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Why Coach Websites Get Less Than a Call a Month - How to Get Dozens With Yours
As I coach a lot of coaches in building their business, as I talk with those coaches one thing really stands out. Most coaches websites don't work. At least those websites aren't bringing them very many calls.
In a recent tele-seminar I asked hundreds of coaches on the call, "How many calls a month do you get from your website?" The answer may surprise you.
EVERYONE on the call said they had gotten ZERO calls in the last month. So, my next question was, "How many months has it been since you did get a call from your website?"
The answer was "about 10 months ... or longer. Several said they had NEVER gotten a call from their website.
So, is that about what you get? Would you like to do something about that?
Here's some reasons why that happens.
Some Coaches Told Me That They Use Their Site as a Brochure
What this means is that when they go around town talking to potential prospects, when they are done they suggest that the person go look at the website to get more questions answered.
This is a mistake. Why?
Many reasons, but first, let's step back and look at "the marketing formula" to understand the overall concept of what we should be doing and getting from all of our marketing, and the website is just one of these. Also keep in mind that if the website marketing isn't working well, that likely says that none of our other marketing is likely working well either. In fact, use the internet to test what you say and how you say it. Within days you will know how your marketing results can multiply by 5-10 times easily.
The marketing formula:
the number of people who see your marketing X conversion rate of your marketing = number of people who call you, or otherwise act the way you want them to.
Now let's apply that to your website.
Number of People Who See Your Marketing (your website in this case)
If you are passing your "brochure" around as you meet people, what is the number of people that see your marketing?
Let's make a high-side guess. Let's say that you meet with 10 people in a week, and I'd bet few coaches ever reach that many people. Most struggling to find ways to get in front of enough people. So, that number is definitely on the high side. But we'll use it for this example.
On top of that I'd bet that, after you met with 10 people,, that not every one of them even went to the website, maybe fewer than 1/2, but, I'm going to be easy here and say you got all 10 to the website.
To apply this to "the marketing formula" we'll also need to know what the conversion rate is for your website. The conversion rate is the number of people who contact you after viewing the site divided by the number of people who actually go to the website. When I talk to almost any business, let alone coaches, I find that most of them are getting less than 0.1% conversion. That means that we have to send 1,000 people to the website before we'd get a call. In any case let's apply "the marketing funnel" to our numbers now.
We are sending 10 people a week to the site, and have a conversion rate of 0.1%.
# people who see you X conversion rate = calls, or leads you get
10 X 0.1% = .01 people a week, or it would be 100 weeks, 2 years before you got your first call.
And that's pretty much in line with what hundreds of coaches have told me from my tele-seminars. When I ask "How many calls a month do you get from your website?" The answer is almost always ZERO. When I ask, "So, how many months has it been since you got a call?" the answer is typically 10 months or more.
Now, let's look at some really BIG opportunities that you might be missing out on.
Using Google Keyword Tool to get a report on how many people are looking for what you do and how, you'll find that: there were over:
201,000 -- Searching for a Life coach
60,500 -- Searching for a business coach
40,500 -- Searching for a career coach
just for 30 days in June, 2009. Just think about that. That's over 300,000 a month looking for some kind of coach, and we didn't begin to hit all of the types of coaches. Now take that times 12 months, and there are well over 3,624,000 people looking for a coach every year.
Let's play with those numbers in the formula again. If there are over 302,000 people a month looking and you still only got 0.1%
# people who see you X conversion rate = calls, or leads you get
302,000 X 0.1% = 302 people a week. That's considerably different than our first pass that took 100 weeks to get even one call.
Usually, when I say something like this I hear a grumbling from the back of the room. Comments like, "I don't work the whole world" or "I only want a few people in my city."
Well, if you want to play the game that way, and cut your market down let's use another rule of thumb. I find that there's somewhere around 0.5% of the world's searches done in my city. (302,000x.5% = 1,510 right here in town. So, let's run those numbers.
# people who see you X conversion rate = calls, or leads you get
1,510 X 0.1% = 1,5 people a week, or 6 calls a month.
Now I'm going to tell you that a 0.1% conversion rate is ridiculously low, a good figure would be in the 5% to 10% area for websites "that work", and I've got some working 40% to 60%, but that's a different article and a different time, a whole book as a matter of fact. But, 1% to 5% is within reach of all of you.
Conversion Rate of Your Marketing (your website conversion)
So, what would a 5% conversion rate do for that last city-wide discussion? It would be bringing you 50 times more customers, or could be bringing you your first customers in 1/50th of he time. Remember when we said that it would take 100 weeks according to our first numbers?
For those of you who were hesitating and saying that you wanted to narrow your field we can either do that up front or qualify them when they call. NOW we have people CHASING after us and we can afford to say yes or now we own't take you. Certainly a much different place to be, right?
So, how do we improve the conversion rate?
That depends on what you say, how you say it, and who you say it to. In other words, if you are getting less than 1% you just aren't connecting with your target audience and we must say something different, change how we say it, or drive a different set of people to that website. (Keep in mind that YOU have been driving people to the website by hand so far.)
In later emails we'll work on improving the conversion rate of the website.
About the Author Get "How to Build a Super Star Coaching Business" for free. Alan Boyer coach's coaches, who want more business than they can handle ... The reports have been "5-10 times more clients in just a few weeks http://www.leaders-perspective.com/Super-Star-Coaching-Business.htm
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