In today’s guest post Michele Christensen shares some of her experience and knowledge to focus upon the subject of building a coaching business.

How to measure if your business building efforts are working

by Michele Christensen

As the owner of a coaching business, you do a lot to build your business. There are many ways to bring in new clients and customers and new ways pop up all the time. It’s easy to fall into the trap of doing more and more, and to continue to add new business building tactics until it becomes too much to manage.

The key to building your business without overwhelm is to focus on what works best for you. What will work best depends on your talents and temperament as well as your target market. Some people have found huge success on Facebook, others speak on live stages. Blogging brings great results for some, one-on-one sales calls work well for others.

So how do you figure out what works best for you? The only answer is to measure your results. It helps to start with a sound idea that has a good chance of working in your situation, but the only way to know for sure how well something works is to measure the results.

Before you implement any new idea, it’s critical that you know why you are doing this new thing and what you hope to accomplish by doing it. For example, you might be using Pinterest with the goal of generating traffic to your website. The general goals would be to have more people visit your site in a given period such as a month after you begin using Pinterest, and you will also want to see specific numbers of people visiting your site from Pinterest.

At this point, it’s important to note that when measuring results you might set specific goals such as 100 unique visitors from Pinterest, or you might set general goals such as “get traffic from Pinterest.” You may also start with a general goal of “more traffic” and then try to improve it month over month and hit specific numbers. Both general goals of “more” and specific numeric goals work, and the key thing is that you have a goal.

Once you’ve set a goal for your new idea, figure out how you will gather the data you need to measure your results. If it’s a traffic goal, you might need to install traffic analyzing software such as Google Analytics. If it’s a certain number of clicks, you can use a link shortening service such as bit.ly to tell you exactly how many people clicked on a specific link. If it’s teleseminar signups, you’ll want to capture those so they can be counted. Once you know what you need to measure (traffic, clicks, signups, etc) it will be much easier to find the tool you need than if you are grasping at straws.

Next, begin tracking your results. Compare them over time as you make changes and see if you can improve. What happens if you do the same thing for 3 months? If you double your efforts, do you double your results? Is it worth the time you put in?

If you already measure your results, great! If not, get started today. Pick one thing you already do that you don’t track the outcomes for and start measuring. It’s the only way to know for sure what is working and the only way to make sure you are spending your time in the right place.

About Michele Christensen

Michele Christensen is a business coach and mentor for solopreneurs. She teaches people how to have a profitable, sustainable one-person business they can run from home without overwhelm or working 24/7. For more information and free resources, find her online at michelechristensen.com, or on the social sites.