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June 16, 20268 min
9 Ways to Build Your Network to Grow Your Business
9 Ways to Build and Strengthen your network to grow your business (the undeniable power of community and collaboration!)
Cultivating relationships to build your network is the absolute highest ROI activity you can spend time on when it comes to growing your business.
Having a solid list of personal connections that are either potential clients or referral partners (if they aren’t your ICA) that can refer clients to you is one of the best asset your business can have!
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1. Identify ‘collaboration partners’ – product or service providers that share your ideal clients and partner up with them to share your audiences. It’s a Win/win – you build your audience’s trust by providing them with another amazing service provider they need and you gain access to a fresh crowd of potential clients with their audience Look for yoga teachers, life coaches, meditation coaches, personal trainers, nutritionists/dietitians to grow your collab squad!
2. Participate in a JV (joint venture) digital giveaway – connect with a group of collaboration partners for a hosted digital giveaway, where you all have a freebie to give away. The group all promotes the giveaway to their own list and their social media audience, allowing all of you to grow your own email list and social media following.
3. Do a virtual summit – like a giveaway but instead of a freebie you’re presenting on your topic of expertise. Look for upcoming summits where your ideal client is likely to be attending.
4. Stay in touch! Put it on your daily to-do list to reach daily to at least 5 contacts. You’ve probably heard the quote: “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago… the next best time is today.” Waiting until you have something to sell/pitch to try to grow your potential leads list is a huge mistake. (we all have that high school friend who slides into the DM’s after 20 years of silence to recruit you into their direct sales business, right??)
Don’t be that guy. Stay in contact regularly with people in your network (other coaches, past clients, and potential clients) by checking in, being genuinely interested in what’s happening with them, wishing them a happy birthday, or forwarding content you think they’ll like (In other words, just be helpful!)
5. Do a podcast tour – Podcast hosts are almost always looking for guests to provide expertise to their audience (ask me how i know!). Research podcasts that share your ideal client (remember we talked about collaboration partners?), so it’s not a competitor but someone who already has the attention and trust of your ideal client and be sure to share so much value that both the host and the audience will want to find a spot in your network!
6. Routinely reach out to past clients to see if they know anyone who is looking for help with whatever it is you offer. They may know someone (maybe them?) if nothing else, it reminds them that you are ‘their guy’ they know to send people to
7. Promote your local businesses on your social media – while we mostly focus here on the online aspect of business, don’t overlook the power of the Shop Local movement in your community! Your business may be virtual but that doesn’t mean all of your clients have to be miles away to hire you!
8. Grow an email list and connect with your subscribers regularly – Create an amazing freebie that captures the email address of your ideal client and provides them with a quick win will start the trust building process on day 1! Share this lead magnet in all of your social media platform bios, on your website, and on the podcasts you’ll be appearing on.
9. Join a membership collective of like-minded health and wellness experts (like you’ll find in the Profitable Health Coach Collective – doors open soon!) We will be hosting regular events to help you connect with amazing collaboration partners!
Episode Transcript
Welcome everyone. In this episode we’re going to be talking about the nine ways that you can build and strengthen your network to grow your business and the undeniable power of community and collaboration when it comes to business growth. Now relationship building has the absolute highest ROI when it comes to growing your business.
Having a solid list of personal connections that are either potential clients or referral partners, even if they aren’t your ideal client, is one of the best assets that your business can have. So number one is identify collaboration partners.
You may have heard me talk about the circle of trust. In the beginning of your business when you are first building visibility and getting your name out there, your circle of trust is pretty small. It’s limited to your immediate personal network and maybe your Facebook friends list.
So what you’ll need to do, and this is a really critical strategy to use in the beginning, is identifying collaboration partners. And these are product or service providers that share your ideal client and if you partner up with them to kind of borrow the trust that they’ve already established with their audience, this can really help you move the needle along in your business growth because you are aligning yourself with somebody that your ideal client already trusts.
If these collaboration partners are willing to kind of vouch for you, it’s like telling their audience, “Hey I trust them, you can trust them too.” And this is a great way to get your first set of clients.
It’s a win-win because if you are the collaboration partner, then you’re building your audience’s trust by providing them with another amazing product or service provider that they need and then you’ll also gain access to a new crowd of potential clients with their audience.
So you basically you’re sharing audiences because you offer complementary services and products. So if you are a health coach, you know, look for yoga teachers, life coaches, meditation coaches, personal trainers, nutritionists, and dieticians to grow your collaboration partner list. Now the second way that you can build and strengthen your network is to participate in what’s known as a joint venture digital giveaway.
And this is when you connect with a group of collaboration partners who all have the same ideal client for a hosted digital product giveaway. And this is where you all have a freebie to give away and the group all promotes the giveaway to their own list and to their social media audience, allowing all of you to grow your own email list and social media following by sharing audiences.
Now the next way that you can build and strengthen your network is to participate or host a virtual summit. It’s kind of like a giveaway but instead of the freebie, you are presenting on your topic of expertise.
Now what I would recommend is looking for upcoming summits where your ideal client is likely to be in attendance or that’s geared towards your ideal client. And this is a great way to get in front of them and establish yourself as an expert and really build trust.
Now the next way to build and strengthen your network is to stay in touch, right? So put it on your daily to-do list to reach out to at least five contacts. Now you’ve probably heard the quote, “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the next best time is today.” Waiting until you have something to sell or promote or you’re running a launch to grow your potential leads list is a huge mistake, right?
Don’t we all have that high school friend who slides into your DMs after 20 years of not talking to you to try and recruit you into their network marketing business, right? Don’t be that guy. Stay in contact regularly with the people in your network.
These could be other coaches, these could be past clients, potential clients. Just by checking in and being genuinely interested in what’s happening with them. Wish them a happy birthday or forwarding content that you think that they’d be interested in. So in other words, just be helpful. Go in with the intention of just service and connection, not looking for a sale.
And this is how you cultivate a network of potential clients and referral partners.
Now the next way to build and strengthen your network is to do a podcast tour. Podcast hosts are almost always looking for new guests to provide expertise to their audience. #AskMeHowIKnow. Do a quick Google search and look for podcasts that share your ideal client.
Remember we talked earlier about collaboration partners? So it won’t be a competitor of yours, but somebody who has already got the attention and the trust of your ideal client, who provides a complimentary product or service, and be sure to share so much value in the podcast that both the host and the audience will want to find a spot in your network.
The number six way to grow and strengthen your network is to routinely reach out to past clients to see if they might know anybody who’s looking for help. So keep in touch with your past clients. Retention marketing has one of the highest conversion rates in marketing. So somebody who’s already worked with you is highly likely to work with you again.
So it’s worth it to stay in contact with them to see if they are ever interested in signing up for a refresher or signing up for a new program. And if not, you can always ask them if they know somebody who might be looking for help with whatever it is that you offer. And if they’re not interested and they don’t know anyone who’s interested,
if nothing else, it keeps you in top of mind to remind them that, oh yeah, you are the person that they know who’s the expert in whatever topic that you work in. And that’s who they should send people to if in the future someone needs a recommendation. Now the number seven way to build and grow your network is to promote your local businesses on your social media.
Now while we mostly focus here on the online aspect of business, do not overlook the power of your shop local movement in your community. Okay, your business might be virtual but that doesn’t mean that all of your clients have to be miles away to hire you. The number eight way to build and strengthen your network is to start an email list and connect with your subscribers regularly.
Create an amazing freebie, any kind of lead magnet that captures the email address of your ideal client and provides them with a quick win that will start the trust-building process on day one.
Share this lead magnet and all of your social media platform bios on your website and on all the podcasts that you’ll be appearing on when you do your podcast tour. Now the number nine way to build and strengthen your network is to join a membership collective of like-minded health and wellness experts just like the ones that you’ll find in the Profitable Health Coach Collective.
Keep an eye open because doors will be opening soon.
We’re going to be hosting regular events that help you connect with amazing collaboration partners that will help you build and strengthen your network.
I hope these tips were really helpful for you because relationship building is absolutely the most critical thing that you can do in your business and I really hope these nine tips will help you get started on it today.
Thanks for listening and if you liked this episode go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when the next episode is live. Check out our show notes for this episode where you can find any of the links and resources that were mentioned during the show.
Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
June 16, 202625 min
Creating Your Signature Sound with Takenya Freeney
Takenya Freeney, the Chief Treble Maker, is a singer, voice instructor, composer, and entrepreneur explains how to use your voice, literally and figuratively, to create your Signature Sound to your best advantage in your business.
Creating Your Signature Sound with Takenya FreeneyListen to the EpisodeConnect with TakenyaEpisode Transcript
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Connect with Takenya
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/takenya.freeney
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kenyaskeys
Her website: https://kenyaskeys.com
Find out more about her Put Your Best Voice Forward Workshop
Episode Transcript
Welcome everyone. I am here today with Takenya Freeney who is a singer, composer, music teacher, and an expert at helping people release their inner superstar.
She has over 20 years of experience teaching music and voice lessons. She is here today to talk to us about how you can turn your voice into a money-making tool for your business by developing a signature sound. Welcome Tekenya.
Takenya Freeney: Hey Laurie. Yay. Yes, I’m so excited to be talking to you about this because as a vocal performer and somebody who instructs people how to use instruments and how to show up vocally, you are an expert on using this instrument figuratively and literally in your business, in life, everywhere.
So let’s dig in to all of this. First of all, what is a signature sound and why is it important?
Takenya Freeney: I love this question. A signature sound is the thing that is uniquely yours. When you create your signature sound, you’re creating something that easily identifies you to your audience.
They’re able to buy in with you and your authenticity. They’re able to buy in with you as far as creating that personal connection with them. You know how some people say sometimes, “Well, I want to sing just like insert artist name.” We don’t need another “just like insert artist names.” We need a you. We need a you.
You want to be your own voice. You want to have your own signature sound. For me personally, my signature sound when it comes to singing, my signature sound is I have the voice that sits kind of low. I have a low-ish singing voice.
Takenya Freeney: That allows me to sing a lot of the songs that you would expect a male to sing. A lot of times people aren’t necessarily expecting that. You’re not gonna get me singing all up in the rafters with all these high voice folks because that’s not where the happy place is for my voice. And when people hear the richness and the warmth and the depth, the breadth of my lows, they are floored. So that signature sound is the part of your voice that you love to shine the spotlight on.
That signature sound is the part that comes straight from the heart and right into the ears of your audience.
My signature sound includes my laugh. I have a special laugh. I’ve always had it. I’m highly identifiable by this laugh. It’s my calling card. And I know that’s not what exactly what you’re talking about. You’re talking about your voice and the way your voice sounds and the way your messaging and your brand. But that for me is my laugh. That’s part of it.
That’s the thing that’s uniquely yours. Who can copy your laugh, Lori? Loons. Loons can copy my laugh. I’ve actually heard them and I’m like, “That sounds like me.”
