Are you a life coach, looking to improve your social networking skills? Many life coaches have been asking me about how to get more clients on social networking web sites. Here is how:

Create An Effective Social Networking Profile

Very often I visit potential networking partners’ profile to learn more about them, visit their web site and to learn more about them. Unfortunately, very often their profiles don’t contain enough information about them and about what they do. What is even worse, they do not have links to their web site!

If you are a life coach, who is using social networking web sites to get clients, you must list your web site address in your profile. If you don’t, how will your potential clients find out more about what you do?

Connect With Your Target Market

Very often I see life coaches not putting any thought into who they should be connecting with. They just connect with anyone who asks, and, as a result, their connects are very untargeted.

Since you are using social networking web sites to find clients, make sure that you connect with your potential clients. Spend the time on social networking web sites to purposely connect with people who you want to do business with.

Ask Your Target Market To Take The Next Step With You

Very often I ask my clients, who are life coaches, “What is the next step that you want your potential clients who you met on social networking web sites to take with you?”

Many times they say: “I want them to become my clients.”

Thing is, it is hard to convert someone you just met on social networking web sites into a client. It is much easier to turn them into newsletter subscribers and then build a relationship with them. That way it will be much easier to turn them into clients.

So ask your social networking connections to take the next step with you, to subscribe to your newsletter. It is much easier to convince your connections to subscribe to your newsletter than to become your clients.

Use this three-step plan to get more life coaching clients using social networking! Here are a few study guides that will help you get better social networking results:

How To Build Your List With Social Networking

How To Create Your Social Networking Strategy

How To Use Twitter To Promote Your Business

Do you have a Facebook Fan Page? Your Fan Page is a great resource to promote yourself and your business on Facebook. Your Facebook Fan Page gives you the ability to promote your business, your web site, your blog, your products. You can even create a whole tab on your Fan Page just to promote your free newsletter gift, which is extremely important when you are promoting your coaching services.

Another reason to create a Facebook Fan Page is to make it a part of your viral marketing strategy. When someone joins your Fan Page or comments on the page, this information becomes a part of their feed and now their friends are able to see a link to your fan page! This way your Fan Page is promoted to your Fan’s friends and you are able to get more and more fans.

Here are three tips to help you get the most out of your Facebook Fan Page and to help you get coaching clients with it:

Decide On The Purpose Of Your Fan Page

Your Fan Page can promote anything you want about your business. You can create a Fan Page for your business, for a specific program or product, for your affiliate program or for yourself.

Make a decision about what you want to create your page for, as this is going to help you better results.

Create Your Fan Page!

Many business owners tell me that creating a Fan Page is a part of their plan, and they will create one very soon. But until you actually take action, you will not be able to get all the benefits of promoting your business and using viral marketing, so create your Fan Page today!

To create your Fan Page, scroll down your Facebook Page when you are logged in. Click on “Advertising” and then click on “Pages” and create your Fan Page!

Once you have created your Fan Page, dd enough to your page to have it really represent your business and your products:

Keep Adding To Your Fan Page!

Marketing is not an event, it is a process. Just creating a Fan Page is not going to do a lot for your coaching business. What you need to do is create a Fan Page, and then use it consistently to promote your business.

Ask yourself these questions:

- When in your marketing funnel does your Fan Page fit?

- What kind of results are you expecting from it?

- What do you need to do with your Fan Page to get the results you are looking for?

Once you make these decisions, you will see that it is easier to promote your Fan Page and get clients from it. For more information on using your Fan Page to get clients, get the How To Get Clients With Your Facebook Fan Page Study Guide to learn which applications to add to your Fan Page, how to get leads and clients from your Fan Page and much, much more!

Interested in getting coaching clients on social networking web sites? The way to get crystal clear on how to do that is by looking at the big picture.

What is social networking? Social networking is a marketing technique that helps you promote your coaching business and get clients.

The cornerstone of marketing a coaching business, is generating coaching leads, that you can then convert into clients. It is very hard to sign up coaching clients right on social networking web sites. Your potential clients need to know you, like you and trust you, before they decide to become your coaching clients.

This means that the best way to must use your current lead-generating activities and introduce them to your social networking connections, so that you can generate leads on social networking web sites.

For example:

- Do your articles generate leads for you? Then share links to your articles on social networking web sites and you will get more leads.

- Does your blog generate leads for you? Then make sure to share your blog posts on social networking web sitess.

- If your main lead-generation strategy is putting together and teaching teleseminars, then promote your teleseminars on social networking web sites.

If you do not have a clear lead generation strategy, then you must put one in place before you can get results on social networking web sites.

