146: Stand Out as an Online Coach: How to Position Yourself as the Go-To Expert

Do you want to elevate your positioning and stand out in the online coaching market?

Are you tired of feeling like you have to hunt down clients instead of attracting them to you?

Have you been told that being the best coach is enough to win in the online space, only to find that it's the best marketers who seem to come out on top?

The frustration of pouring your heart and soul into your coaching, only to struggle to stand out and attract the right clients is real, right?

It's time to shake things up and position yourself strategically to finally become the go-to expert you know you are. In this episode of Let’s Get Visible Entrepreneurs, I share with you my best tips and strategies on how to position yourself as a go-to expert in the online coaching industry. With over two decades of experience as a marketing strategist, I know how to help you stand out and attract your ideal clients.

“It is not the best coach who wins, it's the best marketer.”- Christine Amerman

You’ll hear about how to:

• Position yourself strategically to attract your ideal clients effortlessly.
• Build a personal brand that fosters trust and deep connections with your audience.
• Consistently create compelling content to establish a strong and memorable brand presence.
• Showcase your expertise to become a recognized authority in your industry.
• Amplify your client success stories to boost your credibility and attract more clients.

…and more! 

Let's dive in and uncover the secrets to perfect positioning that will elevate your online coaching business!

Have a question or topic you’d like to see covered on the podcast? Go to www.lifewithpassion.com/podcast and I’ll create a custom episode just for you!

