#305: Invisible to Influential: Transform Strangers Into Followers and Clients

Hello there, health coaches. It is so nice to be back with you today. I was just saying before I hit record
that my kids went back to school this morning. It was a joyous occasion. I was so happy to send them off.
They're in middle school together this year, and then I got all kinds of motivated, all right, time to get
down to business. This school year is upon us. So if you're starting your business or if you've been in
business for a while, or maybe if you've been in business for a long time, there comes a point where either
you're tired of hearing crickets, you're just feeling invisible. Is anybody feeling that way lately in your
business where you're a health coach and you know how helpful health coaching is, but nobody seems to
care at all. So that might be happening. And the other thing that happens pretty frequently is that you may
have found that your first round of clients, they just came to you.

You had enough people in your circle of friends and family, they showed up, they raised their hand. This
doesn't happen for everybody, but it happens for a lot of health coaches. And you're like, yeah, I got
clients. And then it dries up on you and you're like, well, now what do I do? So it's very, very common,
and you've probably heard me say this and you probably know that if you want to build your business,
you got to build your mailing list. But who is going to go on that list? Who do you even have access to?
How do you get people interested or even nodding their head and saying, yeah, sure. Go ahead, put me on
your mailing list. Where are these people? So today we're going to talk about something that I don't think
it's talked about enough. I'm even going to give you the formal marketing term for it.

We're going to talk about the top of your funnel, and that is basically the very first touch point between
you and your health coaching business and a new person, someone that is just laying eyes on you for the
first time, someone that is just figuring out who you are for the very, very first time. It's that initial touch
point. We talk a lot about people on your mailing list. We talk a lot about how to ask someone to be a
client that's further down the funnel. First, people just even have to know that you exist. So how do we do
that? Today, I'm going to share four ways that I built my audience. First as a practicing health coach and
also talk about how I built my audience of health coaches like you. And I'm thrilled to be able to help you
even more on this very same topic with my brand new audience attraction virtual retreat for health
coaches.

And it's happening in just a few weeks. You can get your free ticket at healthcoachpower.com/audience.
Again, that's healthcoachpower.com/audience. I'm going to drop it right over here into our feed. It's going
to be so fun. I've reached into my health coach industry network. I've pulled together eight presenters that
are going to come hang out with us. They know a thing or two about audience attraction. In fact, you
probably know a few of them. Plus we're going to make it a whole well-rounded experience. We're going
to include wellness activities to help you as a coach, a live social time for you to connect with each other
and connect with me. You're going to learn a lot about the topics that I'll touch on today in this episode,
plus more that these speakers are experts on. The very, very best part is we're making it very easy to fit
this virtual retreat into your life. Short and sweet presentations. You can do it on your own time, all that
jazz, zero pressure, nothing to buy. Go to healthcoach power.com/audience, get your free ticket and then
we'll be able to go even deeper into these topics. But for today, I had to dig in my brain and I'm like, what
did I do? What moved the needle the most when I was starting out? Because you guys, I used to work in
advertising. I had worked my way up in that field and then suddenly I was a health coach. Nobody knew
that. They didn't look at me. Anyone in my world did not look at me and say, this is a health person. She's
a health expert of some kind. No, they were like, she's an art director. And then there was the whole rest
of the world who I didn't know and they didn't look at me or think anything at all.

And therein lies the challenge. So one of the very, very first things that I started doing was getting myself
out in public. And you can do this umpteen different ways, but the way that I mostly showed up in public
was by hosting workshops. And I think it was, I'm not going to say it was easy, it was incredibly scary to
do it the first time or the first few times, but I had a little bit of an in because I was teaching yoga. So I
started doing workshops at the yoga studios where I already taught at the gyms where I already taught,
but certainly branched out from there and thinking, where else could I hold this workshop? Where else
can I put myself in public? Could I put a table at this fair? Could I set up a food demo in this location?
And just a lot of reaching out, a lot of just trying to connect with people and physically in person, planting
my body where there are other bodies so that we could possibly exchange some words. And it worked. If
you did nothing else and all you did was show up that multiple times a month for sure, this isn't like a one
and done thing, maybe even multiple times a week. You could build your entire business that way. And I
know that I sometimes would meet someone and they'd be very interested in what I did and they'd
become a paying client right away. Oh, that's the dream. That doesn't usually happen though. That's not
why we're doing this stuff we're doing just to get that first initial touchpoint with people. Some down the
line will become clients, some will tell their friends about you. Some will say, I have an event coming up
at my work. Do you think you can come speak? They're going to connect you to other opportunities. So
any kind of public speaking, live workshops, live demos, anything where you are interacting in person
with brand new faces, these are the things you want to get on your calendar.

