Want to become a life coach and launch your dream coaching business? Or maybe you just want to expand your coaching repertoire with a best-selling program? If you’re looking to earn more money as a coach online, then you’ve come to the right place.
In this blog post, we’re guiding you through the process of creating your own signature 8-week coaching program, step by step, from choosing your niche to building out each weekly session. We’re also providing you with an 8-Week Coaching Program template, which includes all the essential elements for creating an effective (i.e. profitable) coaching program, along with helpful writing prompts and fillable tables to help you throughout the process. Get it for free now!
How to create an 8-week coaching program
Did you know you can create your own 8-week coaching program in just six steps? That’s right— and we’ve outlined them all here! Read on as we walk you through how to create your next best-selling coaching program:
- Find your niche and choose your program’s topic
- Determine your program’s purpose and its target audience
- Determine your coaching strategy
- Decide how you’ll assess your clients’ progress
- Build out your program session-by-session
- Determine your program’s pricing
Step 1: Find your niche and choose your program’s topic
Before you dive into the creation process, first thing’s first: you’ll need to determine the topic of your 8-week coaching program. The topic you choose will determine everything else about your program, from its purpose to its pricing, and that’s exactly why it’s step number one.
So, how do you go about choosing your program’s topic? Well, first, you’ll want to look towards your coaching niche (and if you don’t have one, you’ll want to find it).
Your specific coaching niche will help you narrow down your topic options by giving you a set of parameters to work within. In other words, your niche will determine the range of topics you can address with your program.
Example: If your niche is career coaching, then you probably won’t be creating a program about overcoming procrastination (leave that to the mindset coaches). Instead, you’ll be building a program surrounding the themes of your niche, which include professional development, job searching, and career transitions.
Still need to find your coaching niche? Don’t worry, our Coaching Niche Finder template provides you with all the need-to-know information on the most profitable coaching niches currently on the market. With lists of pros and cons, and tons of sub-niches to explore, our handy template saves you hours of research, helping you find and define your niche in just a few minutes. Get it for free!
Step 2: Determine your program’s purpose and its target audience
Now that you’ve found your niche and chosen your program’s topic, it’s time to dive deeper into the “what” of your program. This means defining your program’s purpose along with its target audience. These two steps go hand-in-hand, as your target audience will inform your program’s purpose and vice versa.
A helpful way of thinking about your coaching program’s purpose is in terms of its objectives and outcomes. For this step, you’ll be asking yourself what, exactly, your program will help your clients achieve.
Identify your target audience
To properly address that question, however, you’ll need to find out what your clients actually want to achieve. And that means determining your target audience. Understanding your ideal audience will help you create a program (and choose a purpose) that will directly address their pain points and, ultimately, earn you more money.
Conduct market research
To learn more about your target audience, you’ll need to conduct some user and market research.
If you already have an audience or client base, you can start by collecting data on your followers and current customers through a number of venues. To learn about your audience’s pain points, you’ll want to head over to your comments sections and DMs. These are both spaces where followers commonly ask questions and air their frustrations, making it a great place to learn about the solutions they’re looking for.
If you currently run a coaching business and already have a client base, you can also peruse your customer service inbox, and digital products and services reviews for valuable customer feedback. These pieces of data are all great starting points for determining which problems your program can address.
During the market research phase, it’s also useful to check out the current coaching market within your niche. Check out what kinds of programs your competitors are offering. Is there a gap in the market that your program can fill? Then you’ve probably found a very profitable purpose for your program.
Write your offer statement
As a final step, you’ll need to put your purpose into words. Your purpose should be easily summarized in a single, concise sentence that will resonate with your target audience. Think of it as an “offer statement” that explains what you’re helping your clients achieve.
Let’s take a financial coach as an example. After some market research, this coach has discovered that a large fraction of their audience are women who are looking to start investing. In this case, the coach might want to build an 8-week course with the purpose of “helping women with their investments.”
Looking to understand your target audience even better? Our Target Audience Templates Bundle helps you dive even deeper into your audience’s needs, so you can build the digital products and services they want to buy.
Step 3: Determine your coaching strategy
Now that you’ve determined your program’s purpose (aka its “what”), you’ll need to dig into its “how.” That’s to say that you’ll need to determine how you’ll help your clients achieve the program’s intended outcomes.
To build out your coaching strategy, you’ll need to decide on the tactics and activities that you’ll be employing throughout the program.
The good news is that there are tons of methods and tools at your disposal as a coach looking to help your clients achieve their goals. But that also means you’ll need to narrow down the options to those that will best suit your program. The activities and tactics you choose will depend entirely on your program’s specific purpose and outcome. For example, the Wheel of Life is a helpful tool for life coaches wanting to assess their clients’ overall life balance. However, it’s probably not a useful tool for personal finance coaches looking to help their clients boost their savings and grow their investments.
