Why join the Lifecoach.com International Coaching Directory?

Summary of Benefits:

1. Location.
Lifecoach.com is a great domain name that gets thousands of hits from people looking for coaching each month and an average of 100 actual visitors daily.

2. License to use the lifecoach.com domain name in your own marketing materials. Reserve your name before it is taken! Obviously, there is only one per customer. When you register to be listed in the Lifecoach.com International Directory of Coaches you will automatically receive your personalized lifecoach.com email address ( Eg. john.smith@lifecoach.com. We will provide an email forwarding service for you. In other words, your current email address is johnsmith@aol.com . You keep that, but can now use johnsmith@lifecoach.com on your business cards, etc. This is easier to remember and associates you with other qualified and highly trained and credentialed coaches. In the next few years, if you aren’t a registered lifecoach, people will wonder why not. Reserve your name now by registering. It’s first come, first reserved!

3. The most fun and public-oriented coaching directory in the world! Compare us with the competition below and you will know that this is the best place to list yourself as a coach in the world. We already get as many visitors (thanks to the lifecoach.com domain name) as the ICF.
 
4. Exclusive listing service. Lifecoach.com only allows highly trained and qualified coaches to register as a coach. You must have been trained or be in training at one of the ICF Accredited Coach Training Programs. There are so many coach training programs out there, we require that you received coach training from the most rigorous in the industry.


Top Ten Reasons to Become a Member Coach:

1. LOCATION: Lifecoach.com. You’ve heard it in real-estate, “Location, Location, Location.” You can have the most beautiful, magnificent website in the world and it will do absolutely nothing for your business if no one can find it. At the very least, you need to be linked to a site that gets traffic. The currency of the web is how many actual visitors your site gets. Hits don't mean much if no one actually goes to your site to take a peek. A website without traffic is like a billboard in the Sahara desert. Lifecoach.com currently averages 100-140 visitors each day. (click to see a stats page). And these are people looking for coaches. Compare these statistics to the ICF, currently the largest listing service which gets 120 visitors a day. How many of these visitors are coaches coming to find out about the next conference or update their coach listing? The ICF doesn’t specify, but I’d guess that most of their visitors are other coaches as it isn’t likely that someone would know to type in coachfederation.org when looking for a coach.

2. Lifecoach.com License. Another key advantage is the domain name lifecoach.com in itself and the license to use it as your own email address and on your marketing materials/biz cards, etc. This means that when you register you will receive your name@lifecoach.com and can use it as your public email address if you desire. Or, you may prefer to use the coaching directory service without the email address. Either way, lifecoach.com is the online “yellowpage” address. Lifecoach is the generic term for personal, professsional and business coaches and already receives huge marketing  from Oprah’s "O" magazine (writer, Martha Beck, calls herself a lifecoach) and from Real Simple magazine –a monthly article called Lifecoach. These major publications keep the term, lifecoach in the public eye on a regular basis. Starting Over, a new NBC show is featuring two life coaches coaching a house of women. This increases the exposure for lifecoach.com. Even Tony Robbins calls himself a lifecoach. Lifecoach.com gets 3,000 searches a month so the exposure is already there and we will engage in additional advertising as well. The more coaches who join and use the domain, the more the exposure will increase for the site. So, by virtue of the domain name already, you are already ahead of all the competitive coaching directories. Before you list yourself with any directory service, you should first ask the question, “How will people looking for a coach find this site?” This is where 24-7coaching.com has a problem. No one in the world will think to type in 24-7coaching. Unless they do a huge marketing campaign world-wide, they are not going to get hits on their site and no one will find you other than the other coaches already listed there.

3. Benefit of association with the excellent reputation and public profile of Talane Miedaner, the website’s host. Talane is a respected, Master Certified Coach, and international best-selling author of Coach Yourself to Success. The book advertises the lifecoach.com domain name in the back.

4. Fun, interactive, risk-free experience of coaching for prospective clients. The Lifecoach.com International Coaching Directory is geared toward the public first, coaches second. Lifecoach.com is committed to providing a fun, risk-free environment where prospective clients can get an experience of coaching. If you want people to get experience of you as a coach, you first need to provide a fun and exciting context for that to occur. Which is why Lifecoach.com offers the public:

• Excellent content and free advice on finding a coach
• Free quizzes
• Free gift cards to send to clients and friends
• Free newsletters and coaching tips
• Free Monthly Book Club Telephone discussions
• Free “Ask the Coach” Column
• Free 20-30 minute sample coaching sessions from our life coaches 
• Free online coaching from Lifecoach.com coaches

Our goal is to provide the public with a risk-free way to experience coaching. We want to get people interacting and feeling comfortable about hiring a coach. Lifecoach.com also offers free gifts that will keep them coming back to the site again and again.

