it is very cost-effective with a proven return on investment, then it is something you can consider. But for the most part, traditional marketing and traditional media is not as relevant as the emerging fields of all of the internet base, social media, and digital distribution methodologies.

Topher, do you want to say one more thing on that before we go into continuity income models?

Topher:

Well, you know, the thing to remember about videos is attention span. People nowadays, because of YouTube, have lost their attention span. The average attention span of somebody watching videos on YouTube is going to be less than two minutes so if you want to have a video that is anything more than two minutes, there is one fundamental rule you need to follow. You have to be entertaining. I don‘t care if you want to give good content or good information and teach them something – that is fine – but you have to be teaching them something in an entertaining, attention-grabbing way.

Whenever you make your videos, make sure that you always go back to the fundamental rule, the more entertaining, the longer they will watch. The more informative, the less they will watch. So if you want to inform, you have to do it in an entertaining way.

John:

Well said, well said. All right, let‘s talk about continuity income models. What do we mean by continuity? Well, by definition, continuity is something that continues. It is from the root word there, so to continue earning income.

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Some examples of continuity income models that you may know is your gym membership. You pay every month. They continue to earn money every month.

It may be an annual membership, but that is continuity, just done per annum rather than per month. Another continuity model might be some club you belong to other than a health club. There endless continuity income models.

A good friend of mine gave an example of how basically anything can become a continuity model and he found online that there are about six sock-of-the-month clubs—socks! The things you put on your feet. You would think that someone would just buy a pair of socks maybe with two stripes that go about halfway up your calf and they would be good to go, but no. Some people actually belong to clubs which give them a unique pair of socks each month and they pay a monthly fee to be a part of the sock-of-the-month club. Anything can be created into a continuity business model.

Can you think of some non-traditional or perhaps ordinary, as well, models of continuity, Topher, before we move on?

Topher:

Well, you now, the thing is, coaching in and of itself has to, by the very nature of itself, be a continuity program because to have something have—even though earlier we talked about having a start time and an end time, the whole goal of the end time is to give them reference that they are getting a value so they continue on and on and on. The very nature of coaching has to be continuous, otherwise you

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison are sitting there telling people, ‗Nope, once you do this you are cured, or you are fixed,‘ and that is just not how life works. So everybody reading this book has to realize that they have continuity.

Here is the question for you: If you are, right now, reading this and you are sitting there thinking, ―I can‘t think of how my program can be created with continuity in mind.‖ I would submit that you are not niched enough and you have not asked yourself how do you solve someone‘s problem because if you know how you solve someone‘s problem, you will inherently know how that problem continues to creep up in their life all of the time and you have to find a way to make sure that it doesn‘t creep back in after you have solved it even once.

HELPFUL HINTS: Nowadays, creating continuity streams are super simple! Everything is pretty much ‗plug-n-play‘ Here‘s a link to one of the simplest to use, and cost-effective continuity programs ever. http://bit.ly/gqtXMv Don‘t have time to create a continuity program yourself? The team at Infuzy is an integral part of my business success and I use them all the time to help me get my membership sites up and running… they are a Godsend for saving time, and getting things done right the first time. Check them out.

John:

Well, let‘s talk about coaching models that can thrive with a continuity system.

One of them is just doing a program for six months. Rather than a given number

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison of sessions, you just say, ―This is a six-month system.‖ Now, in some cases, they may call that micro-continuity or if it is three months – ―micro‖ just meaning ―small,‖ so the continuity is that it is three monthly installments and they commit to that 90-day process broken up into three equal monthly installments. It may be a six-month statement. It may be an annual program, but it is broken up into monthly installments. That is continuity but with a fixed end-point.

Then there is continuity that just goes on and on and on for as long as people are willing to stay in the system. In most cases, that is done as a membership. The program that I do when I coach people is called The Matrix Mind. You can see it here: TheMatrixMind.com. So for me, the Matrix Mind allows me to help more people, to make a bigger difference in their lives, and it also frees up more of my time and allows me to continue to be in the service of other people no matter where I am at and what time of the day it is because the content is delivered in audio lessons, web cam, or some type of video capture like Camtasia or Screenflow to where I make a video that gives them the necessary tools and resources to live a better life and it is a tremendous program that a lot of people – hundreds of people – benefit from and so that, for me, as me being a coach, that is my continuity business model as a coach. It is very cost-effective for the people who use it, far less expensive than if they were to hire me one-on-one (a fraction of the cost), and it also allows me to help 20 times more people than I would otherwise be able to serve.

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John:

We are going to continue to move on and talk about membership sites as a business model and a revenue stream for your coaching practice. So Topher, what is your experience with membership sites? What has all of your experience working with personal development professionals around the world told you about membership sites?

Topher:

You know what, John? One of the most interesting things about any business – not even just the coaching business – but something that is really important about any business is being able to identify and predict trends. And that's one thing as a professional speaker I must say I‘ve been pretty good about spotting what trends are going to work for professional speakers specifically, and I have to confess this is one where I missed the boat.

John, you have mastered, in my opinion, the aspect of continuity programs, membership sites, things that constantly drive in consistent revenues and that was something that I actually ignored.

I was still focusing on the professional

speaking side of things because it was so lucrative and I didn't capitalize on the membership sites, much to my dismay, because as the economy started to shift, that was one thing which could secure people a financial, stable level of income and I didn't have that. So even myself, I am just getting into the membership sites right now so if anything, I'm a testimonial as to how important they are because you can have the most successful business – I mean, my professional speaking business was driving in annual revenues of seven-figures and even then, all of a sudden when the economy shifts, the strategies don't work that were working six

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months ago, and they fallout.

The good thing about continuity programs is even though they're not recession proof, they don't seem to be as affected by the economic trends as destination websites that people are going to do specifically by something and I think the reason for that is because once they are into a membership site, they are already in and there are those times where even if they forget they have paid or subscribed, those two or three months go by and maybe they're not even utilizing it, but then all of a sudden they gain that awareness back and say, ―Oh, I‘m paying for this. I need to use it,‖ and it kind of keeps them enrolled. It is absolutely an essential part of anybody's coaching business, in my opinion, that is in the realm of personal or business or physical development.

John:

Agreed 100% and I think it goes back to the old adage that it is easier to keep someone‘s business rather than get new business from a new prospect. And, because you have already proven yourself and given value and helped them enhance their life in some way, then the expectation is that if I continue to pay this given amount, my life will continue to improve on the same scale or perhaps even escalate.

So there is something to be said about continuing to thrill

someone—in a little bit we are going to get into reciprocity. That certainly is part of that.

