Are you looking for flexible ways to
generate
sustainable income? Does the idea of positively impacting
people and helping them succeed interest you? If
you have a passion for
working with students and making them expand their scholastic potential,
online
coaching is an ideal business for you.
To deliver with
agility is an art
that you must master in order to gain a leading edge in the digital
world. When we
particularly talk about online coaching, delivering the
best is no more limited to imparting quality
education alone, the mode
of delivery and the platform you choose to connect with students
influence the
overall coaching experience.
In this blog post, I will help
you
gain insights into the essential factors to consider before launching a
successful online coaching
business.
Why Should You Choose Online Coaching and
Mentoring Business
As most of the
coaches are drifting
towards online models to significantly expand their target market,
choosing an
online coaching business has become a necessity nowadays. It
enables you to seamlessly connect and provide
coaching to students
worldwide even during the pandemic.
eCoaching is an excellent business
model that enables you to register coaches and provide online
coaching
classes to thousands of students as opposed to a limited few in case of
traditional coaching
sessions. Plus, there are no time constraints as
students can select coaching sessions as per their
availability.
"Going
digital surely pay dividends to keep the business afloat & generate
revenue
by offering coaching sessions to multiple students online."
Business Model
An online coaching marketplace connects
students with potential coaches in a 1-on-1 live session. Amid the
pandemic as most
schools and educational institutes are shut, the
eCoaching platform is the perfect setup to simulate a
real-life learning
environment. The marketplace offers detailed information like coaching
expertise,
ratings & reviews, and more to help students find the
right coach.
The working model for the eCoaching business is pretty simple and similar to an
eLearning platform.
- The student will sign-up on
the platform.
- Create a learner account.
- Search from the listed coaching experts and send a session booking
request.
- Make a payment.
- Receive a booking confirmation.
Coaches follow a similar process with sign-up or registration
- Coach profile creation.
- Profile is listed post admin approval.
- Receive a session booking request.
- Accept
or reject the request as per the availability.
The online coaching session starts at a specified time agreed by both parties (i.e. student and
coach).
P.S. The admin receives payment before
the
coaching session begins but transfers it to the coach's wallet once
the session is successfully completed
and after deducting the commission
fee.
Revenue Model
No business can survive without a
revenue generation channel and the eCoaching
platform is no different.
Below we've curated the most lucrative sources of revenue for online
coaching
business:
Booking a coaching session is the
foremost revenue
channel for the eCoaching marketplace. Once students
make payment for the desired coaching session, the
transaction fee minus
the admin commission goes to the selected coach after the session is
successfully
delivered.
-
Commission fee per booking
As students make a payment for
booking a coaching
session, a nominal commission fee is charged. This
commission fee is a direct revenue source for the
marketplace admin and
is decided by the admin beforehand.
-
On-site promotion for tutors
With homepage banner, premium
listings, and additional
spaces for running a PPC campaign, on-site
promotion for tutors is another prominent yet lucrative revenue
channel
for the marketplace. Tutors looking for more students to coach and earn
would likely invest to
improve their visibility.
Students can avail access to classes
on the marketplace
with a monthly subscription plan. The fee for
different subscription packages and how to distribute earned
money among
tutors is decided by the admin beforehand.
Essential Features for Every Online Coaching and Mentoring
Platform
To revolutionize the
coaching
experience and effectively streamline your mentoring practices, raising
the pre-defined
standards of teaching is essential. Here are some of the
features that can make your online coaching
platform more accessible
and trusted among the users:
By empowering users (teachers
or learners) to set their country as well as time zones
manually, every
user gets notified for any lectures scheduled by other users in a
different time zone. It
simplifies the process of class schedule on your
online coaching platform.
By showcasing the
content in
multiple languages on your online coaching platform, you can empower
students to easily
achieve their learning objectives. Additionally, a
filter can be included to list teachers based on the
language they may
communicate in with the student.
If there are paid courses available on your
online coaching
platform, you need to provide a convenient method that
enables the students to pay for those specific courses.
The online coaching portal you choose to
launch your website
must be integrated with an advanced tool such as
CometChat that enables live video chat sessions between the
teacher and
students.
Using workspace, the teachers can easily
upload files related to
the course and the students are given access to
download those files from the Workspace.
