#319: 3 Income Streams That Built My Health Coaching Practice

Michelle:
Hello there, health coaches. I hope your holiday season has been magical so far. I say that like a little bit tongue in cheek because I know that you might be the one who's making all the magic for everybody else. Be sure to make some for yourself too. There's my hot tip for this December episode. I talked to so many health coaches who are trying to find a path to more clients, to more financial freedom. That's magical, right? If anything is, and what often happens is we get lost in a sea of what if this and what if that and maybe this other thing and just shiny object, shiny objects. It's lovely in many ways that health coaches have so many different opportunities available to us. It can also be disorienting, right? Should I go after this or should I try to do that instead? And we just end up all over the place in kind of a hot mess.
Yeah. You know what I'm talking about today? I'm going to share the three, just three income streams that built my entire health coaching practice, which I was active in for 13 years. And I know that these are still working today for health coaches because it's what I teach inside my Healthy Profit University Fast track program. It's how our coaches start to make headway in their own businesses. Same three things. Now that being said, we're all different. We all have different goals, different skills. So today obviously I'm sharing my experience of what has worked really well and I'll also throw in some bonus so-called opportunities that have not panned out so well. At least not for me now, by the way, as I put my glasses on so I can better see my screen. By the way, this episode is brought to you by Practice Better, which I absolutely use for years and years and years as a health coach and recommend all the time.

Practice Better is going to handle your billing, your scheduling, your client notes, your private sessions, your online programs. It integrates with fullscript, it integrates with That Clean Life, you name it. It does it all beautifully so that you can spend less time with admin tasks and your clients see you as completely professional. There is a reason the Practice Better is a big favorite inside our Health Coach Power community. And you as part of our community can sign up for a free trial and save 30% off your first three months at healthcoachpower.com/pb. That stands for Practice Better. So again, if you're here with me live, I think I mentioned this before I hit record, if you're here with me live, if you're watching the replay later, tell me in the chat how many streams of income are you working with at the moment. Another way of saying that is how many different things do you sell or do you have to offer as a health coach?

How can you make money? So everybody pretty much graduates from health coaching school with one, and that's private health coaching. So that's one income stream and we'll talk about that today. Do you have any others? I'd love to know. I'm going to tell you today what worked really well for me and why, especially in hindsight, because hindsight is 2020. Why I think it works so well, even as a new coach, and I just want to say this upfront, the trick is promoting your services, whatever they are. If you have won, if you have two, Ellen over here says she has three. Great. The trick is promoting these services throughout the year in a purposeful, intentional way, not just going, Hey, I got this thing to offer. I got this program, I got this product, and just waiting for clients to fall in your lap. That's generally not what happens.

You're going to be sitting around waiting for a really long time. So if you want to turn next year into a real breakthrough year for your business, we're going to be talking more about income streams and more about mapping out a plan for your year. In my free workshop coming up later this month, you can go to healthcoachpower.com/2025, get yourself signed up. We'll see you there. But as for today, the three income streams that in hindsight, I'm looking back and I'm like, what really made a difference? What really moved the needle? I've tried, I think I tried everything in my health coaching practice. You name it, I tried it. But the three that always top the list, like if I were properly tracking my income, and hopefully you are, and if not, hopefully you'll start. If you're properly tracking your income, you can see at the end of the year exactly where you made the most, which of your efforts paid off.

And so number one, for me it was always private coaching. It's the most basic thing. Sometimes it feels boring, sometimes it feels intimidating, right? New coaches feel like, am I really going to be in this one-on-one conversation with someone? What if I don't have all the answers, right? There's lots of reasons that I think we tend to shy away from wanting to do the private coaching. However, first of all, you can do it any time or place at the drop of a hat. That is the beauty of private coaching. You do not have to have, don't let anybody tell you different. You do not need to have some big old program created upfront. You do not. You can show up. You should be able to show up and coach someone anytime, anywhere. If I said right now, boom, client in front of you, you could hold a client session right now.