So I'm going to suggest you do that at any point in your career. This is not just if you're new to Health's
coaching, this is at any point. I was just talking to my friend Andrea Beman, who some of you may know,
and Andrea's going to be part of our audience attraction retreat. And Andrea is an amazing public speaker,
and Andrea's been in the health coaching field for like 25 years. I mean, she's the OG and Andrew's still
doing every public speaking event if you ask her to do something, I bet nine times out of 10 she says yes,
because she's always got some kind of speaking engagement going on, including hanging out with us. So
I was so happy to be able to speak with someone who's been doing it even longer than now. I have. And
her biggest advice, and you'll hear what she has to say inside of the retreat presentation, but she was like,
it just takes practice. It's always going to be scary at first and some places are going to say no, we're not
interested for one reason or another. And you just got to keep trying and then it gets easier and easier just
like anything in life. So putting yourself in public, speaking words out loud in public, this is the quickest
way for people to get to know you. We do a lot on screens, but I feel like I've been beating this drum for a
year or two now, and I'm not going to stop marketing yourself as a health coach does not begin and end
on Instagram. It just does not. Okay? So this is something that I know works exceedingly well for me and
it's still working for health coaches who are getting themselves out there.

Alright, let's see what you guys are saying. By the way, I got a couple yeses when I asked earlier, does
anybody feel invisible? And you know what? Some days I still feel invisible even now that there's
thousands and thousands in our community, in my audience, and some days, maybe especially during the
summer when it's a little slow or on holiday or something like that, I'm like, boy, it's crickets out there. So
it does come in waves sometimes, but if you are consistently hearing nothing but crickets, my goodness,
go get yourself out in public. Lisa is saying over here, yes, the yoga studios here are owned by health and
nutrition coaches or have their own. Well, that is certainly not true of all yoga studios. Keep looking. And
then you're also going to think about Pilates studios and gyms and spas and massage places, and
somebody who's doing reiki, anyone who has a space and an audience. I'm even thinking of one of our
coaches. She used to do a ton of workshops through the local continuing education center and they even
had a nice beautiful kitchen. She could do cooking classes, she could teach classes on various topics.
That's another way to get yourself out in public. So it's very easy to start doing the I can't because I can't
because there's two places I'm thinking of right now, said, no, I can't because I'm not at my perfect
weight, therefore I can't show myself in public. You know what I think about that for this episode. Let's
take all the I can't be causes, smash 'em up into a little ball and we'll just throw 'em over there. You can
pick 'em up later if you need 'em. You don't need them though.

All right. The next thing I did, and this was huge, I kind of forgot about, I mean, I didn't forget that it
happened, but I didn't think of it. I hadn't thought about it recently and how pivotal it really was. But
there's a lot to be said for networking and that sounds scary and it sounds kind of corporate-y and I hate
me personally. I hate networking events. Now some of you are probably great at them. I know a lot of
people do this kind of thing with a lot of success, just like I am more of an introvert by nature and the idea
of going to a straight up networking event makes me break out in hives. So that was never so much my jam.
But networking can be done so many different ways. It can be as simple as picking up your phone and
texting somebody that you haven't heard from in a while, or scheduling a time to catch up a phone
zoom or getting a cup of coffee. It can be done. Smaller settings, one person, two person, three people,
something like that. You don't have to walk into a room where a place is like, this is a networking event,
right? Because here's what happened.