The coaches have their own “back door” behind the scenes [coaches login on the upper right hand corner]. It is all about taking care of the public looking for coaching. Anyone who types in lifecoach.com is looking for some coaching in their lives. Unlike many other coaching directories, Lifecoach.com will not bombard the public with reasons why they should list themselves as a coach. This is completely irrelevant to them. The newsletter content will initially be provided by Talane, who already has over 6000 subscribers on her free Tip of the Week. 
 
5. Lifecoach.com offers you live exposure to potential coaching clients. Once you have registered, any time you are at the office ready to receive emails from prospective clients you can come to the lifecoach.com website and login that you are actively Online. This means that prospective clients will know you are ready to provide them with some online coaching to their issues or questions. Get exposure to prospective clients by making yourself available for free online coaching. Some clients may be reluctant to pick up the phone and call you, but they might feel comfortable sending a quick email query to coaches online. This will give you an opportunity to chat with a client online and see if a sample coaching session would be a good idea.

6. Lifecoach.com helps to educate the public as to what the different coaching credentials mean. I get inquiries all the time from people desperately trying to figure out how to find a trained and qualified coach. Lifecoach.com is the answer to this problem—an international coaching directory exclusively for coaches committed to professional coach training and development and who agree to uphold the highest standards and ethics of the profession.

7. Exclusive listing. ONLY certified, trained coaches or coaches in ICF accredited coach training programs will be allowed in this coaching directory service. These credentials will be differentiated in the Advanced Search questionnaire so customers can select the level of certification and training they desire. Coaches in training will receive a first year discount to join the Lifecoach.com International Coaching Directory as most new coaches make less than $10,000 their first year. (Keep your day job!)

8. Create and manage your own coach listing and make as many changes as you want free of maintenance charges. At any time you can go to the coaches login area and update your coach referral listing without incurring maintenance charges or fees. 

9.  Free link to your existing website.

10. Standards/Ethics: All coaches will agree to uphold the ICF coaching ethics and will be removed from the site without refund if they are found violating any of these standards. We reserve the right to do this up front. It is very important to uphold the integrity and standards of the coaching profession. Any coach who is found to be making untruthful claims about their training and experience will be removed from the site immediately without refund. We will do random verification checks to ensure the integrity and quality of the site. No other site does any sort of verification whatsoever. This is a huge advantage to the public and to you, the coach as it raises your prestige.

COMPARING THE COMPETITION: 
It used to be that the only place you could list your services online was the ICF’s coach referral service. Today coaches have a number of options. Before designing this site, I did a little comparative study to see what choices were available and here is what I found:

www.FindaCoach.com – Coachinc.com Sandy Vilas’s site. Pretty good name. $385 a year fee includes standardized listing and access to coachinc/email address. Limited to CoachInc trained coaches. Marketed, at least initially, to the public. Professional site, but search engine almost too sophisticated. No live exposure to coaches. Exclusively for Coach U or Corporate Coach U (CCUI) coaches.

www.247coaching.com – Aggressive marketeers in the coaching community, but how do they market to the public? Site geared primarily for coaches, not public resource. Seems to be another Coachville strategy with phoneclasses. How are they marketing to the world? Cost $299 one time fee with $199 occasional specials. Can advertise phoneclasses for free and use telephone bridge for free. They make their money on referral fees as they only recommend Coach Inc. Training for wannabee coaches. No standards or criteria so anyone can join.

ICF—www.coachfederation.org – The International Coach Federation’s non-profit site geared toward coaches. Basic membership is $150 plus referral listing is $150 so total fee is $305 a year. Benefit: Request for Proposal’s (RFP’s). Non-profit, but strangely enough not exclusive to ICF accredited coaches. This shocked me because I have always assumed (and I think everyone else had as well) that only properly trained coaches could become ICF members and be listed in their directory. Not so. Anyone can become a member and get into their coaching directory. They do not do any checking of credentials for coaches whatsoever. This is bizarre as it is the ICF that claims to be the upholder of coaching standards/ethics world-wide, but anyone can be listed on their coach referral service. You don't even have to be a coach. You can be a web designer, a therapist, a consultant, a nutritionist, you name it. Other benefits, you can use the bridge line for free for limited times. Standardized web format with brief space to write and can ad photo. $305 a year. No access to email address.

www.Coachingstudio.com – Somehow they secured the top listing for lifecoach on google and for coaching and for lifecoaching. Unattractive cheap-looking website. Who is this guy? Again, geared toward coaches. Benefits: can have as many web pages as you want. No credentials required so anyone can list themselves. Cost: $64.95/year £39.95/year. You are clearly paying for their number one listing. Also, it is very odd that the founder pops up every time you do a search for a coach.

www.Coachville.com – Site geared toward coaches/coach training programs/phoneclasses, massive free downloadable audio library. Coaching certification offered, but Coachville is not yet accredited with the ICF. Referral site –again. How will public know to look there? Site can be overwhelming. Listing service –standard format, photo, no credentials to list, free listing. Sites are approved for content. It’s free so, although I personally wouldn’t select a coach there, why not list yourself there as well?

Sign up to be a registered Lifecoach.com Coach and start getting exposure to 120 visitors a day!