One of the biggest challenges almost all coaches face is getting leads – high quality contacts of people who are interested in improving their life, relationships, or career.

First, an important distinction:

Building a mailing list is not the same as getting coaching leads. I know many people with mailing lists who are not making enough to pay their bills!

Getting coaching leads means building a database of people who expressed interest in your type of coaching.

There are five sure ways to attract high quality coaching leads, and I will reveal them to you today.

These five lead generating strategies have worked for me and thousands of other coaches and entrepreneurs extremely well.

Here they are:

1. Web site It has to be a mini-site whose only purpose is to get your visitors to opt-in to a free e-course, an audio course, or a toolkit. You may even have several mini-sites to have multiple points of entry into your “funnel.”

2. E-Course/Newsletter Each segment in your e-course or newsletter must bring your readers closer to becoming your client. It must be relevant, useful, personal and calling them to action.

3. Articles In my experience writing a handful of high quality articles and submitting them to as many targeted places as possible is much more effective than writing many articles of lower quality. Every article must help solve a problem and invite readers to take the next step with you (request your e-course, buy a CD, enroll into a program, etc.)

4. Teleseminars Don’t want to have just 4 people on your teleseminar? Use the first three strategies to build up your database of leads, then announce a teleseminar to them on a highly relevant topic. You may even re-purpose one of your articles by turning it into a teleseminar. Also, keep in mind that the goal of every teleseminar is to enroll coaching clients into a program. This means that you should have your program concept ready before holding your teleseminar.

5. Joint Ventures I left this one for last, but it’s certainly not the least! In fact, if you use joint ventures and nothing else in your business, you’ll generate more coaching leads than you’ve ever wanted. The key is in partnering with people who have large databases and who need what you have to offer – your expertise and ability to coach.

Are you ready to boost your coaching leads?

Quick action-plan for you:

- create an e-course that coaches people – create a mini-site that gives away an e-course – write a high quality comprehensive article – invite your article readers to request your e-course – submit your article to highly targeted publications – when your list of targeted leads reaches 500, hold a teleseminar and enroll participants into your coaching program.

Hope you find it helpful to jump start your coaching business.