We’re running a series of blogs this month called “Why WordPress is perfect for…” and we’ll be looking at various professions or business models and talking about how WordPress solves challenges and enhances opportunities for that group.

Today’s highlighted business model: Coaches

While some coaching services can be sold online, a majority of a coach’s work is based on the time they spend with their client. That could be over the phone, it could be in person, it could be one-on-one, it could be in groups. The bottom line is, most coaching is person-to-person.

So what’s their website for? A coaches’ website needs to start out as a place to demonstrate their skill-set in order to show potential clients their thought leadership and how they might help them. An organizational coach might want to blog about organizational tips; a productivity coach might want to blog about how to improve efficiency; a career coach might want to blog about how to get that next promotion.

From this blog, new clients will call coaches and book appointments and a coach’s schedule will fill up.

And that will work for many coaches as the primary way to earn their living. But there will come a point in many coaches’ careers when they realize that they are only working for the short-term and every client brings in a temporary cash flow but doesn’t do much for the long term health of the business.

At this point, the coach then looks at their site and how they might be able to develop more sales out of it. And two distinct ways they can do that include:

• Selling information
  Offering a password-protected “membership” site

Offering these necessitates some basic rearranging of the coach’s site, perhaps bringing in a home page (instead of using the blog as a home page). Perhaps adding more resources and making their site a destination site.

These changes require flexibility. And a coach who buys a website that is designed and maintained by a web developer is at the mercy of the high priced web developer to transform the site and turn it from a blog into a website.

This is why WordPress is ideal: The coach whose practice is growing no longer has to rely on a web development team to do the job. The coach can do it themselves in an evening! With just some simple clicks on an easy-to-navigate dashboard, the coach can go from “small time” to “big time”!