#293: Build Your Health Coach Mailing List Without Facebook Ads

Hello there, health coaches, thank you so much for joining me for another episode. I know it's summer, right? It's feeling good outside. Maybe you want to be at the beach right now. I would like that. Maybe your kids are all done with school. Mine still actually have a few weeks left, but I love the slower months of summer for working on my business. I know it feels like who wants to work in the summer, but you have to work in your business, but you also need time to work on your business. In your business. It's like when you're coaching clients and you're doing the work of a health coach, working on your business. That's all the planning and strategizing and networking and most importantly of all, in my opinion, building your email list. So let's see how you guys are doing with that. So far I've invited everyone who's live with me inside our Facebook group to tell me how's it going, building your list so far.

Heather says slow. Macaulay says slow. It can be painfully slow, and also sometimes our expectations are like woo, way over here and we need to reel in the expectations, but it really is the slow and steady. It's like if you ask one of your clients, how's it going, reaching your weight loss goal, they might say slow, and sometimes that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as it's slow and steady. Today I am responding in particular to something that Emma shared in our health coach power community Facebook group, about struggling to grow her mailing list. This is important because there is a direct connection between the size and the quality of your email list and the number of paying clients that you're going to have. They just go hand in hand and here we go. Rosalyn's also telling me over here on Facebook that it is slow going,

Alright, you guys, well if you're here live with me. What have you done so far to grow your list? Let's move on to that, those answers. That's what I really want to know, and then we'll kind of match that up to what I'm going to share with you today. As for Emma, this is what she said inside our Facebook group. She said, I have tried three different freebies and nothing is working. I used to organically get 30 new people minimum to my list each month. Now, this is a struggle, but I keep trying. I possibly need more traffic and a better freebie. So first of all, Emma, I want to invite you and all of our listeners to this June's free event. It's called your Next 100 Email Contacts. I'm going to be sharing my entire list building system for health coaches. You don't want to miss this.

You can register for free at healthcoachpower.com/email. Again, that's healthcoachpower.com/email. List building. It's always going to be an important aspect of your business. It's not like you do it once and then you're done. Let's see what you guys are doing so far. Rosalyn says she has a lead magnet. Okay, we're going to talk about that today. Macaulay said, I just asked some people if I can add them. Good. My freebies didn't work. Okay, alright, I'm glad you guys are here. Let's build it. Like I said, it's something that you're going to continue to do year round. So if you have one lead magnet and that just did not work for you, that's okay because you're going to continue to go through this process week in, week out. It's never, oh, I've been doing this for 15 years. I'm still building my list. So whether you already have a mailing list, like Emma already has a mailing list, clearly, so does Macaulay, so does Rosalyn.

They're looking to add more names. Or if you're listening and you're like, I don't have a mailing list, Michelle, I'm just starting out. I don't have anything formally set up, that's okay. Join us this June. You're going to get my extremely efficient and effective list building system for health coaches that leads to paying clients and get this. It requires absolutely zero paid ads as promised that URL to join us for free again is healthcoachpower.com/email. So in response to Emma today, I want to talk about that last piece that she mentioned. She said she used to get new email subscribers every month and it was fairly easy to do, but no more. It's like what happened? Does she need a better freebie, an incentive for people to join her list? We call those freebies or we call them lead magnets, so it's possible, I don't know what Emma's lead magnet is, but it's possible that she needs something better.

What does that mean? Better but better performing? Sometimes I hear health coaches saying things like, oh, nobody wants to download a freebie anymore. Freebies don't work anymore, and I got to say, I really don't think that's the case because people are always, always in life interested in getting help with a problem that they're having and they're always interested in getting things for free. That's for sure. That's not changing. That's like human nature. That's not changing. What they are not interested in is junk or fluff, and you've seen it out there. Sometimes you go to download something, you give an email address and what you get back, you're like, oh, it's just a pitch. Oh, this is just blah, blah, blah, fluff, fluff, fluff, nothing of value here. So it is definitely worth carefully looking at your freebie to determine is this truly valuable? Is it noteworthy?
Will it capture somebody's attention for three seconds? You need their attention just long enough for them to go, oh yeah, I'd like this and give an email address, right? So does it stand out and say high value, super important, and I'm going to be walking you through this very specifically inside this June's your next 100 email contacts event. By the way, what makes for a really strong health coach freebie? How do you get people to jump on it? How do you attract the right people who may actually hire you down the line? We're going to cover all of that. So that's the creation of the freebie itself. How are you incentivizing new subscribers to join your list? And you want to think, am I getting my freebie in front of the right people? Who are the right people? Who do I want on my list?