Or a car that won’t turn over kind of also sounds like me. Yeah, it’s pretty. Or a witch. Like I do a witch cackle. So witches can actually. Yeah. So it’s not uniquely mine but it’s a very select set of laugh twins that I have there.
You’re talking about brand awareness and connecting with your audience in a way that they resonate with you in the way that you sound and what you’re saying.
Takenya Freeney: Oh yeah. You have to build that personal connection with your audience. And if you’re never giving them your voice, they’re not necessarily making a connection with a flat piece of media. They need to see you. They need to hear you.
There’s a saying, “A customer needs to have seven touch points before you’ve built enough trust for them to buy from you.” But if they see you or hear you, we can kind of jump the line. We can collapse. We can definitely. That’s the word. We can collapse that timeline significantly.
So if you are in an online business and you are only posting text, you’re only doing images, it’s gonna take a lot longer for your audience to say, “Okay this is somebody I connect with. This is somebody I trust.” What kind of content would you say is the type of content that’s gonna collapse that timeline?
I can tell you honestly when you look at the numbers for people who need to see the data, I can honestly tell you that if I put something that I’ve said in like one of those cute little Canva visuals and like post it to social media versus me saying the exact same thing, making a video of it, and posting it as a real or a TikTok or a YouTube short or a Facebook, what you’m gonna do?
When I’m in it, the engagement’s way better. If I was doing like an Instagram Live every week and then I would take that Instagram Live and put that on YouTube, then I’d take that same Instagram Live and put it out in the emails that I was sending out every week and then I would take that same Facebook Live and I would make it into a blog post.
Or I just like said the same thing I said again and just like take it out real quick and BAM! So we’re collapsing that time to make the connection. We’re talking about using audio and video in our business as part of our marketing, as part of our sales process.
There may be some people in the audience who are just starting out, if they’re not comfortable showing their face, starting a podcast or starting a video or something like that because they’re nervous to use their voice literally and figuratively because of their own self-conscious, how they hear themselves, what they think they sound like, what they think other people think they sound like.
When I was a kid, I went to the Museum of Science in Boston and everybody who’s from Boston knows what I’m talking about, but they had this exhibit where you could pick up a phone, talk into it and hear what you sounded like in the phone. And I was in elementary school so I picked up the phone and what I heard horrified me.
I said, “Is that what I sound like? I sound like I should be on Wizard of Oz?” So I was very self-conscious of how I sounded to other people growing up.
Fast forward to, you know, being at work, giving presentations, that only intensified that anxiety of like having to give presentations. So now not only is everybody staring at me, but they’re thinking about what my voice sounds like.
And of course, what you sound like on the phone is not the same as in person, but I’d already grooved in this negative thought like for decades. So it was in there. It took a lot of work to kind of overcome this and say, “Listen, this is what I sound like. Deal with it.” I’m fascinated by this, that you were able to do this as a kid, like pick up the phone, say something into it and actually get to hear what it sounds like back. But when we hear what we sound like back, it’s weird. It’s weird.
When we hear ourselves speak, we’re hearing it from the closest point possible. You can’t get any closer, it can’t get any more intimate than ground zero. We are ground zero for the sound of our voice. But when other people are hearing you, they’re not at ground zero.
So by the time the voice leaves the body and makes it to someone else’s ear, that sound, those sound waves have had to travel not only through the person at ground zero’s body, now they have to travel through the air to get to the person’s ear who’s listening on the other side. And it’s changed. So yes, it sounds weird. It sounds weird to us.
Really not that weird to other people. And even if it does sound weird to you, and maybe it sounds weird to other people, I’m gonna tell you, that shouldn’t stop you because what you have to say is very important and the people who want to hear what you have to say are gonna listen.
Absolutely. When I was thinking about starting a podcast and I was like, “Oh, who would want to listen to me? My voice is so annoying.” I found podcasts created by people whose voices I personally found irritating. To me, they were like nails on a chalkboard.
And I was like, “Wow, if this person isn’t self-conscious about their voice, I’m not gonna be either.” Right? They’re putting something out, they’re confident in it, and they’re just doing their thing. So I said, “You know what? I’m just gonna do my thing.” And my first few podcasts that I created, it was hard to listen to. I’m over it now. But you get used to it. And I think, you know what? You kind of just stop caring about the sound and you care more about the content. Absolutely.
When you think about people who have a unique voice, Fran Drescher comes to mind. You know, “What makes you different is what makes you special,” according to Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse. Thank you, Miles Morales. Like, Fran Drescher’s voice is definitely uniquely hers. It’s her signature sound and she’s been able to parlay that and leverage that into something that, like, when you hear her, you know it’s her. It works for her.
She knows she’s got this unique voice. Another person who has a unique voice is the singer, Michelle A, from, like, the 80s and 90s. If you hear her speaking voice, her speaking voice, it’s really high and it’s got this quality about it that’s super light. But when she sings, it’s much more aggressive but still high.
And that’s because of how she passes the air over her vocal cords when she’s speaking is different from how she passes the air over her vocal cords when she’s singing. Just made me think of somebody else who has a unique sound that they’ve embraced and there are people on both sides who’ll say, “Love it. Hate it. Stevie Nicks.” Very raspy.
Yeah, I mean, that’s their sound. They embrace it and you’re gonna have people who maybe love it or don’t love it and that’s okay. You don’t have to be for everybody. If what you’re saying is important enough for them to listen to, they’re not gonna care. They’re there for the content overall. They’re there for you. They’re there for the content. They’re there to connect.
So the way that you sound specifically is not of utmost importance to them. Yeah, we don’t care. We just want the good stuff. Exactly. They’re there for the gems. Exactly. Let’s look at when people are creating, let’s say they’re like, “All right, I’m gonna go ahead. I’m gonna start doing some audio content. I’m gonna maybe do some podcasting.
I’m gonna do some interviews. I’m going to do some video content.” As a vocal performer and as somebody who, you know, this is like your instrument, you know how to help people fine-tune, use that instrument. What are some ways that they can present themselves to their advantage? I would say hydration. We’re not even singing yet, but hydrate. You want to make sure that when you’re getting ready for your speaking portion that you had a plan in advance.
It can be as simple as, “These are the three key points I want to hit.” You need to offer yourself some wiggle room to deviate from that plan and kind of go off on a tangent this way or that way. You also want to make sure that you’re speaking in a way so that you can be understood by others. You’re gonna have to pace yourself, but in the end, I really don’t want you to sweat it so much. Just put the product out there. Editing can fix a lot of mistakes.
The signature sound. It’s an evolution. You know, when we’re publicly presenting ourselves, it’s an evolution. If you go back and look at stuff that I did like 50, 11 years ago, that stuff is… I would say, “Oh man, that was whack.” But it wasn’t whack in the sense of what I was saying. It was whack in the sense of I just wasn’t confident. And people can pick up on that. So what if I’m doing a live in my group and I want to just come off as confident, and how can I hide the fact that I’m nervous about being live in front of this group of people?
So you can use a script. Some people use a script, even when they’re live. They’re following their products out there, their services out there, where you can write everything ahead of time and it will scroll the same when you would see it scroll, like say for someone at a news desk, like an anchor, how things will scroll and it keeps up with you. There are products that will do that for you.
The other thing is to keep it short. Keep it brief. If you’re gonna go live, people probably aren’t gonna watch for a two-hour live session. So keep brevity in mind. Eliminate words that… I’d say if you’re scripting it, write it out and then eliminate things that you don’t really need. Eliminate the fluff. Keep it concise, as short as possible.
What’s the quickest way for you to make your point without using all these extra words? So get to the point. Also, if you’re live, talk to the screen. I know you’re not seeing the people. I know you can’t always see them, but speak as if somebody is right there.
The ideal person that you want to be talking to, talk directly to them. That person is your friend. It can be an imaginary friend even, but talk directly to that customer. It’s not necessarily a customer, but talk directly to that person that you want to connect with. Practice, record yourself, and then watch it back.
Oh yeah, I do that all the time. I promise you. I do that now. I’ll still, to this day, I’ll give it a go. I’m in my car. “Hey guys, I’m gonna talk to you today about whoop-de-whoop.” I’m firing off the dome. I don’t want to say making it out. I know what I want to say, but I’m going in order in my head versus having that plan that we talked about before. I’ll go back and look at it, and then I’ll hear, “Oh, well I can take this out. Oh, I forgot to add this part.”
So that when I am ready to go live, I know exactly the points that I need to hit and the things I should eliminate. One thing that I noticed, especially in my podcast or when I do interviews, when I’m editing and I’m watching myself, I’m editing the video and I’m watching and I’m listening, that’s when I realized there’s a pattern.
That I have habits of words that I say, things that I do with my mouth, with my hands. I noticed my mannerisms, not just verbal ones, but visual ones, and it’s kind of helped me. Okay, slow down, take a breath, look at the camera. I had this thing where I used to just stare off because there used to be a window right behind my monitor.
So when I was talking to people, and I’m thinking they don’t care that I’m not looking at them, but it kind of looks like I’m having a stroke or something because I’m like talking like this, staring out the window, and I’m like, “It looks kind of weird and I should probably just practice looking at the camera.”
Yeah, so practice looking at the camera. I know the first few times that I went live, it was weird because I was like, “I’m talking to no one. I’m talking to the ether and it’s weird.”
So kind of getting used to, “This is just how it goes and it’s not gonna look like this on the other side.” Yeah, we’re humans. We take cues from the visual a lot of times, and if there’s no human to visually interact with, it’s another blocker. But the way you overcome that, again, is to talk to that person, talk directly to the camera, talk to that person that you’ve made up, or that person who’s your favorite, but look directly into the camera. Eye contact. That way you don’t have to look into the ether.
When I first started doing lives for my audience in my Facebook group, I had trouble with talking too fast. I was constantly yawning and I would be out of breath because I’d be talking so fast. I would just be like, “I’d have to take a pause, catch my breath, be cool,” kind of look like I didn’t just run a 5k or something.
I was exhausted just from talking through this whole paragraph. I can relate to a lot of that, honestly. We talked about signature sound and how it’s important for you to be putting your message out there personally, so people can hear you, they can see you, they can connect with you, not just as a brand but as a person.
That builds trust and we can collapse that timeline of the buyer’s journey by doing that. When we talk about creating a signature sound, you talk about voice. What else goes into a signature sound? Being sure, being confident, and if you’re not confident, just doggone well have the courage to do it anyway.
You have to be willing to say the things that make people think, as long as you’re not offending a group of people, let’s be clear. You have to be willing to take that risk. So say the things that get people talking.
Ask the questions that increase engagement. So if you want to end or begin every time you’re live with somebody, begin with a question. Know who you are, who you serve, and how you help them. I think these I help statements people are moving away from, but essentially you still need those elements.
Make sure you’re talking to that audience every single time. If you confuse people, they ain’t coming to you. Being authentic, being yourself, taking a stand, making statements that are actual thought-provoking statements. When you’re attracting your target market, or you’re attracting your ideal clients, you’re actively repelling everybody else.