That's why private coaching is so powerful. There's no lead up time. There's no lock yourself in your office and plan stuff out for six months before you even think of taking a paying client. No way. Get out there, start doing it. Learn to coach. Learn to be a great coach. And you could be making, here's the other great thing about private coaching, high ticket. It's a high ticket item. Your people are paying you a substantial amount of money for private coaching. I am always advising my healthy profit university members to charge at least a thousand dollars for a private coaching package. And that could be six months, it could be three months, it could be six weeks. It doesn't really matter honestly. It's not about trading time for money. It's about helping people get a result. So whatever that timeframe is, however much that result is worth to them, that's what you should be charging.

And it is your one-on-one time. It is not scalable. So it's very meaning you can't add more people and make more money. So you need to charge high ticket pricing for your private coaching. You making a lot of money and you can do it easily and on the spot. Yay, yay for that. So if you're like, I don't know what I'm going to do in 2025, I don't have a program, Michelle, I don't have anything. You got private coaching, do that focus there. I think especially for new coaches, especially if you're the person I just described that will get you the furthest the fastest. Because if you're trying to sell something that costs like $29, you're going to have to sell a lot of them to add up to what you could make with just one private client. And I know you don't have a huge audience in the beginning, so you're much more likely to find one person to hire you for private coaching than 20, 30, 50, a hundred people to buy something smaller from you.

It's just math, okay? So private coaching did the best for me. I always took private coaching clients. I did raise my rates through the years, obviously, especially at one point. And my practice was really very, very busy. And this was actually during COI was very, very busy because I was also caretaking for my kids who were still quite small at the time as a single mom. Everything that went along with covid, I had no time and I doubled my rates at that point. And so at any point, if you're too busy, you can't take on more clients, or if you're working another job and you only have space for one or two private clients, great. As soon as you're finding it easy to fill those spots, bump up your rates, it's just all about supply and demand. This way you can keep showing up and doing good work in the world and people can keep getting help from you.

You're not going to put yourself out of business, you're not going to burn yourself out. It's very, very flexible private coaching. I think that's the biggest thing I want to say about it. Very, very flexible for any coaching practice. Alright, let's move on. The next way that I blew the doors off my business, and this started about a year into my practice and it continued straight through all 13 years of my health coaching practice, is I ran a lot of short online group programs. When I say short, I'm telling you they were never longer than 21 days. I ran 21 days, 10, maybe 14, 10 and five days. And really over the course of the years, I think with the advent of a social media and everything that our brains are up against, I found that the shorter programs always worked better and you could charge pretty much the same price.

So there you go. How about a five day online group program? That's the kind of thing that started to work like gangbusters because it's so easy for people to say yes, it's so easy for somebody to invite a friend to because these things would cost $99, $79, something like that. It's like a no brainer. So it's really nice to have in your income streams, something that's a higher ticket price point, like private coaching and something that is a lower ticket price point, like this kind of short online program. Now, like I mentioned earlier, your income streams become scalable when you can add more and more people to it without it increasing your workload tremendously. So the difference between one private client and two private clients is double. That's double the amount of time, double amount of work. Every time you add a client, it's a hundred percent more work.

But when you have a short online group program, you create it once and if you have one person going through it, two people, 20 people, 200 people, by and large, it's the same amount of work to run the program. I mean, you're going to have a little bit more admin of course when you're dealing with hundreds of people than when you just have one or two. But the work's done and that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. So you can keep adding people to that program. You could run it several times a year. This is something you definitely want to consider for 2025. I do not recommend you guys jumping into expensive. So high ticket online courses that are like many months long, many weeks long until you have mastered the short online course. It only makes sense. It's like you run a 5K before you run a marathon.

It's a very specific skillset to create and run a program like this. So for most coaches in our community, I want you to start with the smaller ones. See how much fun they are, understand exactly the kind of work that goes into it. You can always build larger courses later, again, as your audience expands. So we got private coaching, we got short online group programs, and the last one that's always worked really, really well for me is affiliate marketing. And a lot of people don't know exactly what that is, so I'm going to just define it really briefly. Affiliate marketing means you are products and brands that you love to your clients, to your friends, to whomever. And if they make a purchase, you earn a percentage of the sale. It's no extra cost to them. So if they buy from your affiliate link or not, they're going to pay the same amount.