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to let's get visible entrepreneurs. This is the podcast where we bring you the secrets behind what it actually takes to get seen, get known and get more clients. I'm your host, Christine Ammerman, and I'm sharing my best strategies from over two decades of experience as a media marketing and messaging expert to help you expand your exposure, grow your personal brand, attract dream clients and more, all while staying true to your authentic self and unique vision. If you're a passionate, heart centered entrepreneur, thought leader or expert looking to stand out from the crowd with confidence, you're in the right place. Are you ready? Let's get visible. Welcome to how to stand out and differentiate yourself as an online coach. In this episode, we're going to talk about how to perfectly position yourself to stand out in the online space so that you can attract people to you rather than feeling like you have to hunt them down somewhere. What we want you to understand is what are the pieces to position yourself in that way, to become the go to expert, because this is really important. I was taught this years ago and when I ran it through every filter that I could imagine, I found it to be true. So the hypothesis, this is something I'm working on with my seven year old. She just participated in a science fair. What is the hypothesis? And we're going to test it and find out if it's true. The hypothesis is that I have found to be true is it is not the best coach who wins, it's the best marketer. It is not the best coach who wins. It is the best marketer. Now run that through the influencers that you follow and see what kind of marketer they are. They're probably a very good marketer, and you could argue they may not be the best coach. Maybe you've worked with some of them. Maybe they were the best coach. Maybe they're a great marketer and a great coach. That is not enough to be the best coach, to have all of the most letters behind your name, to have honed your craft in such a way that you really know that you're the best one out there. If you know you're the best one out there, or you have a feeling you might be, or you really, really love it and feel like it's your gift and your calling, then you owe it to that work to become a marketer, to become a good marketer. And that doesn't mean that you have to market in the ways that you've seen, the ways that feel gross, the ways that feel icky, slimy, like you're pretending that you're not going to pitch someone and then you do. I had one of those over the weekend that I wanted to play with, sliding into my dms, becoming a friend, pretending they cared about what was going on in my business in the first message. And then when I responded, they went into the pitch and I was like, you know, I was really hoping that was not the case, but I sniffed it from a mile away. Right, so you don't have to do that. You probably have had that happen to you as well. You don't have to do that. And we're going to talk about what to do instead, which includes becoming a great marketer. And part of that is positioning yourself, not only how you position yourself, but where to position yourself. Now, I've come up with strategies that are worth eight figures. An Instagram bio that would take somebody from seven figures to eight figures in terms of the valuation in their business, with the tagline that I came up with in place. This is the power of positioning. And I'm actually giving a talk on eight figure branding secrets at the biggest retail market, 30,000 retailers in the world by the time you hear this, go live. And so I understand what it looks like to do this at a big level, and I also understand what it looks like to take a smaller business to a larger business using the power of positioning and becoming a go to expert. So what do we mean by perfect positioning in order to stand out as a coach with an online business? Well, while we use the term perfect, we all know that done is better than perfect. I identify as a perfectionist, and what I'm doing is I'm learning to become an adaptive perfectionist who uses those traits to fuel me and to help me become more present and practice. Done is better than perfect, than to hold me back and to do what's called maladaptive perfectionism. And I'm learning this from a book called the Perfectionist Guide to losing control. So if you resonate with that, you might want to look it up. While we say perfect, what we mean is perfectly present with your positioning, perfectly aware of what it is that you're doing, strategic and in alignment with who you are. Because it will always be changing. You will always be iterating. You will probably always be updating that Instagram bio. In a way, if you use Instagram as a way to reflect what it is that you are doing, and that's okay, but creating from some of the things we've already talked about and dive into that and what we're talking about today an identity that sets you apart from people doing some similar work to what you do so that you get thought of first among the right people. You're the one who gets tagged. You're the one who's seen as the expert, the person to go to. And it involves aligning your personal brand and the brand that represents the entirety of your work with the needs and values and aspirations of your ideal client, your target audience, your clonable client, whatever you want to call it. So we're going to return to basics here, which is to define your niche and your audience. Who exactly are you positioning yourself as the go to expert for in your industry? It's not just anyone in the industry, it is who exactly you want to reach. And we will never stop talking about niching. I was running programs about this years and years ago because it is one of the most important things that you can do no matter where you are in business. To define, redefine, revisit your niche. To become that go to expert. If you try to focus on one size fits all, you're probably operating in scarcity mode and instead focus on what your individual clonable clients need or needed when they came to you. The goal is to, with your content, have people saying you were in my head when you posted that. I thought it was about me, even if it wasn't right. Over and over and over. If you want to go deeper into niching, check out episode 138, which is all about niching. Next we want to talk and focus on building a personal brand, which is part of your positioning. Showcase your personality, your stories, your values, your vulnerability. What have you struggled with in the past? What have you been through on your journey? What do you really love that maybe is outside of your business? These things help your clients to know you better, trust you and connect with you on a deeper level because you are a whole person. You are not just your work. You do things other than work, even if you work a lot because you love it, right? You have some other things in your life that are important and those can help you stand out. We talked about personal branding in episode 141. If you want to go deeper into it, we gave some specific examples of how to do it. Remember that building a personal brand is part of your perfect positioning. Next, choosing your primary platform. What's the one way that people are going to find you? Is it blogging? Is it podcasting or