Blogging for coaches

Why do I write this newsletter? This article forms part of the 190th CorporateCoach newsletter. You will have noticed that I no longer succeed in publishing a newsletter every week. However, this record does represent something like 500 articles. So why do I do it?

Although I do enjoy passing on my knowledge, the real reason is two-fold. One, obviously, is to promote Brefi Group activities and to increase our attraction to search engines. The other, is to promote our personality so that we will attract clients who already fit our vision and values.

Since we started publishing a newsletter many years ago, the Internet world and technology have moved on, and blogging has become a simple, straightforward and effective form of publishing.

I have been reading a book by a coach on how to use a WordPress blog site to make money, attract clients and gain expert celebrity status. The author, Sandra De Freitas, calls herself the "super tech coach for the blogosphere".

This book is just over 100 pages of large type and open spacing; it is easy to read and informative. Although we transferred our newsletter from Dreamweaver to WordPress some years ago, I have learned quite a lot from "Does this blogsite make my wallet look fat?" about what I could also do using this open source program.

Coaching is about relationships. In my experience, the biggest problem that coaches face is finding clients. So why not put your effort into helping clients find you? This is what we have done for many years with great success.

I strongly recommend this book and encourage those of you who have not already started a blog to do so.

Typically, blogging involves frequent shorter articles about what you're doing. In many cases they can be very superficial and self-centred.

However, the technology can be used to write about serious subjects. Using WordPress makes building a website easy. In addition, it is designed to feed the search engines, so that as your website grows your attraction increases.

Let me tell you what I do. Our blog is integrated into the Brefi Group website. However, in most cases, WordPress is used to build free-standing websites, and we could have easily done this for CorporateCoach using our domain name corporatecoach.co.uk.

I used to write newsletters using Dreamweaver and then copy the individual articles into the blog in order to build the content of the website. This required a certain amount of HTML expertise and caused some formatting problems because of the way in which WordPress interprets new lines. What I do now, is to write the articles in WordPress and then copy the entry paragraphs into the newsletter program. This is very much easier.

Another innovation that I have introduced recently has really transformed the way in which I operate. I have purchased the Dictate software dictation package for Mac. Although I have been typing for several decades, the act of composition is very different if I can just dictate out loud.

The combination of using WordPress first and creating the content with Dictate has halved the time that it takes for me to produce a newsletter.

Dictate is a version of Dragon, which has been developed for Windows. It is a fantastic program; not only is the latest version very successful at interpreting my words, but it is able to learn - artificial intelligence in practice!

Of course, blogging is only one method of building a profile and you will remember from my last issue that I have also succumbed to Twitter. In addition, there is also Facebook, and many others. The challenge is to develop a marketing strategy that is focused and time effective.

Much as I enjoy writing, I am not a natural social networker. Time or will tell what works best for me.

USEFUL LINKS

• Does This Blogsite Make My Wallet Look Fat? Sandra de Freitas
  


• MacSpeech Dictate Amazon.com
  


• MacSpeech Dictate with Talk Pro Xpress Headset (Mac) Amazon.co.uk
  



• Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred Amazon.com
  


• Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 10.0 (PC DVD) Amazon.co.uk
  


• Twitter


• Facebook

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