Which brings me to that last part of what Emma shared where she said maybe she needs more traffic. Yeah, she probably does. I bet everybody listening right now. If you have a freebie out there, I bet you need more traffic. I mean, you could never have too much traffic, but I bet you could use more, and I bet Emma needs more of the right traffic. So let's see. What are you guys doing to get people to download your freebies? Rosalyn says Facebook group signup. That's a deep cut, Rosalyn. Usually when people join our health coach power community Facebook group, I do offer some type of free gift or free signup for something and that works. It can definitely work, but I would say it's a small percentage of the signups that I get to my mailing list, unless you have a huge number of people coming into your Facebook group, hopefully you're doing other things to promote your freebie.

There's the number of people who will actually give an email address when they join your group, and then the number who will actually go ahead and sign up for the thing. I like that you're doing that, and I want you to pay attention to what we're talking about today. I think when we're like, oh, I need more traffic. Oh, I need more people. I need to reach more people. Our minds leap to, and I hear health coaches saying, well, maybe I should try Facebook ads. My obvious next step would be to run Facebook ads, right? I'm going to say no, pause, wait on that. We think if we pay for traffic, maybe that's the solution and we see hundreds and thousands of ads on Facebook and Instagram, so it must be working right? Here's the thing, sometimes those ads are working for some people. Many times they're not working in my health coaching practice of over a decade.
I never ran a successful Facebook ad, and maybe that's my big failure. I never could get an ad to work. Today I'm going to share why I never had an ad run and a few different list growth techniques that worked really, really well. Instead, remember, I'm going to share my entire email list building system for health coaches this June. I'm even going to walk you through it for free. So if you go to healthcoachpower.com/email, you can register. You can share that page with all your health coach friends and networks. This is going to be a big old community event. So Facebook ads, and I realize right now I am live streaming into our Facebook group. I have a lot of gratitude for this platform that is available to us, but oh, Facebook ads. I have tried them many times on my own and I've even hired Facebook ads experts, and those retainer costs are like thousands, multiple thousands of dollars per month just for the retainer.

Then you also have to pay for the ads themselves, and I'm telling you, whether I was doing 'em on my own or even when I hired a company that supposedly knew what they were doing, it's really hit or miss. It's really tricky and mostly in my experience, it's a miss, not a hit. So I don't recommend health coaches going down this road. I know you don't have buckets and buckets of extra money to just play with and just hope that these ads might work out for you. It's very likely you will be wasting your money like I did so many times. It's like the ads have to be done just right and it's complicated and it's always changing. They're always changing the stupid ads platform just like they're always changing everything else. But beyond that, for health coaches, Facebook has really, really strict rules. Did you know this?
They have really strict rules for the health industry in particular. I did not know that years ago, and I once tried running an ad and it got approved, but then it was taken down and not only was it taken down, they shut off. They locked me out of my entire Facebook ads account. I could no longer pay the money to run an ad if I wanted to. I was just locked out, and there was never really a strong reason for it except in the ad I was talking about improving health and they are so strict in this area. So for years I couldn't even get into my ads account, so thank goodness I had other methods for getting my freebies in front of people. It's not just me. By the way. I know a lot of health coaches and I've heard about the same situation happening with other health coaches too.

So this is why I can honestly tell you I never had a successful Facebook ad as a health coach, and I don't think it's your best bet for building your mailing list anyway, because even if you could get the ads up and running for a decent price, it's not like having to take out a second mortgage just to run some Facebook ads. Do you have a proven effective freebie on the other side of that? Are people going to click your ad and then go to your page and are they going to want that thing? Because we don't just want ad clicks, we actually want what we call conversions. Sometimes a conversion rate on things like this are like 10%, 10% of the people who land on your page giving away your freebie, like your opt-in page actually give an email address that stinks. Sometimes it's 20%.