Topher:

I will tell you one of the reasons – or the main reason why – I never got into any type of a continuity program was I made the mistake of saying, ―Look, I'm too

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busy doing all of the other things to keep my business profitable. I don't have time to learn something else.‖ And this is something that really, you know, business has changed over the past five years. I mean, five years ago you had to pay $5,000 to get a really good website. Nowadays, you can literally get a really good website in five minutes or less through online modules and now there are membership creation programs.

There are companies that specialize in developing continuity programs for companies to where it doesn't take a lot of extra effort or work on your part if you already have the ideas, you already have the concepts, they have the way of packaging it in a specific way which sells and which works and it is far better and easier to hire a company who specializes in continuity programs than to actually sit there and try to develop and learn how to do the business yourself and then create the program on your own. It is plug-and-play at this point in time. In fact, that should be a phrase that you remember in most coaching business from now on because technology has gotten to the level now where everything is literally plug-and-play. Customization happens through templates. It is the strangest thing, but it is absolutely the way to go in business.

John:

Well said.

All right, we are going to talk about teleclass series as a coaching model and, just to clarify – and for the sake of a definition – a teleclass may also be called a conference call, a conference series, a teleseries, or Teleseminar, a teleconference just to name a few.

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There are many different names they all basically encompass a teleclass. And, just as the name implies, it is a class that takes place over the telephone. And one of the things that you need to keep in mind here is that there is different ways to do it. A teleclass series can be done for free or it can be done for a fee, and generally when they are done for free – zero cost – it is a one-off teleclass, meaning that you will give a lot of value and then at the end you will have a pitch – an offer – an irresistible offer for them to enroll in a higher level and more comprehensive teleclass series which will take them to the next level of whatever it is that you are helping them with you within your niche.

In a teleclass series, you will generally have it for a specific group of people like we have talked about in the past – like a niche. You can't have a teleclass series for a wide range and a broad group of people because you are going to be talking about, likely, one specific topic and you need to make sure it is an applicable and fun and exciting and appropriate for that one group.

At the end of the book, you will see a list of resources for different teleclass services and teleconferencing services. Some have a fee, some are free, some can involve video, some have the ability to accommodate more lines, and some have a moderator and some do not. It just depends on what you want to do, how many people you need to serve, and what services you need to offer. I do suggest that a teleseminar series or a teleclass series have a given duration such as four weeks and it will be, for example, every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time

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for four weeks, and each week will build on what happened in the week before.

In conjunction with the teleclass series, as the people sign up in an e-mail contact form such as the one that we recommend on PersonalTrainerTools.com, once they opt in you also have, obviously, all of their information.

That is how you

communicate with them, that is how you give them all the information for the teleclass series, and that is also how you can do e-mail communication and follow up and also delivery of support materials perhaps such a text documents, PDFs, images, forms, and surveys and things like that that are run in conjunction with the teleclass series.

Now, Topher, what I would like to know from you is what have been some of your successes with teleclasses; what are some of the things that have gone wrong; and what is the best way to make them profitable?

Topher:

All right, well, let's start with the most memorable, which would be some of the things that have gone wrong. I am not the most technically savvy person and the good thing about teleseminars, or teleclasses, is that they are relatively easy to perform. It is not that hard. You have a phone, you call in, there is a password, and it is fairly simple. In the past, I have overcomplicated these and I have tried to have slideshows in conjunction with the phone call to where they can go online and they can watch a slideshow and I bring in all of these extra elements that, at the end of the day, don't make a hill of beans difference.

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The one thing that I would suggest is that when people start doing these things, just keep them simple. Stick with the phone. You don‘t have to get very elaborate. You don‘t need graphics for them to log on. Most of them aren‘t going to do that anyway. Just keep it with the phone and make sure that you record the phone call for later delivery to people who missed out.

I think one of the other mistakes that I have made is, in the past when I have done teleclasses, I‘ve just done the teleclass and then I‘ve walked away. I did my offer and whatever results I got, I got. But the reality is, when you offer or you do teleclasses, almost every single service out there now has an ability to record them. Now, if they don‘t, you have the ability to record them on your PC and you can just talk into while you are doing the class.

Once you have got it recorded, then you no longer have to be there to do the teleclass in the future. You can run it again next month and the next month, and the next month after that and it will continue to generate revenue for you without you even being there and that is so critical nowadays where entrepreneurs or solopreneurs are oftentimes wearing more than one hat in their business.

John:

You know, one of the things you were talking about is adding the video element.

There are different webinar services – and again, at the end of the book, look for our list of resources for webinar services and teleclasses and so on.

I recall many, many years ago – before the advent of the webinar –there was a

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison coaching professional that— actually, it used to be my personal training client – that is how long ago it was—and this is probably in the first generation of dot.com revolution, and what he would do is get people on a bridge line – a teleclass – and he would load all of his information onto one long HTML webpage and he would have people follow along as he went through the material. This is a little bit antiquated, but yet it worked very well. And what's funny is that I still think some of the things apply today because he had it all on one page and he had the people load the page in advance because, at that time, people had all kinds of old dial-up modems and all sorts of things and the internet wasn‘t nearly as smooth as it is now. But I think there is still something that can be said about that. You simply have a webpage that goes up that is perhaps long where it has all of your information on it, it is not a public page. It is only for people who have registered for that webinar who have the URL – the web address for that – you email it to them – to the people who have registered. They load it in advance. It may take a minute to load if it is a long page, and you just scroll through it and that is their outline as they go through.

Another thing is that on that page, you might also give it to them a couple of hours in advance. They might have PDF documents that are linked to it and on that page, they can click and open up and print out the PDF documents to do work along with what they are viewing on the screen and also what they are listening to over the teleconference line. Have you had any experience with that, Topher, or anyone you have ever worked with?

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Topher:

I haven‘t had experiences just going through an HTML but I love the idea because it's simple and the key is to keep things as simple as possible. The more things you have to distract you, as the leader of the teleclass, the more dangerous it becomes, the riskier it is in you losing your place, getting distracted, having something go wrong. Simple is best. Follow the KISS principle – keep it super simple.

John:

All right, let‘s talk about the speaking profession which is obviously something that Topher does very, very well. In my opinion, Topher is one of the world‘s leading speakers and the leading speaker training expert – not only for how to speak from the stage, but how to sell from the stage, how to be a professional, and also the whole business of being a professional speaker and, you know, this is his domain so I‘m going to turn it over in just a second. He is going to run with it.

