We believe that ‘proper’ businesses have websites, that having one is required and essential for building a coaching practice. We spend weeks or months planning it, can spend thousands of pounds building it, and countless hours perfecting the copy about our values, our approach, and why we’re great coaches.
The truth is that very few people are looking for a coach, so it’s vanishingly rare that anyone will find your website by accident. Even if they did, a website about you and your values isn’t what turns them into clients.
Why We Think We Need One
Most coaches have spent their lives in employment and actively seek the same structure and frameworks as the kind of organisations they belong to or belonged to when we set up our own businesses. The corporate world has websites, proper businesses have websites, so we assume we need one too. It feels like a fundamental building block of a business, something you must have in place before you can really get started.
Back to what I said about ‘proper’ businesses having websites – this belief drives us to prioritise website creation (and maybe also setting up our limited company) over almost everything else. We think we can’t call ourselves a business without one, that potential clients won’t take us seriously without it, that we’re somehow not legitimate until we have a professional website with our branding, logo and our carefully crafted copy about our coaching philosophy.
The truth is that a limited company, a website, or branding aren’t as important as income. Until there are paying clients, there is no business. A beautiful website with no clients isn’t a business – it’s an expensive hobby.
What We Put On Our Websites
When we do build websites, we fill them with information about us – our qualifications, our training, our approach, our values, our coaching philosophy, why we became coaches, what we believe about transformation and potential. We think this is what potential clients need to see. We think showcasing our credentials and explaining our methodology will convince people to hire us.
It won’t, because that’s not what potential clients care about. They care about whether we understand their problem and whether working with us can help resolve it. Our ICF credentials (or wherever we gain them from), our additional certifications, our coaching philosophies – none of that matters to someone who’s struggling and looking for help. What matters is whether we’re talking about their situation in language they recognise.
A website that talks about you, your qualifications, and your approach is a CV, not a marketing tool – and CVs don’t generate clients.
The Investment We Make
Building a proper website costs money – anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand pounds depending on who builds it and how complex it is. It costs time – weeks or months of planning, writing, revising, and perfecting. It costs energy – the mental effort of trying to distil everything we do into compelling copy that will attract clients.
All of that investment happens before we know who we’re talking to in our marketing, before we know exactly what that person needs to hear, and before we’ve tested whether our marketing message actually works. We’re building a website based on guesses about what potential clients want to see, rather than on proven understanding of what actually attracts them.
That’s backwards. We’re investing significant resources in a tool we don’t yet know how to use effectively, at a stage when those resources would be better spent elsewhere.
When A Website Actually Becomes Useful
A website becomes useful when we know who we’re talking to in our marketing, when we know exactly what that person needs to hear, and when the marketing message we have is working. At that point, a website becomes a place where people who’ve already found us through your marketing can learn more about how to work with us.
Notice the order there. People find us through our marketing first. Our LinkedIn profiles and our content, our articles, our visibility in spaces where our chosen audience spends time – that’s what attracts potential clients. The website comes later, when someone who’s already interested wants to know more about our process, our packages, and how to book.
A website doesn’t generate interest, marketing generates interest. A website can support that interest once it exists, but it can’t create it in the first place.
What We Should Be Focusing On Instead
Client acquisition is usually the missing skillset for coaches, and it’s this one – client acquisition – that we need to master before we spend time, energy, and money on things like websites. We need to learn how to choose our target audience, how to articulate the challenges they’re facing, what language they use to describe their situation, where they can be found, and how to create content that makes them think “they’re talking about me.”
None of that requires a website. All of that can happen on LinkedIn, in articles, through consistent visibility in the spaces where our potential clients are. The client acquisition skills we need to learn don’t depend on having a website. In fact, building a website before we have those skills often becomes a distraction from learning what we actually need to know.
We tell ourselves we need a website before we can really start marketing, but that’s backwards. We need to start marketing so we can learn what works, and only then does a website become a useful tool to support what’s already working.
The Priority Problem
What we believe to be a priority isn’t necessarily a priority. We think website first, then marketing. The reality is marketing first, then website once we understand what our website needs to say and who it needs to say it to.
Our number one priority should be finding out how effective client acquisition works – learning who our ideal client is, understanding their challenges deeply, creating a marketing message that speaks to them, and showing up consistently with content that demonstrates our understanding and builds trust. That’s what generates clients, and clients are what we need to have a business.
