Health Story

Simple website mistakes can cost you potential clients, lost revenue, frustration by the bucket load, and jeopardize the success of your coaching business.

It takes time to establish a successful coaching business, so make sure you give your business the best chance of success by getting your coaching website right the first time. Your website is one of your most important marketing tools, if you avoid these common mistakes when you create your coaching website, you will be way ahead of the competition.

Lack Of Focus

Your goals for your coaching website need to be clear, detailed and time-specific. They need to be like a road map, helping you to make good decisions and get closer and closer to a successful coaching business. If your website goals are fuzzy you’ll struggle to put all the pieces together and build a site that attracts your ideal clients to you.

Trying To Appeal To Everyone

You website needs to be aimed at a specific target market with a specific problem. There are a lot of coaches out there, you need to stand out from you competitors and have a clear message. It’s not enough to tell your visitors that you’re a coach and can help them solve their problems and be successful. You need to demonstrate that you understand your visitor’s pain and have a solution, and you need to do that in the first few seconds or your visitor will click away.

If your website is targeted towards a specific target market with a specific problem – such as first time mums, aged 25 to 35, who are working and overwhelmed with the responsibility of being a mum, wife and breadwinner you will find it much easier to grab their attention and offer a solution.

Talking about you and about coaching rather than your visitor and the solution to their problem

Your visitors don’t buy coaching, they buy solutions to problems. Your website needs to demonstrate that you understand their problem and have the solution. That’s what your visitors are looking for and that’s what they will buy.

Not having enough keyword rich content

Many coaching websites don’t have enough content. Your website needs to demonstrate that you are an expert and that you have solutions that will produce results. You need to prove to your visitors that you can help them, so provide keyword rich content that builds credibility, helps you to connect on a deep level and encourages potential clients to take action.

Not knowing your most wanted response and not having a clear call to action

Your website needs to lead your visitors to take action that will help them to solve their problem. If you don’t have a clear sense of what you want your visitors to do, they won’t know what to do and are likely to click away and never return. Your website needs to encourage your visitor to take action and leave them in no doubt about what they need to do and how to do it.

Guessing at the keywords potential clients will use to find your site

If you target the wrong keywords you will wait for months and still not get search engine traffic to your site. You need to research the keywords clients use to search for what you offer and focus your content around those keywords. Only then will your site have any chance of being listed on the first page of Google.

Why does your site need to be on the first page of Google? Because 90% of searchers don’t bother to look beyond the first page of search results! If your website isn’t on the first page of search results it will be virtually invisible to the people you want to find it.

If you are making the mistake of focusing your coaching website around keywords that hardly anyone is searching for and know you need to do keyword research but hate the idea or don’t know how, you could pay someone to do keyword research for you, or you could buy already researched keyword lists.

Whatever you do, don’t guess at the keyword phrases your potential clients will use to search for what you have to offer.

Panic serves a purpose as the body’s physiological system of self-protection during a threatening, stressful or dangerous situation. For some people this natural alarm system becomes unbalanced through mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), or a general phobia. In those cases, the patient’s life may become significantly restricted by their fears and both quality of life and ability to maintain relationships can be heavily affected.

Exposure therapy, an integral part of cognitive behavioral therapy, is a treatment technique that is utilized to reduce fear and anxiety responses resulting from phobias or anxiety disorders. Exposure therapy is effective in preventing the progression of acute stress disorder to post-traumatic stress disorder according to the June 2008 Archives of General Psychiatry.

Exposure therapy is considered extremely effective in that it aids a patient in gaining control over his or her anxiety disorder by confronting the triggers that cause negative reactions. All exposure therapy is held within a controlled and therapist-supervised environment. The basis of exposure therapy is that the management of anxiety is the means for overcoming that anxiety, and that phobias are the result of habitual thoughts not entirely based in reality or developed as a result of a trauma.

Such habitual thoughts have either developed spontaneously or over time to the point that the body’s physiological responses are maladjusted toward overreacting to certain stimuli. By using coping mechanisms and therapeutic confrontation of the fear, a patient’s mind is retrained to respond to a particular trigger with relaxation versus panic induced by the body’s natural “fight or flight” response.

Exposure therapy is carefully administered through one of two primary methods to avoid re-traumatization of the patient. The first method is known as “flooding.” Flooding is a confrontation of trauma memories or reminders all at once. Desensitization, the second method, is one in which relaxation techniques, imagery and other methods provide a more gradual confrontation of life stressors through dissection of the trauma. As each patient is different in both stressors and coping ability, the therapist will assess the best means of exposure therapy to utilize in that individual patient’s recovery.

One of the most important factors in exposure therapy is providing the patient with adequate tools and life skills for coping with their fear. Without such skills, the exposure will likely heighten the fear or intensify the phobia and provide a setback in treatment. To force the confrontation of fears without the patient being aware of how to cope with his or her own response is much like forcing someone who does not know how to swim into deep water. When patients have first learned how to cope with anxiety through relaxation techniques and positive imagery they are prepared for actual confrontation of their fears.

“Ethics (from Greek – meaning “custom”) is the branch of axiology, one of the four major branches of philosophy, which attempts to understand the nature of morality; to distinguish that which is right from that which is wrong. The Western tradition of ethics is sometimes called ‘moral philosophy’”. (WIKIPEDIA).