A whiteboard allows the users to effectively
edit documents,
save revisions, export files, and more. The whiteboard
feature brings ease for the teachers and students to keep
records and
make notes during online sessions.
This feature enables the teacher and
the student to
seamlessly communicate with each other through text chat
during the online lecture. Adding components like
text messages
interchange, emoticons, special characters, and more is a great idea.
Apart from these, there are a few
essential features specific to learners and
professionals/coaches. The
most notable features for e-learners include - coach listing page (with
information like price range and lessons delivered), free trial session,
lesson rescheduling, and more.
Also, for e-coaches, the most notable
features are - availability calendar, price setting (like lesson price
or personal student price), teaching tutorials, and more.
Factors to Consider While Launching an Online Coaching Platform
The success of a bespoke online
coaching business is
based on the learning experience it offers. To
provide an effective and real-life coaching environment
online, it's
important to choose a reliable platform that can host different content
formats for
addressing the different learning styles of your students.
Using a learning platform involving various
content & learning
modules, communication modules, and evaluation modules can play a
pivotal role in
creating a high level of interaction that students
need.
-
Key Attractions For Learners
In order to make your online coaching
platform succeed,
it's necessary to understand the pains, desires, and
troubles of the students you wish to cater to. As
coaching markets are
expanding at an annual rate of 7%, delivering a result that matters to
the students
you serve is extremely crucial. By searching for user
reviews and analyzing their conversations on social
media platforms, it
becomes easy to offer irresistible solutions to them.
-
Additional Features For Tutors
As the online coaching platform
empowers the tutors to
conduct classes online, it relieves them from the
real-life hassles of physical classroom teaching. By
providing tutors
with additional features like teaching profile updates, availability
calendar, and
price setting for lessons, it becomes easy to handle a
large number of students effectively. This further
saves time and effort
of the tutors thereby uplifting their productivity.
Strategies To Scale Your Online Coaching Business
As your online coaching business
grows, it becomes difficult to keep
up with the users' (learners or
teachers) demands and expectations. To plan for the future is crucial
for the exponential growth of your business and that's where the scope
of scaling comes up. Being an
effective way to strategically manage the
growth of your online coaching business, scaling can prevent you
from
unsatisfied and unhappy customers. Here's how you should scale your
online business:
Since coaches cover the same topic
over and over again,
their energy levels keep dropping after every few
sessions. Group coaching is a prominent feature that
retains the energy
level by allowing professionals to coach multiple people at once.
Moreover, it
enables participants to create a deeper connection between
themselves forming a community.
-
Build a membership community
Building a membership community can
be an excellent
strategy to scale an online coaching business. But be
extra careful when approaching this strategy or you
may end up managing
more people at less price. For instance, instead of starting a community
with a
membership price as low as $20-$30/month, build a higher-value
membership community at $50-$100/month. This
way you can easily assign
group coaching calls or delegate more tasks to community members,
potentially
scaling your eCoaching business.
-
Introduce video lessons or worksheets that are easily accessible
Since coaches' availability depends
upon time zone and
other key factors, they fail to attract students with
time zone differences and other constraints. Such
restrictions can
potentially weigh down a coaching marketplace from steady growth.
Consider introducing
video lessons, worksheets, and other materials from
coaches that the students can easily access anytime and
from any
device. This is a splendid option that enables coaches to impact more
people within the same
platform and scale their revenue source.
-
Create a unique talk page for
coaches to post videos
The coaching niche empowers a
professional to bring
unique perspectives to the audience. To enable
coaches to share their individual perspectives, create a
unique talk or
speaking page on a platform. This would allow event
organizers/organizations to directly
contact and reach out to potential
speakers through the platform, generating revenue for the
marketplace.
-
Create value-based learning packages
Determining the right price for
coaching services can be
a bit challenging in the marketplace. Instead
of just charging hourly rates for each coaching session,
introduce new
coaching packages that are based upon value-based learning. For
instance, allow coaches to
list more value-added services for a higher
pricing strategy. This is a predominant method to scale revenue
over
time.
Conclusion
The online coaching business is a
striving and thriving business venture
with numerous revenue channels
and scaling options. As students/learners look for ways to connect with a
professional coach online amid shutdowns, starting an eCoaching
business can be a great business idea to
invest.