But if they do buy through your affiliate link because you were the one that recommended it or you made it so convenient for them that they bought through your link, you're going to earn a percentage of the sale. And it ranges from, I don't know, if you're an Amazon affiliate, you probably make half a percent of the sale, but if you are working for other companies, you can make something like 20%, even 30% of every sale. And that can really start to add up, especially if it's the kind of thing where your client or your friend or your family member is buying this product or service again and again and again, like a subscription service or one of the brands that I am still an affiliate for to this day is Annmarie Skincare. I've been with them for gosh, over a decade. And you think about how a woman buys skincare products.

She doesn't just buy 'em once. If she likes 'em, she's going to continue to buy over time and they even have a subscription program so she can just get her cleansers and toners and oils and everything in the mail. That is a beautiful source of revenue. So the way affiliate marketing is different from an MLM or selling any other kind of product is that you have no obligation to the brand. So if you want to promote them a lot, great. You don't promote them at all. Doesn't matter. You don't have any minimums that you have to hit. You don't have an upstream, a downstream, none of that going on. You are completely independent and you can decide for yourself exactly how you do or don't want to promote. I always like to use it like this. I'm an affiliate for let's say five brands that I love.

I talk about them all the time because I love them and I use them, right? So I'm always telling my clients about them anyway. And then my clients would say to me something like, Hey, what skincare products do you use? Or like, Hey, I've been trying to look for a natural moisturizer or something. What do you recommend? And I would say, oh, here's the brand that I use. Check it out. And I just send them my link, right? We're doing it all the time anyway. As health coaches, why not earn something from that sale? So what you would want to do to get involved with affiliate marketing is think about the brands. Usually smaller, mid-size brands have affiliate programs go to their website. Sometimes they have a link. Sometimes you have to contact support, get signed up as an affiliate, get your special affiliate tracking link, and then you can start sharing that with people.

And there's a million other ways that you can earn through affiliate marketing, but I think that's the most natural. People are always asking, Hey, what brand of vitamin C do you take? Or Hey, what water filters do you or, right? These are questions. Health coaches are always, always fielding is that that's what makes affiliate marketing my third most favorite, favorite income stream because you're earning and you don't have to do anything. I mean you do. You still have to promote your link, you have to use your link. You can even run more specific promotions around it. But once the sale is made, you don't have to do anything after that. The company that they're buying from is going to fulfill the order. If they have an issue with the product, they're going to talk to that company directly. It's very different from anything you're selling within your own business where you are primarily and fully responsible for everything tip to tail, right?

So affiliate marketing fills in the gaps. It allows you to earn money in a very passive way. And gosh, I got to tell you, it has really served me well through the years. So these are my top picks, private coaching, short online group programs, and affiliate marketing. Any of these that you're already using or have questions about, if you're here live, you can go ahead and ask in the comment area. I want to go on and tell you about what hasn't gone so well, the income streams or the opportunities that never really panned out for me and that I don't see panning out for too many other health coaches either. And I'll take some educated guesses at why that may be. So here's one that may surprise you. Group coaching. I know somebody out there just went, what? I have a great group coaching program.

I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do. Here's why it's never been my favorite. First of all, if you don't have a big enough audience, if you're not working with a mailing list of, I don't know if everyone always asks, I'm going to say four or 500 people minimum. It is going to be unusual that you're able to market a group coaching program and get enough people signed up who are all interested right now, able to afford it right now, available at the day and time that you're going to be meeting, et cetera, et cetera, and sign up for it. Now you need a big enough audience to support that. So let's say you got that. And so last time I ran a group coaching program, I dunno, maybe I had between eight and 10 women meeting in a small group. Well guess what? This week, Susie has a doctor's appointment, she can't make it.

