How To Start A Health Coaching Business, Grow Your Income And Avoid Big Mistakes

Looking to start a health coaching business, nutrition coaching business or wellness coaching business and grow in your niche?

Good news: more and more people are turning towards alternative ways of restoring their health, hence the need for health coaches has increased.

Bad news: competition has also increased, especially since a lot of people in the health coaching niche had shifted online.

This means that the wellness coaching niche is now more crowded and without a solid marketing plan, it’s hard to stand out and rise above all the noise out there.

So if you’re in a place in your life where you know now is your time to start a health coaching business and get more paid clients online, you’ll want to read this article.

I myself have been a certified health coach for 10+ years and together with my husband, we’ve assisted thousands of people toward optimal health.

After struggling with our nutrition coaching business for 5 years, we turned everything around, and using our health coaching program we took our business to $10K-$20K months online.

What’s more, we did it while travelling the world (I’ve been to 40 countries myself!) and running our business from different locations, such as Bali, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, France, and more.

So I wanted to write this article as a business coach for health coaches who want to start a health coaching business online.

Today, you’ll discover how to start your online wellness practice, how to choose a health coaching niche, design your health coaching program and … make money online to build the life you want to live!

Let’s dive into it …

How much do health coaches earn?

First, let’s address that very important and valid question: how much can you make as a health coach?

What’s a “normal” health coach salary aka how much do health coaches earn?

Well, there isn’t such a thing as a “normal” health coach salary.

I’ve been a business coach for health coaches for a number of years and my answer is: you decide how much you earn.

Statistically, most health coaches make $30,000-$40,000 annually on average.

Yet, do you want to be an average health coach?

Then, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t start a health coaching business and grow it to and beyond six figures a year.

I did it myself and have helped my clients do it too.

For example, one of my clients, health coach Karolina, generated $45,000 in 90 days after she had applied my Six Figure Coach strategies.

Another client of mine, hormone coach Katie, had gone from zero to $9,500 in revenue within just 2 months!

How to start a health coaching business

Don’t start your health coaching business by creating a website and posting pictures/videos on social media!

This is one of the worst ways to grow your coaching business online.

What you must have in place is a strategy.

A strategy is something that can help you reach bigger, long-term goals for your business.

Interested in discovering the strategy that takes health coaches to $5K-$20K+ months?

Register for my free online case study and discover the 3 steps other wellness coaches use to grow their coaching business online.

Link to register: www.yuliatarbath.com/casestudy

There are 3 main strategies you need to focus on to start a health coaching business and make money online.

The first one is your niche and message strategy.

This means having that clarity about who you want to serve, what their key problems are, and how you can communicate with them to help them discover your health coaching program.

The next one is your coaching offer. 

Your coaching program will address a specific problem for your clients and offer a transformational opportunity for them.

The third is your marketing strategy which is your plan to attract and enrol clients.

So your niche and message are how you connect with your audience, your program is how you serve your audience and your marketing plan is how you attract people into your paid health coaching program.

Let’s dive in deeper.

How to pick the right health coaching niche

Do you feel that you want to help people and build a successful health coaching business, but there’s one thing that is missing … and that is a clear niche?

You can’t build a successful coaching business without clearly defining who you talk to.

Marketing is 70% of who you talk to.

Can you imagine 70% of who you talk to is part of how successful or unsuccessful your marketing strategy is?

So when you understand the person you’re marketing to, their problems and needs – that’s the first starting point for a successful coaching business.

When you are unclear on your niche, what can happen is that you can, simply become yet another generalist health coach.

So that means that you’ll be focusing on weight loss, blood sugar-related problems, anxiety, gut issues, brain issues, skin issues, and every single health problem under the sun…

Now, what happens with that is that your message becomes too diluted. You become a generalist instead of a specialist.

It’s very hard to start a health coaching business and grow online if you start as a generalist.

This means that you will struggle to find clients and especially clients who will pay you more for your services.

This is why you need to pick a specific health coaching niche.

So let’s say that niche is weight loss, for example.

It sounds like a niche, but weight loss is still a rather generic niche.

Are you going to be helping men or women?

Women in their 20s or women who are going through menopause?

People, who are obese, or just want to lose their last stubborn 10 pounds?

People, who want to build muscle, or just get toned and be healthy?

So these are the areas that you need to get specific on as that’s how you’re going to build your magnetic message and start attracting high-paying clients.

When you become a specialist, you can start charging higher prices for the problems that you are going to be solving.

When you start solving big, urgent problems for people, you’ll have a bigger bank account!

For example, of my clients, Beata has signed up 16 new clients in just 90 days after I helped her gain clarity on her niche and marketing.

