No matter how big or small your health coaching business may be, building your online presence is an absolutely essential marketing endeavor.
A clever way to help you stand out amongst the rest is to create a professional health coaching business website as it:
- Provides accessibility to existing and new clients
- Builds your credibility in the health and wellness industry
- Helps develop your health coaching brand
There are loads of online tools and resources that make building you own website an option of everyone, no matter your level of experience and technical know-how.
Here we outline how to build your very own health coaching business website in 5 simple steps with links to online resources to help you along the way.
1. Get a Domain Name
Your first step toward creating your health coaching website is to get a domain name, or in other words, the address of your website.
For example, the domain name for Primal Health Coach is www.primalhealthcoach.com.
A domain name is unique to your website and cannot be shared between multiple sites. Your domain name can be any combination of letters, as long as it isn’t already being linked to another website.
A great place to start when determining what your domain name should be is to consider the name of your health coaching business. Many health coach domain names match their health coaching business names or are derivatives of them.
Website builders such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Weebly offer free subdomains, which is great if you’re just starting out and you don’t want to fork out any money.
However, if you’re looking to build a long-term health coaching business, using a freely available subdomain may not be your best option, as you don’t actually own the domain name, your service provider does. This means that if you ever choose to change website builder, your subdomain name will not come with you.
Another disadvantage of using a subdomain name is that your website builder will include their extension at the end of the domain name.
For example:
- healthcoachexample.wordpress.com
- healthcoachexample.squarespace.com
- healthcoachexample.weebly.com
Rather than:
- healthcoachexample.com
Having your website provider’s extension isn’t conducive to developing your unique health coaching brand, so it’s worth spending a little money to buy a domain name.
To check the availability of a domain name, search for it at Instant Domain Search.
Domain names can be purchased through either a domain name registrar or a website builder like Squarespace or Weebly.
Two of the most popular domain name providers are GoDaddy and NameCheap.
Domain name registration usually needs to be renewed every 12 months, so be sure to set a calendar reminder to renew your domain name registration before it lapses or set it to auto-renew. If you don’t renew in time, your domain name may be purchased by someone else!
2. Get a Personalized Business Email Address
Having a customized business email address looks more professional than handing out your Gmail or Hotmail address to clients.
Having a business email address means that you don’t have Gmail or Hotmail at the end of the address.
For example: example@healthcoachexample.com
G Suite by Google offers a user-friendly business email account with a business address and is very simple to set up.
If you’re someone that likes to have all your emails in the same inbox, you can set up your Gmail account to send and receive emails using your business domain name.
You can even create separate email addresses for the different aspects of your health coaching business within the same domain. This will help you prioritize and organize your inbox.
For example:
- enquiries@healthcoachexample.com
- helpdesk@healthcoachexample.com
- support@heathcoachexample.com
- feedback@healthcoachexample.com
3. Choose a Website Builder
Choosing the right website builder to suit your needs and website building skill level is essential to the success of your health coaching business website.
WordPress is the most widely used website builder. In fact, it’s estimated that over 25% of all websites are built on WordPress. It has an awesome blogging interface and is highly customizable, so you can really give your website its individual style. WordPress has a freely available basic website option, or you can upgrade to the paid website option, which opens up many more features including your own custom domain name.
People of all experience levels can use WordPress. However, you will need to invest time into learning how to navigate the system, but this is definitely worth the investment.
If WordPress seems a little intimidating, but you’re still confident in your abilities to set up your own website without outsourcing or delegating, then you’ll be pleased to know that there are some more beginner friendly website builders, such as Weebly, Squarespace and Wix that will give your website a professional feel.
Weebly, Squarespace and Wix all use a very similar drag and drop interface with lots of cool pre-designed layouts to choose from, so there’s no need to start from scratch.
Most of these website builders offer free options or a free-trial period so it’s a good idea to test out a couple of these website builders to see which is best for you, based on your website building experience, your content and the look and feel of your health coaching website.
4. Choose a Website Template Design
The look and feel of your website is essential to attracting clients, so it’s critical that you choose the right website template (aka website theme).
Website builders have hundreds of template designs for you to chose from, but how do you know which template is the right fit for you?
To answer this, you must identify the goal of your website. It may be to store content in the form of a blog, to provide information about your health coaching programs, or it may be to share delicious primal recipes. Once you have identified what you want your visitors to do, it’s now time to choose a website template and here are four handy tips to help you out.
1. Select a template with appropriate features. There’s no need to choose a template that has all the bells and whistles if you have no intention of using them. For example, don’t choose a template with a large video on the homepage, if you don’t want a video.
2. Choose a layout that fits your needs. For example, if you want to create a recipe inventory, then select a template that allows for multiple pages with text and images.
3. Choose a health-based template design. Industry-specific templates are designed to appeal to a specific target audience, so check out the health- and fitness-based template designs, as you may find exactly what you’re looking for.
4. Pick a suitable color scheme. If the template you choose doesn’t allow you to change the color scheme, then make sure the colors match your logo and your health coaching business brand.
5. Generate Content
This is where the fun begins. It’s time to turn your vision into something real.
Having attractive images on your website is very important to creating your online health coaching brand. If you’re looking for high-quality, free-to-download stock images check out Pexels or Pixabay, or if you have some extra to spend on stock images, head to Adobe Stock, iStockPhoto, or BigStock.
If you’re going to create blog posts, it’s important to post regularly, whether it is weekly, fortnightly or monthly, the most import thing is to be consistent. When writing blog posts, keep your audience and their problems in mind. If you provide solutions to their problems, and if you do it in a way that’s more comprehensive and more engaging than others, your content will be well on its way to attracting readers to your site and clients to your health coaching business.
To recap, in this post we’ve summarized how to create your very own health coaching business website in 5 simple steps:
- Get a domain name
- Get a personalized business email address
- Choose a website builder
- Choose a website template design
- Generate content
Now it’s time to start creating your own health coaching website!
