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Transcript:
Hello health coaches! I am back and today we’re going to be talking about the very, very constant push and pull of creating content. You know what I’m talking about, right? I mean, you’ve got to be feeling this. It’s not just me, it’s the blogging, it’s the emails, it’s the podcasting. Don’t even get me started on social media like ray the hand, if you know exactly where I’m coming from here. Yikes. So if you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by all of this content creation, you are absolutely not alone. And today we’re going to be talking about stream lining your process so that you can actually do quite a bit less and achieve more with your time. Now, if we haven’t met before, my name is Michelle. I’ve been a health coach with my own private practice for about 10 years now and I act as a mentor for my fellow health coaches.
That’s why we’re here. If by the way, if you graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, you may have seen me in your curriculum there where I teach about marketing. Now here’s the thing; speaking of marketing, when you blog, when you create a video for YouTube, you know, whatever it is, all of those things can be amazing for your business if they’re done right, it is excellent marketing, but none of these things are in and of themselves. Income generating activity. You know what I mean by that? They are not directly creating income for your business. It’s not like the time that you spend meeting with a client where you are earning money during that hour that you’re spending with your client. That is income generating activity. Okay? So if you’re, you’re spending like 40 hours a week on general content creation, you will have no time left for actually earning a salary.
And that is bad news. And I want to change that for you. So if you’re not currently making the money that you want as a health coach, please for the love of God, sign up for my free training at healthcoachpower.com/earn the word earn, E. A. R. N, I’m going to show you how to turn the next 12 months into the salary that you want to make, salary that you need to make and it’s all very practical stuff so you can just go to healthcoachpower.com/earn and sign up there. Now of course, the very first thing that you got to do is stop overwhelming yourself with all the bits and bots and blogs and podcasts and what not because it’s just too much. Right?
This topic actually came from Jess. Jess, I don’t know if you’re watching, but hey, she’s one of our members inside healthcoachpowercommunity.com that’s our free Facebook group and Jess said, I’m curious to know what balance you’ve all found with creating new content and promoting existing content. I feel like I’m creating a lot across many channels. It might be too much and I need to put more attention on making sure each piece of content is shared and promoted effectively. Also, I’m expecting my first baby in June and definitely need to streamline the content creation process.
Yes, Jess and congratulations. I have been there. Every time I have another baby (I make it sound like I have like 10 babies, I don’t have 2), but every time I’ve had another baby, my game has to get tighter and tighter because you got to make it work with limited time, right? So I actually asked Jess, okay, well what do you mean by this? How much content are you creating? What is taking up all your time? And she said that most weeks she’s doing one or two blog posts, one YouTube video and podcast, a weekly Facebook live and emails to her list every week and Instagram daily posts and or stories.
So that’s a lot, right? And it kind of reminded me of a conversation that I had, just like two days ago with Melissa, she’s one of the members of my course Healthy Profit University and we were kind of talking about the same thing. Like what are you doing this week? And she said she was going to be first of all working on setting up some workshops and she wanted to complete two in depth blog posts and finish recording a podcast episode. And I was like, girlfriend, how about you pick one of those things? It is way too much and this is coming from a woman who, you know, many people tell me, Michelle, I don’t know how you do so much. So I know what it’s like to really fill your plate. Let’s talk about it. The first thing that I want to share with you guys is that you truly, truly, truly can get away with and should get away with less content across the board and more promotion of the content that you’ve already created.
This is kind of what Jess is getting at when she’s asking me this question. Like, maybe I’m creating too much, maybe I need to promote more. Absolutely. Let’s say you write 100 blog posts and each time you will only promote it like once you only send it to your list or you only posted up to Facebook like one time you’re reaching like 10 people and you’re spending hours upon hours writing all those blog posts. I would rather have you just write 10 blog posts, but for each one you’re promoting it much more heavily. Maybe write one blog post per week, but you’re promoting it across all of your social channels. Maybe 10 times over, maybe for the next 10 weeks, you’re going to post it once every week. This is not too much because people are not paying attention, right? They’re really not. They’re not. You know this, look at your email open rates about what 25% of your list is opening your emails.
