If you’re an educator, coach, consultant or advisor you usually want one main thing for your clients - that they use your advice.

That only makes sense, right? They’re paying you fees, sometimes large fees, to help them either change something or accomplish something that they just can’t manage on their own. It doesn’t matter whether you’re hired to give advice, as a consultant might do, or be more hands-on in helping with change as a coach might - the desired outcome is still the same.

This sometimes leads to pressure to help our clients get results. A little pressure on the client to change is good. After all, change is seldom easy and often requires a little push to get started (okay, and sometimes a big push).

Yet any good coach or consultant knows that we have to manage our clients and how they progress with a bit of skill. Sometimes we can put it all out there and people get it. Other times we have to pull back a bit and offer change in small steps. So we give each client what they can handle in the way they can implement it best. As I’ve seen it, this is the art to being an effective coach or consultant - and even to being an effective teacher, parent, spouse, or friend really.

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Less than a year ago, my good friend Adam Kayce decided to change careers.

For years Adam was a successful intuitive healer and teacher who helped countless people work with and heal their personal issues and physical diseases. As a teacher, Adam could explain the most complex ideas about consciousness and healing to people in ways that were easy to understand.

It was as a teacher that Adam got his first experiences working with businesses. Soon, he was focusing more on bringing spirituality and personal development into the workplace. And he loved it.

So this past fall, Adam decided to close down his healing practice and begin working as a business coach. Now his focus is on helping people find the “purpose and meaning behind their work, so you can attract and serve the people who love what you do.” (his words).

And so was born, Monk at Work.

Why did I tell you this story (other than Adam being a close friend)? Well, in our latest one2one conversation, Liz Strauss asked me…

What do you do when your business is going well and close friend’s is not?

My answer…YOU HELP!

What else could I possibly say?

Like most new business, Adam had to endure the early, lean stages of Monk at Work. All the pieces were in place - knowledge, experience, expertise, great service and products, and…great looking blog (if I do say so myself). What he lacked was clients.

That’s where I knew I could help. I knew that I could use my own success to help my friend get started toward his. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the core of my work is to help businesses go from where they are to where they want to be.

Adam consulted with me on blogging, marketing strategy and relationship building. We talked a bunch about how to use the conversations on his blog to create momentum around your business. We talked about blogging as a central marketing strategy. I helped him with solutions for increasing his website and product reach. I even introduced him to people who are now fans of his work.

More than anything, I think what I’ve done is help Adam understand how his website/blog are the foundation for his marketing efforts. And now, Monk at Work is building momentum. Am I responsible for that - not really. He still had to put what we talked about into practice. I simply filled in his gaps in knowledge and helped him focus his efforts using his website/blog.

Do you have a good friend who’s struggling with their business?  What can you do to help them? 

And Liz, since we’re having a one2one conversation,

What tips can you offer for writing quality, conversational blog posts and website copy? 

Continuing our one2one conversation, Liz Strauss asked me (and you):

What’s the the part of business, besides relationships, that you look forward to doing more of?

Okay, so here’s how I read your question…”what other part of business, besides building relationships.” I hope this is what you meant, because my entire business is about relationships. From how I market to how I work with my clients, what I see in my business IS relationships.

But I can look through building more and stronger relationships at aspects of my business. So that’s what I’m going to run with.

I’ve been building websites for more than a decade at this point. So it’s mostly what I’m known for. It’s also the easiest way people can describe what I do to their friends, clients and colleagues. So more often than not, I get calls about website design.

What ends up happening, however, is that the people soon find out that I do so much more than most web designers. They learn that I understand business development, marketing, product development, copy editing, etc. And often, they hire me to consult and coach them while we’re working on their website.

So really, I’m really a born teacher. I know that sounds like a vast, presumptuous statement. Yet at every point in my life this fact has been mirrored back to me. In elementary school I used to show my classmates how to do math problems when they didn’t get it. As a baseball player I could spot mistakes in a teammate’s swing and help them feel the correction. Even when I had a private healing practice I would somehow find a way to explain complex spiritual concepts in a way that people just understood.

Even as a web designer, I’ve been very successful at making the technical easy to understand - even a neophyte. This gives clients the power to make their own, informed decisions about their business.

