The Best of 2021: Most Popular Articles, 10 Most Loved Free Resources, Top Products & More!

Originally Posted on The Coaching Tools Company as The Best of 2021: Most Popular Articles, 10 Most Loved Free Resources, Top Products & More!

Probably just like you, we had a very full and more challenging than usual year. Every year, in preparation for our 2022 goal-setting we review our successes, products, articles and blog posts for the year—which we share below.

I can thoroughly recommend doing something similar for your business, we even have some questions to help you do just that here.

It’s not just interesting to review the past year, it’s empowering and uplifting to realise that we achieved much more than we remember. Creating this article has become an essential part of our annual review. And while COVID continued to “throw a spanner in the works”, we worked hard—and kept going. I hope you enjoy—and get inspired by—the summary below.

2021 was a busy year: here are a few highlights

Our Top Achievements

• NEW PRODUCTS: We launched 12 individual months of diverse and inclusive done-for-you Social Media Quote Graphics.
• WEBINARS: We provided 4 highly attended webinars for our readers and fans (over 8000 of you registered!):
  1. Jennifer Britton (Group & Team Coaching, Remote and Virtual Coaching). Watch here: ‘Ask Me Anything’ Live Session
  2. Cindy Schulson (Marketing for Coaches). Watch  here: How to Create a Coaching Offer that Sells Itself
  3. Emma-Louise & Jennifer Britton (Online Webinars): How to WOW Your Online Groups Webinar (Experiential Webinar)
  4. Dr. Irena O’Brien (Neuroscience for Coaches). Watch here 10 Research-Backed Strategies to Help Your Clients Change their Habits, their Behaviors and their Lives
• GUEST AUTHORS: We finally completed our “Guest Author Project” where we created a profile page for each of our 37 wonderful Guest Authors, and an author byline/sign-off that automatically get added to the end of every blog post.
• FREE TOOLS: Our free tools were downloaded 152,253 times!
  

  Updated FB Group Manifesto

• READERS: If you read our newsletter, you are now part of a community of 43,000 newsletter readers from 175 different countries. It’s exciting that coaching is now so international.
  • Interestingly our list has reduced in size (last year it was 56,000). We’ve been removing people from the newsletter who haven’t opened an email in 6 months. What this means is that we only send emails to people who want to hear from us!
  • We deleted 12,500 subscribers in 2021 year alone. In total we’ve deleted 37,000 subscribers over the last few years (so our total subscribers without this would have been 97,000!)
  • And our newsletter open rate is running at a whopping 44%! That means almost half of the people we send our newsletter to, open it. With average newsletter open rates being 12-25%, we must be doing something right 🙂
• TOP COACHING BLOG: We were named again as a Top 60 Coaching Blogs and Websites (we’re at number 4!)
• NEW ARTICLES: We posted over 86 articles written specifically for coaches!

Supporting You

• The “Coaches Helping Coaches” Facebook Group grew to over 18,000 coaches! It’s a highly active group with lots of questions answered and support offered. We’ve continued to put a lot of effort into keeping the conversation going—and that promotions don’t swamp the group news-feed. We also updated the Manifesto for the Group (pictured right) to include “understand the difference between coaching and therapy”.
• We introduced a Coaching Column called ‘Heart to Heart with Julie’. In these articles, Master Coach Julie Johnson shares real coaching conversations with us – along with what she learned. Learn more about Julie and scroll down to see all Julie’s articles here >>
• We ran 3 annual sales again, the Fireworks Sale, Cyber Sale and continuing with the Spring Sale which we launched in 2021 to  help people during the pandemic. We know it’s hard to build a coaching business!
• We also now offer great savings on at least four products per month!
• We offered a helpful Business Planner as our 2021 Holiday Gift to help Coaches “Make it Happen” in 2022! Get yours here >>
• We updated and improved our Free Tools: The Client Action Recording Sheet and the Free Blank (Customisable) Wheel of Life

Plus over $10,000 of Free Training & Giveaways

• We gave away five ‘Pro-Coach’ Tickets from WBECS (World Business & Executive Coaching Summit) (valued at$1694 each), each training offering up to 223 CCEUs!
• We gave away one BDAC (Business Development Academy for Coaches) program brought to you by WBECS (World Business & Executive Coaching Summit). It runs for 10 months and offers 35  CCEUs.
• We also gave away 5 copies of the book Transformational Journaling for Coaches, Therapists, and Clients: A Complete Guide to the Benefits of Personal Writing to coaches around the world!

The Coaching Tools Company Team

The Coaching Tools Company team had some big changes in 2021!