That kind of stinks too. So it means even if the ads are good, they don't really want your work. It doesn't put names on your list and your list doesn't grow. So if nobody wants the freebie, you really want to have something proven that's working in all other ways across different audiences before you would ever even dream of paying for traffic to run to that same freebie. Is this making sense? Just say yes in the comments of what I'm saying makes sense so far. If you've run Facebook ads in the past, I'd love to hear what the results were for you. Did you feel it was worth the money? So in my health coaching business, since the ads were not working, I was most successful building my list really two big ways, and there are many, many ways, but the two that I want to stress today, these are gold.

So definitely write this down. Okay, everyone says yes, yes, everyone says yes over here in the comments, so you're following me. Great. I figure someone's going to be like, you're wrong, Michelle. I've had so much success with Facebook ads. I would prove me wrong. I would love for you to prove me wrong. It would be so nice if we could just hit the easy button and run some ads and just guarantee that our business was going to grow. I would love to know if that was working for anybody, but since it wasn't, the first thing that I learned worked really well was creating my own content on a regular basis. So you can promote your freebie, you can put it on Instagram, you can walk around town with a T-shirt that's like, ask me for my freebie, whatever you're doing. But if you're always waving that same freebie or that same lead magnet at people, download my thing.

Download my thing, it gets old. It does. But if you produce a new blog post or a new podcast episode every week or even really thoughtful social media posts, that's the kind of stuff people share. They do that organically. They do the work of the paid ads for you for free. How often have you seen a real and then you shared it to your own stories or you read a blog post and you sent it to your sister? That's what I mean by people organically sharing. You're not paying them to do it. They're helping tell people about you. I will never forget when I looked at stats on Pinterest, even though I wasn't using Pinterest at the time, other people had been pinning my blog posts. I had a lot of recipes, thousands and thousands and thousands of pins. People were sharing my stuff. So if you create good content on a regular basis, it's like the work just gets done on your behalf. So here's how it works. You create the content, it's got to be good, it's got to be shareable, and you can include relevant freebies within that content.

It's like an apple tree. If the apple tree asks the animals, Hey, you want my seeds? Can you take my seeds? Can you go spread my seeds around? The animals would be like, what are you talking about? So instead, the apple tree is really smart and it produces delicious apples and tucks the seeds inside, and then the animals kind of go off and happily do the rest. That was kind of a weird metaphor, but I think it works. We have to make apples. We have to give people things that they want, and within that, we can then offer our freebies. Once we've wowed them with that free content, they're going to be like, yeah, maybe I do want that resource. Maybe I'm willing to give an email address. Because remember, even though freebies are free, everybody knows that an email address is worth something. It really is.

So sometimes we're stingy with our email addresses. Prove that you've good stuff to say that they haven't heard before. You can really help them get aha moments. They're going to sign up for your freebies. So if you have a valuable freebie, you can get it in front of the right people by creating related content that gets shared, or it can be vice versa. You can decide what kind of content you're going to write, you're going to podcast about, and then you can build a related freebie. So for example, in my own health coaching business, I remember this one time I was doing a blog series on sleep. There were four parts to the series, so four different blog posts and each one included this freebie that I created about sleep. So I designed it all together. I designed those four blog posts and the freebie to work together kind of like as a package.

So this way I knew anyone who was interested in the topic, they'd probably not just read one of the blog posts, they would probably read the next one and the next one. So I'm getting that freebie in front of them multiple times, and they'd be the exact right audience for that freebie because clearly they were interested in reading about sleep in the first place. So they're very likely to opt in for. It worked really well, and this is worth mentioning, it worked very well because I had been writing my blog for several years. I had some traction. You could do exactly what I'm saying. You could start a blog, you could start a podcast, you could already have some content that you could lean into and start offering freebies that way, but also lean into whatever you have you teach in-person fitness classes, okay? How can you use that leverage to promote your freebies, right?

