Coach Vs. Influencer…to be or not to be. That is the question! In the online space, coaching and influencing are two incredibly lucrative careers. But neither of them are right for everyone! So this is part one of a series where I’ll dive in to the pros and cons of coaching vs. influencing.
I’ve got a unique perspective on both industries. Years ago, I worked in influencer marketing. I witnessed the extravagance of influencing and the bureaucracy of brand deals. But I left it all behind to become a full-time coach! First specializing in mindset and then niching to podcast coaching, I’ve really had my hands deep in the coaching industry for a while.
So why did I choose to coach? We’ll get into that today because we’re starting with a deep dive into the online coaching space.
We’re talking all about the perks of creative control but also the downsides, like the overwhelming solo learning curve. This will not be a sugar-coated summary. You’ll get a real behind the scenes look into the life of a coach. And stay tuned for next week where i’lll be focusing on the influencing side of things.
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In this episode, I discuss:
chelsea: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody. Welcome back to my non expert opinion. I'm your host, Chelsea Riffe, and I'm also a podcast strategist who helps people launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts. I recently launched a sub stack called Slight Turbulence. So if you want to read my writing about my 10 years of globetrotting, head to the link in my show notes to read all about it.
Now that's a perfect segue into what I'm talking about today. Coach versus influencer. How do you know which one you are or which one is the best for you and can you be both? As someone who has experienced both channels, being a coach and being an influencer, I'm here to speak from personal experience and I'm here to speak from experience of my expertise working in influencer and content marketing for six years.
So if you don't know this, before I had my own consulting business, I actually worked as a salesperson for an influencer and content marketing [00:01:00] software. So what this software did was house all these influencers and when brands needed to work with influencers on campaigns, we had this software that could easily track down exactly who they were looking for.
So they would say, Hey, we're a snack brand in the Midwest. So we need moms with two kids that one is a toddler and one is an infant and they need to shop at Costco. Their household income is 40 to 60, 000. They're married, so on and so forth. And we had all this data in our platform to be able to spit back out these influencer lists and be able to partner with these brands.
So I was fortunate enough to work there for over five years, I think it was close to six, and work with some of the biggest brands in the world, including Dell, M& Ms, Yahoo Sports. I worked on little campaigns all the way to massive campaigns. We worked on the Yahoo Sports March Madness campaign, and I worked with celebrity influencers and I got to fly to New York and work with Dan Marino and all these NBA stars.
And Richard Sherman was on the campaign who's in the NFL. [00:02:00] If you don't know all these athletes I'm talking about, all these people are major, major NBA and NFL athletes. So I have a very unique lens because I worked in the influencer sphere, just being able to observe as a marketing expert. And then I had all this knowledge to be able to try it out myself, which is what I did when I went solo on my own.
So again, I'm speaking from my personal experience working as an influencer. And being on the other side of it, like essentially selling influencers. Same thing with coaching. I've been a coach and I've also been coached and I can observe and understand coaching and be able to speak to both of these sides and how they work.