There is a new buzz word doing the rounds in the Entrepreneur and Startup World – ‘Growth Hacking’.

You may be curious to know, ‘What is Growth Hacking?’, ‘How is Growth Hacking relevant to Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) trainers or Life Coaches? or if you are aware about Sales and Marketing Buzz words, then ‘How is Growth Hacking for Life Coaches important?’

Growth hacking has nothing to do with stealing credit card details or important information.  ‘Growth Hacking’ or ‘Marketing Version: Non-traditional’ is a terminology which is used to define innovative non-traditional ways to quickly expand a start-up using non-traditional marketing methodology.

As NLP Trainers focus largely on skill development, and not business development, where will Coaching clients come from? This aspect always gets neglected, or is not thought through while deciding to become a Life Coach or NLP Trainer.

Sales and Marketing are key for any business. A coach has to think like an Entrepreneur, where it is important to be well versed in marketing concepts – What goes into setting up a business pipeline? How should branding be taken care of?

The traditional route largely used by companies for marketing and sales takes time to show results, and is expensive. Start-ups don’t have that kind of luxury, as they are under pressure to grow quickly, as it is all about becoming profitable as fast as possible with less cost.

Hence, an NLP Trainer or a Life Coach starting a business has to think like a start-up Entrepreneur. One can either take the traditional method to develop organically, or employ the services of a Growth Hacker to quickly scale up with non-traditional methods. The Growth Hacker consultant will apply a combination of non-traditional Marketing, Sales, Digital Marketing, Branding, etc., as the main agenda, to quickly deliver results.

The hard fact is that survival as a Life Coach depends on acquiring new skills, hence a Life Coach or Trainer can also spend time educating himself/herself about Growth Hacking, Social Media marketing, and Sales.

An alternate approach is a dual approach, where the Coach takes up the responsibility to do part of the work and employs a Growth Hacker to take up responsibility of another aspect.  This enables the Coach to focus on coaching, and have the Growth Hacker develop the business, hence Growth Hacking for Life Coaches is becoming equally important like for any Start-up.

Now the question is – Where to start with Growth Hacking?

*A Life Coach or NLP Trainer can learn about website maintenance in order to manage their own website after the initial design/development stage.  A simple 2-3 days course is more than sufficient to take ownership and manage a website or blog, which can feed into Growth Hacking for Life Coaches.

*Manage Social Media (Facebook, Google+, Twitter), and be in touch with your existing or potential clients.

*Write engaging content – This is very important as a Life Coach, because nobody understands your client better than you. You know exactly what you want to communicate, so develop a habit to write engaging content, and communicate with your clients.

*Read about innovative ways to do Sales and Marketing. Nobody will have more interest in developing your business that you. Sales and Marketing knowledge will go a long way in establishing you as a Life Coach.

* Take a course on Social Media Marketing and Growth Hacking and start to utilize some of these concepts on your own to further develop your business as a Life Coach.