I don't know. You do cooking classes, a walking group, whatever it is that you're already doing, wherever you already have an audience, think about ways to expand that audience and offer them free things to get on your mailing list. That's really what it's all about. So for me, content, definitely a proven way to go about it, but also think about what's unique in your world. Content. Alright, what do we got here? Macaulay said she did Facebook ads and canceled it really fast, had no clue what she was doing. Same, and I mean, I've had people explain it to me and I will go in there and look at the dashboard and then my eyes just start to cross and then you get scared. If you don't understand what's going on with your money and you're just kind of throwing it at the problem, it's not going to end well, and the Macaulay had a exploding head aha moment at some point in the past few minutes.

I like that Connie says, love it. I'm glad this is landing. You guys stick with me. I've got another very important way for you to make sure your freebies are getting in front of more people getting that traffic. And this is all about, and if you are ever taken any of my courses inside Healthy Profit University, if you've been inside Fast Track, I guarantee you've heard me say this before, I'm going to say it again. We have to cross pollinate with other people's audiences. I kind of feel like I should start talking about Apples again because it's, there's this cross pollination thing that has to happen. You can only reach on your own who you can reach, right? You're only connected to so many people, even in a second degree, third degree kind of way. But if a friend of yours or another practitioner or another business were to share your freebie or remember what we just talked about, what if they just shared your content, your blog post, your podcast episode with their audience?

It's like, boom, you just found yourself a brand new orchard. That's how you grow. That's how you really start to multiply your reach. So in fact, just last week on the show, that was episode 2 91. I shared how one of our fast trackers, Madeline, she's doing this exact type of cross pollination with a friend of hers who teaches bar classes. So Madeline's a health coach, her friend teaches bar. If you miss that episode, go back and take a listen because it's such a win-win when we can set up these types of situations, and I bet you can set up something similar with someone that you know and you know what? You don't even have to know them. I was thinking about this, and I remember way back when, gosh, I was putting together some type of freebie about sugar cravings or the dangers of sugar or something like that, and I reached out to a brand called NewNaturals. They make stevia, and I had no relationship with this brand or with anybody at their company, so I really just reached out cold. But I explained that I'd love to include a coupon for their product within my freebie. They thought that was fantastic because that's free advertising for them. So they were very willing to do this, and I asked that they would be willing to share about this freebie to their audience, and they posted it to their social media accounts that had tens of thousands of followers. So just like that, I got new eyeballs on my stuff and new names on my list just to put some numbers against it. When I'm running Facebook ads, I do run them. Now, I find that if I can get new leads, meaning new names on my mailing list for under $5 each, that's pretty good. Sometimes it can be as low as $3 each, but sometimes it could be as high as $10 each.
So think about every new name on your list being worth 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, $10, something like that. If New Naturals, put 10 new names on my list that was worth a hundred dollars. That's amazing. So you can really get the results and save yourself so much money with these cross-pollination techniques. Now, I'm not going to lie, it's definitely easier to make an arrangement like this when you have an established relationship for sure, but even if you don't, you might as well ask, right? You never know. You want to come up with some reason that it's a win for them as well as a win for you. Small businesses do this with each other all the time, so be creative and think about how can I really make this a valuable opportunity for this partnering business so that they'll say yes, and maybe you can get it posted to their social media.

Maybe they'll send out an email on your behalf. That's really the gold standard, but there you have it. Two solid, highly effective ways to promote a freebie, assuming you have a good valuable freebie in the first place without running costly Facebook ads. Do we love this? I love when we don't have to spend buckets and buckets of money just to get our health coaching businesses off the ground. I love when we can do things for free or very low costs regardless of how you decide to share your freebies with the world. And even if at some point you do decide to try paid advertising or maybe if Macaulay decides to try it again, there's so much strategy that often gets overlooked when we put our freebie together, and it's why health coaches like Emma are saying, it just doesn't work like it used to. So this June, I'm going to be sharing my entire list building system with you, and I think you're going to be in for a few surprises. Definitely run and sign up to join us now. Once again, it's healthcoachpower.com/email. I will see you there and I'll see you right here on the show next week. Thank you for joining me.