Even fewer, actually paying attention to it once they actually opened it up. Your reach on Facebook is like meh, right? You know how many people your posts are reaching, so if you put a piece of content out there, only a handful of people are really noticing it. Put it out again, a few more people are going to finally read it, put it out again. You might start reaching some numbers. You don’t really have to worry about annoying the person who’s already seen it once or twice. They’re not going to be annoyed by that. They’re just scrolling through. But you’re trying to reach the people that you haven’t reached before. So way less content, way more promotion and one way that I do this is…
Somebody else asked a question. Claudia asked about recommending an online social media planner that posts things automatically at a set time.
One tool that I’ve like fallen in love with this year is called Edgar e d g a r and the website is like meetedgar.com what I love about this service is it doesn’t just let you schedule your posts, it actually creates a library of posts and it recycles them, so I do not have to think about it. I filled up my library and I continue to add to that library and then it just goes out on a schedule, so every day there’s something getting posted up to my Facebook page. Every day there’s a new article or one of my past blog posts or one of my past podcasts are being repurposed as content onto my Facebook page and meet Edgar also works on Twitter and it also works on Instagram. Instagram is always a weird one to schedule to though. So, you’re going to want to look very carefully at how that works.
So I really recommend Meet Edgar. It’s a little bit more expensive than some of the other tools, but it makes me like so hands off and my content gets repurposed and repurposed and repurposed every single week. So that has been phenomenal for me because who has time to write all the social media posts, especially if people aren’t even looking at them. You know, you send it out to your, let’s say you have 1000 Facebook fans and only like 20 of them maybe see it right with the algorithms the way that they are. So repurpose, repurpose. Um, it just, if I were you, and this goes for everybody, I would think about one new piece of content each week, spread across all of your channels. So you’re doing this a little bit already. Jess did tell me that she does a YouTube video and then she uses the audio from it to create a podcast that is very, very smart.
So it’s like one piece of content that’s working in several different places. I would love to see you bring it down to just one new concept, like one piece of content every week that you were creating one time that then getting repurposed across all of your channels. So the video, the Facebook, the uh, audio for your podcast, and also something to live on your blog. And then of course your email will just reflect, here’s the new content for the week. It could even be less once a week can actually be a lot, right? I do this podcast once a week and sometimes gets to be a lot, I’ll tell you that. So it could even be less. It could be every other week, whatever. It can be once a month. I mean, once a week is probably like the most recommended schedule to be on. But especially when you’re a new mom or especially if you’re working another job, it’s just better to be consistent than it is to be prolific and constantly pumping out new content.
Just be consistent with it and promote the hell out of what you’ve got. So let’s talk about the emails. Your emails are a place where, this is where health coaches seem to get tripped up a lot. Cause they sit down to write the email, they know they’re supposed to write it to the list and it’s like, oh my God, what am I going to write about? And you will never have this problem if you think of it this way, your email serve to deliver content that you have already created. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s really not about writing unique content for your emails. Your email is just a delivery method for something else that you’ve already created. So let’s go back to what we started to talk about and just is already doing a little bit of and what I love, which is this strategy of creating one piece of content one time and then rolling it out across multiple platforms.
I’m doing it right now actually as we record at this very moment. I’m doing a Facebook live video, right? Some of you are here with me, so hello. And then what happens? We download the video and we upload it to YouTube. Boom. Now I’ve got a YouTube channel and I didn’t have to create anything for it. I’m creating it right now, right? My VA does this work for me. By the way, it takes her like five minutes. If you did it yourself, it would take you like five minutes, but even if you’re paying someone, it’s really inexpensive. Then we take the same video. What I am saying right now will be downloaded and we’ll rip out the audio from it and we’ll publish the audio to podcast. Some of you are listening via podcast. Hello to you, so now I’m on iTunes. Now I’m on Stitcher and I’m on Google play.
Now I’m on Spotify with the same content that I created in 30 minutes once a week. Then we take the same video. We actually take the YouTube video and embed it into my website as a blog post with a little summary of what the video is all about and we get a transcript made so that if you ever want to review anything that I talk about in these videos, especially if I’m talking like I just mentioned, Edgar, that tool that I use for social media, you might actually see the words and remember what was said during the video or if you just prefer to read the transcript, you can go to my website and that’s where we have the video. We have the whole transcript underneath. Transcripts are again, pretty inexpensive to get done. I use a service called rev.com rev.com. It’s like a cent a minute or something like that.