One thing I want to emphasize is that no matter if you want to go on the road and be a professional speaker or if you just want to speak more effectively or if you want to be able to speak more convincingly and more dynamically when you're making web video, whatever it is, learning how to speak effectively, being an orator and being an effective communicator is probably one of the most important skills that you can master and a great example of that is a politician. Think of any politician who has done well in the elections – whether you like them or not, or agree with their politics or not - when someone has the ability to be charismatic, dynamic, and effective in their speaking and not only when they speak do people say, ―Wow, that was a good speech,‖ but they say, ―Let's march; let‘s go. I want

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So, with that, Topher, go for it. Talk about the speaking profession and how it affects coaches and personal development pros.

Topher:

All right, well, if you want to explode your business as a coach, you absolutely, positively must be able to inspire the masses. It is going to be the single-handedly most effective way for you for you to get your message out to the largest amount of people possible. Let‘s face it, the competition out there is in coaching is tough.

That is why we talk about the power of niching yourself so you can help thin out that competition, but even still it is going to be very competitive. You have to find ways to get your message out to as many of those people in your niche as possible and to the success of that business will be in direct proportion to how well you can speak from the platform. So it is very important.

Having said that; you touched on something that is absolutely critical. You called it the ―speaking profession.‖ You didn‘t call it the speaking hobby. You didn‘t call it the speaking lifestyle. You didn‘t call it the speaking idea. You called it the speaking profession. It is a profession and, like any professional science or art, it requires education. And so many times, people watch professional speakers and they think, ―What an easy job! All they do is get up and talk.‖ Well, the reason why the audience thinks that is because that professional speaker has gone through extensive levels of training to make it look like what they're doing on the

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stage is just natural conversation. But the reality is it is never natural, normal conversation. It is meticulously rehearsed. It is practiced for countless amounts of hours and is designed to look effortless. That is when you know you have nailed it.

It is a profession and as a profession it requires that educational

commitment. So wherever you go, you need to commit yourself to learning the tools of the trade.

Now, having said that, let's talk about the other aspect of the speaking profession.

It is a profession. As a result, there needs to be a professional exchange. In any professional relationship, there is an exchange of money for services and this is the hardest part that most life coaches, by the way, suffer from – not just in professional speaking, but also in offering their individual services and the biggest challenge is they have a strong desire to help people. They feel committed to helping people improve the quality of their life. Most coaches got into the business because they hired a coach that helped them get their life on track and as such, this passion to help out other people gets in the way of their profession because they end up talking to people who are in crisis mode in their life and for many people nowadays, when they are in crisis mode, they are in financial crisis.

They don't have the funds to be able to afford what they need and they will come to you wanting to go to your workshops, to your seminars, or get your private one-on-one coaching begging and pleading to have you give it to them as a gift. ―Could you scholarship me? Could you grant me access? If you have faith in me and give me this training, I will use the skills better than anyone you have ever

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taught and I will make the amount of money that I need to and then I will pay you in the long run.‖

And I will tell you, with over twenty years experience in this business, in all capitals THAT IS A LIE! It will rarely, if ever happen. In fact, I would be willing to put money on it saying it will never happen. I have never witnessed somebody getting something for free that is normally a paid service and then they go out and use it to such a great degree that they become the most successful in using it, and here's why.

Think about this way, John. If you, as a person who needs help, to convince a coach that you deserve to get it for free and then you are going to go out and utilize those skills to help other people out, when it is time for you to go and speak with those other people, you are going to have a reference in your mind that it is okay to give away your product. Now, how are you going make money in this business if you have a reference that says you can get it for free and still get value versus ―I had to work my butt off to save up enough money to get the coaching necessary to turn my life around? And I know that, in this culture, financial investment equates to emotional commitment. So, if I truly care about my clientele, I will never, ever give it to them for free. I will make sure there is an exchange of energy which is strong enough to where they are completely and utterly committed to getting the results they desire. And it is the toughest thing that any speaker or any coach will have to do and that is to tell somebody, ―I am

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison sorry, I cannot help you,‖ if they don‘t have the funds. Absolutely charge for your services, whether it be in front of a group of people or one-on-one, yes, there is the marketing strategy of giving away content for free creating a great deal of reciprocity, but there has to be a finish line there. You have to know the point where it ends.

What is the point where it is no longer acceptable to give

something away for free, and now the only acceptable option is to charge? Once you have that defined, then you are entering the realm of a professional speaker.

John:

And so, there is so much debate and – I don‘t know if I would call it controversy – but opinions, as to how someone should start a professional speaking career.

Some people say never compromise and never speak for free, other people say sometimes you do have to speak for free, maybe if it is a charity event or maybe if you have to get your feet wet and speak for free. Other people say that a media kit is essential. Other people say that you don't want to have your media reel – your highlight reel – because everyone knows that your highlights is your best work, but it is not really who you are. So, what is your opinion on all that?

Topher:

Really, it depends upon what type of a professional speaker you want to be.

There are rules that go along with every type of a profession and in this report, we don't have the time to go into all of that detail because that is where the education comes from. But let me give you some insight that will help get you on the right path.

For example, you could be a professional keynote speaker.

A professional

keynote speaker has to have what the industry calls a one sheet. A one sheet is

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exactly what it sounds like. It is one page that basically states a brief biography about you; bullet points about what the viewer or the listener is going to receive when they hear the keynote speech, and contact information, and that is it. And most speakers bureaus will book their speakers based upon the one sheets then the demo reel, which is now, of course, a demo online download. Those are the two things that keynote speakers need.

Now the interesting thing about it is that people always want to become a keynote speaker. I hear it all the time. People come to me and say, ―I‘ve got some great ideas, I‘m a great speaker, and I want to find a promoter!

I want to have

companies hire me to speak,‖ and I‘m like, ―That is a great ambition and the challenge is unless you are a celebrity, like an athlete or a politician, the likelihood of having people call you and book you sight unseen is extremely rare.

Those are primarily done for people who are either celebrities or already wellestablished as keynote speakers and it does take a while to break into that market.

What do you do while you are waiting to break in or trying to break in? You can do seminars or workshops.

Seminars typically are anywhere from one day to three days, upwards of seven days, perhaps, where the people come and they sit there and take notes and get a lot of great information. Workshops are typically similar to seminars, and run the same length of time, but in addition to taking notes, there is also interaction where they practice or put to work the skills that they are learning.

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Seminars and workshops are very lucrative if you know how to do it the right way.

They are very costly if you don't know how to do it the right way.

