by Daniel Groves, Guest Writer
Do you feel like you’re making the most of your coaching business? This post will give you several great ways to explore adding new revenue streams and passive income to your coaching business.
With low start-up costs combined with great flexibility and the potential to scale, running a coaching business is both fulfilling and lucrative.
Many coaches come to a point in their entrepreneurial journey where they’re routinely working with a number of recurring clients but don't have the free hours to grow their income further.
If this sounds all too familiar, one of the best ways to generate more income while still maintaining commitments to your client base is to create passive revenue streams.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at passive income for life and business coaches, and five of the best ways for coaches to create multiple revenue streams.
What is Passive Income for Life Coaches?
Passive income is any kind of income that doesn’t require you to be actively involved.
Rather than non-passive activities like coaching through one-to-one sessions and working with clients to develop training programs tailored to their needs, passive income sources like selling digital self-directed courses and training materials allow you to generate revenue without any direct involvement.
While creating passive income streams can require a lot of work to set up, once you’ve done this and given your passive income sufficient promotion, you’ll unlock the capacity to earn more money in less hours.
How Many Streams of Income Should You Have?
Figuring out how many streams of income you should have as a coach will depend on several variables that are unique to your business.
When you’re mapping out a plan to generate multiple revenue streams, some key things to consider include:
The time and resources you can realistically commit to setting up your additional revenue streams.
The financial goals you’re looking to achieve, and how quickly you need to scale.
How much liquid capital is required to cover the investment you need to build your income streams.
Whether or not there’s a demand for the products and services you’re considering as a source of income.
By considering these kinds of questions, you’ll be able to form a clear picture of your end goal for generating revenue, and the steps you’ll need to take to achieve it.
5 Ways Coaches Can Create Multiple Revenue Streams
Now that you have an understanding of what passive income looks like, and how to form a plan that’s suitable for your needs, here’s five effective ways to generate additional revenue streams as a coach.
Make Your Programs More Self-Directed
As you’ll already know, setting up a quality coaching program takes a lot of time and effort. After this, you have to factor in additional time to help direct your clients through the different stages of the program.
However, by sharing teaching materials and making your coaching programs partially self-directed, you can turn the core product of your coaching business into a passive source of income.
With purpose-built tools like our own Nudge Coach, you can deliver all the content your clients need to work through their assigned modules, track accountability, and keep clients in the loop about their progress towards their goals.
By enhancing your courses with self-paced learning materials, you’ll be able to justify an increase in your price point, without having to account for additional one-to-one coaching.
Reseller Hosting
If you specialize in coaching clients on skills in the digital space, for example web design or digital marketing, reseller hosting could make a natural upsell to attach to your coaching services.
Reseller hosting involves selling hosting services to customers without owning the actual hosting equipment or infrastructure. This allows you to pass on hosting benefits such as heightened security and loading speed to your client’s online projects, without ever having to worry about the technical maintenance, which will be taken care of by the server owners.
What’s more, many reseller hosting programs support white-label packages. 20i, for example, provides white-label reseller hosting that allows you to “create set packages & bespoke quotas” which you can sell to your clients, meaning you can brand the service with your own logo, Favicon, and HTML elements for a higher standard of professionalism.
Create and Sell Passive Digital Products
While coaching itself is a kind of digital product, there are many examples of more passive, “hands-off” products you can sell through your personal brand to generate new passive revenue streams.
One of the most obvious digital products for coaches to sell is an ebook, which has taken some coaches and entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss to the top of international bestseller lists with titles like “The 4-Hour Work Week”.
While publishing and selling an ebook can be a great way to generate passive income among an audience demographic who’s already showing a demand for learning and self-development, there are many other digital products suitable for coaches that you may want to look into, for example:
Podcasts and audiobooks.
Video courses.
Interactive quizzes and tests.
Selling digital products not only gives you an avenue to share your unique expertise with your clients and boost the value of your coaching, but can also act as a lead magnet, attracting people from your audience and directing them to sign up for the core services in your business model.
Monetize Your Social Presence
Social media marketing has huge potential to generate business for coaches, due to the fact that your personal brand is already tied closely to your products.
If you’re able to build a large enough following with an active, business-oriented audience, you could put yourself in a good position to earn from producing sponsored social media content, either earning a flat fee for sponsored posts or commission through initiatives like unique promo codes.
Building a brand on social media that’s strong enough to attract sponsors is very challenging, requiring you to study your audience closely, post high-quality content often, and interact with your community. However, as organic social media marketing can also be an effective way to promote your core coaching services, developing social profiles with an aim to get sponsorships is a good way to kill two birds with one stone.
Affiliate Marketing
If you have an active blog and a target audience who jumps at the chance to consume any learning materials they get their hands on, then affiliate marketing can be another great way to open up a new revenue stream as a coach.
Affiliate marketing involves adding designated affiliate links to your original content that takes your audience to a landing page on a merchant’s site. Whenever someone clicks on the link and makes a purchase as a result, the merchant’s tracking system will record the fact that the purchase came from your link, and you’ll receive a commission.
Generating income as an affiliate will take some time, as you’ll need to create a stream of content that’s high-quality and unique enough to build an engaged audience who are likely to follow your product recommendations.
However, once you’ve overcome this initial hurdle and published enough content that offers real, lasting value to your audience, being part of an affiliate program can be a fantastic way to generate income while you focus on other areas of your business.
Multiplying Your Revenue
Though creating new, lucrative streams of passive income usually takes a lot of up-front effort, the long-term rewards it can generate can be huge.
We hope this guide has helped inspire you to build your value proposition, expand your list of services, and create a more lucrative and time-efficient coaching business.
While keeping your users engaged with content only can be challenging, it’s a great way to scale your business.