No, a dollar a minute. I don’t know. It’s pretty cheap for what it does. It’s very fast and it’s all done. It’s not a person typing out the transcript. It’s a computer, so it’s not perfect, but boy is it helpful. So boom, there you go. In one 30-minute slot, and for me, I do this Tuesdays at three o’clock eastern time, I got a Facebook live, I got a YouTube channel going on. I got a podcast across all the different podcast platforms. I’ve got a blog post and guess what’s going to go in my email to all my health coaches next week? This content right here, that means I’m not sitting down writing another blog post and not creating another video like this is it baby. And then we push it out across all the different platforms done. And so I want you to think about doing less, spreading it out more.
And then of course the promotion, right? So I mentioned posting up to Facebook, posting to Twitter, posting on Instagram. You really want to run through all of your outlets for promotion at every piece of content that you create. Do I do this all the time perfectly? No, I do not. Do I try to? Yes. So here’s another way that we repurpose these videos. This exact same video that I’m creating right now with this audio will download, clip it to like a 32nd clip and I’ll, some of you may have seen, I’ll upload it to my Instagram stories on my health coach power community Instagram account. And then I have a promotion for this piece of content happening on Instagram, right? So just think about every way that you could take the same content and repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.
From a very practical point of view, it helps if you start with the most complicated medium first, so it’s harder to turn a blog post into a video, right? Cause you just have written words how you’re going to make a video out of that. It’s easier to start with video or start with audio, start with the most complicated medium and then break it down into all the other mediums. From there, all I need is one great piece of content per week though. Jess, I’m with the baby maybe every other week.
By the way, if you guys have any questions about any of this and you’re here with me live, go ahead and put that into the comments and I’ll be happy to answer your questions or talk about anything else that you want to talk about today. I’ll have a few minutes left at the end for you for sure. I can see that Claudia is here and Michelle and Aisha and everyone’s saying like hello and welcome back. I know I was gone for a couple of weeks. I hope you were able to catch the bonus episodes that I put up on the podcast about launching the new website and launching the new podcast. If you miss those, make sure you go back on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Those are some pretty good bonus episodes that came out over the past two weeks while I was lounging on the beach in Thailand.
Okay, next question. This one comes from Esther and Esther said she’s curious about our thoughts on having a separate Instagram handle for your coaching business. She says before deciding to be a coach, I was slowly building content on my personal Instagram to reflect my lifestyle and I genuinely enjoy Instagram, but recently I decided to create a new one just for the business, but I’m finding it difficult to split content now and wondering if I should just build on my personal and shift as I evolve as an entrepreneur.
This question really hit me where I live Esther because I recently created a second Instagram account just for health coaches. I’ve always had my personal Instagram account and my business Instagram account kind of be the same because it’s mostly me pics, you know, with pictures of food, pictures of uh, I don’t know, whatever I’m doing during the day, going to the gym, things like that.
And since my lifestyle really reflects my values as a health coach it all really goes hand in hand. However, once I started talking about marketing and pricing your services and how to work with clients, that just didn’t mesh very well with the other content that I was putting out to my health audience. So I did recently split into two and here’s what I want to let you know. It is a lot of work. I mean, I think I’m doing the right thing so that I’m delivering the right content to the appropriate audiences, but I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t have to. And that’s true for what you’re doing. I don’t think you have to because you like me, probably are living a lifestyle that really exemplifies health, wellness, everything that you want to teach your clients and your prospective clients about. So why split it into, why make your life that much more complicated?
If you do have two Instagram accounts for any of you out there, I think what you’ll find is one starts to take a back seat or you slow down on both. So you’re not posting every day to both. I mean, maybe you are, but I’m not. So I would say us are definitely just go with one for as long as you can and by making it about you, that’s okay. But also think about making the content of a more appropriate, more focused on your target market. It may become a little less relevant to your family and friends, but I’m guessing you’re on Instagram loosely to help promote your business and you can always pick up the phone and call your family and friends. You want to really be putting out content that resonates with your target.
Claudia is asking a question here. She says, do you think Facebook lives are so much more valuable than recorded videos? Feeling a little overwhelmed at the thought of doing regular Facebook lives. It can feel super overwhelming.
I mean, if you go, no, don’t. Oh Gosh, all right. If you go back, and I hope you won’t because it’s embarrassing, but if you go way back in this group to the first videos I did, they’re not nearly as comfortable and flowing as what I do these days. Not to flatter myself, I still flub up, but I mean I was much more nervous in the beginning and then once I got used to it, I’ve been doing this now for, I don’t know, two years, a year and a half, something like that. Um, it becomes like a piece of cake. I just feel like I’m sitting down with you guys around a table and we’re chatting, but I know what you mean.
Um, it is, it is a little bit nerve wracking. So either just do it anyway and get used to it so that you can get past the nerves or you know, any video is valued more highly than a static image and that’s an images are valued more highly than just text when it comes to the Facebook algorithm. So even if you’re recording videos beforehand and then uploading them, that’s fine. You know, do whatever you can do. We all have a different comfort level, but I will kind of challenge you to get out of your comfort zone because there’s no way to do it other than doing it poorly for a while. Right. As with anything,
Susan’s asking, how do you plan your content?
That’s a really good question Susan. Um, let’s see. Sometimes it’s extremely strategic. If I know I have a launch coming up and I know the launch is going to be about a certain topic, I will start peppering that topic or angles on that topic into my content leading up to the launch.
So like let’s just say that I was going to do a launch in my health coaching business around weight loss. I probably wouldn’t do this, but anyway, let’s just pretend it was going to be a big weight loss launch and I was going to be offering some program and making a lot of money through this launch. So I want to get a lot of people involved in my world who want to lose weight leading up to the lodge. So I would probably start, if I was doing videos for a while, I was doing cooking videos on my Facebook page as Facebook lives and probably be doing different recipes and talking about how they were useful for weight loss or be doing meal prep videos so that you don’t have to buy lunch. You can bring it from home so that you can lose weight, you know? So it would all be feeding into the theme of my upcoming launch and that’s one way to think about it when I’m in between launches. Like right now I pull content a little bit more organically from my life, from whatever my clients are talking about recently from whatever questions I’m being asked. So like this podcast right now, I developed this material based on the questions that you’ve asked over the past week or two inside the Facebook group. That way it’s, it’s timely and I know I’m putting out content that somebody wants, at least one person wants.
Okay, let’s go onto the next question that came, Colleen, I thought this was a great question to talk about it. I actually, I was thinking of saving it until next week and making it like the main topic, but I thought, Colleen, I want to get to you quickly. So she said, I’ve been running a group coaching program for a few months now and a few of my previous participants had asked for an ongoing group that they can join for continued accountability info, encouragement and community. Sounds like a good idea, huh? She says this would be a step up from the free Facebook group. I currently run open to everybody and I would like to charge a membership fee. For those of you that currently have something similar, I’d love to hear how you structure it.
All right. This is where I just cut through the BS and tell you something Coleen, this is not going to work. No, okay, it might prove me wrong. Seriously prove me wrong. Any of you. But how many times have I run a group program of some kind? People love it and then it comes to an end and they don’t want to say goodbye and they ask, will you keep the Facebook group open? Is there something that I can join for ongoing community and support? Oh, I just want to stay involved and I say, okay, I’ll leave the Facebook group open, or okay, I’ll create this other group for you. Or okay, we’ll do some sort of membership model and it falls flat every time. It’s not just me. I’ve talked to plenty of other health coaches that say the same thing. I don’t know what it is. It’s like human nature. You want to think that you’re going to continue with this group and the support and everything else, but the truth is that human beings are not like that.
If it’s like a three week program, they’re going to be super involved in week one, pretty involved in week two. Half of them are going to have dropped out by week three and week four, week five. I mean if you continue it, it’s just going to continue to taper is really what I’ve noticed. In fact, even after the most enthusiastic groups that I have ever run, I’ll leave the Facebook group open by request and I will even try to keep posting into it and keep the enthusiasm up and it’s like crickets. I’m like where’d you guys go? I thought everybody wanted this. What happened? It just falls off. People do really well with like a set time frame but when it’s ongoing it is very, very hard to keep engagement up. So I’m not trying to say that membership sites can never work. They can.
I have tried them. I have found them to be a huge p I t a I do not have any interest in doing them anymore but there are people who do them successfully. It is a skill. It is like a separate beast that you really have to learn. You can’t just think, oh yeah people are going to continue to pay me like 25 bucks a month to show up for me. Post stuff to Facebook. No, there’s like such strategy behind it and how to keep people engaged over time because typically they’ll sign up, they’ll stay for a month cause they think they want it. They’ll stay for another month because they forgot to cancel and then they’ll cancel on the third month. Truly, if you want to learn how to do membership sites like the right way, like the best quote unquote like industry standard, best way to really make it work for you and make it worth your time.
I’m going to suggest a guy named Stu Mclaren. It’s Stu, Stu Mclaren. Just look him up. He runs all kinds of programs and things that teach how to run a membership site, how to make this type of business model work. Um, you need to think about retention, so keeping people in the group. You have to think about adding new people continuously to the group and also the, the nuts and bolts behind it, how it works so that when somebody cancels, well anyway, it’s a whole thing. It’s just the whole thing. Colleen, I don’t know that you want to get into it. I think you’d actually be better off telling these people, oh, I’m so glad you had a great experience. I hope you’ll join me again in six months when I do this next time so that they have time to like miss you and get excited and think about it and then there’ll be all in with all of their enthusiasm next time. Those are my 2 cents anyway. As always, please prove me wrong. Go be successful in places that I haven’t. I would love to see that for you, but I want to just give it to you straight sometimes. Whereas you know, we come up against a lot of the same questions and obstacles. I feel like as health coaches, and this is just one that I’ve seen before.
All right, what other questions do you guys have for me today? I do have one more sitting here from Ruthann and Ruthann said, just wondering if any of you have a compelling email to send to someone who signs up for your free download or what your strategy is around that.
You’re really smart to be thinking this way, Ruthann. So if you’re giving away a Freebie, let’s say it’s like a free meal plan or something like that, you could just have somebody sign up for it and then you send them an email that’s like, here you go, here you go. Click here to download by. But that’s a missed opportunity, right? So you really should have a strategy about how you communicate with someone after they’ve expressed interest in what you do. In fact, it’s the most important time. Like they’re hot on this idea right now.
They just gave you their email address. They’re expressing pretty much as much interest as they possibly can over the internet. You know, short of like running to your house and giving you a hug, like this person’s interested. So now is the perfect time to communicate with them, introduce yourself, introduce what you do, the problem you can help them with, like strike when the iron is hot and inside healthy profit university, which I mentioned earlier, actually have a series of email templates for this exact purpose. There’s four of them. It doesn’t have to be for, but um, the ones I use a four part series that you send the first email delivers the actual file and then a few follow up emails after that that everybody gets when they join the list. When they opt in for your Freebie. This way they get your best content upfront, they know exactly what you’re about while they’re still opening the emails cause you know how it goes.
A day passes the week passes a month passes and they might forget who the heck you are. So you do want to get in there right in the beginning. Ruthann smart thinking. All right, before we go, I need to give a big shout out to Personal Growth Junkie who left this review on iTunes. It said, “I’m a current health coaching student and I had been experiencing feelings of overwhelm when I tried to wrap my head around starting out thanks to a fellow student who introduced me to Michelle’s website and podcast. I’m feeling less and less this way. I love her message of focusing on working with people through your contacts to start out not worrying about having a website posts and blogging. In the beginning I loved your thoughts on knowing your target market, being able to call out who you’re helping with, what big problem. So grateful to have found this podcast.”
Yes, I’m so happy to hear that new coaches are finding this podcast and sharing it with each other. That to me really embodies my goal of lifting up the whole field of health coaching, whole field of health and wellness rather than seeing each other as competitors. So thank you. You’re awesome Personal Growth Junkie. I have a little gift to thank you for your review. So if you would so kindly send your mailing address to support@healthcoachpower.com and just reference episode number 56 and for everybody, please head over to iTunes, leave a rating, leave a written review so that I can read it on the air. Maybe next week I put out all of this free content for you week after week, and I want to keep doing that. So I need your ratings and I need your reviews so that we can keep reaching all of these new health coaches out there and even health coaches who’ve been around for awhile. So thanks in advance for that. And in the meantime, keep asking great questions on our Facebook group. That’s health coach power, community.com. I will keep answering them and I’ll be back next week. I’ll see you guys then.