Unfortunately, most people that aren‘t professional speakers look at a speaking seminar company, they go to an event, they see the person charge $500 a ticket, they see that there are a thousand people in the room, and they go, ―My God, these people made $500,000 in a weekend. What a great business!‖ But what they don‘t realize is that that $500,000 has to pay for all of the overhead for the next three months to get them to the next seminar, which will hopefully bring in another $500,000.

So it is absolutely crucial to be able to learn how to establish breakeven points.

Now, the beautiful thing about reading this document is that because you have taken action and you have got this document, we are going to give you a calculator which does that for you and it is included in this document and it is our gift to you to help you realize how many people you need to have at your events to actually break even.

The second thing is that you also have to realize that those seminars are going to have to probably be promoted by yourself in the very beginning. To go up and find a promoter who is willing to promote a complete unknown is a very, very tall order. Most of the time, you have to promote your own events up front. You have to pay your dues, get the people into the room yourself, build up your own

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison database sufficiently to where then a promoter looks at you and says, ―Look, this person has something valuable to add.‖ To just come into the business and sit there and say, ―Well the reason a promoter should hire me is because I have a really great gift about being able to tap into the potential of others and bring out the best in them,‖ and people somehow think that is unique gift. It is not a unique gift. We have talked about that already in this document. All coaches have that ability.

The key is ―what is your unique message? What is your unique path? And nowadays, without a specific niche and a specific message, the likelihood of becoming successful as a speaker is a tough one. It is not an impossible one, but it is a very difficult one.

John:

Let's talk about how the a speaking profession as a personal development and life coach—and just so everyone knows—I use the term ―personal development‖ as more of an umbrella term because sometimes it is business, sometimes it is finance, sometimes you are giving, depending on what roles you are playing. And sometimes you are asking questions and sometimes it is personal, sometimes it is professional, sometimes it is relational, sometimes it is spiritual, so all of that is kind of the personal development umbrella.

So, Topher, when someone is integrating a speaking profession into their overall coaching or personal development business, how can it be integrated? Is it the tool to get people into your membership program? When does it happen if you

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have a mastermind program? Is it the tool that allows you to sell more books or does the book lead to the opportunity for the speaking? How does all of that tie together?

Topher:

Well, that‘s the key thing. It all ties together. It never leads from one to another.

It is a bit like a Möbius strip. If you look at a Möbius strip, it appears as though there is two sides, but in reality there is only one side by the way it has been constructed and an effectively designed business in speaking, will be very much like a Möbius strip in that one side is the other, and the other is the other.

So, for example, the one thing I do know for sure is that, as a speaker, it gives you the right to charge more for your one-on-ones. So if you really want to continue to do the one-on-one route, that is fine, but you need to make sure you are charging enough. How do you get to the level where, for example, you can charge over $300 an hour, $3,000 an hour, $30,000 as a retainer per month? The way that happens is though speaking. It is as plain as that. It is because speakers are considered the experts and they are also considered the top in their field.

So, for example, if John, you went to a marketing expo and you were sitting in the audience and there was a gentleman on stage who is teaching you the seven most critical components to marketing your business, and sitting next to you on your left and next to you on your right were two different companies that specialized in marketing, and you introduced yourself to them and they say, ―We specialize in helping people market their business.‖ You‘ve got person on your left, you‘ve

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison got person on your right, and you‘ve got the guy up on stage. Who are you going to want to hire to help you with your marketing?

John:

Well, obviously the person on stage and the reason for it is metaphoric and it physical. They have a platform. They have a metaphoric and symbolic platform and they have a structural platform and they have perceived expertise immediately. They are the authority by default.

Topher:

Absolutely. In fact, they are even a better authority than the person to your left and to your right, you assume, simply because the people to your left and your right are learning from the person on stage. If you want to charge top dollars for your coaching, you better learn to be a powerful presenter and have that platform.

So the speaking definitely leads into the one-on-one. Now having said that, the more successful you are with your one-on-ones, the better stories you have while you are up on stage. So you can see they start to tie into one another and that‘s why I said it is a big like a Möbius strip because they are actually one and the same. One of the best reasons why a speaker would want to do one-on-ones is it gives them great stories. Now, as a speaker, this is how you book yourself more one-on-one appointments: While you are speaking, you are telling anecdotes and stories about people who you have worked with one-on-one that have produced amazing results. The people in the audience then—if you are doing the one strategy I‘m going to share with you in a moment—will all be sitting there wanting to be your next success story. Now the key is how do you get them to want to be your next success story?

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One main component:

When you design your presentation, you should be

designing it such that the people in the audience are thinking or feeling one primary thought and the one primary thought should always be ―Me too!‖ You want them listening to your stories and going ―That‘s like me. That's like me.

That is just like I am.

I have those same problems.

I have those same

challenges,‖ and then when they hear that you solved those problems for the person that you are using in story, they immediately know that your techniques will work for them. That will be the single most powerful tool in getting them to want to hire you for a one-on-one.

John:

And let's talk about how a mastermind group can tie in with speaking and the overall picture. Obviously, a mastermind can be a whole other topic and we can discuss that in a bit, but essentially, a mastermind is an elite level, high level, high fee group who are dedicated, focused, and determined to achieve and share and grow far beyond your other people in your tribe. So how would you position your speaking in conjunction with a mastermind group?

Topher:

Well, one of the things that somebody in your audience will be listening for is ―How do I know this person is going to be with me after the program is over?‖

So let‘s say you are doing an introduction workshop and your whole ambition for the workshop is to enroll them into some sort of a coaching program or maybe a future event. Most people nowadays, if they have ever gone down the route of

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professional or personal development, they have been burned at least once. How did they get burned? Typically, it shows up like this: They sign up for an event, they go to the event, and after the event the company disappears, goes out of business, doesn't return their phone calls, and they don't get the follow-up support that they need.

I think nowadays, audiences are more sophisticated than ever and they understand the need and the necessity for ongoing spaced repetition and they are looking for that. They are not looking for the fly-by-night, one-shot give it to me and cure me. They are looking for a relationship. We are looking more and more to connect. In fact, if you look at the whole aspect of social networks, the whole aspect of social networks is based upon the desire to connect with more people, so we are looking for that connection. A mastermind is a great way to create that connection to where it is only an elite group of individuals.

You know, one thing that people are going to want just as much as working with you, is also being able to surround themselves by an elite group of people who are just like them. So mastermind groups offer them those solutions to where they feel the desire to want to continue on with you because not everybody offers that.

John:

I have one more question about the speaking profession. What is the first step and how do you know it is right for you?