The origins of ethics are related to the introduction of moral behaviour in early societies. The application of concepts such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and the definition of these concepts in different environments, induced the need for a formal approach to social behaviour – an attempt to create commonality and organisation in a society. In this context, codes of behavior were created, and different forms of behaviour enforcement adopted.

As societies developed, and increasing importance was placed in structural thinking – such as the advent of sciences – meta-ethics became an eminent topic of discussion. Meta-ethics refers to the investigation of ethical statements, an actual analysis of ethics itself. Names such as Hobbes, Kant and Nietzsche were prominent in this period.

Nowadays, ethics is still a main topic of discussion. As societies evolve, the relationships between individuals become more complex, and so do the etiquettes and codes of conduct. The development of business relationships has raised many ethical dilemmas, and ethical counselling is one of them.

Ethical Counselling

Because counselling is not a regulated profession in many countries (including Australia), the use of ethical standards is a method of guiding the quality of the services provided by counsellors, the quality of training provided to counsellors, and of protecting clients.

These standards provide conduct guidelines for professionals and are an effective way support many counsellors lacking experience or knowledge of the industry. It also serves the purpose of structuring the counselling industry, providing common professional descriptions, definitions and service boundaries according to each type of counsellor.

There is a wide range of issues comprising the field of ethical counselling – which are also part of common guidelines for the practice of therapy. According to Daniluk and Haverkamp (1993), “the main ethical framework referred to in many discussions of therapy is one based on the concepts of autonomy, fidelity, justice, beneficence, non-maleficence and self interest”. In this context, we devise several ‘problem areas’ in ethical counselling:

Law and Counselling

The need for professionalisation has created a common link between ethical behaviour and legal conduct in the therapy fields. Legislation was provided to primarily protect clients from misguidance, and ultimately to provide guidelines for the profession. However, as cited previously, in most countries ethical conduct in counselling is not yet part of the legal framework – which outlines the importance of professional and industry peak associations in providing guidelines and codes of conduct for affiliated professionals.

The Australian Counselling Association is one industry association in Australia that provides ethical guidelines and a code of conduct for counsellors. The ACA’s Code of Ethics and Code of Practice are part of the Code of Conduct – which can be accessed from their website at www.theaca.net.au/docs/code_conduct.pdf. An excerpt from this Code is:

Counsellors will:

- Offer a non-judgemental professional service, free from discrimination, honouring the individuality of the client.

- Establish the helping relationship in order to maintain the integrity and empowerment of the client without offering advice.

- Be committed to ongoing personal and professional development.

Confidentiality

This area is closely linked with the legal issues in counselling therapy. Confidentiality plays a major role in defining the communication between a counsellor and a client, bearing in mind that trust is one of the backbones of a therapeutic relationship. Albeit confidentiality is a key component of the relationship, it is also one of the leading causes of ethical dilemmas for counsellors. Situations which may put the client – or other individuals – in danger usually require the counsellor to make difficult decisions in regards to breaching confidentiality. In many instances, the actual breach is a legal requirement as it may incur the prevention of a crime against the state, or another person.

Other predominant issues such as consultancy with supervisors or colleagues; definition of the type of confidentiality to be used (absolute or relative) prior to the counselling relationship; and session record-keeping, must be considered by therapists when practicing professional counselling.

Bad Practice

The issues of privacy and power in a counselling session can be prejudicial in terms of unethical practice. The private nature of a counselling session leaves a ‘gap for unsupervised practice’, and therefore it is quite difficult to be assessed. For instance, fairly recent explorations of unethical practice in therapy have shown the emerging problem of sexual abuse of clients. This issue is augmented by the power relationship between client and counsellor, in which the therapist could take advantage of their position of power to practice unethical behaviour.

Training and Professional Recognition (Australian Industry)

As cited before, counselling is not regulated in most countries. In order to standardise the industry, and ensure that counsellors have the necessary skills to professionally practice, training and recognition must be accentuated. In Australia, the ACA plays a role in coordinating industry efforts, providing information to the public and maintaining records of counsellors in practice.

That system protects clients from bad practice, and supports training standards for organisations that provide counsellor training. The Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors, as an example, is recognised by the ACA – which means that AIPC and the Diploma of Professional Counselling complies with industry standards defined by this peak organisation in regards to training standards for counsellors.

Safety and Negligence

These concepts are utmost concerns of counsellors in practice. A counsellor-client relationship is a very delicate encounter of an individual seeking help, and a professional providing advice. Primarily, it is the counsellor’s responsibility to provide a safe environment for the counselling session – particularly because physical and psychological safety is a premise for the counselling therapy to succeed. Negligence is closely related to the concepts of breach of confidentiality and safety. Observing principles for duty of care is part of ethical behaviour in counselling.

Complying with ethical guidelines is one of the most important aspects of being a professional counsellor. Creating awareness in both counsellor and clients of the boundaries of the services provided will lead to a better development of the profession, and overall improvement of industry standards. Counsellors are responsible for keeping up-to-date with professional codes of ethics, confidentiality guidelines, and other relevant information.

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