A website sitting there looking professional but not being found by anyone doesn’t build a business. Learning to market effectively and consistently attracting enquiries from people who need your help – that builds a business. The website can come later, when you know what it needs to say and to whom.
The Painful Truth
Many coaches spend months building beautiful websites before they have a single client. They can invest thousands of pounds in design and branding before they know who they’re designing and branding for. They perfect their copy about their coaching philosophy before they understand what their target audience actually needs to hear.
Then they wonder why the website isn’t generating enquiries. They think maybe the design isn’t quite right, or the copy needs tweaking, or they need better SEO. They don’t realise that the website was never going to generate enquiries because that’s not what websites do. Marketing generates enquiries, websites support the marketing once it’s working.
The painful truth is that the time, money, and energy spent building a website in the early stages of a coaching business is almost always wasted. Not because websites are useless, but because they’re being built at the wrong time for the wrong purpose by coaches who don’t yet understand what their website needs to do or say.
What Changes When You Get This Right
When we focus on client acquisition first and websites later, everything changes. We learn who we’re talking to through market research and testing our messaging, rather than guessing and hoping. We discover what language resonates with our ideal clients through consistent content creation, rather than assumptions about what sounds professional.
We build trust and credibility through demonstrating our understanding of their challenges in our marketing content, rather than hoping our qualifications listed on a website will impress them. We generate enquiries through visibility and relevant content, rather than waiting for people to accidentally find our website.
Then, when we’re consistently attracting interest and our marketing message is proven to work, we can build a website that supports what we’re already doing successfully. At that point, we know exactly what our website needs to say because we’ve tested our messaging and seen what works. We know who our website is for because we’ve been marketing to them consistently. We know what converts interest into clients because we’ve been having those conversations.
The website becomes a tool that makes our already-working client acquisition process more efficient, rather than an expensive guess at what might attract clients.
The Mindset Shift
The mindset shift required is significant because it goes against everything we’ve absorbed about how businesses work. In the corporate world, websites are fundamental. In the world of small coaching businesses trying to find clients, they’re secondary to the marketing skills that actually attract those clients.
Accepting that we don’t need a website yet, that the time and money would be better spent on learning client acquisition, that we can build a thriving coaching practice without one – that challenges our assumptions about what makes a business legitimate and professional.
However, legitimacy and professionalism don’t pay the bills. Clients pay the bills, and clients come from effective marketing, not from having a website sitting there unused and gathering cobwebs.
What To Do Instead
Instead of building a website, invest your time and energy in learning proper client acquisition skills. Understand who your ideal client is at a level of detail that goes far beyond demographics. Learn their challenges, their language, their shame, their desired outcomes. Create content that speaks directly to them about their specific situation. Show up consistently in the spaces where they are.
Use LinkedIn as your primary platform because that’s where pretty much every coaching client is and it requires no website to be effective. (I have never met a coach whose potential clients aren’t on LinkedIn, but I have met hundreds who tell me that they’re not!) Write articles that demonstrate your understanding of your target audience’s challenges. Create posts that speak to their specific situations. Be visible, consistent, and focused in your messaging.
Generate enquiries through your marketing, have conversations with potential clients, start coaching people and getting paid. Build your business through actual client acquisition, not through having the trappings of what you think a business should look like.
Then, when your marketing is working and you’re consistently attracting clients, build a website that supports that success. At that point, you’ll know exactly what it needs to say and to whom. You’ll have proven messaging that works. You’ll have a clear understanding of what converts interest into clients.
The website becomes the final piece of an already-working system, not the first piece of a system you’re hoping will work.
The Real Priority
What you believe to be a priority isn’t necessarily a priority. A website feels important because proper businesses have them, but what proper coaching businesses actually need is clients. And clients come from effective marketing, not from websites.
Your number one priority should be finding out how effective client acquisition works, learning those skills, and applying them consistently. Everything else – including websites – comes after you’ve mastered the fundamental skill of attracting paying clients.
A website won’t make you a legitimate business. Paying clients will. Focus on the thing that actually builds your business, not on the thing that looks like what businesses are supposed to have.
An Opportunity
If you’d like the opportunity for a robust conversation about this – or to just flat-out tell me why I’m wrong – why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche? We run it several times each year and there’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations!