Stumbling around with Instagram and looking for inspiration to build your business? Look no further. In this episode Michelle shares the exact IG accounts all health coaches should be following and explains how this will help you actually grow your business with social media.
Join Michelle’s FREE live Instagram training on 11/7/19 to get the full scoop on using IG effectively – http://HealthCoachPower.com/instagram
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Transcription
Hey everybody, we’re just getting set up, getting ready for our weekly Q. And. A. Thank you for joining me today. We’re going to be talking about Instagram, so just hang tight for one second while I push all the magic buttons and then we’ll get going. Alrighty. Hello health coaches. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Michelle and man, we have got some good juicy stuff to talk about today. Every week inside of the Health Coach Power Community Facebook group, I post, “Hey, this is the topic for this week. What questions do you guys have? Hey, this is what we’re going to be talking about.” And this week, we got such a phenomenal response. A lot of people liking that post letting me know that. Yeah, you want to hear about Instagram, so if you are here with me live, I’m thrilled. Please go ahead and tell me anything that you need to ask, or want to talk about as it relates to Instagram in the comments and even if it doesn’t relate to Instagram, this is sort of an open Q & A session.
I’ll get to all of your questions towards the end, but I know, well first of all, before we even talk about Instagram, if you’re on my mailing list then you probably got an email from me this morning, kind of laughing about how similar it is to open up Instagram and try to use it for the first time for your business as a using Tinder for dating. Oh my God, I am suddenly finding myself back in the dating world and it is very, very, very different from when I was 20 years old. OMG! So, there’s the Tinder and there’s the Bumble and there’s a whole bunch of other ones too. I don’t even know what I’m doing and I can relate to that feeling that you must have if you’ve just started using Instagram or if you’ve been using it for a while, but you’re still just kind of like WTF.
Like how does this work? How do I actually get any action from this, from this very cool online tool. So that is what I wanted to talk about today in particular around who you should be following on Instagram. So I don’t want you to go on Instagram or Facebook or Pinterest or any other social media platform and just kind of stumble around and waste time because we all know how easy it is to do that, right? And you can feel like you quote unquote worked like a whole day. Oh God, I work so hard on my business today. And really you get nowhere if you’re just sort of blindly posting things and blindly leaving comments and you don’t really have any strategy behind it. But I do know that you want to build your business. And I do think that Instagram holds a lot of promise for that.
I’ve been using it a lot in the past six to 12 months and I see a direct result. I see people moving from new Instagram follower, converting them to my mailing list and becoming clients. So, um, I thought, man, we need to just get into this today, right? I want you to be growing your business and making a profit. Some people say, well, what do you do for health coaches? I say, I help health coaches earn a living. Okay. That’s my goal for you. I don’t help health coaches, you know, waste three hours a day on social media. That would be horrible. So, when I got this question from Merley and I’ve actually saved this question for a while because I knew I wanted to do a whole episode about Instagram, I might even do another one next week.
Merley said I’m looking for some awesome Instagram accounts to follow for inspiration. What’s your favorite?
And she was kind of asking all of us what are our favorite Instagram accounts? So I guess she could go follow them all and we could all just be inspired. Once again, my goal is to help you earn a living as a health coach. My goal is not for you to just be infinitely inspired. I mean inspiration is great, but at the end of the day, last time I checked I couldn’t pay my mortgage with that. So we’re going to get down to some brass tacks. Are there Instagram accounts that I love to follow? Yeah, of course. Of course there are. And PS, we are on Instagram at Health Coach Power Community. So follow it up. We love to see you there. I love to follow others in the health and wellness field. Of course I like to be inspired in that sense. I like to follow a lot of um, other types of businesses as well.
I think you can learn a lot from other health and wellness professionals, but stepping a little bit outside of that bubble can be a really helpful thing. So, I like to follow, um, fashion. I like to follow any sort of psychology, self-help, anything in that realm. I love to follow music. I love to see how other industries are representing themselves on Instagram. And I find a lot of inspiration in that too. And then of course there’s always just the people posting a lot of funny quotes. Hey, I like funny quotes so you’re going to follow them as well. But what I want to say to you today, Merly and for everybody, the people you should be following on Instagram are not the big shots in the industry. They’re not the ones who are like doing what you want to be doing, right? In fact, sometimes it can be counterproductive to follow those people.
So like if you’re following Dr. Mark Hyman, hey that’s, that could be great. Or you could be like, Oh my God, he is like gabillion followers and I have 12 and Oh my God, I never could come up with such great stuff to post like he does. There’s a lot of like compare and despair that comes with social media as I’m sure you know. So that’s sort of the downside about following all the hot shots in the industry. Well you really need to be following are your potential clients. Yeah. Yeah. I hate to break it to you. It’s not like whoever just released the book or who’s you know, whatever doing this in the, in the keto coaching space, no, you don’t really want to follow people like that nearly as much as you want to follow and gain inspiration from your perspective clients.
How many times, how many of you actually you can just raise a hand if you’re here with me live or if you’re listening to this later, you can still raise a hand. How many of you think a Instagram’s kind of a waste of time? Because the only people that are following you are other health coaches. Yeah. Have you ever felt that way? I hear that all the time and I have Ben in that position myself where it’s like, what am I doing here? Why am I just preaching to the choir? This is a total waste of time. And when I learned and it sort of clicked in my brain like, Oh no, I need to be posting things meant for my perspective clients. I need to be actively seeking out my prospective clients and following them and engaging with them. That’s when everything started to change because that’s who you want to reach, right?
Those are the people that you want to come to your Instagram, click on a link, join your mailing list, and eventually boom, be paying you for something. That’s how you’re going to build your business. So how can you do that? Where are your people? I got news for you. That’s really easy to find them on Instagram. Okay. It’s going to take a little bit of work but compare to other social media platforms or as opposed to just walking outside your front door and like looking around for prospective clients. Instagram makes it infinitely easier. We’ve got hashtags, we’ve got location, we’ve got other people that your prospective clients might be following. There are so many ways to do some sleuthing around and you find these people, you follow them and now you are inspired because you start to see what’s going on in their lives. You start to see how they’re describing their daily life and their problems in their own words.
And I’m not saying that you’re going to go on to, you know, Betsy Smith’s Instagram account and find how she’s talking about how she wants to lose weight and like pitch yourself in the comments. No, I’m not saying that, but you can become a valuable part of her community. You can be engaging. You can be watching her stories, leaving comments and eventually Betsy Smith, is that the name I gave her? Betsy Smith? I think she’s going to follow you back. You make friends right? At the end of the day, it’s about who you know and who wants to know you and who you can connect with in an authentic way. So I want to encourage you to go out and do that and spend more time doing that. Then following the big wigs and wondering why you don’t have 4 million followers. Follow your people, follow your tribe. Of course, that is all predicated on the idea that you know who your perfect prospective clients even are.
So, if you don’t have a target market, Hey Nick, today’s a great day to get down to business on that. You really, really, really want to know who you want as your followers so that you can start attracting those people so that you can go look for them. And so that every time you post something to Instagram, you know who you’re posting it for, you know they’re going to respond to it. If you’re attracting, uh, breastfeeding moms, let’s say breastfeeding moms is your target market, then everything you post is going to have something to do with breastfeeding or being a new mom or having a new baby. You’re not going to post a picture from your kid’s soccer game like your 12 year old’s soccer game cause that’s just irrelevant to the breastfeeding mom. You really can start to hone all of your content to speak directly to her.
And if you have found her online, you’ve been going to the breastfeeding mom hashtags and finding these women and interacting with them, now you’re going to gain some traction. Okay? So that is number one, well of who you should be following. Does this make sense so far? Can you do this? You get where I’m going with this? All right. The second type of people that you should be following on Instagram and, and this is definitely second. I think first the most important is what we just talked about. The second most important. Okay? It’s finding people that you can partner with, not other health coaches who do the exact same thing as you, but complimentary practitioners, local spaces like maybe um, for example, I follow Karma Road Yoga, which is the yoga studio that I go to. So you know, venues, spaces, stores, businesses in your town, your local area.
You want to start following people and again, making those actual authentic connections so that you have a place to hold your workshop so that you can, you know, I actually, I just had this conversation the other day. I walked into this yoga studio, I hadn’t been there in a while and the owner of the studio looked at me and goes, Oh Hey Michelle, cause we follow each other on social media. And three seconds later she was like, love what you’re doing. Love your new website. Such great work. You should come do a workshop here. Hey, you want to teach yoga again? You could, we could put you on the schedule. She was offering me jobs. I just showed up un-showered for a yoga class. I mean, that’s how you want the universe to be working for you. So follow people that you can become partners with and become again, raving fan of theirs, leaving comments, being engaged with them in their community.
They’re going to think of you. They’re going to be offering you a job when you just show up on showered, not expecting anything. And that’s the kind of energy that we want in our business. We want it to be flowing this way. So how can you find the right people to follow that you might partner with? Again, use that location, a device, whatever you want to call it. Use the location feature on Instagram to find who is near you or just literally think about the places that you go during the day and look for them, right? If you’re following by hashtag, let’s say that you are a health coach that specializes in eczema, will search all the eczema hashtags, look for other practitioners that are operating in that space, not other health coaches, maybe an acupuncturist, right? Somebody else that’s doing with eczema because you might be able to partner with them and do some sort of online event together down the road.
Now I’ve got your wheels spinning. Okay. We have so much more to talk about when it comes to Instagram and we have a couple of questions here that I want to get to. Um, but before I do that I want to let you know that in a week and a half, well look at the calendar cause I’m not sure when you’re going to be listening to this episode, but if you’re here with me live in a little over a week we’re going to be doing a free live training all about how to use Instagram to be most effective in your business. So this is just a quick bite today but we’re going to be going way more into it with a demo on a phone actually showing you how to set things up so that you can be most effective when you are trying to use this platform to grow your health coaching business.
So I want you to definitely, definitely join me for that and you can sign up for free at healthcoachpower.com/instagram. I’ll say that again. Healthcoachpower.com/instagram and I hope to see you there. We already have like a couple hundred people registered so I know this is going to be a really popular event. Okay, let’s do questions. What do you got for me when it comes to the Ole IG. I am still not completely comfortable calling it that, I’m just trying to be cool. The IG, let’s see.
Michelle said something about having a separate business account.
I know what you’re saying Michelle. So on Instagram you can have a personal account, you can have a business account. Should you have both? She should have one. Should you have the other, what I have is just, well I don’t have a personal account per se where I’m like posting pictures of my kids and like stuff for my friends.
I don’t really have time for that. I truly believe in this business that your personal life becomes business and business becomes personal and the more you can just co-mingle them, the easier life is. So my, she’s got power Instagram account. I would consider a combination of both. I occasionally post pictures of my own life or like what I made for dinner tonight if it’s relevant. But it is definitely a business account and it is formally a business account. So if you switch your profile to business mode, then you get insights and you know, you have, uh, there’s some features that come with having a business account versus a personal account. So I would encourage everybody to definitely do that. And then if you want to maintain a totally separate personal account from your, your business account, I mean that’s on you. But my goodness, there’s just not enough hours in the day.
Is there? So think it more in terms of what can I post from my personal life that is relevant to my target market. And then it’s kind of like you’re killing two birds with one stone earliest. That’s how I approach it. Diane says, first of all, she says she’s all, Oh no, Michelle says she’s already signed up for the webinar. Excellent. We will see you there. Diane says, how do you separate your personal account, your name versus your business account, which it would be your business. Many colleagues know my personal name, but don’t look for my business name to follow. Um, again, I just use my name for both. Like, even if your actual Instagram handle is different, like so for example, the handle for Health Coach Power communities, Instagram account is Health Coach Power Community. But if you go to that page, you will see my name, you’ll see Michelle Leotta.
So, if somebody searches Michelle Leotta, they’ll, they’re going to find it even though the handle is a different name. Does that make sense? So I, I think it’s a good idea to use your name as much as possible because ultimately we’re selling ourselves as like a coach. And so you want people to get to know you. I hate when I go to somebody’s website, social media page, whatever it is, and it’s just like a, you know, like healthy, balanced transformations, this entity, and I have no idea who the person or persons are behind this entity. So I say you should always have your name on everything that you do for your business. Um, and again, you might not really want to separate your personal and your business account, Diane. That might just kind of not really be serving you in the long run. So just think about that and is it entirely necessary to separate. But good questions all around.
Um, how about this, Michelle is asking how often to post?
Okay, I’ll say something right now and then you guys are going to go check out my Instagram and be like, she doesn’t post that often. But I think that posting once per day is sufficient. And I think when I do that, I get the most traction. You know, there’s all these algorithms working behind the scenes and I feel like if I haven’t posted in a week and then I post something, eh, the engagement is a lot lower. But if I’m boom, boom, boom, regular with my posting every day, then I start seeing bigger numbers. And now that’s just kind of anecdotal from what I have experienced. The stuff’s always changing how they figure out the algorithms and such. But I think it’s good practice with any of your social platforms to be posting on a daily basis or every other day.