And Mimi's asking, how are you networking? So these days I actually have a little tool, it's called Dex.
Lemme see, I'll get a link for you guys on that. I think it's healthcoachpower.com/dex. And that's funny, I
just thought of that right now. Dex is like a Rolodex for modern day. So if you want to keep track of
people that you've met and make sure that you do stay in touch with them, this has been a very helpful
tool. It means just drop into their Facebook account and leave a note, one of their pictures and say
something or send them a quick email. Haven't heard from you in a while. Do you want to get coffee
sometime? That's also networking. And like I was saying, just texting someone you haven't heard from.
Back in the day when I first started my business, I had been laid off from advertising. This was 2008
when everybody was getting laid off from advertising and many fields and I didn't know where to get
clients. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was on Twitter at the time and I tweeted or whatever. I sent
a Twitter message or whatever they were called to a friend of mine who had also been laid off from the ad
agency and I was just like, what are you up to? What's keeping you busy? How are you spending your
time? Right? That's just like a friendly note. It wasn't networky, but it was because my friend Eric said,
well, actually I'm working on a documentary about people who are laid off and what they're doing now,
and I've been meaning to contact you because I'd like you to be in it. And I ended up being part of this
documentary that got amazing press and we'll talk about that too, right? It's hard sometimes for you to get
yourself in the newspaper or get yourself on TV by yourself, but if you connect with the right people who
are doing the right things, you guys, I was on major news outlets, I was interviewed on NPRI. So I
remember being so scared to do that interview. It was so much so fast in my career. It didn't lead to clients
directly being in that documentary, but it got me noticed by other opportunities. And all of these led to
clients down the line and it all started with a single little message to an acquaintance. So I bet you have
acquaintances and you don't know, they might be putting together a documentary and they want you to be
in it or something else that you couldn't even dream of right now.

So that was just an amazing example about how a very small thing that I did on a very particular day
turned into a very big thing in my own business. What ended up happening, and again, it wouldn't really
play out for many years, you're playing the long game here guys. Initially I could have said, well, this was
stupid. This was a waste of time. I don't have a roster full of clients to show for this. Just being in this
documentary, who cares? Well, the school that I graduated from as a health coach was the Institute for
Integrative Nutrition. They caught wind of this documentary. They put my face in their next brochure.
This is back when things were still in paper and getting mailed through the US Postal Service. And so
we'd get this brochure in the mail. There was my face a little mention of how I had been featured in a
documentary. They were saying, look, these are our successful graduates. These are the different things
that they were doing. And suddenly health coaches started contacting me in droves. They wanted to hear
about the school, they wanted to hear about my experience, health coaching. They wanted to, and hello,
what podcast do am I talking on right now? Who am I talking to right now? It was the start of where my
career eventually would go 10, 13, 15 years later, this is where we are now. So even the opportunities that
feel like nothing at the time or feel like you don't know the significance of at the time, boy does it
snowball. It really does. It's such a cool thing. Alright, the next thing I want to talk about, I'm just
glancing over here our comments. We're still talking about different ways to network, but here's
something that you can do from the comfort of your own home without having to talk to anyone at all.
And you shouldn't pick one of the things I'm talking about today or one of the things that we're going to
cover during the retreat later this month. You should be doing many of them, some where you're talking
to people, some where you're connecting with people and some like this one, you can sit right in your
chair in front of your desk and create content. So content creation was a huge piece of how I built an
audience. I was going to say starting on day one, but no, starting before day one, before I even had a
health coaching business, I had started a blog about whatever I wanted to write about, whatever my little
heart desired. It was like 2006, blogging was still quite new and I would just write about whatever healthy
food I was excited about or healthy recipe I had just made or whatever.

I didn't have any strategy at all these days. We put a lot more thought into the type of content that I'm
producing here on the podcast and the way that it gets published on my website, et cetera. But the point is
consistent content, and I'm talking about publishing something once a week, maybe more will again over
time, not in the first day, not in the first week or the first month, but over time you'll create a following.
You'll create people that are looking forward to the next episode that you put out. There'll be people who
are like, I've tried all the recipes on your blog. I couldn't believe it that people were actually reading and
then taking action and doing the things and this created this fan base for me. So again, this is something
you can start now or if you've already started, keep going because it's not going to pay off immediately
and you're going to think, is this worth my time?