Here’s what you can do: write your niche statement by filling in the blanks:

I help _____ (people you help) overcome their ______ (specific problems they have) so that they can ___, ___, and ___ (achieve 3 main outcomes they want to experience).

Let me give you an example:

“I help driven moms overcome their hormonal and weight issues so that they can claim boundless energy, restore their hormonal issues, drop 10-50 lbs of extra weight and be present for those they love.”

Who do you help? Moms!

What do you help them do? Balance hormones and weight issues.

What will they achieve as a result of it? Boundless energy, restored hormones, and a healthy weight.

Bottom line: if you want to attract high-paying clients, start solving big problems and pick your health coaching niche accordingly!

How to build your signature, high-ticket health coaching program

Your business doesn’t exist until you have something to offer.

A well-designed signature health coaching program is there to help you build a foundation for your business.

If you’re just starting out with your health coaching business online, you absolutely need to create a program.

What’s more, with your nutrition coaching business, you need to focus on mainly ONE coaching offer that will be your signature coaching program.

Yes, that’s right – not 5 or 10 different offers, but just ONE main offer.

As a health coach, nutrition coach, fitness coach or a transformational coach, you have the power to change and transform people’s lives.

You have the skills and knowledge to help people achieve big and priceless outcomes in their lives.

There is absolutely no reason why you should not be making money online with your coaching business.

When we introduced a signature health coaching program in our business, we went from struggling to $120,000 a year in just 12 months.

One of my clients, had celebrated her first even $10,000 WEEK thank to the health coaching program that I helped her build and launch.

How to structure your health coaching program

Your health coaching program is going to be an A to Z process that your clients will go through.

Basically, if they want to achieve a specific outcome and you have a 2-3 month program to help them get there, what do they need to do each week?

So you break it into weekly milestones that your clients will need to go through and create your signature program accordingly.

You already have the knowledge.

You just need to package it the right way and follow the right steps to grow a successful program.

How to price your health coaching program

Now, I’ve sold over $750,000 worth of online coaching programs.

So if you want to start a health coaching business and make money with it, you need to price your health coaching program the right way.

The price of your coaching program should not be based upon how many training modules, worksheets, and coaching hours you provide to people.

The price of your coaching program should not be based on what other health and wellness coaches charge in your local area or even online.

And the first question you need to ask yourself is this: how much do you want to earn as a health or wellness coach?

What’s your income goal?

What’s your lifestyle goal?

Next, you need to understand how many clients it will take for you to get there.

For example, if you want to be running a $100,000, six-figure health coaching business that makes money online, you need to be generating around $9,000 per month.

If you’re going to be charging people $100 per session, it will take you 90 clients to get there!

That’s a LOT of clients and a lot of meal plans for you to create. So this is not sustainable.

Instead, a sustainable strategy is going to be charging $2,000-$4,000+ per package that will be 2-3 months long.

Yep, doesn’t even need to be 6 or 12 months long at this stage for your front-end offer.

With just 3-4 clients a month, you’re already running a six-figure coaching business.

You’re going to be posting on social media and doing work to attract clients, so why not do it in a way that attracts high-paying clients?

As long as you position yourself the right way and follow the right marketing plan, there’s no reason why you can’t attract high-paying clients.

Inside my 90-day coaching program for wellness coaches, The Coaching Breakthrough Academy, I’ve helped nearly 100 health and wellness professionals build their signature coaching program and start attracting high-paying clients, even if there were total beginners.

For example, here’s my client, IIN graduate health coach Lupita. She went from total zero to generating $7,500 in profit in just a few weeks after launching and marketing her program.

Here’s the truth about it: people CRAVE a much deeper level of support and guidance, as well as a complete blueprint that they can get inside your high-end package.

If you charge around $2K-$4K per package, it’s just a matter of signing up 3-4 clients each month to get to the level where you are generating six figures.

3-4 clients are easier to find than 50!

You can offer other options as well, but your main area of focus will be your premium package, or your high-ticket health coaching program.

When we introduced a high-ticket health coaching program, we went from $45,000 per year to $120,000 per year in just 12 MONTHS!

We actually gained more clients, instead of fewer clients. And more income and freedom too as we were able to create a team and give other people jobs.

High ticket coaching program

Charging high ticket is good for your clients!

Your clients will be a lot more committed to their health or fitness transformation.

They will take things a lot more seriously.

There’s usually very little commitment in people when they buy a $19 meal plan. It’s a small, insignificant investment.

They follow it, they don’t follow it – what’s the deal?

But when they invest and pay a higher fee, it’s different.