And you do want that. I have absolutely said that same thing before, because in every social media interaction, you should be speaking to the people you want to have at your party. Who’s coming to the party? Not everybody gets an invite. I don’t want everybody at my party. You know, as a website developer, that is something I do tell clients.
That you are speaking to somebody specific. And if you are thinking you need to open the door wide for everybody to come in, you will regret that. Because there will be people for whom you are not the right person, and you will regret getting into that transaction. Because it’ll be an energy drain, a time drain. It’ll really just wear you out and exhaust you, and burn you out, if you’re trying to help everybody all the time.
So it is important to attract and repel at the same time, using your authentic voice. Absolutely, I’m telling you. When I was saying I taught lessons to everybody, everybody was coming. And I was not happy with everybody. You know, maybe you just don’t buy it. Or maybe they’re better off with a different teacher, because you can’t serve their needs. That’s totally fine. It all comes back to that’s your main tool for your business, and all facets of it.
So, we want to talk about your custom music designing service. So if you have a YouTube channel or podcast, you have a website, you have something that you want to create a signature sound, or some kind of musical piece. Tell us how that works. I love this aspect of my business, because I get to create something that doesn’t exist unless I make it happen. And it requires me to be really connected to the client. So I think the most recent thing I did was, I took someone’s love story.
The husband’s birthday was coming up, and the wife wanted to honor her husband with a song. And I just said, “Well, tell me your story. You know, how did you guys meet?”
And in her response, she said, “He knocked on my door, and two weeks later, we went on our first date. We met at college. On the first date, we got to the top of the Ferris wheel, and he said, ‘I love you.'” She just went on and on, but I was able to take everything that she said and make it be like two minutes and 20 seconds of their love story.
Their love story is in a song, and it matches their personality. It matches their upbringing. So that tells me, “Okay, well, these people attend church, so let me make it sound ‘churchy'” in air quotes. “Let me make it sound ‘churchy,’ and then let me give it the vibe and feel of a throwback 1980s, 1990s R&B song.” It was perfect for them. But my bookkeeper, on the other hand, this is someone who’s from New Orleans.
He’s all about that New Orleans bounce. He’s all about that heavy bass line. He’s all about the high vibe, the fast beats moving, the rhythm’s got to be on point. And when I gave him the song that I wrote for his podcast, he said some words I can’t say here, but let’s just say he was very pleased.
I get to create the things that reflect back who you are. It’s like I’m a mirror, but I’m a music mirror for who you are and what it is that you want. And I think it takes a certain level of empathy. It takes a certain level of musicality. It takes a certain level of connection in order for me to do that. And I love doing that for people.
It’s your own theme song. I’ll write it. People easily will know exactly who you are. It’s like when they hear my bookkeeper’s music, they know it’s time for his show. It gets them ready. So that could be for a podcast. It could be for a YouTube show. For business owners or online professionals who either already have video/audio content that they want to improve or they want to start using, they want to make it up a notch because they’re already invested in that.
Like people like me who are like I’ve already been doing pod… I have two podcasts. I already have… I’ve had them going for two years. I’m invested in this process. I need to kind of make it a little bit more, a lot more professional.
Well, streamline and just kind of take it up a notch because it’s… I mean you can tell it’s DIY when you listen to it. You can tell I mixed it on Audacity or whatever it was. Like don’t you laugh at me. How else could somebody use the pieces that you create? Digital ads.
So if you’re running a Facebook ad and you want someone to write a song that is your ad, I got you. It’s like roses are red, violets are blue. You should hire me to write a song for you kind of thing. I love that. That’s hilarious. What about ads for like podcasts too? Mid-roll, could you create like… The jingle. I live for this. I’ve been doing this so long and I still love doing it.
How else can people work with you?
If you’d like to work with me either one-on-one or in a group setting, I am launching a program where you actually find your signature sound as a business owner. Give me some more details on that. We’re learning how to take proper care of the voice. We’re learning how to warm up before we go in front of an audience.
We’re learning how to have the sustainability so we can speak for the whole time that we’re doing our speech. We’re learning how not to lose our voice because of how many times we’re having to speak somewhere.
I want people to be able to come out of this knowing that they can take a speaking gig here, there, and everywhere, wherever the speaking gig may be, from their home or in-person event.
And they can confidently, without a doubt, know that what they have to say is landing because they’ve learned how to take command of that body so that they can have control of their voice. I want this signature sound to be something where people leave knowing that they got the juice. You got the juice.
I love this because I think for a lot of my audience, what sells their program is doing workshops, doing corporate wellness presentations that could be lengthy, they could be repeated. For large groups, learning how to be in front of this group and becoming just public speakers, presenting confidently with their voice, with their content, taking care of their voice over the course of multiple presentations.
Also, that body presentation that you mentioned, like how to position yourself and your body to exude confidence and project your voice so that you’re not downplaying what’s coming out of your mouth by how you carry yourself.
Let’s wrap this up. What I like to do at the end is get my guests top three tips for fill in the blank. So, what are your top three tips for creating a signature sound and/or sounding better online?
Top three tips for creating your signature sound and/or sounding better online include rest. People aren’t gonna think about that one. The way I sound after I’m well rested sounds way better than the way I sound if I’ve had maybe a couple hours of sleep.
Now, it depends on what you’re going for. If you’re going for the the moody, groggy, Barry White’s Little Sister sound, then you know, I’ll take two hours of sleep. But if I know that I need to have some endurance and some longevity in my day, my voice serves me better when I’ve rested my body.
So, tip number one, rest.
Tip number two, pace yourself. Our brains can’t keep up with our mouths all the time and I know I have to filter what’s in my head to try and get it out of my mouth in a way that makes people better understand me.
And tip number three, use your voice as it is. Like for me, I’m from Texas and that’s why I be strong sometimes. Use what you already have. It’s not, “But my voice does this.” That’s an asset, not a liability.
This has been amazing. Takenya, thank you so much for coming in and chatting with us today.
All right, y’all be good to yourselves.
Thanks for listening and if you liked this episode, go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when the next episode is live. Check out our show notes for this episode where you can find any of the links and resources that were mentioned during the show.
Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
Check out more episodes of the Profitable Health Coach Podcast
June 15, 20266 min
Episode 1 – Welcome to The Profitable Health Coach Podcast
Welcome to the Profitable Health Coach podcast! I am your host, Laurie Mallon. I’m an ACE-certified personal trainer, a former womens’ health coach, and a certified yoga instructor.
This episode is really the origin story for The Profitable Health Coach – how it all started, how it’s going and how it ended up as a podcast…
Here at the The Profitable Health Coach we’re not just talking to coaches. I know it’s in the name but really anyone who runs an online wellness business will be able to benefit from the podcast!
June 10, 202615 min
Using my signature 5 Step F.O.C.U.S. Method to Get Your First Clients
Today I’m walking you through the 5-step method I used to get my first clients and it’s the exact process I now teach my own clients who are just getting started. If you’ve been wondering how to stop spinning your wheels and finally get your first clients, this method will give you a clear and simple path forward.
The 5-step method is called F.O.C.U.S., and it’s perfect to help you get your first clients or to help you get MORE clients if you’re already a seasoned coach.
When I first started my coaching business, I wasted way too much time doing things that didn’t actually bring in clients. I obsessed over logos, played around with websites, and tinkered with business cards.
The truth is, none of that got me paid.
What finally worked was a simple five-step method that got me my very first paying clients and later became the framework I now teach to new coaches who are just getting started.
I call it the F.O.C.U.S. Method. It’s designed to cut through the noise, get your business off the ground, and help you build real momentum. These are the exact steps I used to make my first $1,000 in coaching, and they still work every time I feel like I need to quickly grow my client roster.
If you’re tired of spinning your wheels and want a straightforward way to get your first clients, let’s walk through F.O.C.U.S. together.
What’s inside…Before You Get Your First ClientsStep 1: FOUNDATIONStep 2: OFFERStep 3: COLLECT NO’sStep 4: UNDERPROMISE, OVERDELIVERStep 5: SOCIAL PROOFWhy the F.O.C.U.S. Method Works to Get Your First ClientsSuccess Stories: Coaches Who Used the F.O.C.U.S. MethodFAQ: Using the FOCUS Method for Getting Your First ClientsEpisode Transcript
It’s perfect for getting your first clients or any time you need to quickly grow your paying client roster!
The 5-step method is called F.O.C.U.S. and it looks like this:
Before You Get Your First Clients
Make sure that you are officially set up to operate as a business, legally and financially. (**Please note: This is not legal of financial advice because I’m not a lawyer or an accountant)
Step 1: FOUNDATION
Make sure that you are officially set up to operate as a business, legally and financially. (**Please note: This is not legal of financial advice because I’m not a lawyer or an accountant)
What this step includes is making sure that in the eyes of your city, county, state, etc that you are legally authorized to be in business. Where I am, this requires a business license from the county which involves filling out an application and submitting it with a yearly fee.
To get this license, it means your business has an official business name.
RELATED: 5 Things You Need to Know Before You Name Your Health Coaching BusinessChoose a name that is clear about what you do. Something like: “<Your Last Name> Wellness/Fitness/Health” is clear and to the point. You are the coach, what you provide is help with health, wellness, and or fitness.
BOOM, DONE.
Legal note: You may choose to create an LLC before you take on any clients. I didn’t, I waited until I was further along in the process because an LLC is not a requirement to be in business.
I operated as a sole proprietor at first and got a Tax ID from the IRS.
Financially, you want to make sure you are keeping your business finances separate from your personal finances with a separate bank account and later on a separate business credit card for future expenditures. You’ll need your EIN from the IRS for this business account, which you can get online.
You’ll also want a way to track your business expenses as you go, trust me, you will thank yourself at tax time for keeping it organized from day 1! You can use something basic like a Google sheet or excel spreadsheet.
You’ll need to set up a way to take payment that is separate from your personal Paypal or Venmo account if you have one. I use Stripe and have been very happy with it.
Now before you take any payment from clients you’ll want to make sure you are covered in a worst case scenario by having insurance, waivers for clients to sign, and/or client agreement forms.
These will look different based on what type of a business you are running so I always recommend checking with the organization that provided your certification to see if they have standard forms or templates to use and then having a lawyer review your client documents to make sure they’re going to cover you legally.
(Notice i didn’t say build a fancy website, spend hundreds of dollars (or hours!) creating a logo, spending money you haven’t made yet on business cards, or any of the stuff that really is not going to directly help you get your first clients!)
I have seen way too many coaches get hung up on, and spend days/weeks/months in the busy-work of websites and business cards before they’ve even gotten a client.
Foundation step is all about setting your business up as an official entity and setting up an organized way to manage your clients and your cash.
Step 2: OFFER
Outline who you help, how you help, and how long you’ll be working together during this 30-Day Jumpstart.
Keep this **super** simple. I know a lot of coaching organizations tell their grads to offer a 3 month program and a 6 month program but when you’re starting out, that can be a hard sell for both you and your clients.