But if you're putting effort in consistently to create useful content that aligns with what people are
actually looking for and need and are interested in, and if you can make it kind of fun, otherwise nutrition
and health, it can feel kind of boring. If you're not health nerds like us to the rest of the population, they
can be like snore. She's talking about macros again. But if you can make it a bit fun, a bit entertaining,
and also something that's useful and valuable to someone, they're going to read it. They're going to look
forward to your next episode or your next post. They're going to share it with their friends and you will
build that following. I cannot stress this enough and we will be talking about more about content during
the virtual retreat for sure. Content could be, like I said, a blog, a podcast, it could be a YouTube channel
and it could even be on social media. But anywhere that you are very consistently showing up and it's not
just a silly picture of your dog or here's what I ate for breakfast, but something that's actually thoughtful
and makes someone go, that's worth a follow, I'm going to send that to someone that makes them think a
little bit, maybe makes them laugh. This is where the really juicy parts are of content creation. Is anybody
who's here live with me? Are any of you already creating content in any form? I know it's easy to say, oh,
it's saturated. There's already so many health and wellness blogs, there's already so many health and
wellness podcasts. But the truth is that a very, very tiny percentage stick with it. So if you can keep going
past month one, past month two, now you're on year one, year two, year three, it just whoop very, very
few people are left at that point. And then it's really not that competitive at all, but it is a long game. So
stick with it.

Okay, Luke says, yes, Instagram and Facebook. Luke, I want you to think about long form content on a
platform that is more evergreen in nature in addition to maybe what you're doing on social media there.
Ellen said she wrote her first guest article. That's another fantastic way of getting yourself in front of new
eyes, right? New eyes are important because when it's like your own blog, this is great, you will create a
following. But if you're writing for another publication and they already have all their readers look at all
those new people that are going to be reading your words and that gives you street cred, that is an
amazing step to take. Ellen, I'm very, very proud of you. And so last but not least, let's talk about social
media. I did say earlier, it's not the end all be all to building your health coaching practice. If you had a
pie, we're going to do some fractions and we cut the pie in half. I wouldn't even give half your pie to
social media. I just wouldn't unless you love it so much and you are so into it and you just live and
breathe the algorithm. I wouldn't even give half your marketing pie to social media. I think it's a slow
road. I think it's a misleading road. I think it's not very good for your health just as health coaches for us
to be on social media all day. So it is something to include, maybe give it a quarter of your marketing pie.
That's my advice to you because every coach I feel like comes out of health coaching school lately and it's
like, well, it's all going to be about Instagram.

I got to get on Instagram. That's how I'm going to build my following. Got to go get those hashtags and
agonize all day over one post that nobody looks at because you have no followers. Let's just say what it is.
It's one tool in the marketing toolbox, and I have used it to build my business. So like I told you earlier,
when I contacted my friend Eric, I did it through Twitter. Well, that's social media, isn't it? And then one
time there was this woman looking for a health writer. She wanted guest articles like what Ellen just did,
and that's really all she said. She said she was looking for a health expert to contribute a weekly article.
And I wrote to her and said, I would love to do that. I had never done anything like that before, but she
didn't say anything about having to be a licensed medical professional or have any fancy letters after my
name, so I figured I must qualify. And she said, great, and I got that gig and through that gig I got access
to tons more women that I never would've reached otherwise. So that was also through social media. So
that was sort of networking slash social media. And then there's been the occasional, I used the right
hashtag and someone was following that hashtag and they saw what I had to offer and they bought it. And
that happens 0.1% of the time. Okay? I want to be real clear about expectations when it comes to social
media. We got it because I don't want you wasting time. Kathy said, has your blog grown in followers or
maybe she's talking to someone else in this thread, but I'm going to answer the question anyway. Well, I
don't have the same blog that I did in the beginning, of course, but when I was, and I was not podcasting
at the time, but I was blogging consistently and getting better at it every time, just incrementally getting
better at it.