Oh, and Megan's kid is sick and she can't make it either. Oh, and then Julie, she got a stomach butt. Suddenly you got two people in the meeting and it's like, what happened to our group? So when you're asking people to all show up live together, and they're coming from all their different lives and all different walks of life, you never going to get the whole group there for various reasons. So you really need a substantial size group to start with. Do you have the audience to support that? And then how do you keep them actually showing up so that they get the group experience? Because yes, you can record these sessions, but that's not the beauty of group coaching. Group coaching is the relationship that builds between the participants. I have found it difficult. I'm just saying, I know there's health coaches out there making it happen.

I love the idea. I've tried it many, many times. It's just never been my favorite truth be told, all right, confessional right now. That's why you won't hear me talking about it too much. It always seems to be one of those things that sounds great and it doesn't pan out so well. Here's another one like that, working with a doctor or another practitioner partnering with a medical practice. Anyone here making that work really beautifully? You know what I see? I see a lot in our group, people asking about it. Oh, I'd love to partner with a doctor. And everyone's like, yeah, me too. And then just crickets, because I think a lot of people find, a lot of health coaches find what I found, which is it's real hard to get in the door with medical practices. And if you do, and I have, and I've had various practitioners want to bring me on to their staff, want to refer people to me.
I mean, you hear that and you're like, yes, I have made it. This is going to be amazing. I had a very, very prominent functional medicine doctor offer me a spot with her team in this regard. And I was like, wow, I haven't made in the shade and that my friends, as far as it's ever gone, because then logistics come up, how much are they going to pay you? Or is the client going to be paying directly? Oh, the client pays the doctor this much. Well, how much are they going to pay you? Or are they going to pay the doctor and the doctor's going to pay you a percentage? And then is it going to be under your business or their business? It's very hard to merge business models. That's what I've learned, especially if you're talking to a medical practice that accepts insurance even harder because as a health coach, you don't, and that's just a weird thing.

It's a totally different model of care can be problematic even if you're working with a practitioner outside of the insurance model. It's just the same thing. And then not to mention personalities and schedules and work ethic, and are they doing all the things they need to do to promote this health coach on their staff? And I just have to take a breather there because it's just one of those things that has a big buildup and not too often does it have the payout that you wanted. So I'm not saying don't go after it. I'm not, and there are health coaches who've done it. Just another thing is if you are hired, you're going to make a lot less per hour than working for your own clients. A lot less. Ellen's saying here, not great compensation. Correct, A lot less. So you got to weigh that as well.

So then you're working for their practice. You have to do things the way they want you to do them. They're offering a certain protocol or whatever you have to coach to that you can't actually do the coaching that perhaps you want to do. So there's lots of roadblocks here. Again, I'm not saying don't try, just know that if you get a green light from a practitioner, you'll be like me. You'll be like, yes, my life is made, my career is made. Maybe, maybe not just giving you fair warning. You might want to take all this energy and reroute it into your own private coaching, into the marketing of your own short online program, that kind of thing, where you're much more in charge of the outcome. And here's another example of that. When you can't control the process, when you're putting your success in someone else's hands, well, you can't control the process.

And so anything could happen. That person could get ill, that person could get busy, that person could decide they don't like your haircut, whatever, and just stop communicating with you. It can be very frustrating. Elma saying, thank you for touching on working with practitioners. I've been dealing with this lately and I'm at a crossroads feeling like it's not really worth my time and efforts. I know it could be, and I still want everyone to give it a good try, but go into it eyes wide open. So this goes for working with other practitioners and very similar, although it's a different setting. Think about working in corporate settings, holding workshops in corporate offices. Sometimes various corporations might want to hire a health coach part-time on a contract basis or have you come in a certain number of times per year. It's kind of similar and oh, it could feel so amazing, wouldn't it?

