How to Get More Clients for Your Coaching Business On Medium With 0 Followers
Medium is a fantastic lead generator to get more clients if you use it right.
In a recent consulting call I did, I had the opportunity to experience once again the eye-widening awe my client felt when she’d grasped exactly how powerful Medium, a humble blogging platform, was to get more clients for her coaching business.
It’s incredible, when you think about it: Medium, though you might not realize it, is chock-full of readers who might want to hire you. Medium also makes it very clear how to access those readers. All you have to do is provide the value.
What makes Medium such a great place to get more clients for your coaching business?
Most coaches I know go into coaching not to make a quick buck but because they genuinely believe in the value they can provide for their clients. This mindset is exactly what makes Medium such a good way to get more clients for your coaching business, because on Medium, it’s exactly the same: value wins first and foremost.
It’s easy to miss the potential of this blogging platform because we’re all so focused on the next big thing — we all want to be on TikTok, creating YouTube shorts, uploading Instagram Reels, and maybe pinning a pin on Pinterest. (I’m guilty of this, at least.)
But written content is hugely persuasive if you can get the attention of a reader. And Medium, unlike many other places on the internet, has millions of engaged, interested readers. All you have to do is get your work in front of their eyes.
Plus, Medium is better than search engines because when someone googles keywords that bring them to your website, for example, they’re already at the high-purchase-intent stage. They already know they have issues; they already are looking for information on how to solve it.
But casual readers might be struggling with issues you can solve, totally unaware of their own problems or the fact that you provide a solution. By reaching clients before they know they need to buy, you can raise awareness and educate them on their troubles. That’s what Medium can deliver for you.
Let’s get more explicit about how to use Medium to get more clients for your coaching business. We’ll work through the process to arrive at the final workflow to get more clients.
1. Generate a list of adjectives that describe your clients.
The first step in using Medium to get more clients for your coaching business is to figure out who you want to pay you money. Who stands to gain the most from your work? Who’s the most fun to work with? Who do you deliver the most value to?
Come up with a list of adjectives that describe your clients and their interests. This is going to help you figure out where they’ll be hanging out on Medium.
For example, my client is a career coach. Her clients were typically busy women interested in leadership, entrepreneurship, and work. Her adjective list was: female, busy, career-minded, maternal, determined, creative.
The reason this is such an important step is that, on Medium, stories are distributed by topic, more than followers or any other distribution factor. The more direct you can be about what your clients are interested in, the better you’ll be able to reach them.
This is the first step to get more clients because, for the rest of the steps to make sense, you absolutely need the context of who you’re writing for. Even if you’re already crystal-clear on who your client is, understanding their interests is key to creating content on Medium that will reach their eyes.
2. Find where your clients are lurking.
To get more clients, your list of adjectives should conjure up a very specific idea in your mind of who you’re targeting. Medium has millions of readers all with diverse interests and reading habits. When you’re trying to get more clients, it can feel difficult to navigate those waters and find exactly where your clients are.
Luckily, Medium has done the hard work of compiling areas where people like your clients might be reading. You can access this list of areas by going to Medium.com/topics. Pick out the topics that most closely correlate to your ideal client.
In my client’s case, her topics were: work, creativity, entrepreneurship, leadership, women, and parenting.
Now, scroll down the topic page for each of these and identify three publications that come up again and again. These are going to be where your soon-to-be clients are reading on Medium.
My client identified P.S. I Love You, The Post-Grad Survival Guide, and Entrepreneur’s Handbook as her target publications.
3. Learn the rules and get accepted into the club.
To get more clients on Medium, your next step is to access that list of potentially interested clients. You know who holds the keys? The editors of those publications.
Their mission on Medium is to provide value to their readers. Yours, in order to reach your future clients, must therefore be the same.
Study their guidelines. Learn what content performs well in their publications and what doesn’t. Submit, submit, and submit until you write something that’s to their standards. This step can take the longest because you have to learn to write to someone else’s requirements, rather than on your own blog as you may be used to doing. Luckily most of these guidelines are clearly laid out on the publications themselves.
You should also take this opportunity to study Medium’s curation guidelines. Unlike many other blogging sites, Medium has a really nifty distribution mechanism. When you write something that adheres to their curation guidelines, they distribute it into one or more topics.
What this means is that even if someone doesn’t follow you on Medium, if you write something that gets curated in the “Parenting,” topic, for example, an interested reader who has enjoyed Parenting content before might come across your post.
The end result is you’ll be writing fantastic content for a publication that has in the tens, or even hundreds of thousands of followers. To get more clients, it makes sense to create awesome content and meet them where they already are.