You should have seen the first pictures that I ever put on my blog. I mean, it's like I never heard of
lighting in my life. So it was just incrementally getting better and better. And the traffic to my website
was growing tremendously because people would be searching for something. Some people might be
searching for health coach, not that many, but people are searching for things like dairy free chocolate
dessert or whatever, like what to eat when you have celiac disease or whatever. And if you have articles
about these things, they're going to find you through Google. So there is one point where I was getting
tens of thousands of visitors to my website every month organically because of the content that I had been
publishing for years. This is a good time to tell you about Answer the Public. I think that's what it's called.
Somebody check me on that answerthepublic.com. There's a website that will help you see exactly what
people are searching for so that you can then create the content to match or to answer their questions. You
already know it's a common question. You already know. It's something that people are typing into
Google, you provide a really great article to answer it, boom. Now they're going to find you again. This is
a long game. It will not happen overnight. Nothing worthwhile ever happens overnight.

What else are we saying here? Luke's saying So long forum is best when it comes to content. They each
serve a purpose. But when you post something on social media and then a week goes by, two weeks go
by, it is way down in your feed. Really. Nobody is seeing that anymore. You can tell on Instagram
because it'll tell you you're real reached this many people and you're like, yay. And then if you go back a
month later, some more people may have found it, but generally you get the biggest bang right in the
beginning and then it kind of disappears, right? It just goes down the timeline. And that's the end of that.
When you are writing long form content or you're producing long form content like a podcast, people are
going to be finding that stuff like how I was just describing through search and listening to it, watching it,
reading it for years to come. It is evergreen content, and if you're hosting it on your own website, which is
what I do, it's content that belongs to you. So they're not just looking at it over here on this app, they're
looking at it on your website. They're one click away from your about page. They're one click away from
your work with me page. That content you now, you control everything about it. It's not up to the
algorithm. It's not up to like, oh, did Facebook go down or did Zuckerberg shut it all down and now I lost
all my content. So there's really something to be said for owning your content, and that's another good
way of thinking about long form content versus social media and where to put your efforts. Although they
do go hand in hand like this episode, we'll take a clip of it and yeah, we'll post it on social media.
So Lisa says, so blogs are back in and not dead. They're not dead, but it's different than it used to be. Back
in the day, people would, did you guys ever subscribe to blogs? I had a blog reader, like a special
application that helped me keep up to date with all the blogs that I was reading. We read them like it was
someone's diary or something. We don't do that anymore. Blogs now really serve the purpose of I'm
searching for this particular topic and I found it via somebody's blog post. Right? So that's happening
constantly, constantly. I just made a birthday cake for someone and I needed a vegan cake recipe and
guess where I found it? I found it on a food blog, right? I am sure you guys use recipes from food blogs
all the time, so it's just an example.

Okay, great. You guys are all interested in blogging. I'm seeing that here in the chat. That's fantastic.
That's fantastic. Get started and keep in mind everything I'm saying today, there's no get rich quick in this
business. That's just not it. But if you can invest yourself in building your audience that's top of funnel,
like I said at the very top of the episode, top of funnel, then from there, they will become email
subscribers. And from there they will start to buy things that you're selling. And some of them will buy
the high ticket or your one-on-one services, your most expensive services, and then this creates that entire
funnel that you're always hearing about. We toss that word around a lot, but it all starts with people just
seeing you, hearing you hearing from you.

Now, the best part of everything that I've talked about today, and no one has brought this up, I don't think
so, I'm going to bring it up. Everything we've talked about so far today is free. I was not talking today
about Facebook ads. You could run paid ads. I've done a little bit of that through the years a little bit, but
about 99% of my growth has been through tried and true techniques that cost $0, and that is where I
advise you to invest your time. Most health coaches, I know you don't have a ton of time, but you
probably have more time than you have money to throw into Facebook ads. That is a very, very tricky
place to live when you're trying to build an audience. I'm going to advise you to take advantage of all the
very low cost and free ways of getting yourself in front of a new audience, and we're going to be sharing
much more about that during our virtual retreat starting September 29th. You're going to go to
healthcoachpower.com/audience to grab a free ticket. Listen, this event, there's never been anything like
it. It's open to all health coaches. Doesn't matter if you're in school, out of school, what school you went
to, vegan, I don't care. I don't care what dietary dogma you're coming with, I don't care. I don't care if
you're board certified because we all have this one thing in common. We're all looking for clients. We all
have to learn how to fill our funnel from the top and build that audience. So I hope to see you there and
also back here for next week's episode. Take care everyone. Thanks for joining me today.