If you feel stuck on which tools and tactics to choose, we suggest doing a bit more market research. Look into your competitors’ content and coaching programs to see what tactics and tools they’re using to help their clients. On top of your competitors’ channels and services, Google (and other search engines) are also great resources to harness in order to see what types of tactics and tools are out there. So get googling!
Step 4: Decide how you’ll assess your clients’ progress
Now that you know how you’ll help your clients progress through your program, you’ll need to decide how you’ll assess said progress.
Assessment is crucial to any successful coaching program for two reasons. One, assessing your client’s progress helps you ensure they succeed in reaching their goals. Two, these assessments are also crucial to maintaining your program’s effectiveness. Regular evaluations (and re-evaluations) allow you to track your client’s progress across your coaching relationship, so you can gauge whether they’re on track to achieve the program’s intended outcomes.
These reassessments can also indicate emerging pain points and goals, so you can adapt your coaching strategy and program accordingly. In other words, regular assessments ensure that your coaching stays relevant, impactful, and aligned with your client’s changing needs. And that’s why integrating ongoing assessments into your 8-week coaching program is essential.
There are lots of ways for coaches to gauge and track their client’s progress throughout a coaching program. These methods include performance assessments, behavioral assessments, self-assessments, and self-report questionnaires. Each of these tools allow you to assess different aspects of your client’s progress at different points in your coaching relationship. To gain a 360 view of your client’s progress and success, you’ll probably want to harness a combination of assessment tools throughout your program.
Step 5: Build out your program session-by-session
Now that you’ve laid out the foundation for your coaching program, it’s time to actually start building it out week by week.
Because this is an 8-week program, you’ll need to create 8 unique sessions to round it out. When outlining your program, it’s important to remember that no two sessions should be interchangeable. Every session should be distinct from one another, with its own clearly defined topic, objective, list of activities and tactics, and client homework, and should help your client move one step closer towards their goal.
Plan your onboarding session
When building out your 8-week coaching program, it’s important to keep your client’s coaching journey in mind. Before you can dive into the real coaching, you’ll need to get acquainted with your client. Think of your first meeting as an onboarding session where you can introduce your client to the program and give them an initial assessment to determine where they’re at before they begin.
Guide your client’s growth journey
Following this introduction, your client’s growth journey will make up the most significant portion of your 8-week program. During this section, you’ll use your unique coaching strategy (including all those activities, tactics, and tools from step three) to help your client develop their skills and reach their goals.
Evaluate your client’s progress
After those growth sessions, you and your client will want to debrief about the experience. During your final sessions, you’ll discuss what insights your client has gained during their coaching journey and evaluate whether they achieved the program’s intended outcome. From there, you can both discuss next steps, which might include more coaching from you!
Need some assistance building out your coaching program? Our template helps you create a profitable 8-week program, week by week. The template’s handy writing prompts and fillable tables include all the essential components of a successful coaching program, so you don’t miss a beat or a step.
Step 6: Determine your program’s pricing
If you’ve made it to step six, that means you’ve successfully created your very own 8-week coaching program. Congratulations — you’re almost at the finish line!
Before you can start selling your brand new digital service (and making that bead!), you’ll need to price your coaching program.
Conduct competitor research
For this step, you’ll once again need to do some market research. You worked hard to create your 8-week program, and your expertise is incredibly valuable, so you’ll want to earn your money’s worth once you put it on the market. However, you’ll also want to ensure your program is priced competitively, so that potential customers will be enticed to hit “Pay Now” on your latest offering.
To price your coaching program competitively, you’ll need to, well, check out your competition. Browse your social platform(s) of choice for coaches within your niche and look into how they’re pricing similar programs. In this case, “similar” means either programs on similar topics (the more specific, the better), with similar purposes and outcomes, or of similar lengths (you definitely wouldn’t price an 8-week program the same as a 4-week program).
Choose your pricing strategy
Typically, coaches will price their programs as a package. This just means that you sell your entire program for one lump-sum price, rather than pricing each individual session. Once you’ve priced your coaching program, you can decide whether you’d like your clients to pay the entire cost up front or pay off the cost weekly, before or after each session.
According to coaching pro Stefanie Fiteni, the average price for an 8-week program is between $1,500 to $2,800 for most new coaches. You might want to keep this number in mind as you conduct your market research. However, remember that, ultimately, you should price your program at what feels comfortable to you based on your unique creator needs.
If you’re a beginner looking to break into the coaching market, you might also want to give penetration pricing a go. This pricing strategy helps you penetrate the market by offering the lowest coaching fee that you’re comfortable working for.