During the Ultimate Social Networking Training you will learn exactly how to create a lead generating strategy for your coaching business, how to use it to generate leads on social networking web sites, and then how to turn your leads into clients. Register for the training now at http://www.UltimateSocialNetworking.com

Biana Babinsky

Are you a coach, who is completely overwhelmed with all the social networking available to you?

Twitter, Facebook, Fan Pages, Applications, Blogging, Automation…..Which one should you use first, and where can you find time to work with clients, if you use all of them?

Here is a five-step plan that will help you promote your coaching business effectively using social networking web sites:

Create An Effective Gift To Give Away To Your Potential Clients In Exchange For Their E-mail Address

The most effective way to use social networking web sites is to have your potential clients subscribe to your newsletter, so that you can continue building relationships with them and let them know about your coaching products and services for many years to come.

And the most effective way to convince your potential clients to subscribe to your newsletter is to give them a gift in exchange for their email address.

The most effective gift is a gift that they really want, on a topic that they are really interested in. Create a gift like that, and you will be able to convert many of your social networking contacts into newsletter subscribers.

Create An Effective Squeeze Page

A squeeze page is the page where you send your social networking contacts to register to get your free gift.

A squeeze page is a page with just one goal: to convert the visitors you receive from social networking web sites into newsletter subscribers. When I review web sites, I see that many coaches add a lot of information to their web pages. As a result, their web site visitors get confused and leave the web site instead of subscribing to their newsletters.

With an effective squeeze page you are not confusing your web site visitors too many options and you will get many more newsletter subscribers as a result!

Become Active on Social Networking Web Sites

People connect with people who talk and share. So in order for others to find you and connect with you, you need to be active on social networking web sites.

Connect, share and engage others - this way you will get more connections and more people in your target market will learn about what you do, and how you can help them.

Share Your Blog Posts On Social Networking Web Sites

Every time your connections read something that comes from you, they are able to connect with you on a deeper level. By sharing your blog posts, you let your connections learn about your expertise. That way, when they decide that they would like to work with you, they are already pre-sold on you.

To share your blog posts, use Notes on Facebook to pull your blog posts to Facebook and use twitterfeed to post your blog posts to Twitter.

Drive Traffic from Social Networking Web Sites To Your Squeeze Page

This is one of the most important steps in your social networking strategy. Even if you have the best gift for your newsletter subscribers and an extremely effective squeeze page to convert your social networking visitors into subscribers, nothing will happen until you take this step.

You MUST drive all of your social networking to your squeeze page. Here is how to do that:

- Link to your squeeze page from your profile pages.

- Mention your free gift from time to time on social networking web sites

- Diversify. Just one free gift/squeeze page combination is not enough. Create a few different free gifts to attract more of your social networking connections to subscribe to your newsletter.

Lately I have been hearing from many coaches asking me how they can use Twitter to gain more coaching clients. In fact, I have talked to quite a few coaches who told me that Twitter isn’t working for them as means for getting coaching clients.

One life coach told me that she has been offering her free coaching session on Twitter for months, and no one has taken her up on her offer. She decided that Twitter wasn’t good for promoting her coaching business and decided to move on to other online marketing techniques.

Twitter and other social networking web sites are great for promoting a coaching business. However, just offering your free session is not the best way to use those social networking web sites. You need to have a plan for how to use social networking to promote your coaching business.

Here is what you must include in your plan:

Know Who You Want To Meet

You must have a profile of people you would like to connect with a twitter - your potential coaching clients, potential JV partners, etc.

If you don’t know who you want to meet, how will you meet them?

Once you know who you want to meet on social networking web sites, you can look and connect with these people, instead of connecting with people randomly. Just doing this will dramatically improve the results you are getting from social networking.

Get People Interested

Have a good mix of twits - something about you, something that gives back (retweeting others), something that helps others (tips, articles, ideas) and something that promotes your business.

It is about having a good mix and sharing what your followers enjoy.

Social Networking Web Sites Alone Are Not Enough

You need to have a way to invite your followers to take the next step with you - subscribe to your newsletter, attend a teleseminar, etc.

Once people who meet on social networking web sites are subscribed to your newsletter, you can continuously build a relationship with them and introduce your products and services to them.

Use Features Available To You On Social Networking Web Sites To Let Others Know About Your Coaching Business

Learn different features available to you on different social networking web sites to promote your business. For example:

- Use Twitterfeed to automatically post your blog posts to Twitter

- Use Facebook Events to promote your teleseminars and webinars on Facebook

- Use applications on LinkedIn to automatically post your blog posts to LinkedIn

There are many different tools available for you. Learn about them and incorporate them into your overall social networking strategy for your coaching business.

