How to Grow Your Coaching Practice on the Internet

While living in Ukraine, music was Milana Leshinsky's life. But when she moved to the United States in 1992 and discovered the world of Internet marketing, Milana started singing to a different tune. By launching an Internet-based venture, she reinvented herself as a successful entrepreneur, author, and advisor to life and business coaches.

That is why Milana is featured, along with other successful, self-employed entrepreneurs, in a new book, "The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing on the Internet" by Robert Skrob and Bob Regnerus. The book, out in September 2008, is the sequel to last year's "The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing." Milana's transition from music to an Internet info-marketer began when she started doing web design for an insurance company and a newspaper. But it was only after Milana was hired by coaches to develop their websites that the budding entrepreneur started to hit high notes.

"At first, I didn't even know what a ‘coach' was," Milana admits. "But after a third time a coach came to me for a website, I took notice and started to investigate this industry." Milana started a membership site for coaches using all the materials she gathered during her research and her business took off. "One of the clients who hired me to do a website was a coach who asked me to be part of her team," Milana recalls. "Later, I wrote an e-book, "How to Grow your Coaching Practice on the Internet" and she wrote the foreword for it.

Her partnership gave me a lot of credibility." Milana's "doorway into the industry," however, was a website called Tele-Class.com by the late Thomas Leonard, a key player in the field of personal and business coaching. Milana advertised monthly tele-seminars on this site, eventually creating a membership site and a program called "7Habits of Most Successful Coaches." "I noticed that successful coaches had products, names for themselves, processes and follow-up sequences," Milana says.

"So I gathered all of these factors into a program and I coached people who had sites that didn't generate business. I critiqued the site and worked with the clients to create content to rework it." Milana had clearly found her niche but, she says, she needed a "breakthrough" to get to the next level of her business. She found it during a mastermind session, "Infopreneur's Think Tank," with Sterling Valentine, which led her to telephone based, multi-day events called "tele-summits." This was the win-win solution not only for Milana, who didn't like to attend live conferences, but also for her clients, because they had an opportunity to participate in training programs without having to spend time and money to travel.

"With Sterling, I created a global event for coaches," Milana says. "Before, the word ‘tele-summit' didn't even exist, so that was my big break." How big? Milana's first eight-day tele-summit netted $60,000 - with more to come. "That was huge for me, but the chain reaction happened afterwards," she reports. However, that chain reaction resulted in Milana's site being flooded with too many products, so it was hard to market. In fact, websites cluttered with too many graphics and too much useless information are counterproductive, Skrob notes.

"The more choices you put in front of people, the longer it will take them to make a decision and the less likely they are to be happy with the choice they make. When the number of options gets overwhelming, people often respond by making no decision at all." So Milana hired a consultant who suggested folding all her products into one - a home study course called Coaching Millions, based on her book, "Coaching Millions Business Building System." The other part of Milana's venture is her "Coaching Business Mastery," which includes a home study course and an implementation program. A streamlined landing or opt-in page was essential to Milana's continued success.

"These pages are the best way to welcome potential customers to your website, and they allow you to establish the right type of relationship with your visitors," Skrob says. "An effective, well-written landing page builds trust and establishes your credibility. The more visitors you convince to opt in, the more sales you'll make."