Offer a 30-day jumpstart program to get your feet wet, add a few bucks to your bank account, and gain a TON of clarity and confidence in yourself as a coach.
Your goal is to get your first clients to work with you for the minimum amount of time needed for them to make some progress, see results, and be excited enough about what’s happening that they want to tell others about their experience working with you.
Once you have a handful of testimonials, you can change your offer but for this method, offer a 30-day jumpstart for a specific outcome that you feel passionate about helping people achieve. Quitting smoking, getting active, eating healthier, having more energy, feeling less stressed… anything!
When you are starting this can be really hard. You’re a health coach – you can help anyone! But what you’re going to find out if you haven’t already is that a specific offer and outcome is going to make it a lot easier for clients to see the value of what you do.
I won’t get too deep in the weeds here about niching down but just know that if you can put together something specific that a potential client can visualize themselves achieving and this particular change would be meaningful in their life, it’s going to be a lot easier to get clients to say YES to a 30-day sprint than a 6-month marathon.
Remember, this offer isn’t forever, it’s just for RIGHT NOW. it’s going to change, and it should! But the purpose of this offer statement is to help you get your first 3-5 clients so that you can get experience, gain confidence, get clarity, have impact, and make some money! Otherwise this is just a pricey hobby, right?
Here’s a sample FOCUS offer: “I’m looking for 5 busy moms who are looking to have more energy in 30 days so they can keep up with their kids and not collapse on the couch at bedtime. Who’s in?”
Create your offer by stating a specific number of client slots you want to fill, a specific demographic and something that you know they’d really love to achieve and a set number of days in which you can help them see those results.
Step 3: COLLECT NO’s
One of the best things you can do early in your business is desensitize yourself to hearing the word NO. Your job when you pitch your services isn’t to sign a client, but to get them to make a decision.
Sometimes that decision is not to work with you and that’s ok. (I promise that most of the time, it is not personal!)
You’re looking for potential clients who fit the bill: they are a specific demographic, in a certain age range, who want the outcome you’re offering, and are ready to show up, invest the funds, time and energy to make some lifestyle changes in the next 30 days.
That’s kind of a tall order and not everyone you ask is going to check all of those boxes. That’s ok!
Think of ‘No’ as ‘Not Now’ or ‘that’s not me’ and it’s easier to see that their NO has very little to do with you.
It could also be you haven’t done enough to gain their trust yet – either they don’t know you as a coach, a person, or someone who gets results and they’re not willing to extend the trust just yet.
That’s also ok.
I’ve worked with hundreds of coaches starting their business and the thing I see impacting their lack of clients is being too passive in making offers.
They fail to make themselves, their business, or their offer visible to potential clients. They either assume that people know what they do and will reach out if they want help (NOPE!) or think an occasional post on FB is seen by (and remembered by!) their entire friend’s list and they don’t want to be annoying so they fail to share this info often on social media (Definitely not true!).
Or they automatically assume that the people they know are not interested in the specifics of the offer, can’t afford it, or wouldn’t want to work with us.
What we do using the FOCUS method is Actively Collect Rejection. We reach out to anyone that fits the criteria of the offer and let them tell US no. We don’t count anyone out, we stay out of their pockets, we don’t decide for them if they’re ready for change.
So make a list of 50 contacts in your personal network – friends, neighbors, FB contacts and reach out to them with the offer.
If they say Yes, you have a new client!
If they say No, great! You’re one step closer to the 5 who will say yes!
***Don’t forget to ask them if they’d be willing to pass on the information to anyone they know who might be a great fit!
*You can also share this in your Facebook Group if you have one!
Win/win!
Step 4: UNDERPROMISE, OVERDELIVER
I know I did the exact opposite of this when I was starting out and it’s a big mistake!
You book a client and promise them the moon and stars – why yes….you DO offer 24/7 support …and video content… and ebooks and everything they want… till you find out that logistically and energetically, that doesn’t align with how you really want to run your business or you simply can’t deliver and then it can be really disheartening and disappointing for you and the client.
A much better option is to offer the basics that will get your client results – coaching sessions, email support, and worksheets… and then surprise and delight them with extras throughout the program.
This makes for a much better client experience and they’re more likely to stay engaged with your coaching, get results, and provide you with a solid gold testimony!
Step 5: SOCIAL PROOF
Social proof is such an amazing and important sales tool. The more testimonials you collect and share after you get your first clients, the easier it is to get more clients. I have personally seen this in my own business – at some point, the results speak for themselves.
Here’s the deal… your business is based on sales, and sales are based on TRUST.
If someone trusts you, they’re more likely to hire you.
If they don’t trust you, they’re not buying.
Simple as that.
But how do you gain trust? It needs to be built.
Cultivated… developed.
Trust is created one interaction at a time… it but it’s a lot easier (and faster!) to ‘borrow’ trust than it is to build it from scratch.
When you’re first starting out, your *Circle of Trust* (those that know you, like you, and trust you enough to hire you) is pretty much your direct personal network, plus your Facebook friends. (I’m referring to your personal profile where you have friends, not your business page where you get likes and follows!)
This is why we start with this list when we’re collecting No’s with our FOCUS offer!
When happy clients provide testimonials that you can then share with other potential clients, you’re demonstrating that you’ve been trusted by others and then delivered results.
There’s a lot behind the psychology of testimonials – you’ve probably experienced it yourself if you’ve ever shopped online -you check out the reviews of products before you buy and can be convinced to buy or not buy based on what total strangers have said.
Now imagine how much more powerful a testimonial is when it’s provided by someone your potential client can relate to and it demonstrates how you were pivotal in the process.
Testimonials allow you to leverage the trust you’ve already built to create trust in potential clients.
Why the F.O.C.U.S. Method Works to Get Your First Clients
This method removes the guesswork and shows you how to start small, build momentum, and create the trust you need to get your first clients.
To recap:
FOUNDATION – Cross your t’s, dot your I’d officially, legally, and financially to set yourself up for success and protect yourself.
OFFER – Create a short term offer with a specific outcome that’s limited to a set number of clients. Use urgency, specificity, and scarcity to encourage people to take action!
COLLECT NO’s – You can’t wait for clients to knock your door down and beg you to work with them. Put your offer in front at least 50 people in your direct, personal network (they trust you the most right now!) and let them decide if this is for them.
UNDERPROMISE & OVERDELIVER – Surprise your clients with bonus features and delight them with extras they weren’t expecting.
SOCIAL PROOF – Document the kind words and amazing results of your 30-day bootcamp and use those testimonials going forward to grow your business. Let the words of happy clients be the proof that others need to sign up for your services!
I used this method to generate $1k in my business after trying (and failing!) to get up and running for months! I’ve shared this with other coaches and they are always shocked by how easy it is to get clients when they just ASK!
Success Stories: Coaches Who Used the F.O.C.U.S. Method
One of my favorite things about teaching this method is seeing how quickly other coaches get results when they put it into action.
Here are two podcast interviews with coaches who used the F.O.C.U.S. method to land their first clients:
How This Health Coach Got 4 New Clients Using the F.O.C.U.S. Method
How an Online Trainer Got 9 New Clients Using the F.O.C.U.S. Method
These are real examples of how simple and effective this process can be. If you’re struggling to get your first clients, listening to their stories will show you what’s possible when you stay consistent, keep things simple, and trust the process.
FAQ: Using the FOCUS Method for Getting Your First Clients
Q: How long will it take me to get my first clients using the F.O.C.U.S. method?Most coaches who follow the steps consistently are able to land their first clients within 30 days. Some do it faster, depending on how proactive they are about making offers and collecting No’s.
Q: Do I need a website before I can get my first clients?No! You don’t need a website, a fancy logo, or business cards to start. The F.O.C.U.S. method is designed to help you get paying clients quickly without spending weeks or months on setup.
Q: What if I’m nervous about selling my services?That’s normal. The great thing about this method is that you don’t have to be “salesy.” You’re simply sharing an offer that helps people. By focusing on collecting No’s, you’ll quickly learn that rejection isn’t personal, and you’ll feel more confident with every conversation.
Q: Do I need to be certified to get my first clients?Not necessarily. Many coaches start by helping people with areas where they already have experience. That said, having a certification can add credibility, especially as you grow your business.
Q: Can I use this method even if I already have clients?Absolutely. The F.O.C.U.S. method isn’t just for beginners. It’s also a great way to quickly fill spots when you want to add new clients to your roster.
Episode Transcript
Welcome, everyone. I’m really excited because in this episode, I’m going to be walking you through my five-step method that I use to get my first clients, and it’s what I teach my own clients who are just getting started.
It’s perfect for getting your very first clients or really any time you need to quickly grow your paying client roster. This five-step method is what I call focus, and it looks like this. Step one, F stands for foundation.
Keep in mind, I am not a lawyer, I am not an accountant. This is not financial or legal advice. I recommend that you speak to both of these qualified professionals as it pertains to your business, but I’m just giving you an idea of what I did.
In the foundation, you want to make sure that you are operating legally in the eyes of your city, county, state, etc., I’m in the U.S., that you’re legally authorized to be in business. Now, where I am, this requires having a business license and filling out a form and submitting it to the county and paying a yearly fee. Now, to get this license, it means that your business has to have an official name, and what I’ve seen a lot of coaches do is get stuck on this part.
Keep in mind that your business name does not have to be your program name, it does not have to be what’s on your website. This is just the legal official name of your business, and you can keep this very simple. When I first got started, I called it, you know, my last name plus what I did.
So it was just Malin Fitness, and I kept it very simple. So if you are stumped and you’re really overwhelmed with what to call it, use the formula your last name plus what you do. It’s clear and to the point, you are the coach, what you provide is help with health wellness or fitness, and just move on.
Now, a legal note, you may choose to create an LLC before you take on clients. I didn’t. I waited until I was further along in the process because an LLC is not a requirement to be in business.
Again, this is not legal advice. I operated as a sole proprietor at first. I got my tax ID from the IRS, and then farther down the line, I created an LLC for my business for financial and legal protection.
So it’s not a requirement to get started, but definitely talk to a lawyer if you want to make sure that you are protecting your home, your family, and your finances. Now, financially, you want to make sure that you’re keeping your business finances separate from your personal finances. So you’ll want to have a separate bank account and later on a separate credit card for your business expenditures.
You’ll need your EIN from the IRS if you’re in the US for this business account, and you can get that online. You’ll also want a way to track your business expenses as you go. And trust me, you will thank yourself a tax time for keeping it organized from day one.
You can use something basic like a Google sheet or an Excel spreadsheet. You’ll also need to set up a way to take payment that’s separate from your personal PayPal or Venmo account. If you have one, I use Stripe for my business and I’ve been very happy with it.
Now, before you take any payment or work with clients, you’ll want to make sure that you’re covered in a worst case scenario by having insurance. You’ll also need waivers for your clients to sign and or client agreement forms. These are going to look different based on what type of business you’re running.
So I always recommend checking with the organization that provided your certification to see if they have standard forms or templates to use and then having a lawyer review your client documents to make sure those documents are going to cover you legally.