Topher:

The first step is always – regardless of what type of a professional speaker you want to be – is to find a professional speaker who has produced the results that

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you want and then seek their counsel because they are going to be able to give you the best advice possible. You know, I can tell you, for example, that while I am an expert in the seminar business and I am an expert in the workshop business and I make a very good living in the keynote business, when people come to me to want to learn the keynote, I don't work with them. I actually refer them out to my mentor who specializes in the keynote. And in turn, when people go to him and want to learn about the aspects of creating seminars or workshops, he won‘t work with them. He sends them to me because he knows that I am the expert in that field. So what I would say is step one is to find the individual who has produced the results that you already want, and then ask them what those steps are.

John:

So basically, model excellence.

Topher:

Exactly; but make sure that it is excellence in the field that you want to excel in.

John:

And I think that is essential, too, is to always have a mentor, to always have a coach, to always have someone to guide you and who is willing to give you advice when you need advice, give you counsel when you need counsel, give you direction when you are lost, and be able to ask you tough questions that you may not know to ask yourself.

Topher:

Yeah.

John:

So make sure you seek that person out.

Topher, tell us about how you can help people with their professional speaking career.

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Topher:

Well, the first step for anybody who really wants to seek my counsel, is to go to the website, http://www.BulletproofSpeaking.com and download my free living eBook called The Professional Speaking Secrets of Topher Morrison. This is 20+ years of my knowledge that I have compiled into a book which you get one chapter every week that helps you build your business and learn things as you need to learn them. So you are not getting dumped on with a great deal of information, but just simply getting the most critical components out first. We cover everything from how do you develop a powerful one sheet. We provide free examples, we talk about how to determine your profit loss and we provide you tools for doing that.

Inside that book there are loads and loads of additional resources as well, and that is probably the first thing that people should do it simply because it is a great way for them to understand where I am coming from as a professional speaker. Then, if they like what they hear or if they like what they read in the eBook, then they can come and they can see me personally. We can do a one-day workshop that we offer over the world and they can get a live experience. They can go online and get the seminar downloaded if they don't want to go in person. We have loads of resources available, but the starting point is always go to http://www.BulletproofSpeaking.com HELPFUL HINTS:

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If you are really serious about becoming a professional speaker, there is no finer program on the market than Legacy. Full disclosure: I‘m biased because I created it. Check it out at http://www.legacycertification.com One of the things you‘ll rarely, if ever witness is a professional speaker endorsing another professional speaker for a competitive product. But this wouldn‘t be the ultimate guide if I didn‘t take the time to tell you about the 2 other people in this industry that I endorse. Tom Antion, and Steve Siebold. These guys are personal mentors of mine, and while we all specialize in slightly different areas, it would be in your best interest to be trained by all 3 of us. So check out all of our programs here: 7 Secrets to Becoming a Highly Paid Professional Speaker, by Topher Morrison – http://www.bulletproofspeaking.com Wake em’ Up Professional Speaking Program, by Tom Antion – http://bit.ly/hhBuX0 Bill Gove Speech Workshop, by Steve Siebold – http://www.speechworkshop.com/ (make sure to mention my name, Topher so they give you the special ‗red-carpet‘ treatment) John:

All right, and I 100% strongly recommend that everyone does that and, although I am not as effective as a speaker as you, I have certainly learned a great deal from you and each time I get on stage, it definitely improves, it gets more comfortable, and I always like it when you are in the audience because afterwards I can say, ―How was that?‖ and you can give me some feedback and it definitely helps and

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that is giving value to me and that is the next topic.

Giving value to everyone in your organization, from the people you work with that are perhaps employees or contractors, giving value to your family, to your friends, and even more specifically, right now we are going to talk about giving value to your customers.

So, in simple terms, you are exceeding their expectations and we said this earlier you don't want to under promise and over deliver, you just want to say you are going to do a lot and then do a lot and then do more and invite critique, criticism, feedback, and commentary, learn from that and then give even more value. Now, there are different philosophies and formulas for how much value you give before you ask for something in return, which is the next topic of reciprocity. But Topher, I would like for you to give your input on giving value to the customer, why it is important, and some different strategies for doing that.

John:

Sure. You know, I follow a philosophy that I learned from a dear friend of mine and also my promoter in the United Kingdom, Daniel Preistley of Triumphant Events, and he has done extensive research on this and his philosophy is that you need to provide approximately seven hours worth of free content to a prospect in today‘s culture before they feel compelled to pull out their wallet and do some sort of monetary exchange. So, if you keep the baseline idea of I want to get at least seven hours worth of good content for these individuals, you will probably be on the right road to success.

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Now, with regard to what contents do you put in there, this is a battle. Do you put your best stuff forward or do you hold back to make sure that you have got something else to give them once they sign up? Well, a little bit of both.

Here is the thing: The key ingredient I found to free content is to make sure that inside that free content, they have the ability to hear something from you that they cannot hear from anyone else. If you just simply provide content that they can go online and Google and get within five seconds, it is not really value, is it John?

John:

No, that has to go back to niche and knowing your audience and also being unique – being a standout.

Topher:

Yes, and the best way to be unique is to share with individuals your unique philosophy, concepts, and theories. In fact, be willing to even go against the grain and be contrary. I'll give you an example of this.

I have two theories about personal development that I tell people all of the time, which is an example of unique content that they are not going to hear anywhere else: Number one, I share with my people who are getting my free content that the personal development industry has created too many people in the world passionate about having an amazing life, but not enough people committed to actually creating the life they are passionate about. And that is a huge difference because most motivational speakers out there are really about just pumping people up, getting them spastic, getting them excited, jumping around, rah rah,

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happy-clappy to where they feel so good in the moment, they are willing to buy something, but when they get back and they get home and they get alone and it starts to quiet down, all of a sudden they realize they have not significantly made any unique changes in their life anyway. So I go against the grain. In fact, I call myself the motivational speaker for people who are sick of motivational speakers.

I am a motivational rebel. I will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. That is one aspect, or one direction, to where I give them a new way of looking at life - so then we can approach them and say, ―So, are you passionate or are you committed? What is the difference?‖ Then I go through the difference of what are the characteristics of a passionate person versus the characteristic of the committed person.

So for example, passionate people will get up extra early and stay up extra late to work on their passions in life. The committed people don't work that late. Now, that is something they wouldn't expect to hear. Then I have to justify it and I say, for example, a committed person will get more done during an eight-hour day than a passionate person will get in a fourteen-hour day, but the passionate person will be loving what they are doing and having a great time so that they feel like they've made progress when, in fact, all they have really done is entertain themselves. A committed person says, ―I've only got eight hours; let‘s get it done.‖

A passionate person is optimistic. A passionate person will sit there and look at

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the bright side of everything, but the committed person will take the time to educate themselves about the risks and the rewards and then make sure that they do what is necessary to avoid those risks so that they can get more done more effectively. All of a sudden, this is a new approach they have never heard. That is one example.

