It’s that time of year again when you put on your warm clothes (here in Arizona, that means jeans instead of shorts), drink eggnog and search for a great new year’s eve party! But it’s also that time when you come up with new year’s resolutions that you know you aren’t going to keep. I mean I vowed to learn French last year but all I have learned so far are the words, baguette and duck l’orange (from the local french restaurant).

But hey, you can’t have the same attitude with your business - it might end up as bad as my French. Setting New Year Goals for your coaching business is one of the best ways to grow it every year. Don’t try for a moonshot, instead go with something more achievable - some goal you know you won’t give up on easily.

Obviously, the goals will vary depending on your particular coaching business, but here are a few ideas to help you get started. Some of these tasks might seem daunting, but don’t worry. You can easily complete them with the help from a virtual team.

Increase Email Lists

You know those annoying emails that you keep getting from your bank asking you to get a credit card that you can’t possibly afford with your shopping habits? Yes, that means you are a victim of their mailing list. This is just one of the ways that the banks market themselves and you can do it too! Now, it is your turn to increase your email lists so you can market your products and services to others including banks as well.

Modify your website

One of the most common ways to increase your mailing list is to target the people who are visiting your website. There is a multitude of ways of getting them to your website - we leave that up to a different article. For now, focus on getting the emails of the people who do end up visiting your website.

You can ask your web designer to create screen overlays with tempting offers in exchange for their email. For example, you can offer some of your content in the form of an ebook in exchange for it. You can also restrict the content to members who can gain access through free signup using their email ID. A well designed pop up, with easy to enter email and a tempting enough offer might just lure your users to give you their emails for you to add to your personal collection.

Leverage your offline meetings

Every day, you meet people offline who can be a potential lead, so why not ask them for their email to forward them some good content. A simple way of leveraging your offline meetings is to use the business cards that you receive from people and add their emails to your list.

Alternatively, you can also use the seminars to distribute sign up forms to online newsletters so you can get their emails. Trading your business cards in for theirs is also a great way to increase the number of people on your list.

Use Social Media

Finally, you can use social media too as a great tool to ask your followers to hit you up with their email addresses so you can send some new content their way. You can publicize this through media posts or text posts. Alternatively, you can ask them to send you an email so you can reply to it while adding their address to your list.

If you want to save yourself some of the efforts, you can just ask one of your connections in the same business to do an email list exchange of sorts. It would profit both of you equally with no hard work required. This is where all the skills of networking on Facebook and Instagram that we taught you would come useful 😉

Now there is a possibility that you already had an extensive mailing list which is lying dormant somewhere in your computer. You can skip a lot of this effort and simply organize and re-engage the old email list. This would save a lot of time as well.

Create an Online Program

As someone running a business, your goal should always be to make more money with the least amount of added efforts. A clever way to do this is to create an online program for the same stuff that you are teaching in seminars offline. Once your online program has started, with some effort of marketing it, you will be able to sell more by not putting in any extra effort other than when you created the content. Furthermore, it would increase your reach from a local level to a national or international one. Meanwhile, you can continue running your offline coaching business to get more revenue.

Get the resource ready

The most important thing here is to create the resource that you want to sell online. It is up to you to decide what is it is. You can either create a series of videos as tutorials or go with an ebook that you can sell to others. Both of them will require quite a bit of effort from you in the beginning. However, with the help of a virtual team, the work can be cut in half or even lower.

For an ebook, you could hire a writer and give the basic points that you would like to be covered or a detailed summary of the whole book. The writer should then be able to form the content around that. On the other hand, the videos can be created with the help of an animator with your voiceover. Alternatively, if you are too lazy, you can just skip the animation part and jump to distributing audio files. As long as you focus on making good content and not something on lines of ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’, you would be able to sell the content easily.

Create Awareness

A popular saying goes “If you’ve got it, flaunt it”. Once you are finished creating your resources, you should start marketing them on your website as soon as possible. For higher chances, start advertising your new product on social media too. Facebook has some great options that allow you to advertise online. Hire a social media marketer to make this job easy as pie.

Write a Book

Writing a book is something everyone says they will do but no one ever gets around to it. There are a number of reasons for this, but let’s not focus on that. Instead, let’s focus on why you should start writing a book and how you can go about it.

Firstly, it would be a great way to document all (or some) of your teachings and wisdom in your field. As you are noting all of it down, there are chances that new ideas come to you kid of like how you remember the best argument during a fight after the fight is already over.  It may also be possible that while you are researching for this book, you find something out that you and/or others didn’t previously know about. All of this makes the book, something of great value. You can later use this book to sell it online or offline.

One of the best times to write this book is when you feel like taking a break from all your work. That way, you will be spending your breaks productively, stepping away from procrastination and writing a book all at the same time. Of course, you can take the help of a content writer from your virtual team and fill in the gaps, beautify it or just have it proofread. Either way, at the end of this, you will have something that you can call your legacy.