Notice I didn’t say for foundation that you’re going to build a fancy website or spend hundreds of dollars or hours creating a logo or spending money that you haven’t made yet on business cards or any of the stuff that is really not going to directly impact you getting clients. I have seen way too many coaches get hung up on and spend days, weeks, months in the busy work of websites and business cards before they’ve even gotten a client.
Heck, I did the same thing. Foundation step is all about setting your business up as an official entity and setting it up in an organized way to manage your clients and your cash. So step two in focus method is your offer.
What you’re going to do here is outline who you help, how you help and how long you’ll be working together during your initial offer. This is not going to be permanent. This doesn’t have to be the program that you offer forever.
And I know a lot of the certification organizations will say, you know, offer a three month program and a six month program. But in the beginning, I would say take on a client for 30 days. Keep it short.
Keep it simple because a three month program or six month program when you’re first starting out is a big commitment. And that can be a hard sell for both you and your clients. What I did was offer a 30 day jump start.
And it was perfect for me to get my feet wet with coaching. It got a few bucks in my bank account. And I got a ton of clarity and confidence in myself as a coach.
So your goal at this point is to just get your first clients to work with you for the minimum amount of time needed for them to make some progress, see results and be excited enough about what’s happening that they want to tell other people about their experience working with you.
Once you have a handful of testimonials, you can change your offer. But for this particular method, offer a 30 day quick start or jump start for a specific outcome that you feel passionate about helping people with.
Maybe it’s quitting smoking, getting more active, eating healthier, having more energy, feeling less stressed, whatever it is. When you’re first starting out, narrowing down what you’re going to offer can be really hard. You’re a health coach, right? You can help anybody.
But what you’re going to find out if you haven’t already is that a specific offer and outcome is going to make it a lot easier for clients to see the value of what you do. Now, we’ll get too deep in the weeds here about niching down.
But just know that if you can put together something specific that a potential client can visualize themselves achieving and this particular change would be meaningful in their life, it’s going to be a lot easier to get clients to say yes to a 30 day sprint than a six month marathon.
Now, remember, this offer isn’t your forever offer. It’s just for right now. It’s just to get your foot in the door.
It’s just to get your feet wet. It’s going to change and it should. But the purpose of this offer statement that we’re creating is to help you to get your first three to five clients so that you can get experience, gain confidence, get clarity, have impact and make some money.
Otherwise, this is just a really expensive hobby, isn’t it? So here’s a sample focus offer. Here’s the offer that I posted on my Facebook page. I’m looking for five busy moms who are looking to have more energy in the next 30 days so they can keep up with their kids and not collapse on the couch at bedtime.
Who’s in? Now, I created this offer by stating a specific number of client slots that I wanted to fill, a specific demographic and something that I know that they’d really love to achieve and a set number of days in which I could help them get those results. Now, step number three is collect knows.
One of the best things you can do early in your business is desensitize yourself to hearing the word no.
We’re so programmed to fear rejection. But your job, when you pitch your services, isn’t always to sign a client to get them to make a decision. And sometimes that decision is not to work with you, and that’s OK.
And I promise that most of the time, it is not personal. You’re looking for potential clients who fit the bill. They’re a specific demographic.
They’re in a certain age range. They want the outcome that you’re offering and they’re ready to show up, invest time, money and energy to make some lifestyle changes in the next 30 days. Now, that’s kind of a tall order and not everyone that you ask is going to check all of those boxes, and that is OK.
So I want you to think of no as not now or I heard your description and that’s not me. If you do that, it’s easier to see that their no has little to do with you. It could also be that you haven’t done enough to gain their trust yet, right? Because sales don’t happen without trust.
Either they don’t know you as a coach or as a person or as somebody who gets results and they’re not willing to extend the trust just yet, that’s OK. Now, I’ve worked with hundreds of coaches who are starting their business and the thing that I see impacting their lack of clients is being too passive in making their offer. They fail to make themselves their business or their offer visible to potential clients.
They either assume that people know what they do and will reach out if they want help. That’s not true. Or they think an occasional post on Facebook is seen by and remembered by their entire friends list and they don’t want to be annoying.
So they fail to share this info often on social media, which is also definitely not true. Or they automatically assume that the people they know are not interested. They can’t afford it or they wouldn’t want to work with them.
What we do in the focus method is actively collect rejection. We reach out to anybody that fits the criteria of the offer and we let them say no to us. We don’t count anyone out.
We stay out of their pockets and we don’t decide for them if they are ready for change. Here’s what it looks like. Make a list of 50 contacts in your personal network.
These could be your friends, neighbors, Facebook contacts, co-workers, relatives. And we reach out with the offer. If they say no, great.
You’re one step closer to the five who are going to say yes. And don’t forget to ask them if they’d be willing to pass on the information to anybody that they know who might be a great fit. If they say yes, great.
You have a new client. Now, you can also share this in your Facebook group if you have one. Step four, under promise and over deliver.
Now, I know I did the exact opposite of this when I was first starting out, and it’s a huge mistake. You book a client and you promise them the moon and stars. Why? Yes, I can offer 24 seven support plus video content and e-books and everything you want.
And this is great till you find out that logistically and energetically it does not align with how you want to run your business or you find you simply cannot deliver. And then it’s really disheartening and disappointing for you and the client. A much better option is to offer the basics.
That’s going to get them results, the coaching sessions, email support, maybe a worksheet. And then you can surprise and delight them with extras throughout the program. Let me tell you, this makes for a much better client experience and they’re much more likely to stay engaged with your coaching, get results and provide you with a solid goal testimonial, which is the purpose of the focus method.
Now, the final step, step five is social proof. Social proof is such an amazing and important sales tool. The more testimonials that you collect and share, the easier it is to get more clients.
I have personally seen this in my own business. And at some point, the results of what you do speak for themselves. Your business is based on sales and sales are based on trust.
If somebody trusts you, they’re more likely to hire you. If they don’t trust you, they’re not buying. It’s as simple as that.
But how do you gain trust? It needs to be built. Trust has created one interaction at a time. It’s a lot easier and faster to borrow trust than it is to build it from scratch.
Now, when you’re first starting out, you may have heard me talk about your circle of trust and that circle of trust are people who know you, like you and trust you enough to hire you as a coach.
It’s pretty much your direct personal network plus your Facebook friends list, not your business page where you get likes and follows. This is why we start with this list when we’re collecting those with our focus offer.
When happy clients provide testimonials that you can then share with other potential clients, you’re demonstrating that you’ve been trusted by others and then deliver results. There’s a lot of psychology behind testimonials and you’ve probably experienced it yourself. If you’ve ever shopped online, if you’ve ever bought anything on Amazon, you know you go straight to the reviews of products before you buy anything.
And you can be convinced to buy or not buy based on what a group of total strangers has said. So now imagine how much more powerful a testimonial is when it’s provided by somebody that your potential client can relate to, and it demonstrates how you were pivotal in the process. Testimonials allow you to leverage the trust that you’ve already built to create trust in potential clients.
So just to recap, the focus method is foundation. You’re going to cross your T’s, dot your I’s, officially, legally, and financially to set yourself up for success and protect yourself. O is your offer.
You’re going to create a short term offer with a specific outcome that’s limited with a set number of client spaces. You’re going to use urgency, specificity and scarcity to encourage people to take action. See, you’re going to collect no’s.
You can’t wait for clients to knock your door down and beg you to work with them, so you’re going to put your offer in front of at least 50 people in your direct personal network.
This network is the group of people who trust you the most right now, and you’re going to let them decide if this offer is perfect for them. You’re going to under promise and over deliver.
You’re going to surprise your clients with bonus features and delight them with extras they weren’t expecting and not the other way around. And S is social proof. You’re going to document the kind words and amazing results of your 30 day jumpstart or boot camp or whatever you call it.
And you’re going to use those testimonials going forward to grow your business. Let the words of happy clients be the proof that others need to sign up for your services. I want to tell you that I use this method to generate the first thousand dollars in my business after trying and failing to get up and running for months.
I’ve been using this with my clients and they are always shocked by how easy it is to get clients when they just follow the process and ask. I hope that this was really helpful for you as you are getting up and running in your business because I’ve been there and I found this really helpful to get my first clients and jumpstart making money in my business.
So I hope that this is helpful for you when you’re first starting out.
June 10, 20265 min
8 Steps to Create and Execute a Strategic 12-Week Marketing Plan
Table of ContentsListen to the Episode8 Steps to Create and Execute a Strategic Marketing PlanEpisode Transcript: Create and Execute a Strategic 12-Week Marketing Plan
Listen to the Episode
8 Steps to Create and Execute a Strategic Marketing Plan
Step 1: Set your 12-week goal – is it to build visibility and build brand awareness? Generate more sales? Collect more leads? Your marketing activities, the content you share, and the call-to-action you promote depends on what you’re looking to achieve in the next 12 weeks. Identify the lead and lag indicators for this goal, such as an increase in sales, discovery calls booked, or email subscribers.
Step 2: Get clear on your ideal clients (see Episode 10 to find out the 10 things you absolutely need to know about your Ideal Client Avatar) and the messages that you need to share to build trust.
Step 3: Identify the top 3 or 4 topics that are pillars of your offer (for most of my clients these pillars are one of the following: nutrition, hydration, stress management, time management, physical activity, gut health, and self care.)
Step 4: For each one of these big topics, identify 3 subtopics that align with the pain points your ideal client is struggling with. You’ll focus on one subtopic per month (4 weeks)
Step 5: For each one of the subtopics, create 4 engaging pieces of content. Each piece of content should pertain to a relevant problem/solution that interests your ideal client in the format they want to consume it (blog post, vlog, podcast episode, etc). Plan to publish these pieces weekly.
BTW – The type of content you create is up to you! Will you create a step-by-step tutorial? Tell a story to build connection? Share a case study to show how you help people just like them? Will you provide an interactive tool such as a calculator or a quiz that will engage your readers?
Step 6: Send a weekly email to subscribers teasing the content you’ve published for the week and provide them with a link back to your site to get the whole story.
Step 7: From each piece of content, create 5 pieces of micro-content that connect to some aspect of the main piece that you’ll share throughout the week that the piece is published. Tease the main piece of content with the micro-content and share it on social media to pique the curiosity of your followers, directing them back to where the main content is published (ideally on your website!)
Step 8: Find out which platform your ideal client hangs out on most and be sure to engage with other users on that platform for 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after publishing your content daily.
Episode Transcript: Create and Execute a Strategic 12-Week Marketing Plan
Welcome, everyone. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the eight steps to create and execute a strategic 90-day marketing content plan.
So step number one, set your 12-week goal.
Now, if you’ve listened to this podcast for more than five minutes, you know that I am a huge fan of the 12-week year planning system, and I like to do my strategic marketing plan in a 12-week block as well. Think about your goal, and we’re going to only set one or two goals per 12 weeks.