Another example of something that is contrary to what other people have said is that I actually call out the lack of authenticity in this business. So, I will say something like the personal development industry is more inauthentic than Hollywood or politicians. In fact, they are probably even more inauthentic than Hollywood simply because at least Hollywood admits they are fake; where there is so many in this business who won't admit that. They try to come across as being sincere and open-minded, really giving, charitable, loving and at the end of the day really all they are about is making the sale and they disappear once they have got your money. So one of the things that I am committed to doing is making sure that I don't follow the typical path of the personal development role, but I actually don't care if I get too happy-clappy and motivate you. What I am more concerned about is‌. are we producing results for you in your life?

I would much rather have somebody get pissed off at me and create powerful shifts and change in their life than have somebody think that I am the most amazing speaker in the world, but ultimately not doing anything with themselves.

Once again, a contrary philosophy that they hopefully have never heard before in

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somebody else's free content.

So ask yourself what do I have that is unique that nobody else has? That is the free content. It has got to give them something that they have never gotten from anybody else. Once they do that, it creates within them this knowing that, ―Hey, if this is what this guy is giving me for free and it is something I have never heard before, what else is available to me?‖ and that is going to create the real powerful compulsion for them to want to invest in you later.

John:

And that is our next topic which is reciprocity and, specifically, creating reciprocity or a need or a feel of a need to reciprocate. So in other words, you have given so much value that at a subconscious level, the client feels that they owe you something and this all needs to be done with the highest ethics, morals and standards, and nothing low and sneaky. In other words, you are just going to give them things that they want, need, and perhaps they are asking for and that enhanced their life and they want it because they have signed up to receive the information, and then, when it is time for you to ask for a sale of something, they realize the value and they say, ―You know what? Gosh, Topher has been so great to me. He has given me all of this stuff. I think I am going to sign up for his speaker training program,‖ because there is that sense of reciprocity. I want to reciprocate.

Now many ―experts‖ will have their own formula for the value reciprocity sale, upsale, downsale formula. So, in other words, what is the sequence of giving

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value, giving value, giving value before you ask for a sale and then upsell them or down sell them on something and then give more value, more value, more value, and so on. Topher, what is your thought on the sequencing of giving a lot of value before you ask for something and then an upsell and a downsell, if you could explain that as well.

Topher:

Sure. I believe I have touched on this earlier but I am going to repeat it because it bears repeating. There are three steps necessary in anything. What most people are looking for in life is an experience and that experience is always the result of an action. Now what happens is, if somebody takes an action, but they don‘t like the experience that they got, they go back to try to create a different action. But the problem with trying to go back and create a different action is that there is a step prior to that, and the step prior to that is the environment.

Environments always influence the actions that people take.

And it‘s those

actions that create an experience. So when you are creating value for people, a lot of people think that they are trying to create an experience, and indeed, they are.

But more importantly, you want to create an environment that is suitable to the action they need to take, which will ultimately give them the experience you are trying to achieve. I am going to give you an example of this.

One of the reciprocity gifts, if you will, that I have is the speakers eBook, The Professional Speaking Secrets of Topher Morrison,. I advertise that on Facebook and I give it away for free.

Why do I do that?

Because Facebook is an

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison environment for free. People don‘t get on Facebook to buy anything ever. [which is an action] Whereas, when people go to Amazon, that's an entirely different environment perfectly conducive to the action of buying. When people go to Amazon.com, they are going there for one reason and one reason only – they plan on buying something. [an action] When people go to Facebook, they plan on getting something for free. So when they go to Facebook, they can get my book for free.

Now, the environment is Facebook, the action is downloading my book for free, the experience is what they get when they read the ebook. But once the book is delivered to them and they are reading it, now they are in a different environment from Facebook.

So I ask myself, as I am giving them this value, or this

experience, what is the environment that I want to create as a result of this? So I focused the very beginning of the book on the whole notion of you got something for nothing in Facebook, but in this book you are going to get something for something. And so what we do is, right away after the very first chapter where I guarantee you they will hear something they have never heard before from any other professional speaker, they get massive value that then gives them an opportunity to get more information in exchange for them filling out a survey. I am not asking for money but I am now asking for something and that creates a completely different environment.

So now, when they're in my environment with my book, they realize, ―Okay, if I

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want something, I am going to have to give something and so we start off with them giving me their opinion on what's important and then maybe a couple of extra chapters later, we have another thing where they can get a bonus, but in exchange for bonus they have got to give us their contact information. And then a couple more chapters later, we have another bonus, but in this bonus, if they want to get it, they actually have to buy it and it just gradually moves them into the process comfortably, lovingly, and respectfully. Always ask yourself what is the environment I am creating with my product and is that environment conducive for the action I want them to take?

John:

Very concise, very succinct and, once again, it all comes back to creating an experience for the people. Now, we are going to get into a little bit more detail in just a moment about the customer experience beginning to end – the whole cycle.

Before we do know, you know, we have learned about giving value, we know about creating reciprocity and this happens throughout the entire customer experience, but what the customer experience is the sales funnel. And so the sales funnel – that is our next topic – is basically the collection of potential clients and a gradual narrowing of the number of clients or customers who have the ability and the desire to purchase more exclusive higher-level and more highly-priced programs, products or services.

Imagine a funnel – just the kind of plastic funnel you might have in your kitchen with the spout down at the bottom and the opening at the top is wide. It is broad and you can collect a lot of whatever it is you are pouring through there. The

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same is so for a sales funnel. So the top of the sales funnel may be using social media, viral video, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, your email campaign, and then giving away something for free – a special report, a small eBook, a video training series, some sort of training that you have special knowledge in and you give away for the exchange of a primary e-mail address. And, by the way, you should always ask for a primary email address because people often will put in an email address just to acquire information and the email is something they never check and therefore, you are not able to follow up and it becomes very ineffective at marketing and that is why many marketers do what is called a double opt-in where people have to click and confirm once it is in their inbox before they are able to get the free gift, whatever it is.

Sometimes people don‘t do that. Sometimes it‘s less effective, but that is why people do a double opt-in for that very reason, so they know that the email is valid and that you can market to them – you know you can market to them in the future.