I don't know. What if Amazon wanted to hire you as a health coach, right? Wouldn't that be amazing, right? They have so many employees, you could impact so many lives, they make so much money, right? They're going to pay you. Well, maybe, maybe not. But then you have so many variables that are just outside your control. Oh, we got to run it up the pole. We got to talk to hr, we got to talk to this other person. We got to talk to the VP of that. Oh, what about this? Or can you submit that? You're running around trying to get the yes from them? It's hard. It can be hard even just to go in and hold a corporate workshop, which again, I'm not against. I think you should do, if you know someone who works in a company, it makes it so much easier.

However, there's a lot of work that goes into developing enough relationships like that that you can consistently, reliably get your workshops booked, get paid. I mean, if I told you how many times I've done something like this and then they never pay you, you got to follow up a hundred times to get the check. Sometimes it's just not worth the effort. I personally would rather build my own mailing list, find my own clients, have them pay me directly. I don't have to deal with any of this. So just things to know. Linda says, I would not want to trade my flexibility. If you are working for, like I said, maybe a practitioner that has their own protocol, you do lose a lot of flexibility. Or maybe you can only meet with clients for 15 minutes or something or however that office is structured. It's definitely a trade off on your flexibility.

Alright, and then one more I'm going to share with you that I think is a big most of the time for health coaches, and again, I'm going to get haters for all of this, that's fine. I often say, prove me wrong. I would be very happy for you to prove me wrong on any of these points. But the last one that I'm going to tell you has not been something that's worked for me or that I'm a huge fan of are MLMs. So if you want to sell certain essential oil brand or you really love whatever vitamins and that company is going to bring you on, there's risk involved here. Unlike affiliate marketing, you have to maybe shell out a certain amount of money to get started. And a lot of times what I hear as coaches, you end up just eating that. You buy that product and you end up with it in your cabinet and you're using it within your own family and you're really making the money to get involved, to really get involved with the company like that and make it work for you and become very successful.

It is a totally different business model than health coaching. Totally different. It's not something you can just dabble in, sharing a link here or there. You really need to get involved with them and get people underneath you, et cetera, et cetera. Do that then, but you're going to have a hard time balancing that with a health coaching practice. It's just like having two entirely different jobs. So I have known health coaches who've become successful with various MLMs. So I'm not saying you can't do it and that it won't work. I'm just saying they, 99% of the time, they're no longer able to run their own health coaching practice as successfully. It's just like if you got a job at, I don't know, a bookstore or the natural food store, you're splitting your energy multiple ways. It means that you're splitting your energy multiple ways. So just know what you're getting into.
I think the income streams that work the best are the ones that you can control. The process, the flow, the timing, it's all on your own terms. That's how you build a business that's not just profitable, but is, what's the word I'm looking for? That makes you wealthy in other ways. Like time, wealth, being aligned with your soul, with the work you really want to be doing, the way you want to be doing it, kind of wealth, all of the things. So that was a lot. I'll look forward to the hate mail from everybody who didn't like my opinions. That's all right. You can contact me at michelle@healthcoachpower.com and make sure if you want to take some of this into consideration, set a goal for next year and figure out how to make that happen. Right? I need health coaches to succeed so that you guys stay in health coaching, health coaches that don't succeed, that never make the income that they need, they end up having to leave the profession.

We need health coaches in this world. So please join me for our 2025 planning workshop. It's completely free and it's going to be very illuminating for you to see, okay, how do I take these income streams and make it add up so I'm not making 5 cents an hour anymore? Sounds good. Register for free. It's at healthcoachpower.com/2025. And this episode has been sponsored by that Clean Life, which many coaches in our community and I myself have used throughout the years that Clean Life makes it easy for you to provide recipe books, help clients meal plan for themselves, provide recipe suggestions. I mean, think how you could use this with private clients, with your short online group programs. You can be doing cooking classes, you can be creating lead magnets with recipes. It is a cinch with That Clean Life. They have so many great recipes that fit every dietary style or restriction. So for all my listeners, you can save 20% off your first four months when you join at healthcoachpower.com/tcl. That stands for That Clean Life. Thank you so much for joining me today, everybody. I'll see you next week. Take care.