4. Give it all away. For free.
This is the part that always elicits a double-take. To get more clients, hold nothing back. Seriously. You want to give away your step-by-steps, your thorough tutorials, your most valuable industry secrets. For instance, Felicia C Sullivan outlined this unbelievably useful and informative tutorial on writing good content:
It answers every question you could possibly have about how to write fantastic content, and you might be left wondering: well, if she’s dropping these chunky nuggets of value completely free of charge, what can she give me when I pay her money? How well can my business do if I hire her to apply these insights to my specific brand?
Consulting clients can already get all the information you have to offer for free from the internet. When they choose to hire you — and they will — it’ll be because they want your help applying all that wealth of knowledge to their very unique situation.
When you hold back knowledge, you’re holding back your brand authority. You’re giving your potential clients a reason not to believe you’re worth the investment. Instead, you need to lean in, give them everything you possibly can, and let them
Once you’ve been accepted and can publish with the publications where your ideal future clients are hanging out, really dig deep. To get more clients, reflect on what you have already provided that’s of value to your existing coaching clients.
What has been the most valuable takeaway from your clients? If your clients all learned one thing, what was it? What have you most enjoyed about coaching? What’s been the most challenging aspect to cover?
Answering this list of questions will generate some content ideas that will appeal to your future clients.
For example, my client found that many of her clients came into the coaching sessions worried about re-entering the workforce after having kids. This inspired her to write a story about best practices, assuaging concerns, and positioning yourself to your best advantage.
5. Bring it home with a call-to-action in your bio.
Once you’ve: identified your ideal client, found out their lurking spots, applied and been accepted as a writer, written your compelling content, powerful content, there remains only one final step: get more clients by giving them a call-to-action.
Let’s do a quick thought experiment: you write the most persuasive story of your life. You reach 100 readers, 5 of whom are interested in coaches. They read the entire piece, voraciously. The final conclusion leaves them stunned with its value and simplicity. Finally, they arrive at your bio, which reads: “Zulie Rane, cat lover.”
Then …they probably move on with their lives and hire someone else tomorrow.
To avoid this, what you need to do instead is decide on a call-to-action. For coaching, it’s often a little too much to expect readers to finish a single article and be ready to hire you.
But it’s not so far-fetched to think they read an article and sign up to your newsletter for more content from you. Again, giving as much value away for free is the best solution to get more clients signing up for your newsletter.
For instance, my client ultimately decided to give her newsletter signups a conversation template for applying to new jobs after taking a parenting break, as this was one of the most sought-after requests during her coaching calls.
You can take it a step further and use different calls-to-action depending on your story subject to ensure the highest conversion rates. Writing for new parents? That’ll be a different CTA than if you’re appealing to a dad-of-three. If your coaching business covers many different client types, it makes sense to take a step back and determine what giveaway and call-to-action makes the most sense for them.
While it is possible to include a call-to-action on a post itself, the tradeoff of getting into those big publications is that they frequently remove your call-to-action and replace it with their own, or don’t have one at all. Instead of embedding it in your post, therefore, you should instead include it in your bio. If a reader reaches the end of your blog post, your CTA will be there for them to see.
6. Sell them your services at your leisure.
Now you have reached your clients’ eyes, you know where they are and what topics they care about. You’ve persuaded them of your knowledge and expertise, and you’ve shown them where to find more through a call-to-action. All that’s left to do to get more clients is let them know when they can book you.
There are a few ways to do this, depending on your sales style.
The simplest is just to include a hyperlink at the bottom of your newsletters. Every time you email your list, you can add something like, “Book me here for coaching services,” that hyperlinks to where you schedule and take payments.
You can also examine your schedule and announce when you have a new opening to take on a new client, again through your mailing list.
Another method is, when someone signs up for your free content through your call-to-action, you put them through a sales sequence that starts a few days after they first sign up.
This sales sequence can be a set of emails that walk through the benefits your coaching provides, the challenges your past clients have faced, and the testimonials you’ve received. This allows you to automate your process to get more clients based on how many people sign up for your mailing list, and means you don’t have to be pushy with your list meanwhile.
If you want to get more clients for your coaching business, I stand by the fact that there’s no better place than Medium. It lets you reach prospective clients before they’re even aware that you might be the solution to their unspoken prayers. It lets you direct the conversation, unfettered by flashy gimmicks or time restrictions. And it is one of the best places on the internet where value, not clickbait, rises to the top of the pile.
In order to use Medium to get more clients for your coaching business, you first need to understand your clients’ interests, find out where they lurk on Medium, access those publications by proving your worth, give as much value as you possibly can away for completely free, point them to where they can get even more from you through a call-to-action, and finally nurture your relationship with them through your mailing list until they’re at the point that they can trust you.
In conclusion, to get more clients for your coaching business, blogging on Medium is the answer you’ve been looking for.