You definitely don’t want to skip like weeks at a time because when someone goes to look at it, they’re going to go, Oh, well this person’s not very active. Or your even your blog, if you have a blog, you don’t need to post every day to your blog, but if you haven’t posted in like three months, people are just going to think, Oh well maybe this person’s not in business anymore. You know, I’m going to move on. So once a once a day is sort of my goal. When it comes to Instagram, do I always make it? No, I don’t. That’s the human in me. What else do we have here? I’m Michelle says, so can you convert your current account instead of creating a new one? Yes, you can convert your current account to a business account. Don’t ask me how, but I know it’s possible.
I’ve done it before. It’s somewhere in your settings and you can just do it in the flip of a switch, so definitely do that. All right. If any other questions for Instagram come up, you guys can go ahead and let me know in the comments. Again, I want to stress to you that I was ready to just put Instagram in the toilet until I learned a few choice tips and tricks and I put them into place. And now like literally every day, even inside of our Facebook group because when you join my Facebook group, if you guys have done this recently, you’ll know I asked how did you hear about this group? And almost every day I get somebody who’s saying or multiple people saying from Instagram. So it’s a wonderful thing and you’re not always going to know where people come from in your community, but asking has been very helpful because I know for sure that people are coming from a health coach, power community, Instagram account into the Facebook group, converting to my mailing list and so on and so forth.
All right, so this stuff is good. Okay, I’m going to answer another question now that is kind of tangential but it’s like the same sort of thing. So this came from Andrea and we get questions like this all the time. Um, and it’s a valid question in and of itself, but I’m going to answer it in kind of a backwards way as I like to do.
Andrea said I’m looking for favorite podcasts, any recommendations?
So yes, once again, we all love all our podcasts, don’t we? We love listening to the, you know, I like to listen to Aviva Romm’s podcast. I like to listen to, I’ve got this new relationship podcast I’m listening to. So good. But when it comes to building your business, yeah, you can listen to business building podcasts. I hope you listen to mine. However, what you want to do most, most, most, most, most of all is figure out which podcasts are your perfect prospective client’s listening to.
Yeah. Like it’s not about you, it’s about understanding them. So if all of your perfect prospective clients are listening to like some finance podcast because they are the type of women who are really interested in like owning their own finances and investing, great. You really need to start listening to that podcast too. So you can get into their head. Does that make sense? You can see what they’re talking about, what they’re interested in and who knows. Maybe there’s an opportunity for you to appear on that podcast. Now I’m not exactly sure how your health and nutrition business would work with the podcast about finance, but you could find a way and maybe they’re listening to a podcast, it’s a self help or it’s about finding love or it’s about decorating the home or it’s about cars and uh, or home ownership. You know, there’s podcasts out there about everything.
So which ones are your target market listening to that can, you could become a guest on potentially or you at least can glean like an awful lot of information from what am I people interested in? What’s stressing them out? What topics can I talk to them about so that I’m really, really resonating with them. This is all market research and those are the most important podcasts that you can be listening to in addition to the ones that teach you things like how to Instagram for your business. Okay. I’m trying to try to split it up. Do a bit of both. Here’s another question that is about social media.
This came from Ion. She says I have a Facebook business account, however it’s linked to my personal account. I have 3000 followers on there and I don’t want to lose them. Is it wise for me to start a brand new stand alone business Facebook account just to separate my personal and business?
So again, it’s kind of the same question about should you separate personal and business. Facebook’s a little bit of a different beast, right? People use it differently. I do like to post like funny videos of my kids and stuff like that that I don’t necessarily want to be public and available to just anybody. So the way that I have worked this is of course I have my personal Facebook page for friends and family and whatnot and I have a Facebook fan page. Your Facebook fan page, any fan page or business page on Facebook there needs to be an admin and you are the admin. Your personal page becomes the admin for that page. So yeah, they’re going to be kind of inextricably linked. Same with like a group inside my groups, like me, my personal Facebook profile is the admin of my groups. So there’s always this like is it business, is it personal?