So you are giving away something for free at the top of the funnel. Then, after you have given that value, and perhaps a little bit more value, then you can start people in at a very low barrier to entry. It might be a $30 program, a $50 program, something for $9.95, but the value – the actual perceived value – is much higher. And then you might have something next $200 or $300, and then you have something that is $500 or $600, and then you have something that is $1,000 or $2,000. Then you might have something that is $5,000, and then you might have something that is $10,000.

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Obviously, it gets more exclusive, more specific, more elite, more higher priced, and fewer and fewer people will have the resources, the ability, or the desire to do it, but you have to start with a large amount and then smaller, smaller, smaller as it gets more and more and more expensive, possibly, and exclusive.

Topher, I would like for you to talk a little bit about your experience with funnels and what you have learned and what successes and, perhaps, which challenges or failures you have experienced along the way.

Topher:

Sure. Well, the first thing is to realize that a funnel does two things. Going back to your imagery of a funnel being wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, there is two things that funnel is doing. Number one is that that funnel is catching anything that is in that circle of its exposure. But it is also ignoring everything else that is not above the funnel. I think too often, people in the coaching business are trying to keep their funnel way too wide up at the very top.

For example, if your niche is life coaching for female divorcees over forty – which would be a fantastic niche for somebody to get into – if they were to have a sales funnel that starts at the very top which would allow men to get in, then is that effective? I would say no. They need to be aware that the funnel – the very top of that funnel – should serve the purpose of reaching out to as many people in their target audience as possible, and no further. How do you do that?

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison Well the first thing, and the first primary rule – and we have mentioned this before – is that if your marketing pieces that you are offering, your marketing strategies – whether you are going for networking or whether you are going for referrals, or whether you are going for professional affiliations, or whether you are going for social networking, or whether you are going for ad media buys, whatever it might be – if your marketing pieces are not repellant enough to totally turn off the people who are not into your niche, the it will never be strong enough to attract the people who are in your niche.

For example, if you were to have a niche of divorced women over 40 and your marketing campaign was to hire a sexy, young, hot model, that would probably attract more men than women over 40. In fact, perhaps a lot of women over 40 that are getting divorced might hate the sexy young-looking model because they think that is the woman that took their husband away. So instead, maybe their marketing has to be much more feminine with a message of avoiding fear and avoiding pain and then all of a sudden men would look at a feminine-designed website and go, ―Not for me. I don‘t want it.‖ They wouldn‘t even sign up. If that was your niche, you could say, ―Life coaching for divorced women over 40.‖ If that was the first thing they saw on your website, every single man would click off. That is a beautiful beginning of your funnel. Make sure that the widest part of your funnel will only attract the type of people that you want in your funnel in the first place. Otherwise, your funnel gets mucked up with a bunch of dirt. That is the first thing.

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The second thing is to make sure that the content that is coming into your funnel is clean content. Now, this is where I am actually slightly different than some marketing experts that are out there and, believe me, I don‘t have all of the answers, but my philosophy is this: Bad data is just as bad as no data, so I don‘t want my website filled with a bunch of data which is inaccurate and false.

You had talked about double opt-ins. The great thing about double opt-ins is that it creates clean data. A lot of times, if you go to somebody‘s squeeze page, which is a page specifically designed to get a name and email address and then give them access to some information, in most cases, those squeeze pages allow you the ability to enter in a fake name and a fake email address and you can still move through and get the content.

I don‘t like that. What I would rather do is I would rather have a squeeze page that has to have them enter their name and their email address and then I will email the link to the email address. Now, by doing that, I understand that I am going to significantly reduce my response rate on that squeeze page, but am I really reducing my response rate or am I simply eliminating all of the people who like to put in all of the bad data into my database? Personally, I am okay if somebody comes to my squeeze page, sees that they have to give me an email address and I‘ll email them a link and then they say, ―Never mind,‖ because if a person then says never mind, they were not going to give me an email address anyway. They were going to give me a fake one. I don‘t want fake email

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addresses inside my database. I want real ones.

I also want data that I can use so I even go to the level, for example, on one of my squeeze pages, I ask them for their name, their email address and what country they live in with a dropdown menu. The reason for that is because I am an international speaker and I want to make sure that if they are in a country that I am at, I can let them know, but I am also not wasting my time telling people that I am going to be in Australia if they live in America. So for me, I also make sure that the data going into the funnel is clean and pure or as clean and pure as it can possibly be. Some people disagree with me on that and they say, ―No, just to get as many people into the funnel as possible because if they give you a bad email address up front and then they have access and then they like what they see, then they will give you a real address later. And there is literally just as much validity to that argument as mine, and neither one of them is right or wrong. I think you have to pick the one that works best for you and for your business model.

Okay. Now, having said that, I have taken somewhat of an exclusionary approach here, but also realize that it is a funnel – it is not a straw. So when you do have your niche, you want to make sure that the top part is still wide enough to catch as many people in that niche as possible.

How do you widen that funnel to attract the people that you want? Well, you have to have more than one marketing channel. At any given time in your business, you should be using at least four different marketing channels all of the

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time. So for example, networking is one form of marketing. Referrals are one form of marketing. ‗Affiliate‘ is one form of marketing. Media buys is one form of marketing. Social networking is one form of marketing. Ezines are one form of marketing. E-mail blasts are another form of marketing. Telemarketing is another form of marketing. There a number of different marketing channels out there. Make sure that you are at least doing four at any given time. That will ensure that your funnel is wide enough at the top to make sure it is catching enough rain.

John:

And I just want to make one more addition to this. In your sales funnel, as you are developing it, you don‘t want to have too big of a jump from one item to another. You cannot have free, $20, and then $10,000 – too big of a jump. Three, $20, $197, $497, $1497 – those are logical progressions based on what you are going to offer, and you need to figure out the timing and the sequence. What can one solve for the people that the one preceding at perhaps a lower level could not until you get to that cream of the crop. Just keep that in mind as you are developing your funnel. You may have to mutate it and add some programs, products, and services in between as you go along and that is just part of the development of your business.

All right, now we are going to talk about the customer experience from beginning to end. What I am referring to is, from the moment the people learn that you exist on this Earth as a professional coach until they pass away from this Earth or they are 100% done with your company for whatever reason: you fulfilled every

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison possible need they have, which probably won‘t happen, but they may perceive it that way – hopefully not – from the inception to the conclusion, they have a great experience which means your image, the way that you present yourself in social media, your website, the quality of your programs, the uniqueness of your information, how you are perceived in your photographs, the customer service when someone orders a program, the effectiveness of your shopping cart, the logical progression of how they evolve as a human because of your guidance, because of your expertise, and all of the way until they have reached the pinnacle of whatever you have to offer – and hopefully you keep adding more. They may go away for a little bit and come back. That is possible as well. Throughout that entire experience, there is a flow, there is a logic, there is happiness, there is fulfillment, there is contentment, and they feel that they matter.