being a podcast guest? Is it video? Is it social media? And if so, which one? Is it email? Is it webinars? There are so many different free ways to reach people. What is the one main one that suits your style, your budget, the way that you like to show up, as well as the intersection of where your audience likes to show up and prefers and trusts? You don't have to be everywhere, but you do have to be consistent and strategic in order to get known, liked and trusted. And we recommend that you do that on one platform until you get to ten k months. At least one platform until you get to ten k months. The episode that you can visit to go deeper into this one is episode 139, the most strategic place to get visible in your business. In addition to your primary platform, you want to create consistency. I mentioned changing your tagline every month. That might be comfortable for you and that might be something that you do. But if you're dramatically changing it, trying to use that as a way to nail down your niche and attract the right people in, that's coming from the wrong place. I would rather you iterate by changing one word or adding a word that makes it more specific so that people know what your niche is in order to position yourself as the go to expert for that niche. Consistency doesn't have to mean posting seven days a week. It does mean that your visuals, the way that you speak and your overall presence creates a strong and recognizable brand. When people see maybe the same colors showing up, when they see a similar style of writing showing up, they are more likely to know what to expect and feel safe, feel like they know you, and then follows the like and trust as you integrate things like your personal brand and showing these things over and over. Finally, how are you showcasing your expertise and credibility? We talked about not the best coach is the one who wins, but it's the best marketer. Well, part of marketing is showing that expertise, right? So bringing that full circle, how are you showing, not only maybe your certification or this or that, but what is it that you really, really specialize in? And a couple of ways to do this are, number one, to showcase your client success. Success, showcase of client stories and testimonials. We call this client success amplification. Because you do it once and it can create a ripple effect. You do it more than once. You do it maybe in different ways and it becomes very memorable. So how are you showing your results that you've gotten for people? The impact that it's made in their businesses and in their lives, and the way that your expertise translates into tangibility, the way that you've worked with people. So social proof. And you've probably heard this is one of the most powerful ways to establish yourself as that go to expert, as the person with credibility, because, look, you've done it right. And if you're listening to this, you probably have worked with at least one client, paid or for free. And so have you asked them for a testimonial? Do you have a process for doing that in a way that feels good for you? Another way to do this is to develop your own, what's often in the industry called IP, that stands for intellectual property. Now, I can remember I was several years into my business before I heard people throwing around that term. I knew it because I took a law class in university, and I actually really loved that. Ironically, all my classmates hated it because they would rather be behind a computer editing something or behind a camera shooting something. But I'm kind of a nerd, and I could have majored in a lot of different things, and I chose media because it was storytelling. Right? Something that I still really focus on today is helping you bring your story, your brand story, the story of your expertise and your credibility and your why, to tangible marketing and messaging and your positioning. Right? Like I said. So another way to say ip, and this is what was brought up to me when I was writing my book, was, is your signature process, your formula for success, your methodology. Now, this can be using your own language, naming your stuff. If you're not clear on that yet, that's okay. It took me writing a book to get clear on my signature formula for helping folks to replace their income, which is what we wound up calling the book, the income replacement formula. It's under the name Christine McAllister, by the way, which was my married name. Now I'm single and I have reclaimed my birth name. So that's why you might have seen a name change, or if you're googling me, you might see both the ability to name your stuff, even if you're like, I don't have a formula. The way that I work with people is different every time. That was my line as well. In reflection with people who could see outside my jar, I realized that I did do the same thing with them every time. But if you're into human design, I'm a generator. I love to respond. And so I had this story in my head that I did things differently with every single person. And while it was completely customized, and it still is, there are things that we know work over and over, and frankly, that's how you begin to scale, because you can talk about the same things that you do over and over the framework, whatever it is, even if you don't want to call it a formula. This differentiates you from other coaches who are just talking in generalities, who probably don't have their niche dialed in, who haven't named anything that they do, who haven't done the work to look at what they do over and over again. That helps create those consistent results when people do the work. Of course, the last thing I want to mention is that when you collaborate with other aligned experts, we call this the collaborative credibility code. It can really, really help you to not only enhance your credibility, but also majorly improve your reach. Because you're leveraging other people's audiences through strategic partnerships, through podcast interviews. You're not doing it in a way that's transactional. If you're following this whole aligned attraction marketing thing, you are truly doing it in a way that is not win just for you, but it's a win for them and it's a win for your combined audiences. So I would call it collaborative credibility. So who maybe they're in a similar spot to you in terms of audience size or business size. They do something that it's complementary. Talked about this before and or your work or their work is an accelerant to what one or the other is doing. And you can showcase both of you and create a true win win by sharing yourselves with each other's audiences. Now, these are the keys to perfect positioning from what we have found over the last almost decade. Perfect positioning that makes you that go to expert. I'll review them very quickly. Be clear on your niche and audience. This can always use more work. Build a strong personal brand. Have a primary platform. Stay focused on that for a minimum of 90 days before you decide to change your mind. Create consistency there. Showcase your expertise and credibility. Now, I'd love to know which one of these lands the most, where you are going to dive in out of these options. And I cannot wait to hear what you create from this clarity. Thank you for joining us for another episode of let's get visible entrepreneurs. Get out there and get