Improve Social Media Presence

As the world takes to social media to try and beat their competition, it is time you do too. There are several businesses that haven’t lived up to their potential just because they lost out in a marketing war while refusing to take things online. This year, try something different and improve your social media presence online so more people get to know about you.

Expand to other Social Media

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit - I would run out of fingers and toes to count but there would still be more social media left. Unfortunately, only a few of these websites are widely used for marketing. But this doesn’t mean that the other websites are less effective. First, check if you are already using most of these platforms to share your content. If you aren’t then get started on them now!

Start by moving on to some other site, then another one, and keep going until your goals are met. This might seem like a lot of work for you, and frankly, it is. That is why virtual teams like us exist. With the help of social media marketers and influencers, you are bound to see a rise in traffic and hopefully, conversions.

Improve on current numbers

If you are already marketing yourself in most of the platforms out there, you need to come up with ways to improve the numbers. In Facebook, you should attempt to get an increase in the number of followers on your page and the percentage interacting with your post.

Similarly, for Instagram, you would want more followers and a large percent of them liking your posts or sharing them. There are plenty of ways to do this, but some of the easiest ones involve you reaching out to viewers or posting advertisements.

Be More Productive

Everyone knows that one of the best ways to earn money is to get more work done. But the real challenge is to get more work done in the same amount of time. Thankfully, I have some tips for you to ensure you don’t get overwhelmed or overworked...with some help from your friends of course.

Set definite goals

One of the key techniques in avoiding procrastination and improving productivity is to set small achievable targets. So you take a big task like increasing your site’s traffic to over 1000 visitors a month and then you divide it into smaller targets with definite time constrained goals.

This will help you achieve them in a definite amount of time and increase your productivity. The completion of these small goals overtime also gives you a small morale boost which leads to better productivity as well.

It is important to ensure that you focus on one goal at a time. Otherwise what happens is that you try and juggle all the different objectives and hardly end up achieving a few of them.

Alternatively, you could reduce procrastination by unsubscribing to Netflix. But let’s not kid ourselves, that’s never going to happen.

Delegate work efficiently

Sometimes when people work in a group, one person tends to take on most of the jobs because he/she feels that they can do it the best. I know I do. But this often leads to a decrease in productivity as you can’t focus properly on one task at a time and thus in a delay in completing all the tasks.

Trust your virtual team and delegate part of the work to them. This will not only reduce your workload but it will help you get more work done faster thus increasing your productivity. Similarly, remember to assign them deadlines with smaller tasks one after the other. This should keep them in check too.

Another great advantage of delegating work is that it lets you concentrate on other aspects of the business. Overall, it increases the productivity of the full team.

Have more time for family

Those that know me well, know that spending time with family is about far more than an obligation. For those that don’t know the story, in 2013, we lost a son. He was just 3 weeks from turning 18. It’s easy to get wrapped up in working to grow your business. But, if you are growing your business so that you have more time to spend with your family, don’t wait. You are never guaranteed tomorrow. You can read more about the story on our About Us page.

Besides, taking a break from work is often one of the best ways to get more motivated and come up with brilliant new ideas.

Here are a few ways with which you can start spending more time with your family.

Free up your weekends

Weekends are meant for relaxing. Anyone who says otherwise is negative company you don’t need in your life. While you should work as much as you can, your weekends should help you detox from everything. Fortunately, this is the nice kind of detox - not the herby green juice kind. Take this time off to spend time with your family. Go out with your partner (or in search of one), show your kids who is the boss in Mario Kart, or simply take a nap on the couch - anything but work.

Go on Vacations

What is the point of making money if you don’t spend it, am I right? Going on vacations is the ultimate way to tune it all out, kick back and relax for a while. At the same time, you will be making your family happy as they will get to spend uninterrupted time with you as well. You don’t need to worry about a single thing. Your virtual team back home (from all around the world) will be helping you grow your business while you are away.

Conclusion

There are several ways to boost your business starting fresh from a new year. However, not everyone follows them through. Don’t try and accomplish all the goals that were mentioned in this post. Go about it at your own pace. To recap, you can accomplish the following goals with the help of your virtual team -

• Spend more time with your family whenever you can
• Be more productive and efficient rather than just blindly doing more work
• Write a book, preferably about your specialty
• Improve your social media influence across all platforms
• Increase your email list
• Create an online program for your followers around the world

Finally, to conclude, I’d like to leave you with a Super Tip.

I don’t know if you realized this or not but most of the goals here are interconnected. So, if you do manage to complete one of them, the other ones will start following dominoes.

If you start being more productive, you will be able to spend more time with your family and finish writing your book. At the same time, your virtual team will help you increase your social media influence leading to a longer email list. With your content and marketing aids ready to go, you can start your own online program creating a boom in business perfect for celebrating the next new year’s eve with multiple bottles of champagne 😉

Don’t wait too long. Get ready for attacking the first goal of the new year now!