Coach Spotlight Upgrades

By:  Bob Simpson

First, let me apologize for the length of this newsletter but we have been hard at work adding new features to make Coach Spotlight the world’s leading public relations service for professional business and life coaches.  

Here are the latest upgrades:

Make Coach Spotlight Your Blog

Last month, I dropped my subscription to Typepad and decided to use Coach Spotlight directly instead.  Typepad was costing about $150 per year, our Alexa ranking was about 12,000,000th and nobody was reading our blogs anyway.  It was a pretty simple choice to upgrade to Coach Spotlight, where our ranking is 498,100. (still not where we want it but progressing well)

You can now add articles directly to Coach Spotlight.  Here is a video that tells you how:

Add Articles Video

This is a very important feature, as it is a centerpiece of our "Shine a Spotlight On" strategy that Kira will talk about later in this newsletter.  By increasing the unique content on Coach Spotlight, we will improve our search engine rankings, which results in more exposure for you.

Using Coach Spotlight as your direct blog is a better strategy for Premium contributors than for Basic contributors.  Blogs of Basic contributors have Premium Profiles (like you see in the right column of the homepage) in a similar spot, so Basic Contributors may want to maintain their own blog elsewhere to minimize the competition factor.  If you are not sure what I mean, please click on one of your blogs.

"Shine a Spotlight On Leadership"

By:  Kira Simpson

As mentioned in our last newsletter, Coach Spotlight is launching our "Shine a Spotlight On..." campaign, where every month, starting in September, we will be asking contributors to submit blogs or articles on specific topics so that we can highlight specific coaching areas for our visitors.  We will publish these articles in a specific section of the site, as well as launch a PR campaign to promote the submitted articles.  The "Shine a Spotlight On..." articles will be topic driven, original content that will help to drive traffic and new business to the site for you.
 
Your PR team at Coach Spotlight will be busy every month sending out press releases about each upcoming campaign, as well as promoting the best articles of every month.  Our campaign schedule will be organized by the current number of coaches per specification, starting with Leadership in September.  The first of every month will be the deadline for topic submission, with the articles due by the 16th.
 
Topics should be fairly general so that we receive a wide range of articles for every month, and yet specific to the coaching area of the month.  For example, in September, some Leadership topics could include "Leading Your Business During Difficult Economic Times" or "Planning for Improved Performance and Profitability".  We ask that you send your topics to me, at kira.simpson@thespotlightnetwork.com with the subject "September Campaign Topic Submission".  Please feel free to include as many topics as you like.  We will have more information in our next newsletter about how to submit your articles, but please, start sending your topic ideas to us now!
 
With your co-operation, we believe that this campaign will significantly help Coach Spotlight to find you new business.  We thank you all for your continued support in this effort and look forward to reading your topic submissions!

Premium Contributor Upgrades

By:  Bob Simpson

Tabbed Page Changes

If you go to one of the pages from the main menu, for example Strategy, Succession, Life, Parenting, etc., you will see that the structure has been changed.  At the top of the page are "Featured Articles" (Premium) and below that "Most Recent Articles" (Basic).

We have also set up the logic so that only Premium Member Profiles who have written an article and categorized it to that tab are shown on that page.  You will notice if you scan the site, that there are some pages now that do not have six profiles.  We think this is a great opportunity for you to upgrade to Premium, as your profile will be up there full-time, until we have more than six profiles in that category.

Premium Membership Interviews

We talked about this last month but are still working on scripts.  We will be contacting every Premium member this month to arrange an interview to be posted to your profile.

Twitter Initiative

We have recently launched a new Twitter page – www.twitter.com/coachspotlight.  We think it is pretty cool, so take a look.  If you would like to start following us, we welcome you.  We did a small trial last week, where we tweeted about a handful or Premium Contributor’s articles.  One article was read 36 times that day and others were read more than 20.  Each day, we will be doing this for three Premium Contributor’s articles, based on the quality of articles, to help you get traffic.

We also tweet about developments to Coach Spotlight on a regular basis so you don’t have to wait for a long newsletter.

Contributor Upgrades (Coming Soon)

We are working on three new features  – Events Calendar, Comments and Ask The Coach.

Events Calendar (Premium Contributors)

If you have talked with me, you have probably heard me say: "See your face, read your bio, read your thoughts through your blog postings, and hear your voice".  We want to allow visitors to build relationships with you so you can grow your businesses.

Premium contributors will have the ability to extend that by posting events.  If you are running a seminar or webinar, you can post it on your profile and it will be automatically added to the Coach Spotlight Calendar, which can be seen on the home page under the introduction to the site and in the main menu.  

This gives potential users of your services the opportunity to connect with you by attending one of your webinars, for example.  The more ways for people to connect with you, the better.  We are hoping for a late August release.

Blog or Article Comments (All Contributors)

As one of our major goals is to create interaction between visitors and contributors, we are working to provide visitors with the ability to make comments about blogs and articles.  This not only gets you feedback about your blogs and articles but also gives a visitor the ability to interact with you.  We are hoping for a mid-August release.

Ask The Coach (All Contributors)

Managing Your Coach Spotlight Profile

Getting Your Profile "Live"

For a profile to be viewed on Coach Spotlight you need to complete your public profile and either give us your blog address or post single or multiple articles.  We have been trying to stay on top of new users to make sure that these steps are completed.  Last week, we completed profiles for twenty users but still have twenty that are incomplete and we cannot find a website or blog to gather the information we need.  If you have not completed your Public Profile, please do so and your business will be in the Spotlight.

Categorizing Your Blogs

As of August 11th, we have 1,694 blogs posted on Coach Spotlight.  That’s in just three months.  In our opinion, this is a great start in building a database that will help people solve business or personal problems from strategy to parenting.  Thank you for being part of that.

Unfortunately, we have 938 or over 50% that are still listed as New Articles.  New Articles do not show up on any of the category pages so if somebody is looking for a parenting coach, they may not find you, as you are not "listed" there.  There are two solutions – spend some time categorizing your blogs (if you forget how, go to My Spotlight and click on video link).

Solution two is to send us an e-mail at info@coachspotlight.com and request that all your articles be posted to a single category and we will do that for you.  Then, you can edit the articles that should not be in that category and place them in the proper category.  That might be quicker if you have a large number that have not been categorized.

The Traffic Report

By:  Bob Simpson

We have used Alexa as a simple measure of our traffic.  We are happy to report that our Alex Ranking has dropped from 3,000,000 two months ago to under 500,000.

We have on average 27 visitors per day for the past 30 days and 27.85% have been from search engines.

In phase one, our plan was to build contributors and content.  Phase one ended August 4th.  Phase two is to attract potential users of coaching services to the site.  "Shine the Spotlight On", the Twitter Initiative and our ongoing SEO work are intended to do that.  

Our goal is to be in the top 10 for all keywords relating to coaching.  As we build content (we are adding over 100 new blogs per week), we will climb the ladder.