• Mary Turcott resigned from her role as Operations Manager for The Coaching Tools Company in January 2021. We were very sad to lose her! She moved to work for a large company where she could lead large teams of people. And Emma-Louise and Mary have since grown their friendship (a blessing in disguise).
• The wonderful Michela Phillips (far right above) joined the team in March 2021 to help us with vital Customer Support and Admin. She has been a brilliant addition to the team, learning fast and easily getting into our customer service groove. Like the rest of the team, she works remotely and we are very grateful for her help!
• The marvellous Marcus Diaz (far left above) continued as our Social Media Coordinator—and he is instrumental in keeping the Coaches Helping Coaches Facebook Group running smoothly.
• Emma-Louise finally created a Home and About Page for her newest project Fierce Kindness: Personal Development for people who make a difference—or want to. There is much more to come here, so watch this space! She continued to write and manage the weekly newsletter jam-packed with goodies, created the 12 new monthly graphics products with Natasha, worked with Duncan, Natasha and Michela on the Guest Author project and generally kept the Coaching Tools Company ship going through the storm.
• Natasha Kong is our resident graphic designer and has now been with us for 6 years! As well as helping create all our sale graphics and two new infographics in 2021, she also created these gorgeous Coaching Quotes for International Coaching Week 2021, these 5 Inspirational Quotes For Earth Day, a website design and many beautiful graphics for Fierce Kindness—and much, much more!
• Duncan Elsey continues to be our essential technical expert and advisor. Not only does he answer our “Help, my _______ has stopped working”, but he also works hard to maintain and continuously improve the website. This year he moved us onto STRIPE (a payment service provider) to make it easier for people to pay, and made the necessary technical changes so we could create Guest Author Profiles. He continues to work on website optimisation to ensure the best experience for our website visitors.
  

  Wendy Buckingham

• We continue to appreciate the contributions of the wonderful Wendy Buckingham as volunteer moderator in the Facebook Group (as well as supplying occasional blog articles). She strives to expand the reach—and maintain the integrity of—the coaching profession for all.
• We are also grateful to Laura Cappello-Bromling of Elusive Beast Editing, who continued as our Editor in 2021.
• And last but not least, our team mascot, Dexter (our dog), died in June 2021. You can read more of Emma-Louise’s thoughts on this here at Fierce Kindness.

Leading from the Heart and Living our Values

• With the COVID pandemic continuing to take over our lives in 2021, we continued to make the COVID Care Package: (Free) Resources for Coaches available throughout 2021.
  

  Geetika Agarwal

• As well as introducing 12 months of diverse and inclusive quotes as brandable graphics for coaches to use with their clients, we devoted one month of quotes to inclusivity, diversity & understanding prejudice. Learn more here: Brandable Quotes on Diversity and Prejudice (of all kinds!)
• We donated over $15,000 to charities we believe are important in the world! These charities included supporting the homeless, mental health, black youth and more! Watch for our article in February for more info.
  
• You met 7 more coaches in our Coach Features, where we helped you get to know your fellow coaches! Geetika Agarwal, Tanya MFK (Marie Figueras Kraisingr) (pictured) and Keyosha Waugh were the most popular and were shared over 400 times!
  

  Tanya MFK

• We put together 4 Free Webinars just for Coaches:
  1. ‘Ask Me Anything’ Live Session with Jennifer Britton
  2. How to Create a Coaching Offer that Sells Itself with Expert Cindy Schulson!
  3. How to WOW Your Online Groups Webinar with Jennifer Britton & Emma-Louise!
  4. Neuroscience Training for Coaches From Expert Dr. Irena O’Brien!

Here are the Top 10 Articles/Graphics from 2021!

2 brand new infographics in 2021:

1. How & Why to Get Journaling! (112 shares)
2. 12 Easily Doable Ideas to Deepen Your Client Relationships! (60 shares)

And here are the 8 most popular articles from 2021:

Choosing our “Top 10” articles is not an exact science! We look at the number of social shares from the blog, but also the number of article comments, shares and comments when an article is posted on Facebook – and also the positive emails we receive about an article!

1. Get Journaling! 15 of the Best Journaling Books by Lynda Monk and Emma-Louise
2. COVID Care Package: 9 (Totally Free!) Resources for Coaches
3. 5 Must-Read Books to Grow Your Coaching Business by Ruby McGuire
4. How to Engage Your Teams and Groups in the Virtual World by Jennifer Britton
5. COVID Care Package: 9 (Totally Free!) Resources for Coaches
6. Reflections on 65 Years of Coaching: Conversation with Lou Lukanovich by Karen Lukanovich
7. Sick of Social Media? How to Grow Your Business Without It! by Ruby McGuire
8. How to Revitalize Your Goals with Appreciative Inquiry (5 Simple Steps) | by Sarah Evans MCC

The 7 Most Loved Free Resource Downloads of 2021

This is more of an exact science! Our Free Resources were downloaded was 152,253 times.

Here are the Top 7 Free Resources downloaded in 2021:

1. Wheel of Life Template with Instructions (downloaded 14,511 times)
2. 21 Questions to Extraordinary Goal-Setting (9,479 times)
3. BLANK Coaching Wheel (8,546 times)
4. Action Brainstorming Worksheet (8,127 times)
5. Intake Session TEMPLATE Checklist (7,889 times)
6. 25 Power Questions to Identify Strengths (7,090 times)
7. 37 Coaching Questions to Liberate Your Clients! (6,517 times)

And our 5 Most Popular Products in 2021

Finally, here are our most popular sellers from last year:

1. Coaching Tools & Exercises MEGAPack!
2. Welcome Pack Toolkit
3. Renew YOU, Love Your Life! Coach Program
4. Small Business Coaching Toolkit
5. Career Coaching Toolkit

Followed by our Vision & Goal Setting Toolkit – Helping your clients will power into the year with these 9 awesome Vision & Goal Setting Tools then (SEASONAL) Set Your Compass: Celebrate 2021 & Prepare for 2022!, Balance & Self Care, Self-Discovery Toolkit, and Big Rocks and Little Rocks Exercise! to round out our Top 10!

I hope you enjoyed these highlights and summary! For our latest articles visit the Coaching Blog or go here to Sign-up for our newsletter!

We’d love to hear your 2021 highlights – share yours in the comments below!