They show up differently. They value you as a coach and they value themselves.

Those who pay more, pay attention.

So it’s a win-win for you and your clients.

How to get paid coaching clients

If you want to grow your health coaching business and a health coaching program to get paid clients, there are certain steps you need to focus on.

Starting a health coaching business is a great opportunity for you to establish your online health coaching niche, make a big impact, and also make money online.

The problem is that if you’re a total beginner coach looking to start a health coaching business and grow it to $5K or $10K months, it can be confusing to know where to find coaching clients.

There are endless ways to start a health coaching business and unfortunately most health coaching tips you’ll find out there show you a very long and complicated way of doing so.

For example:

• You need a fancy website
• You need to offer one-on-one sessions
• You need to be on all social media platforms
• You need to do course launches.

The truth is that you don’t need any of these.

Doing more social media posting or blogging does not equal earning more income and coaching clients if you lack the right high-ticket coaching strategy and have no high-paying skills.

Your first and most important step – the step that will pay you back over and over again will be investing in your own high-paying skills.

For example, if you just post tips, tricks and recipes, it’s unlikely that you’ll have high-paying clients.

However, if you invest in your high-paying skills, and create a solid social media content marketing plan – let that be through Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or TikTok, you’ll see a huge difference.

We built a Youtube channel with over 11 million views for our health coaching business and we got endless high-paying clients from Youtube, as well as other social media platforms.

Again, make sure you know how to build your authority, you’re clear on your health coaching niche to design a magnetic message to your audience, and then connect with your audience.

Once you’ve created that connection and built your authority, you provide value to your audience and those who need your help will want to jump on a discovery call with you.

During that call, you’ll talk to people about their problems, and goals and present your program in a way that can help them solve those problems.

If you’ve got your foundation in place and your marketing message is sharp and well-structured, you’ll see people start to join your program.

Basically, your high-ticket coaching clients are everywhere and you can reach them through organic social media, paid ads, and online live events, for example.

Making income with your health or fitness coaching business

You have your 1-2 social media platforms where you post your content, build your brand, connect with your audience, and get paying clients.

As well as that, you also need to know how to have high ticket sales skills to bring in paid clients.

I call this the “OTC framework.”

It’s the framework I use to help health coaches start generating $5,000, $10,000, and more online.

‘O’ stands for your offer, we’ve already talked about it above.

‘T’ stands for traffic – choosing 1-2 social media platforms to start with and posting client-getting content, plus (optional, but effective!) running paid ads as well.

‘C’ stands for conversion. So that means using your message, communicating with the right niche and their problems, dreams, and desires in order to book more qualified calls on your calendar.

For example, you choose Facebook and Instagram where you post your content and run paid ads.

You build your Facebook group as a conversion mechanism.

You bring people into it, nurture them and start booking calls from your group.

Or, you build a Youtube channel.

You post specific content that will talk to your ideal clients and make them want to take action.

You optimize your Youtube channel for growth.

You build a webinar and direct traffic to it from Youtube.

You start to grow your audience using the right Youtube framework and then build your funnel and book calls from it.

We’ve used this framework ourselves to make hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So you have high-paying skills (mindset, marketing, sales), you know how to sell your offer and you enrol clients.

If you book just 10-15 calls a month, you can already be hitting $5,000-$15,000 months.

One of the clients I’ve helped, dating coach Connell, wanted to get better at sales.

After applying my Call-To-Enrol framework he generated $47,000 in just 30 days!

Making money as a health coach: bottom line

If you’re looking to build a health coaching business, the best time to do it was 5 years ago.

The second best time is NOW.

The online space will only get more and more crowded with time, so you need to have a solid plan to stand out from the crowd and make a great living as a health coach.

There are lots of things that you can miss that can make or break your success.

This is why it’s so critical to have a step-by-step blueprint and a proven strategy that works in the wellness niche.

When you address all the aspects required to succeed, everything comes together and clicks into place.

This framework has worked for many health and wellness coaches and got them clients and results.

Can this model work for your business? Can your wellness coaching niche result in high-paying clients?

Here’s what I propose…let’s get on the phone for a quick 15-minute Wellness Business Audit Call.

We’ll be able to look at:

• Your niche and your offer
• Your desired income level and if you can get there with your offer
• What it will take to grow your health coaching business to a successful level

On that call, we’ll help you figure out if my OCT blueprint can get you where you want to go.

Get on the calendar here.

And if you’ve tried other programs or workshops or coaches in the past, and it hasn’t worked…well, we’ll be able to help you discover why it didn’t work and what to do instead.

And more importantly, what you need to do differently to start attracting more coaching clients and growing online.

Book your call here.