How Having A Blogging Coach Changed My Life

This guest post is by Peter Sinclair of http://www.motivationalmemo.com.

I have been in business for well over 25 years. I in fact owned my first business at the age of 18. Though for many of those years I never, ever thought about the importance of having a mentor or a coach.

My dad was not a businessman. My granddad was not a businessman. So I simply had to learn everything from scratch in the wonderful University of Success, otherwise known as the Academy of Failure.

So it was a couple of years into owning a web design business that I thought about franchising. I suddenly realized that I needed up-skilling fast, and so I hired a business coach.

I hired him for twelve months. We had a sort of love/hate relationship. I hated the fact that he would ask me tough questions that only a coach could ever dare to ask—questions that I had for many years avoided asking myself. But I loved the results, because the very next year we doubled our income.

But after seven years and three months of running that successful business, I decided that my passions lay elsewhere, and that I needed to explore them with a greater level of concentrated effort and focus.

So I sold my web design clients, and as of December last year I started on my exciting journey of turning an existing blog, that I had been writing just for the fun of it for a number of years, into a business—once and for all turning my passion into profit and becoming pre-eminent in my “personal development” niche.

I immediately started looking for a blogging coach online. I also listened to my colleagues who were familiar with people in the industry with that title.

Why did I look for a blogging coach?

Well if a coach had helped me transform my web design business, it made complete common sense to me that the same would happen in the blogging industry.

What is a blogging coach?

It’s simply someone who has made a lot of money through blogging.

Generally they have courses that run concurrently with their main blog, and are designed to help other bloggers make money (no matter what niche you’re in) by teaching the same principles that brought them their success.

My concept of a coach in any field is simple. Do what they say. Be what they are. And make what they make.

No matter how successful one has been in another field, he must become a student in the field of blogging if he wants to become a successful blogger.

Where can you find a blogging coach?

Google is a great place to start. I ended up finding three that caught my attention: Leo Babauta, Darren Rowse, and Yaro Starak.

Now each was commendable with what they had to offer. But as an Australian I decided I wanted to be trained by an Australian (no offence to the Americans—many of your countrymen have taught me a lot about internet marketing and real estate). Now I knew that Darren was probably more experienced than Yaro, but Yaro’s writing style and video presentations really connected with me.

And what topped it when I was making my final decision, was an email I received from Yaro offering his course, which was normally anything up to $97 per month, for one payment of less than $300.

I snapped it up and found out that from that one email Yaro sold 100 subscriptions before New Year’s Day. That was a whopping $30,000 from one email. And that was just about what I had spent on a year’s coaching when I owned my web design business.

How does blog coaching work?

Well it was vastly different to my coaching sessions for my web design business, where we had met weekly for an hour in a coffee shop for an entire year.

Once I paid my money, Yaro simply sent me an email by autoresponder containing my username and password, and I now had complete access to all the videos, audios, written PDF tutorials, and action sheets that made up the course. This course contained six training modules with four lessons per module.

In addition to that, I was invited to attend monthly Skype sessions where I, along with people from all around the world, could ask Yaro questions directly. I really enjoy these. Yaro can look at our individual blogs and give immediate feedback and suggestions to improve them.

What does my blogging coach do?

Well, he obviously put an online course together. The one I was taking had been created a couple of years before I ever saw it.

That’s enough to inspire a future blogger. Do the work once, do it well, and then put it on auto-kerchink-pilot.

But the great thing is that Yaro has responded personally to my emails whenever I needed some one-on-one advice.

What’s changed as a result of having a blogging coach?

• After five months I have developed a substantial separate database in addition to my regular RSS feed from my main blog. I publish three articles a week on Monday Wednesday and Friday on my blog which frees me to do other writing, like this article, on other days for other blogs.
• I am now preparing to send out a survey containing five questions that will give me all the vital information that I need to create my new mentoring program. If all goes according to the plan that Yaro has presented to me, I will launch my paid program within a short period of time and start making monthly income.
• I have been published by many major blogs in my niche and was even picked up by The New York Times because of this. I am gaining pre-eminence in my niche little by little.
• I have opened an AWeber account and use it regularly to send out my weekly newsletter. Clickbank is soon to follow.
• I interview people in my industry and associated industries via Skype or email, and by being associated with people even more successful than myself I am gaining further pre-eminence.
• I have continued to develop relationships with other bloggers in my niche—and many of these will be my main affiliates once I launch my mentoring program. I am firmly convinced that I have laid strong foundations, built upon the experience of my blogging coach, that will ensure financial success through blogging.
• Every post that I write gets posted on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and my team and I are constantly testing and measuring other social media outlets in order to get the word out to an ever-increasing audience.
• I have always had a team around me in business. Even though I owned a web design company I still don’t know how to create a website. So my main web designer has become my right-hand man for all things design and technical. But the cool thing is that although he is still my employee, we have entered into a joint venture with another blog project that he has created while he has been working on mine. Now that’s cool. My plan for him is that he earns more money in the very near future from this blog than I currently pay him.

Oh and by the way, now that I am pursuing my passion through blogging, I’m having a ball. Life is fun. So in that sense alone, my blogging coach has changed my life. Thanks Yaro!

To become a leader, follow in the footsteps of another leader. Have you found this to be good advice in your blogging journey?

Peter G. James Sinclair is in the ‘heart to heart’ resuscitation business and inspires, motivates and equips others to be all that they’ve been created to become. Receive your free copy of his latest ebook Discovering The You In Unique at http://www.motivationalmemo.com and add him on Twitter @PeterGJSinclair today!