Is your goal to build visibility? Is it to build brand awareness? Is it to generate more sales, collect more leads? Your marketing activities and the content you share and the calls to action that you promote depend on what you’re looking to achieve in the next 12 weeks. So identify the lead and lag indicators for this goal as you’re working through the 12 weeks, such as an increase in sales or email subscribers so that you know that you are on the right path to reaching your goal. Step number two is to get clear on your ideal client.
I’m going to drop a link for the episode where we talked about really getting to know your ideal client so that you know what messaging you need to share in your content and in your marketing to build trust with this ideal client. Now, step number three is to identify the top three or four topics that are the pillars of your offer. Now, for most of my clients, these pillars are one of the following.
It’s nutrition, hydration, stress management, time management, physical activity, gut health, and self-care. Step number four is for each one of these pillar topics, identify three sub-topics that are going to align with the pain points that your ideal client is struggling with. You’re going to focus on one sub-topic per month or four weeks of the 12 weeks.
Now, we’re going to take in step five for each one of these sub-topics, create four engaging pieces of content. Now, each piece of content should pertain to a relevant problem and solution that interests your ideal client in the format that they want to consume it. So it’s a blog post if they like reading or it’s a vlog.
If they’re on YouTube, it’s a podcast episode if they like audio and you’re going to plan to publish one of these pieces every week for the 12 weeks. By the way, the type of content that you create is totally up to you. It could be a step by step tutorial.
It could be telling stories, sharing case studies to show how you help people just like them. And it could also be an interactive tool such as like a calculator or a quiz that’s going to engage your readers.
Step number six, you’re going to send a weekly email to your subscribers teasing the content that you’re going to be publishing for the week and you’re going to provide them with a link back to your website to get the entire piece of content.
And step number seven, for each piece of content, create five pieces of micro content to share on social media. Now, each micro content piece is going to connect to some aspect of the main piece of content that’s on your website that you’re going to be sharing throughout the week that that piece is published. Tease that main piece in the micro content and put it on your social media platforms in the format that makes the most sense.
What you’re trying to do here is to pique the curiosity of your followers and directing them back to your website where the main piece of content is published. And step number eight is find out where your ideal client is hanging out most and be sure to do what I call the sandwich engagement strategy. I don’t know if I made that up.
Maybe I did. But the idea is that you use the platform and you’re social on it.
You’re liking, engaging, commenting on other people’s posts and comments for 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after you publish your daily content.
And what this does is it shows the platform that you’re using it to be social. You’re not just posting and running and using it for your business and not really showing up to use the platform, but you are actually engaging. I hope these steps were really helpful for you in overcoming the overwhelm and creating a strategic marketing plan for your business.
September 29, 202512 min
20: Success Story – How This Health Coach Got 4 New Clients Using the F.O.C.U.S. Method
Starting your health coaching business can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re struggling to get new coaching clients. In this week’s podcast episode, I’m talking with board-certified health and wellness coach Annette Smotherman, who recently gave her business a reset using my 5-Step FOCUS method.
[RELATED: Using my signature 5 Step F.O.C.U.S. Method to Get Your First Clients]
Annette shares openly about what wasn’t working in her client search, how she overcame the fear of hearing “no,” and the exact steps she followed to sign 4 new paying clients.
If you’ve ever felt stuck, spinning your wheels, or unsure where to start, Annette’s story will give you both inspiration and a practical roadmap you can follow.
Hit play to hear how the FOCUS method can help you build momentum, land your first clients, and collect testimonials that keep your business growing!
According to HubSpot, 90% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase decision, and 88% trust those reviews almost as much as personal recommendations.
What’s ahead…Episode Summary: This Health Coach Got 4 New Coaching Clients Using the F.O.C.U.S. MethodFrequently Asked QuestionsEpisode Transcript
Episode Summary: This Health Coach Got 4 New Coaching Clients Using the F.O.C.U.S. Method
Annette opens up about the struggles she faced with traditional marketing tactics like running challenges, paying for ads, and trying to build a group program without an established audience. She explains why those strategies left her drained and what changed when she decided to simplify and follow a clear step-by-step system.
You’ll hear how:
Shifting from “I need clients” to “Who do I know that might need help? or know someone that might need my help?” made client outreach feel easier
Collecting “No’s” helped her break through the fear of rejection and build confidence
Offering a short 30-day jumpstart program gave her clarity, quick wins, and real testimonials
The FOCUS method helped her stop overthinking and start taking consistent action
She walked away with not only new clients, but also valuable testimonials to use in her marketing going forward
If you’re a health coach who feels stuck or overwhelmed, Annette’s story proves that you don’t need a big audience, expensive ads, or complicated funnels to start building a profitable business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the FOCUS method?The FOCUS method is my 5-step system for helping new coaches get their first paying clients. It walks you through setting up your foundation, creating a simple offer, collecting no’s, underpromising and overdelivering, and using social proof to grow.
Q: How many clients did Annette get using the FOCUS method?Annette signed 4 new clients by following the steps in the F.O.C.U.S. method, even after feeling stuck and burned out by other marketing strategies.
Q: Do I need a big audience to get clients with this method?No! One of the biggest advantages of the FOCUS method is that you can start with your existing personal network. Annette got her first clients without ads, funnels, or a huge email list.
Q: How is this method different from running a challenge or paid ads?Challenges and ads can work, but they’re often time-consuming, expensive, and overwhelming when you’re just starting out. The FOCUS method is simple, clear, and designed to help you take action quickly.
Q: Can I use the FOCUS method if I already have clients?Yes! Even if you’ve signed clients before, this method is a powerful reset any time you want to boost momentum, bring in new testimonials, or fill a few spots quickly.
Episode Transcript
Laurie: Welcome everyone! In this episode, I am sitting down with Annette Smotherman, who is a board-certified health and wellness coach who recently used the FOCUS method to jumpstart her business to kind of give it a reset and get things moving again. I hope this episode is really helpful for you and inspiring and if you’re interested in the FOCUS method you can check the show notes for the link and find out more. So let’s get back to our recap…
Welcome Annette. I would love to hear all about your experience with FOCUS method.
Annette: Where I was, you know, I felt like I sort of needed to just start over because not that I hadn’t made any progress but I feel like I hadn’t made enough progress and just sort of spinning my wheels and tired of what I was doing and so this gave me an opportunity just to say “okay, let’s let’s just try something different or at least parts of it, right?” Just taking a different look and as challenging as the like the collecting ‘NO’s’, I think everybody should go through that when they’re first starting.
Laurie: The way that you just phrased it was that you needed kind to to take a step back and almost do like a reset of how you were approaching getting clients. Can I ask you to kind of elaborate a little bit on what you had been trying, what you had done before? What have you already tried and what was your approach before?
Annette: My approach before, some of it was similar. I was going through, you know, doing well some of it was not but going through the you know, have a five-day challenge which is a lot of time, a lot of effort, and so you maybe money, doing ads, I felt like I was doing ads, getting some people who were not really interested… or they join the group and then you don’t hear from them or they never open an email and just going through that over and over. I just sort of got exhausted with it.
I guess if I would have been succeeding more then it would have been exciting and wonderful but I just got tired of that …and your program was more about starting with people you know and I have had experience with going to family and friends and that can get awkward but this is more about not “hey, you know, sister or friend or whatever, can you please do this with me and support me and stuff?”
It was “do you know anyone?” and just started using that particular logic and so it wasn’t completely different and maybe for me it was also just me mentally being in in a different place but I was ready to try something different and what you did for me was was just that.
It was saying “Annette, here you are, follow this method, don’t think about all the other stuff that you could do, you should do, you tried” it was ‘take this method, step-by-step” and it helps to for me to stop all the overthinking …” what if I did this?” and stuff . It was just a nice laid out, step-by-step plan that I just I followed and what you have is pointing us in that direction.
I like the structure because I am a structured person and that that really helped me.
Laurie: So the process was easy to follow?
Annette: Yes, for sure.
Laurie: Okay, as you were coming into focus, so you already had your foundation, you had, your social media stuff set up, you had your insurance, your legal, everything was there but you just kind of needed a reset, right?
So putting together your offer, what did that look like?
Annette: I had somewhat of a framework for the the four weeks and getting the group together was it was just the way I wanted to do it and for the price point I thought instead of doing it X number of times individually, it would just putting all the women together in one group.
I just I felt more secure doing that, so it was just me personally, I felt more comfortable going that route.
Laurie: When you have a group, you know, you kind of have this expectation of the of the participants that there’s going to be other participants and there’s going to be community and there’s going to be some kind of thing and if you don’t have a huge audience to draw from it’s hard to really pull that together for a focus offer.
It’s really just like a jumpstart for your business, collecting testimonials and then using what you’ve what you’ve learned about your target market, your ideal client and get and using that social proof to then, right, so price point one-on-one is always going to be higher than group.
So you can always offer a group with an upsell to one-on-one or the optional, one-on-one sessions if that’s what you want to do. The thing about running group is that, you know, you need to have audience, you need to have a list, you need to have people who are ready to to buy what you’re selling.
Let’s talk about collecting your no’s. On a scale of one to ten, how much did you not want to approach people and and make the direct ask to participate or ask them if they knew anybody?
Annette: Eleven. Realistically, I would say an eight. I think it’s just I’m an introvert, I feel like I’m asking people to, I feel like I’m asking people to do something that, I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just I don’t want to ask people.
I don’t want to hear the the silence or the no. I don’t know, it’s silly..
Laurie: It’s not silly, it’s very normal. Most people, unless you’ve, you’re a seasoned salesperson and you understand that yes only comes by hearing no, you know, I think a lot of people are afraid to really put themselves out there because you’re vulnerable, right? You’re offering a thing.
Annette: It’s very, yeah, it’s very uncomfortable.
Laurie: Did you, by the end, were you getting more comfortable because you knew you had to hit a certain number and you’re like, yes, let me just hear the no, let me just move on to the next, and it just becomes a thing. It just becomes a thing you check off.
Annette: Right, and I was starting to follow up and it’s like all I want at this point is is an answer and then after, you know, as time went on, if there’s silence, silence is a no. If I follow up and they don’t respond.
So do you think going forward you’re going to be as uncomfortable or do you think you need more practice there?
Annette: Well, I need more practice, but I won’t be as uncomfortable. It definitely helped me to release some of that discomfort. No, it was definitely, definitely a valuable experience for me, but I do need more practice.
Laurie: So all told, how many yeses did you end up with?
Annette: Four.
Laurie: So you had four clients participate in your focus method, and so the next part of focus is under-promise and over-deliver. So do you feel that that’s what you did? Can you tell me a little bit about what you promised and then what you actually delivered?
Annette: Yes, so I promised weekly habit challenges, delicious, easy meal ideas and recipes, regular check-ins for accountability, group support, and workout ideas.
Laurie: So when you met, when you had your check-ins with everybody at the end and you asked them about the content, right, you did your testimonial form where you kind of got their feedback on the content that you provided. What was some of the feedback that you got about the content?
Annette: They were all very pleased with it. They, I even got comments about how I over-delivered that they didn’t expect as much as I provided. They weren’t expecting as much as they got.