We’re not really sure kind of situation going on. However, what I have really liked doing recently is on Facebook I will Mark my posts as being visible to the public or being visible to friends only. That way if I post something about like what I’m doing this weekend or my house or my kids, I can post that for friends only and then I know that if someone else arrives at my page, they’re not going to be able to see that. Then I can post stuff that I would like to be showcasing as a business person. For example, my cover image on my personal page clearly points people to join me on my, uh, my business page because if someone searches me and they find me, I’d like to say, Hey, join me over here on my business page. I might, ah, post some things from my podcast or from my blog or events that I have coming up on my personal page now.
And then you don’t want to do too much of that. Facebook doesn’t like it, but you know I might reference my business here and there and those posts might be public but then anything that truly is personal, I just kind of Mark that for friends only and that’s been working well for me. But again, anyone who learns about me is going to learn about my personal and my business pretty quickly cause it all goes hand in hand. All right. We got a couple more minutes here so I’m open for more questions. Sandra would like to say that she likes my silver and my hair. Thank you Sandra. Not exactly a question nor about Instagram except to say when I had my most recent photo shoot, which actually was kind of awhile ago now and I really need to do another one, but one thing I told them was I want the silver in my hair to shine.
Like, no, don’t call my hair that way where you don’t see the silver streak comb at this way. Like, I really wanted that to be like part of my brand and I have kind of taken this on not only as like a personal, again, personal or business. I’ve taken this on as sort of a personal thing. Like I’m not dying my hair and I feel really strongly about it, but I also wanted to make that part of my, my brand, right. So my health coaching business is under, shesgotpower.com and she’s got power. Part of that is rockin’ your gray hair if you want to. So Sandra, she says she’s letting hers grow out too. Good on you sister.
Um, here’s a question that came in. I thought this was an interesting one and I just want to throw it out here even though it’s not related to social media. Lisa said, I’ve been health coaching part time for about four years now and just recently quit my job to build my business and have the flexibility to spend more time with my son. My question to all your health coaches is, how did you spend your time when you first started out? Ah, I’m definitely embarrassed to answer that part of your question, Lisa. But she goes on, she says, how did you build your following in clients? I have so much more time to focus on my business now and today was the first time I just felt like I didn’t really know what to do. So does anyone have any suggestions? I reach out to people. I follow up daily with prospects. I post on social media, I’m attending a bunch of local networking groups next week. What else should I be doing?
Lisa, when I started out, I don’t know what I was doing. I was wasting a whole lot of time doing a whole lot of nonsense. And if Instagram had been around back then, that would’ve been part of the nonsense for sure. Cause I wouldn’t have known what I was doing. Um, I just want to make sure that everything you’re doing at this point in your business is aimed at building your mailing list with a specific type of perfect prospective client. Okay. So knowing that target market and all of your endeavors in this stage of your business really should be focused around building that list up. So converting people via offering like a free PDF online or holding workshops where you’re going to be adding the names of all the workshop attendees to your mailing list.
I mean that’s sort of like the name of the game at this stage. The other thing that you can be doing if, and you’re so lucky to think like, Oh my goodness, I actually have like more time on my hands that I might need. When you have the time, an excellent way to use it is picking a platform and creating consistent content. So what I mean by that is starting a blog and committing to publishing to your blog once per week. That’s the kind of thing that’s going to start getting you known as an expert in a particular area. You could start a podcast, same thing. You’re releasing episodes on a regular basis all centered around one central theme. You’re going to become known for the expert in that. It’s an amazing thing that we can do with this internet of hours. We can all become content creators.
Maybe video is your thing. I know nobody ever wants to do video, but YouTube holds so much promise. People are on YouTube every day searching for stuff. Same thing. You start a YouTube channel and you’re putting out a video consistently. You know people become huge on YouTube and you don’t have to become somebody who has like 13 million followers. You just have to be somebody who when I searched for information about intermittent fasting and you’re really an expert in that, your video pops up. Boom, I’m in. I’m going to be putting my name on your mailing list. I’m going to be your next client. So when you have time in the beginning it’s about list building and it’s about building up, uh, your, you’re being known as an expert. I couldn’t figure out a way of saying that better being known as an expert, that’s really, really important.
So consistent content creation would work very, very well for you. I spent a lot of time with my blog in the early years of my business and it absolutely has paid off like a million fold. So, good luck to you, Lisa, and thanks for asking such a great question and thank you to everybody for asking so many great questions today. I am always thrilled to be with you. I will be back next week. So between now and then, if you’re not already a member, please join us at healthcoachpowercommunity.com that is our free Facebook group where you can ask your own questions and I’ll be back next week to answer them. Take care everyone.