Looking to take forward your coaching business online, but don’t know where to start? No more worries. You’ve landed in the right place… 

With the onset of the pandemic, virtual learning has become the buzzword among learning aspirants in schools, colleges, startups, enterprises, and so on.    

You’ve seen in our title, we’ve mentioned it as 3 days, it’s not clickbait! Tools & Software are certainly helping to kickstart your coaching career online in such a short time. Only after experimenting with these tools, we’ve curated these for you to play around with.

Online Coaching Platform – Build Your Virtual Curriculum

Do you know? Online coaching platforms will reach $4.5 billion in market size by 2028.

An online coaching business is an impeccable idea to generate a passive income just from wherever you are. Expenses on transportation, equipment, office setup, and so on can be ignored.  

All you need to have is expertise in what you’re going to teach, passion for teaching, and a little knowledge of these wonder-working tools.

Tools to Start with Your Coaching Business Online 

There are a wide range of tools in the market exclusively for online curriculum. So, it’s not that you must be including all tools, we will help you out here. We’re rounding off features you must be implementing on your coaching platform so that you can opt for tools accordingly.

Seems overwhelming, right? You have got a wide range of tools for all these. 

However, as you’re in the beginning phase, you can just build a one-page website to introduce yourself, secure payment mode for clients to subscribe to your courses, and user-friendly calendars to book sessions, and with that, you’re all set for a business. 

Later on, depending on the traffic for your online coaching site, you can keep integrating lots of tools that enhance the features of your online coaching business. 

7+ Features for your Online Coaching Businesses

1. Website Builders 

The easiest and quickest way to build a website is through ‘website builders’. Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, and many others will support you in creating your DIY online coaching website.

Benefits of Using a Website Builder

• No design skills required
• Lots of layout options to choose from
• Easy to add pages, sections, & widgets
• Create landing pages for selling courses
• Compatible with third-party add-ons

2. Design Software

Everybody gets attracted to visuals & graphics. Simply plain text-only content may fail in enticing the users. When you’re running a coaching business online, you’ll have to design landing pages, digital ads, banner images, mailers, social media posts, website graphics, and whatnot. 

For all these visual creatives, you need not break your head or learn any design courses. Graphic design tools can be your ‘Good Samaritan’ for creating stunning visuals that you envisioned. These tools offer personalized options for teachers and students, hence, integrating them will help both ends. 

Canva – A Graphic Design Tool

• Offers templates for lesson plans, presentations, etc. 
• Provides copyright-free images, gifs, videos, animations, and music
• Built-in with drag-and-drop editor
• Integrates with Moodle, Google Classroom, Microsoft Team, and more 
• Offer custom templates to design mindmaps, essay outlines, assignments, etc. 
• To explore all features, click here

3. Social Media Management

The impact of social media visibility on today’s businesses cannot be expressed in words. Consistently posting on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., and responding to messages and comments will help you engage with your audience. 

However, handling all these by yourself will eat-up your time, and as a result, you cannot focus on other coaching activities. Therefore, thinking about a social media tool can reduce your workload. 

Buffer – A Social Media Management Tool

• Built-in intuitive dashboard
• Allows to enable auto-publish option
• Possible to assess the performance of your posts, stories, hashtags, and overall activities
• Reports are available in downloadable PDF formats
• Suggests the right time, content type, and frequency to post
• Unanswered comments get popped up on the dashboard
• To explore all features, click here

4. Email Marketing  

Email marketing is not dead, in particular, for coaching businesses. It’s only through emails you’re going to send reminders, payment confirmations, and so on. And moreover, email campaigns are still a working strategy for coaches. 

Being an SME, you’ll have more knowledge on that topic, so you’ll have tons of information to share. While you do so, the truly aspiring learners will possibly checkout into your courses. 

You can ask for email info through newsletter subscriptions, gated content access, and so on. And also, you can leverage email marketing with the help of tools like MailChimp.

MailChimp – An Email Marketing Tool

• Provides email templates for abandoned carts
• Integrates with your website
• Allows to track the performance of campaigns
• Provides drag-and-drop email templates
• Segments your users based on area of interests and behavior patterns
• Allows to send automated emails with templates
• Click here to learn more about of the features

5. Appointment Booking

After going through any of your social media ads or website or mail, aspirants would like to enroll in your course program. You’re solely responsible for properly guiding your users into the booking process. 

The age of booking appointments via phone calls is no more. As you’re an online coaching business, you can accept bookings online. It’s made possible with a few appointment scheduling software in the virtual learning market. 

Calendly – Schedule Management Tool

• Integrates with your website
• Displays booked and unbooked slots 
• Customizes the scheduling pages inline with your coaching brand
• Automates the booking process
• To explore all the features, click here

6. Digital Payment Mode

Now that, you’ve setup a website and that a client has chosen a booking slot, what’s the next step? You’ll have to direct him/her to the payment section. For this, you’ve thousands of payment gateways, you can hand the payment process to them. 

Whether it’s going to be a single-time or recurring payment, you can configure the settings accordingly. 

Stripe – A Payment Gateway

• Easy to schedule the payment dates
• Accepts payments from Venmo, PayPal, Stripe, and credit cards as well
• Built-in with intuitive dashboard
• Offers digital downloads feature
• Supports multi-currency
• Smooth checkout process
• To know more, click here 

7. Webinar Platform

After completing the payment process, as per the client’s schedule, you’ll have to take the session. When it comes to virtual learning, there are many challenges like engagement, number of participants, recording, and so on.  

With the onset of the pandemic, live webinar tools have resolved these issues. Just integrate the webinar platform with your website and you can right away start presenting your sessions.

Zoom – A Virtual Learning Platform

• Allows users to connect from 70+ global countries
• Possible to add 1,000 participants 
• Compatible with GDPR to protect student’s data
• Built with chat options
• Integrates with third-party APIs and tools
• Click here to explore all the features

Wrapping Up Our Tools to Build an Online Coaching Business 

So, yes! Building your coaching business online is not rocket science. You need not manually sit or take help from the big giants in web development & marketing to develop every tool as per the features. 

These tools we’ve curated in this post will get you on the stage and create an awareness of your online curriculum. With these, you can ‘just start with’ however, for further enhancements, you’ll need to take professional guidance from digital agencies. 

At Small Business Web, we’re passionate about web design, development, and digital marketing. We’ve worked with various coaching clients and have ample experience handling coaching-based projects. Drop us a message or give us a call at +1 (919) 234 5140 any time. We’re here to assist you! 🙂