Laurie: Fantastic. So and then the last part is social proof, right? So collecting your testimonials from your participants. Were you able to get a testimonial from everybody who participated?
Annette: I received two out of the four. I need to send reminders on the other two.
Laurie: Okay, and the two that you have already received, how are they?
Annette: Very positive. They said they would recommend me to other people. To me, they were very good testimonials.
Laurie: Awesome. So these are definitely pieces of content that you can use in your marketing. We can put them on your website. We can put them in your social media. You can use them in your sales sequences, in your emails, when you go to promote your program.
These are really going to be valuable for you as sales tools in the future.
Annette: Yes, I’m excited that I did get those. Yes, and that was a really good part about the focus method, too, was that was one of the key deliverables, basically, was because when I’ve done programs in the past, I didn’t, I guess I didn’t go about it the right way to get some good testimonials.
So this really, and I know how important social proof was, so going through the focus method really helped with that piece, big time.
Laurie: On on a scale of one to ten, how much would you recommend doing the focus method if you are just starting out as a coach and you are, have no idea where to start?
Annette: Highly recommend it. I would say a ten for sure. Everybody should go through it.
Laurie: Oh, and that is so sweet. Thank you.
Annette: No, it’s true! It’s true! We’re already overwhelmed, right? So as simple, and like you said, with the templates and stuff, that would just make, because that’s where it is, like, what do I say? What, how do I start?
Laurie: The thing is, you might not get it perfect. You might not nail it on the first try, but you’re getting out there and you’re taking action and that momentum is going to move you forward. You’ve already shown that if you want to bring in money, you can do it.
Annette: Yeah, went to 50 people to get four, which, I’m glad I had four.
Laurie: That’s eight percent conversion rate. That’s excellent, and the more people you talk to, the more people you’re going to find!
The focus method, that jumpstart, is meant to be a very short-term thing, and if it turns into longer-term clients, great. If not, you now have testimonials that you can use.
Annette: A very valuable, useful experience there for sure, but I liked all of the information and just the guidance and the support you gave. Really loved all the information because basically everything was very detailed, very good.
What really helped me personally where I was at was some of that more detailed ‘here I am and what should I do and what should I say?’
Laurie: A lot of your questions were “how do I respond to this? What do I say? What do I put in this email?” Really the wording. That tells me that templates, like swipe copy for emails, templates for emails and social media posts, would be really valuable.
I really do appreciate sharing your experience with me because this is going to help lots of people not feel that frustration that I know I felt when I was starting and that you felt as well. So I really do appreciate that.
.
April 16, 202523 min
31: 10k in Under 60 Days: My Amazing Email List Building Strategy Without Ads
In this episode of the podcast, I telling the whole story of my email list building strategy, from idea to execution – that took my list of email subscribers from zero to 10,154 subscribers in just 57 days, without spending a single dollar on ads.
This strategy isn’t specific to health coaches, but I’ve used it for both online and in-person businesses so I can vouch that it’s a flexible list building option!
What’s inside this episode:The BIG ProblemThe BIG IdeaMy ResultsThe Tech Stack💡 Why It Worked (The 3-Part Framework)1. Purpose2. People3. PlanFinal ThoughtsListen to the EpisodeFAQEpisode Transcript
Have you ever wished your email list would just grow itself? Or wondered how to get more visibility in your community—without shelling out for ads or begging for attention?
The BIG Problem
No List, No Traffic, No Recognition
In early 2020, like so many others, I watched local businesses struggle. Facebook was flooded with desperate posts—“We haven’t had a sale in days… we may have to close.”
These weren’t strangers.
They were the people who owned the yoga studios, bakeries, and vintage shops that made our community feel like home.
I realized two things:
People wanted to help, but didn’t know how.
Businesses didn’t have a centralized place to share updates or get discovered.
I had an idea: what if I built a website to showcase and support them?
The problem? I had no list, no traffic, and no brand visibility or authority.
The BIG Idea
Run a Contest That Does the Heavy Lifting
I asked myself: how can I build an audience and attract local businesses at the same time? What’s fun, shareable, and community-driven?
I decided to run a “Best Of” contest, asking locals to nominate and vote for their favorite small businesses in categories like best coffee shop, best personal trainer, best burger, and more.
The plan:
Nominations Phase: Let people write in who they love.
Voting Phase: Create a final ballot with the top 10 nominees per category.
Celebrate the winners: Use the entire process to drive traffic and capture email addresses.
And guess what? It worked way better than expected.
My Results
10,154 Subscribers in 57 Days
Here’s how the numbers played out:
Day 1: 45 subscribers
Day 3: 500+ subscribers
End of Nominations (Week 3): 1,600 subscribers
Final Day (Week 8): 10,154 total subscribers
During the peak, I was seeing 10,000+ pageviews per day, all from free traffic on Facebook—no paid ads, no dancing on TikTok, and no viral “hacks”,
The Tech Stack
I used tools I already had:
WordPress + Divi Theme for the site and contest pages
ConvertKit & SendFox to add subscribers to my email list
A form builder – I recommend Smart Quiz Builder
Canva for branding and graphics
a free Facebook page for traffic—no paid ads, just tagging and engagement
💡 Why It Worked (The 3-Part Framework)
After running the contest and sharing this email list building strategy in a few Facebook groups, I heard from people who tried it and didn’t get the same results.
That got me thinking… what made my experience different?
It turns out, there were three key elements that make a huge difference:
1. Purpose
This wasn’t just a contest, it wasn’t just an email list building strategy, it was a mission. People weren’t voting just for fun. They were helping their community thrive.
I tapped into an existing movement, which was already emotionally powerful and easy to align with.
2. People
I actively engaged local businesses and tagged them when they were nominated. That gave them a reason to share the contest with their audiences. The virality came from people wanting to support their friends, family, and favorite businesses.
3. Plan
I had clear messaging, simple tools, and a way to capture and validate email subscribers. It wasn’t fancy, but it was organized and systematic.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re trying to build your first 1,000 email subscribers or looking for a new way to connect with your community, this email list building strategy works because it’s grounded in real people and real value.
The key? Make it about them. Support the movement your audience already believes in, and the rest will follow.
Listen to the full podcast episode to hear how I did it step-by-step!
Or check out the first lesson in my 10k in Under 60 Days course for free!
Listen to the Episode
FAQ
Here are some questions I get about my contest list building experience
Q: Were all of those 10,000+ emails real? What about fake or junk entries?A: Yes, they were real, valid, and filtered. While the contest used single opt-in for a smoother user experience, I still had a confirmation email go out to each participant. If the email bounced or was clearly invalid, I was notified, and any form entries associated with those addresses were automatically discarded. I actually collected over 11,600 emails, but I filtered out about 1,500 junk or fake entries before finalizing the list. So the 10,154 subscribers I counted were fully verified and ready for follow-up.
Q: What kind of contest is this exactly?A: It’s a two-phase “Best Of” contest where your community nominates and votes for their favorite businesses, brands, or products in specific categories. It’s time-limited, interactive, and designed to generate massive list growth, engagement, and visibility in a short period of time.
Q: Why did you choose a contest instead of a lead magnet or quiz?A: I needed something fast, community-driven, and buzzworthy. A typical lead magnet or quiz didn’t have the viral, gamified appeal I needed to get people talking and sharing. The contest created excitement, tapped into the shop-local movement, and let people participate in something bigger than my business.
Q: How long did the contest last?A: The full campaign was 6 weeks—3 weeks for nominations, 1 week to organize data and prep the ballot, then 3 weeks for voting. You can adjust this timeline to fit your own goals and energy.
Q: What kind of results can I expect?A: I started with no audience, no list, and no traffic—and ended with 10,154 verified email subscribers in 57 days. While results vary, the key is how well you plan your messaging, categories, prize (or recognition), and community involvement. Some contests bring in more, some will bring in less.
Q: What tools did you use to run the contest?A: A WordPress site using the Divi theme, a form builder, and an email marketing platform. I started with MailerLite and then switched to SendFox when I outgrew the free tier. I also used Canva for graphics and Facebook for all organic promotion—no ads.
Q: Did you run paid ads?A: Nope! I didn’t spend a single dollar on advertising. The entire contest was promoted through free Facebook posts and organic sharing by the businesses and people who were nominated.
Q: What if I don’t have a list, traffic, or any business nominations yet?A: Neither did I! That’s the power of this strategy. The community helped generate the content by nominating their favorites, and their votes created social sharing momentum. The contest becomes the engine that drives traffic, content, and email signups—all at once.
Q: How did you get people to participate and share?A: I used a “You’ve Been Nominated!” tag-and-share strategy. After people submitted nominations, I created simple Facebook graphics and tagged the businesses. Those businesses were excited to be recognized and asked their audiences to vote and support them. It created viral loops without extra work on my part.
Q: How many categories should I include?A: I had 144 total across several subcategories (food & drink, pets, home, services, etc.)—but you don’t need that many. You can start small with just a few meaningful categories in your niche or community. It’s better to go deep with fewer categories than overwhelm your audience with too many.
Q: What’s the most important key to success?A: Having a strong mission behind your contest. My contest tapped into the “support local businesses during COVID” movement. People shared and participated because they believed in the cause. Your contest should connect to something meaningful to your audience—not just free exposure.
Q: Can this work for digital businesses too, or just local?A: It can work for both! After I ran this for local small businesses, I ran it for one of my other sites that’s 100% online. It can easily be adapted for a coach, course creators, and community builders who want to highlight the best products, services, or voices in their niche.
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Episode Transcript
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
I’m Mari Mallon and this is the Profitable Health Coach podcast, the show where we’re all about creating a sustainable, enjoyable and profitable online coaching business that gives you the freedom and flexibility that you want. We’ll hear about strategies, systems and solutions from experts and fellow coaches who’ve created the business of their dreams, providing amazing transformations and connecting with clients across the globe. You’ll learn how to get started without the technical overwhelm.
Join me on this journey to become a profitable health coach. Welcome everyone, I am Mari Mallon and today I’m going to be sharing my story of how I grew my email list from 0 to 10,154 subscribers in just 57 days using a list building contest. And the best part is that I didn’t spend a single penny on ads.
So during this session, what I’m going to share with you is exactly what I did. We’re going to talk about why it worked and then we’re going to talk about how you can adapt this strategy to build your own email list. And quick disclaimer, I cannot promise you that you are going to have the same results with this strategy, but I’m going to share what I did and the things that really helped make the most difference and then some insights that help you to tweak the strategy to work for you.
Okay, let’s dig in. So just to introduce myself, I am Mari Mallon, I’m a WordPress developer and a web designer. What I do is I help small businesses create profitable and sustainable online systems.
First I’m going to go behind the scenes of my first contest, how I went from zero to subscribers to over 10,000 and the factors that made the most impact on my results. Then I’m going to walk through the tech and all the behind the scenes set up of like all the different parts to make it work. I’m going to show you the tools that I used and then I’m going to get really detailed and show you how I set everything up step by step in each individual platform.