According to life coach and creator Luisa Zhou, the average penetration price for a 3-month coaching program (which works out to 12 sessions) is $1,500 for new coaches. Doing the math, this works out to a $1,000 price for an 8-week program. If you’re interested in using this beginner-friendly pricing strategy, Luisa’s price point is a great ballpark number to keep in mind as you’re choosing your program’s pricing.
Sample 8-week coaching program
Need a little help kick starting the creation process? Use this example 8-week coaching program to help you develop your own.
- Week 1: Onboarding, assessing, and developing an action plan
- Weeks 2 – 7: Tracking your client’s growth journey
- Week 8: Evaluating progress and taking the next steps
Week 1: Onboarding, assessing, and developing an action plan
Before your client can begin their growth journey, they’ll need to become acquainted with you, your program, and your coaching practice.
During your first session, you’ll onboard your client to your 8-week program. The onboarding process includes introducing yourself, your expertise, and your experience as a coach, as well as explaining the program’s intended outcome and how you’ll be helping your client achieve it. During this meeting, you’ll also go over the expectations for your coaching relationship, including both your and your client’s responsibilities towards their growth journey.
Here, you’ll also want to give your client an initial assessment to see where they’re at before they’ve embarked on their coaching journey. This evaluation will provide you with a valuable baseline that you can use to measure your client’s progress throughout the rest of the program.
You can also treat this session as an opportunity to build trust with your new client. Encourage them to ask you any questions they might have about the coaching process and the program itself, so they can begin their coaching journey with confidence.
Finally, it’s time to create an action plan, taking into account your client’s initial assessment, alongside their own personal goals and challenges in relation to the course’s main topic. Talk through your client’s needs and goals, so that you both have an adequate understanding of exactly what they’d like to achieve and what you can help them achieve throughout the program.
From there, work together to develop an action plan with discrete, weekly SMART goals that will take your client from where they are now to where they want to be.
Weeks 2 – 7: Tracking your client’s growth journey
Your client’s growth journey takes up the most significant portion of your 8-week coach program, spanning weeks 2 to 7.
Here, you’ll be helping your client progress towards achieving their goals. Every session within this block should take your client one step closer towards the program’s end goal. In other words, each session should have a clearly-laid out objective, along with tactics and activities to help your client achieve it.
And don’t forget about the client assignments! Giving your clients work to complete or concepts to reflect on between sessions helps them internalize what they’ve learned and apply their insights to their real life.
Week 8: Evaluating progress and taking the next steps
Now that the growth portion of your program is complete, it’s time to evaluate your client’s progress and assess whether they’ve achieved their goals.
The final session in your 8-week course should serve as a final check-in to evaluate your client’s growth and discuss next steps.
During this session, you’ll give your client their final evaluation, whether it’s a self-assessment, performance assessment, or otherwise. Comparing this final assessment to their week-one evaluation will show you your client’s total progress across the program.
Here, you’ll also want to have a discussion with your client about their growth and progress throughout the program. Ask them what insights they’ve gained from their coaching journey, how they think they’ve grown, and whether they feel they’ve achieved their goals.
Finally, discuss what challenges your client still might want to address and the goals that they still have for the future. From here, you can suggest a number of next steps, including additional coaching towards the same goals you’d been addressing or towards completely different goals, altogether.
Launch your coaching business today
Now that you know how to create your own 8-week coaching course (and have our handy template at your disposal), it’s up to you to build it — and start raking it in.
Want to start making more money as a coach right now? You can with The Leap.
The Leap is an all-in-one creator platform with features like a mobile-first digital product builder and mobile-optimized link-in-bio storefront. The Leap lets you create a variety of the most popular digital products, including mini-courses, tutorials, guides, challenges, and mini-consultations in just a few minutes.
Rather than hopping on a live coaching call, The Leap’s mini-consultations let you share advice, offer feedback, and answer your clients’ questions via pre-recorded video. In other words, these bite-sized consults are an easier, more hands-off way to monetize your coaching expertise, earning you more money for less time and effort.
Interested in selling mini-consultations or broadening your digital services offering? Try The Leap for free today.
Offer micro-consulting and sell coaching sessions with The Leap.
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Further reading
- How To Become a Life Coach (Tips + Free Templates)
- How To Create a Life Coaching Business Plan (+ Free Templates)
- How To Create a Coaching Contract (+ Free Template)
- How To Find Your Target Audience (+ Free Template)
- How To Use the Wheel of Life in Coaching (+ Free Template)
- How To Find Your Coaching Niche (Tips + Free Templates)
- Your Guide to Creating a 12-Week Coaching Program (+ Free Template)
