Virtual coaching business is big business. If you are a service professional or engage in any kind of consultative expertise from industrial equipment design, to medical practice to marketing consulting, you can create a powerful marketing stream or profit center through podcasting and teleseminars.

Virtual coaching and consulting has grown alongside capabilities in online collaboration and communication. With both coaching and online collaboration growing by leaps and bounds, fast moving entrepreneurs have moved in with innovative business models that leverage both trends.

5 Virtual Coaching & Consulting Business Models

The following sections illustrate how different criteria can be combined or split up to form business designs that appear unique as a whole but share much the same fundamental characteristics. Each model can be enhanced by using teleseminars or podcasting tools.

1. Digital Infopreneur

An infopreneur business model rests on the ability to spot the informational challenges facing a market segment and to aggregate, package and promote an informational bundle that meets the needs of that market segment. A digital infopreneur accelerates the whole cycle by using the online channel as her primary platform for market research, information gathering, product creation and distribution.

Due to the low overhead of doing business mostly on the internet, a digital infopreneur business can often grow very quickly while maintaining significant profit margins. One of my favorite ways to get infopreneurs started is through the use of teleseminars and podcasting systems for lead generation and information product creation.

2. Virtual Counseling

A coaching client of mine was able to convert their marriage counseling business from a local scope to a national and international one. We did this by adding virtual counseling capabilities to their website. More than just sticking up a website and advertising nationally, virtual counseling involves the ability to turn generic counseling needs into a packaged list of situational and service themes.

By carefully segmenting the marketplace for degree of severity, desired counseling time frame and demographics, you can convert your expertise into a powerfully pre-selling content marketing system that attracts just the right people. In addition, you can use free tools like freeconferencecalling.com to give people an organized way to interact with you and receive optional access to recorded sessions.

3. Individualized Skills Coaching

Many executives and business leaders find that they need soft skills coaching for their subordinates. Skills like phone selling, negotiation, customer service, communication and others that are verbally-oriented can be taught by phone.

4. Small Group Coaching

Many business coaches also use teleconference services to run facilitated group coaching, mastermind sessions, strategic visioning sessions and other such team activities. Depending on the context, teleseminars can be an excellent way to transfer new professional knowledge and skills to a small group of people.

5. Recurring Membership Groups

Almost any small business can profit by incorporating recurring revenues in the form of memberships. This could be a loyalty rewards club for your highest referring clients, frequent user programs for the top 10% of your client database, or public-facing profit center established to solve challenges in one narrow problem area.

Teleseminars are a great way to build up your content and deliver it easily and conveniently to a large group of paying subscribers. Even free teleseminar services are often very scalable, allowing groups from 1 to 500 on the same call.

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