I am going to have you elaborate on that, Topher.

Topher:

Well, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier that people want a connection and once that connection gets into a financial transaction, they don‘t just want the connection. They want the relationship. So before you begin your coaching business, ask yourself, what type of relationship do you want to be known for? Do you want to have an online relationship with these people? Do you want to have a one-on-one? Do you want to have a one-to-many? Define up front what type of a relationship you want to create and that will also, by the way, give you the guidance for how you should lay out the products that you create as you continue to unfold inside your business.

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John:

Now it is time to look to your future. So what I mean is that it is good to start with the end in mind and we have discussed this here and if you have read or watched any of my other material, you know what I am referring to, so I will give you the short, abridged version here.

Imagine your perfect, average day. What does it look like? What are you doing?

Who are you working with? Where do you live? How much money did you make? How much money is in your bank account? How in love are you? How much sleep did you get the night before? What are you excited about? Create your ideal average day and then work backwards. What did you have to do to get there? So let me give you this example.

If your ideal average day is to work 4-5 hours helping 30-40 people each day, to have half a million dollars a in the bank, to be a well-respected, well-paid and well-educated coaching professional and yet, your current path is simply to earn a single certification to not do a lot of continuing education, to not embrace technology, to not leverage time, to not learn about networking, affiliate marketing, internet technology, social media – if you are choosing to ignore those things but yet you have this grandiose vision of your future, you also have a major incongruency and you cannot have visions of one thing and actions that point you towards another, and expect to meet at any one place. So it is imperative that your goals, your values, your dreams, and most importantly, your actions, are all aligned. When that happens, you will get everything you want. And remember,

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simply because there is a delay, that does not mean that it is a denial of your goal.

Sometimes things take a little longer than you first hoped.

What I can tell you after being in the trenches of the coaching industry and doing coaching, health, fitness, wellness, personal development, communications and so on, for over two decades, there have been many times when I thought that I wanted to have something at a certain time and I realized that I just needed more time to mature, to grow, to learn, and most importantly, to continue to be a student and only the most stifling time of my life – or I should say the most stifling time in my life was when I thought I had the answers and chose not to be a continual student.

So as we conclude this book on your life coaching business and your life coaching career, I want you to know that you should always be a student. Your training can be formal or informal, online or in person. It should include specific techniques as it pertains to coaching, such as using linguistics skills or clinical hypnotherapy or psychology or things of that nature, and it should also have an equal balance of learning business success strategy that we have talked about today. It has to be a1:1 ratio and I what I can tell you is the people who embrace that – regardless of what type of coaching field they enter or decide to move into perhaps after starting a career – the people who are most successful are the ones who have an equal balance of gaining really good quality skills as a coach in their chosen discipline and a very high level business acumen.

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Topher, I am going to have you close up this section.

Topher:

Thanks, John. You know, what you have just said there is so spot-on and it also opens up a door for people to really appreciate the power of evolution in their own life and taking the necessary steps to get where they want to go. Now let‘s take a look at that with regard to your business and your customers. I am guessing that if you want to become a coach in whatever field you want to coach in, you know that there are a certain set of understandings, lessons, philosophies that you want your clients to adopt in order for them to produce the results that they want.

Now I want you to sit down and ask yourself what would be the most logical evolution of acquisition in those lessons, those philosophies, those ideals, those concepts, because in many cases, sometimes the most powerful lessons that someone could receive from your coaching will fall on deaf ears if it comes prematurely.

For example, let‘s say you were going to be a coach for permanent weight loss solutions and you know that the most important thing for permanent weight loss is that people have to love and accept their own identity—this is a hypothetical now—and that is the ultimate lesson by your concept or philosophy. So you now create a marketing piece that says, ―Come to my coaching program and learn how to love and accept yourself unconditionally.‖ That is the most powerful lesson so

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that is what people would sell. But the reality is, that actually might turn off all of the people that need to hear your message. So instead of thinking about what the most important thing is, ask yourself what would be the most appropriate time to learn that. So instead, you might realize that, okay, that is a huge concept and a huge idea and maybe it is not the thing that I should give them in their free book.

Maybe that is not the thing that I should give them in their first two weeks of coaching. Maybe the first two weeks of coaching, we should focus on their diet.

Maybe the first two weeks of coaching, we should focus on helping them learn how to do some sit-ups.

Now, you know in your ultimate goal that those sit-ups or those push-ups really, fundamentally, have nothing to do with permanent weight loss. It is all about them loving themselves enough to where they want to do the sit-ups. But you know what? It is premature; it is too early. Unpack your entire evolution of acquisition of knowledge; design your products and your services in a way that will allow one thing to open up a door, which, if it weren‘t open, would otherwise block something else out. People need to learn to crawl before they walk. They need to learn to walk before they run. They need to learn to run before they ride a bike, and they need to ride a bike before they learn how to drive. And they need to learn how to drive before they learn how to fly. And they have to learn to fly before they learn how to navigate a spaceship. And in your coaching business, don‘t take them out to space if they don‘t know how to crawl.

John:

One step at a time.

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Topher:

Absolutely, and in that order.

John:

And be there to help them and realize when the pace needs to slow or the pace can be accelerated and that is all by being a good listener and a good observer.

I want to thank you once again for reading this book on developing your dream career of a successful professional coach and Topher, thank you so much for your input and your expertise.

It is much appreciated, and remember to use the

resources we have for you in this book. We have approved them, we use them, we know they work and we want you to experience the same success as the coaches we have already helped get well on their way to a dream career as a highly successful, highly paid professional coach.

RESOURCES John‘s personal web site http://www.johnspencerellis.com Topher‘s personal web site http://www.tophermorrison.com A complete list of resources (more for fitness coaches) http://www.personaltrainertools.com Passive income models for coaches: http://www.teamjse.com http://johnspencerellis.isagenix.com Spencer Institute for Life Coach Training http://www.spencerinstitute.com

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Ultimate Life Coach Business Book – John Spencer Ellis and Topher Morrison The Matrix Mind – John‘s Coaching Program http://www.thematrixmind.com

NESTA (National Exercise & Sports Trainers Association) Education and Certification for Fitness Coaches http://www.nestacertified.com