So like you, Liz, I am a teacher. I’m a teacher and I love to solve problems. And this has led me to doing more consulting/coaching/educating-type work. I love it. And it’s opened up a whole new part of my business.

Now people don’t have to need a new website to work with me. They can hire me to help them with any number of projects or aspects of their business: from service and product development to marketing, increasing traffic and building relationships to branding, utilizing a newsletter to just plain problem solving.

And best of all, they can hire me to help them learn how to use social media - blogging, social networking, etc, - more effectively, to grow their business or to increase the visibility of their blog. That I’m doing already with a handful of clients.

So that’s what I want to do more of…coach people to a more rewarding and successful business, consult with people to solve their business problems and educate people on how to do anything they need without being dependent on me. Does that make me a coaching strategist? Maybe.

So Liz (and you, reading this, too), speaking of strategy:

What do you feel is necessary to create an effective strategy to promote a business?

If you got this far, I’d love to hear your answers to either question. Join our one2one conversation in the comment box below.

And if you need some help with your business, let’s talk about it.

Boy, that’s an exciting headline, huh? What could possibly be the most important thing you could be doing to market your coaching or consulting business?

Most marketing experts will tell you it’s clearly branding your business or creating your comprehensive marketing plan. Both those are certainly important.

But according to 19 year-old entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, founder of Comcate and author of My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley, the most important thing you can do when starting a business is “harbor a bias towards action.”

If you want a successful business, any successful business, you have to take action. Don’t just think or talk about your ideas; actually put them into action. Successful business owners actually implement their ideas. They let themselves make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and keep growing. Action is what makes a business successful.

If you’re a coach or consultant, you’re paid to think, to talk, to be an expert. Yet to be successful in your business you’ll need to go beyond just thoughts and conversation. You’ll need to actually implement them.

How? Action steps

• Write it down
  When you have an idea around your business, write it down (take action). Writing it down makes it a bit more real. If your thought in your mind, it’s likely to get jumbled up with the thousands of other thoughts you have each day.
• Brainstorm
  After you take the action of writing down your idea, brainstorm it. You can do this in as little as 2-3 minutes. Take longer if you have But get your thoughts about the idea on paper while their fresh. You’ll be surprised what this can lead too.
• Action Steps
  At the end of your mini brainstorming session, write at least one thing you can do in the next 48 hours that will help in the development of your idea. AND DO IT!
• Do It
  I put this twice on purpose. It’s in the action of doing that you’ll find success. Creating action steps that you don’t take action on are useless. So honor yourself and your ideas by following through on your action steps.
• Get Help
  If you find you’re having trouble implementing your ideas, get help. There are plenty of coaches and consultants who can help you take action. Generally, consultants are great for ideas and training while coaches tend to be better at keeping you on task and helping with follow through.

Believe it or not, this is how almost every successful business gets launched. You have an idea and you put it into action. So today, how can you take a single step toward implementing your best idea? Think about it - then act. First with your comments below.

Thanks to Wendy Piersall for asking me to write for her Second ‘How To’ Group Research Project. There’s a number of great posts people have put up on various topics around blogging and business. Check some of them out:

• Mr Flexibility: finding work-life balance
• How to start a company and a family at the same time
• How to cross-market your blog and your business, promoting each to each other’s audience
• Increase your blog’s stickiness
• Google Sitemaps: get found faster
• Countermeasures to combat Google Page Rank leak
• Non-techie intro to SEO
• The how and why you should start leveraging video
• 3 huge steps on how to leap from the business security of a job to a home business
• Beyond Adsense, how to attract independent advertisers to your blog
• How to get your Google Adsense account banned
• How do you get your home business setup right?
• Moving to another domain, what I’ve learned so far, part 1
• Recognition, reaching out, & beyond
• The ultimate guide to where the moms are online
• Safely move your blog
• Protecting forms from spam
• What is Reddit and how can I use it to promote and market my blog posts?
• Web 101, the three-column CSS layout
• CSS for beginners - changing the fonts
• Quick guide to Google Analytics for bloggers
• Statcounter.com and how you can make it work for you
• How to start an online store

These are all good reads, so check them out. But not before you join the conversation below.