If you are not getting the results that you are looking for from the time you spend on social networking web sites, stop and create a plan. Your plan will help you spend less time on social networking web sites, while getting better results.

Need help creating a social networking plan for your coaching business? Join me for How To Make Thousands Of Dollars With Social Networking Training

Biana Babinsky

Lately, I have been hearing from many coaches, asking me to teach them how to get results with social networking. Here is a typical email I receive:

“Biana, I have been reading on many coaching lists and forums about social networking. I jumped in a few months ago, created accounts on Twitter and Facebook and started using them. I typically spend 1-2 hours a day on Twitter and Facebook. It has been three months since I joined and I have nothing to show for it except all this time that I have spent there.

Help! How can I start getting coaching clients from Twitter and Facebook?”

First of all, I don’t recommend jumping into social networking without a plan. If you want to get social networking results, you must have a plan for what you want to accomplish with social networking and how you want to accomplish it.

If you want people who you meet on social networking web sites to immediately become your coaching clients, you will be disappointed. People who you meet on social networking web sites are not there to buy - they are there to learn, communicate, share and promote themselves. Because of this, it is much easier for you to get leads (newsletter subscribers) than clients on social networking web sites. Once you have them on your list, you can communicate with them, continue building relationships with them and turn them into clients. But first you must get them on your list.

But even before that you need to do some prep work. Until you know who you want to connect with and have a specific landing page for your social networking efforts, you are not going to see good results. So let’s get started with your prep work:

Decide Who You Want To Subscribe To Your Newsletter

Before you can get good leads, you need to know WHO they are. Who do you want to subscribe to your newsletter? You always want your target market to subscribe to your newsletter!

Create A Landing Page For Your Social Networking

Now it is time to think about a web page where you are going to send people you meet on social networks. This is the page that you are going to include in your social networking profiles, so that people you meet on social networks would visit it.

This page is extremely important, because it is going to turn people you meet on social networks into leads. This means that the only action that people should be able to take on that page is subscribe to your newsletter.

Many people think that if they offer more option on this landing page, then more people will be able to pick the option that they like and use it. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true. The more options you offer, the more confused people become and the more likely they are to just leave the page without taking any action.

So if you have a page on which you give your visitors many choices, change it! Give just one choice - subscribing to your newsletter - and you will get more results. A page that gives just one choice is called a Squeeze Page and I discuss how to create Squeeze Page for social networking in the How To Create Effective Squeeze Pages Study Guide.

Now you are prepared to use social networking! Start networking with your target market by answering questions, sharing useful tips and information, sharing links to helpful articles and blog posts and adding value. When your target market sees that you are an expert at what you do, they will visit your profile and click on the link to your page and subscribe to your newsletter!

Biana Babinsky

In the past year I have trained many coaches on how to use social networking and social media to promote a coaching business. As I did this training, there were many questions that were asked over and over again. I wanted to share the three most popular questions (and answers) with you:

1. How can a life coach(business coach, career coach, etc) find her target market on Twitter?

Here are my two favorite tools for doing Twitter search:

search.twitter.com searches twits, the actual things that people say. Use it to search on things that your target market would talk about.

For example, if you are a life coach and your target market is looking for more balance in their lives, chances are your target market is talking about “being tired”, “not being able to do everything”, etc. Search for what your target market likes to talk about and you will locate your target market on Twitter!

twellow.com search searches twitter members’ profiles. So if your target market identifies itself in their profiles, use this search tool to search for them.

For example, if you are a business coach for speakers, search for speaker, and it should give you the results you are looking for.

2. In addition to using social networking, a coach also has to work with clients, lead calls and create new products. How can a coach not spend too much time on social networking?

Schedule your time! Only spend time that you have on social networking. Only have 20 minutes in one day? Spend the 20 minutes on social networking and then go on to your other commitments. Don’t make your client work or marketing activities suffer because of social networking.

Don’t borrow the time that you do not have to use social networking. Do allocate some of your marketing time for social networking. Use that time wisely.

3. How can a coach get clients on Twitter?

This is probably the most popular question I receive from clients, colleagues and people I meet on social networking web sites.

Before we talk about how to get clients on Twitter, you should really understand the difference between leads and clients. Have you seen anyone take out a credit card and give out the credit card number on Twitter to buy coaching services? Neither have I. This means that you are going to get leads, not clients on Twitter.

What really happens on Twitter is that you start building a relationship that you can continue in other media. People you meet on Twitter may become long-term readers of your blog, newsletter subscribers, etc. As they read your blog or newsletter, they get to know you better and will become clients.

Want to learn more about using Twitter to get coaching clients? Get the How To Promote Your Business With Twitter Home Study Guide.

Biana Babinsky