How I Got My First $500 Coaching Client (Without Feeling Sales-Y)

You can do it too.

Up until this year, I was a quiet business owner. 

I built my own blogs, gradually gaining millions of views and selling millions of dollars worth of products.

Now I was about to go public and put my face on a website to sell coaching services. Eep.

But I was ready for a new challenge. 

I wanted to take the knowledge I had gained from growing my podcast and help other people. 

It took two months, and then I sent the stripe invoice to my first client for $500.

Here’s how I did it. 

Quietly start writing

This is my go to advice for starting an online business. Quietly start writing about it and see if anyone cares. 

I began writing about podcasting here on Medium, but while the articles got some interest it’s not where my audience was. You have to go to where your audience is and so I went over to Twitter. 

Bingo.

My posts started getting seen by podcasters who would leave comments liking my advice. I had something to offer. 

If I’d been posting advice about podcasting and getting crickets where I know my audience was, it would have been a sign that my advice wasn’t good enough. But it was, and so I knew I could sell my advice.

Sell a service that already exists

If the first thing you ever try and sell is a never-before-seen product, you’re going to struggle. People don’t trust you yet. You need to offer them something they recognize and then convince them that you’re the person to give it to them.

Look at what type of offers other people in your space are offering and do something similar. I found various other podcast coaches offered podcast audits. They look over your podcast and give you feedback, which is definitely something I could do and be great at. 

I then figured out how to offer a more unique approach to an audit and created a sales page. I asked a friend for advice, and he gave me this formula for creating a sales page. It’s how the customer should feel as she moves through each section:

•⁠  ⁠”yeah that’s my issue”

•⁠  ⁠”this sounds like a good solution”

•⁠  ⁠”ok this is exactly what I need!”

•⁠  ⁠”man the guy’s an expert”

•⁠  ⁠”here’s social proof too”

•⁠  ⁠”ok I’m ready, let’s sign up”

If you lead your customer through that journey, she’ll come out at the end ready to buy. If your copywriting isn’t up to scratch, you can ask Claude to help. I did.

Set up a free call

People probably don’t know you yet. That’s fine. You can set up a free “discovery call”. This was a new term to me but it just means sales call. But people don’t like sales calls so you call it a “discovery call”.

They’re easy. You’re just trying to figure out if you’re the right fit for their needs. You ask them questions like:

“So what brings you here today?” Let them tell you about their problems, then, frame how your solution will help solve their problems. Easy.

Find a way to get attention on your writing

Now, you have to drive people to your discovery calls. I did this by looking at news roundup newsletters in my industry. Pod News is the most famous one, and they have a daily roundup of interesting blog posts that people have published. 

I took the most recent blog post I’d written for my newsletter and submitted it for the roundup. It was accepted and promoted to their 30,000 readers.

But how does that get people to the sales page?

Well, at the bottom of the blog post, I put a nice simple “How I can help you” with a link to the sales page. I’ve gone on to develop this to include all my resources, and this is how it looks now:

Smile and be confident

From there, someone booked onto a discovery call… And no sale came. 

That’s fine. I got a rep in and was ready for my next one. Which also wasn’t a good fit. But I carried on submitting new posts to the roundup, and the third time was the charm. 

I hopped on a call with a guy looking for an accountability coach to help him launch his podcast. After we finished the call, I put together a proposal for four one-hour calls for $500 and he accepted. 

You don’t need to force it or pretend you’re something you aren’t. You can just be honest. Authenticity is more valuable than ever with the rise of AI-powered everything. People want to connect with people, and seeing your charming, smiling face on a call is the perfect way to do that. 

Go try it out.

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