Okay, so you may have heard me talk about how I grew my list running a best of contest and if you’re not sure what this means, let’s cover that. My best of contest strategy is a two phase real time engagement event. It’s not evergreen and the way that it works is that a community nominates and then votes for all their favorite products, brands or businesses in that particular nation and the winners in each category can then have bragging rights that they’re the best of whatever their category is to use as social proof in all of their marketing materials.
Why did I even run a best of contest to begin with? You don’t see a lot of this promoted as a list building strategy and as an online business, it wasn’t like my first go to idea to grow a list but let me walk you through what happened. So picture late spring 2020, we all know what was happening then COVID came and basically we were at a standstill.
What happened was my local community, much like others across the country, the world was hit pretty hard, especially that small business community.
They really relied on that foot traffic and regular in-person revenue to stay in business and many of them were on the brink of closure because they could not afford to go months without that stay stream of customers and clients from doing in-person business.
So what I started to notice was these Facebook posts from these businesses saying hey we’re about to close, we haven’t had a sale in two days, we’re going to shut down, we can’t keep going like this. They were basically begging for people to come in and support them.
Seeing these posts repeatedly, I realized two things. That one, there was not a centralized way for the community to support these local businesses that were in need and what would really be helpful is if we had a way to connect the community directly with these businesses. So that’s when I had an idea.
Being a web designer, my first thought was of course, set up a website. So I was thinking well what if there was like an online directory of all these local businesses that people could look up and find out who they could support or who needed support in the community and kind of go and support them and spend money and help to keep them in business. So I thought that would be really good if we had this online listing of all the local small businesses that needed help.
The only problem was I needed a list of the businesses. But the businesses probably weren’t going to join the site unless there was already traffic coming to the site. And also I’d never created an online directory website.
So this would be a whole new type of project for me. So kind of a big learning curve. Also, I had no audience for this.
I didn’t have a social media following. I didn’t have any helpful content to put on the site. I didn’t have a list of the businesses.
I didn’t have any brand recognition as like a local business supporter. I had no website traffic because I didn’t have anything to point them to. And I didn’t have an email list.
So I kind of had this catch 22 of why would people visit a website without the content and why would people put content on a website with no traffic. So I kind of needed to get the ball rolling in one on one side or the other. And so that’s when I was thinking in order to kind of get the ball rolling and get things moving, I needed a strategy that was first of all going to be fun and interactive.
I wanted to get people excited to participate. I wanted it to be gamified because I wanted it to be fun and kind of bring people in and create a buzz and have some kind of reward that would get people involved in the process. I wanted to leverage community generated content because like I mentioned, I didn’t have a list of businesses to put on the site.
So I kind of needed the community and the businesses to tell me like, who’s out there? Who do we need to support? Who do you like to support? You tell me. And I also needed a strategy that would bring in the website traffic. Like I needed a reason for people to keep coming to the website.
I also was thinking it would be great if I could use this to build some brand awareness, right? Because I did not have any kind of clout as a local business supporter. I didn’t have any visibility. Nobody knew who I was.
So something to build some brand awareness, something that could kind of give me a little bit of a social media following and something where I could build an email list to be able to communicate with the community when I had information and updates on what was going on and who they could support and really have that direct line of communication. So my first thought was a quiz. These quizzes are fun.
They’re a little bit extra. I needed to go beyond quiz. I just still didn’t have that information about the community and the businesses that needed support.
And at first I was thinking, well, what if I combined a quiz with a poll? I could ask the community to share who’s your favorite pizza place? What’s your favorite burger place? Where’s your favorite place to buy home furnishings? And while it gave me that community generated content, it lacked that gamification and brand awareness that I was looking to build. So I stumbled upon the contest strategy and I’d never run a contest before. I didn’t know anybody who was teaching it.
I didn’t have any resources to walk me through the process. So I looked online and I kind of cobbled together my own strategy based on the way that I assumed these other contests were being run. So if you’ve been in your community and you’ve seen like maybe newspapers or realtors will run these contests that are like the best of Boston or best of your town or whatever, people will nominate and vote for their favorite businesses that provide different products and services.
So I put together my contest plan and the way that I figured I would do it is I would run it in two phases. I would spend three weeks on each phase. So I would have the nomination phase where I would ask the community right in who would you nominate for best pizza place, best flooring, best personal trainer.
Tell me who should be on the ballot for this. Then I would take all of those entries, put them on a ballot and then give people three weeks to promote it, share it and submit their ballots to vote for their favorite. Now, if you’ve ever seen these contests, they can be pretty extensive.
And I went a little bit extra with this. And I think my contest was 144 categories total. And I’ll show you what they were in a bit but and I broke them down into subcategories.
So I had food and drink, pets, home and garden, professional services, right? I tried to cover all of my bases with all of these different categories. And the other thing was it had to be run on a very lean budget because this was not something anybody was paying me for. I wasn’t monetizing this at the time.
I really wasn’t doing it for money. It was kind of a labor of love. I really just wanted to help support my community.
And I’m not going to lie, my expectations for this were pretty low. I was thinking, if I could create a list of a thousand subscribers, right, that would kind of be the beginnings of like a community list that I could reach out to. If I got 500 businesses for my community to list on the directory, then that would be a good start.
And if I could get about a thousand page views per week, I would be pretty happy. So what I ended up using, I mentioned that I wanted to keep my budget lean and use tools that were either free or ones that I had already paid for and I already had. What I ended up using to run my contest was a WordPress website with Divi theme for all the contest pages and a directory plugin, an email marketing platform.
I talk a little bit more about which ones I use specifically in a bit. I was very familiar already with MailerLite and ConvertKit and I knew that they both had that free tier up to a thousand subscribers or whatever. So I was thinking that was a perfect fit because I didn’t think things would go beyond that.
So I figured those would be a good match. I used Canva to create my logos and all my other graphics and I needed a form builder that not only allowed for free text entry, but also single choice question types. And I also wanted one that would integrate directly with my email marketing platform.
And then I just used Facebook for that free social media marketing. I don’t even know how to run ads, so I didn’t run ads. I just used a regular Facebook profile page, which at this point, I think had about 800 followers.
I created the page when I had the idea of creating the website, but I never did much with it. I might’ve like here and there I would share posts from local businesses, but it was never an all out like campaign to grow that list. And I amassed about 800 followers over those three years.
So that kind of gave me a little bit of an audience to kind of get the ball rolling. Let me walk you through the details of the contest plan. I split it up into two phases and that first phase is nominations.
Now nominations ran from March 6th to March 30th. And during that time, participants could write in whatever business they wanted for any of these categories. So they were all optional.
They could do as few or as many nominations as they wanted. They could only submit one nomination form per valid email address, and then would automatically send a confirmation email to them with their nomination information. This also helped me to validate emails.
So if anything bounced, I would know that that was not a valid email. Nominations closed on March 30th, and then I took a week to review all those nomination forms, collate and clean up the data, count up the nominations, and then identify the top 10 nominees in each category to put on the final ballot. Then on April 8th, I released the final ballot to the community.
So each category had the top 10 businesses that received the most valid nominations. And participants could vote for one nominee per category, just like with the nominations, they could only submit one ballot per valid email address. My expectations were pretty low, right? I was thinking a thousand subscribers, a thousand weekly page views average, and then maybe 500 businesses would be nominated and added to the website.
Here’s what happened. So on the first day, March 6th, when I announced that contest on Facebook, I immediately got 145 new subscribers and the website got 500 page views. By the second day, I had 350 subscribers and 1,500 page views.
By the third day, I had about 500 subscribers and 3,400 page views. By the end of the nominations phase, I had 1,600 subscribers. And then by the end of the contest, I had over 10,000 subscribers and was getting about 10,000 page views on the website every day.
So what I’m going to do now is show you in my interactive graph here, how the list grew over the course of the contest. Let’s start at the beginning. The contest officially started on March 6th.
You see a couple of subscribers sneaking in before then, and that was really me testing and me doing some soft launch, having some other people go in and submit nominations just to make sure all the forms were working and the emails were getting captured and everything was working the way it was supposed to. But to formally launch the contest, I went on my Facebook page and I did a little graphic and I said, hey, we’re doing this contest. Vote for your favorites.
Tell us who you love for the following categories. And I kind of listed the categories. And on the 6th, by the end of the 6th, I had 145 new subscribers come in on that first day.
And what I did to kind of keep things moving was I went in and I looked at the nominations that were submitted and I identified a handful of the businesses and I went on Facebook and I created a little graphic with a little video and said, you’ve been nominated. And I tagged the businesses and I posted it. And from there, a handful of them shared that post and asked their audiences to go in and support them.
So by the next day, you can see the list grew to 350. And I just kept doing the same thing. And it wasn’t too labor intensive.
I didn’t do a lot of, I didn’t tag a lot of the nominees. I really just grabbed a handful that I knew were on Facebook, tagged them, and then they would take it from there. So you can see the growth for the nominations phase is pretty linear.
It’s pretty steady every single day, up until the 31st, right? And that’s when, right, right up until the end. So you can see this is when the nominations ended. So then I took a week to go through all the nomination forms, clean up the data, and identify who the top 10 nominees in each category were, create the ballot, test it, do all of that stuff, and then announce it on April 8th.
Now, and I mentioned earlier that I had specifically chosen an email marketing platform that had a free tier because my expectation was so low that I didn’t think I would get more than a thousand subscribers for the whole contest, let alone not even make it through the first phase.
So about halfway through here, I ended up having to move to a different platform because I wasn’t willing to invest or upgrade to the paid version because I really didn’t know where this contest was going, if this was going to turn into something I could monetize, if this would be profitable at all. So for me, this was still a funsy side project and I didn’t want to sink a lot of money into it.
So outgrowing this free tier for the email marketing platform, I then went on a hunt for another email platform that would let me host a bigger list for free. And I ended up moving over to SendFox about halfway through. So at this point, I move over to SendFox and SendFox is through AppSumo.
I think they have a lifetime deal. It’s a very super basic platform. It worked for my purposes.
I don’t use it anymore, but it was good in a pinch. So here we are nominations and voting is scheduled to begin on April 8th. I’ve announced that’s when the ballot will be available and I’m getting messages.
People are sending me DMs or posting on the page. Where’s the ballot? When’s it going to come out? They’re all excited about it. And this is really funny to me because I mean, I just got I was just so tickled by this because three weeks ago, nobody had heard of my page.
Nobody had ever heard of this contest. It did not exist. And then people were just really excited for it.
So I got a big kick out of that. So you can see on April 8th, I put the ballot on the Facebook page and I immediately jumped from 1600 subscribers to 2441. So 800 subscribers the first day of ballot voting, right? And that was just wild to me.
The next day, we jumped up to 4270 and then 5889. And this was blowing my mind because like I have other businesses where I grow my email and I’ve never ever, ever done anything that was this simple and this effective. And it was just mind boggling.
So the growth at this point stops being linear, right? Once the ballot comes out, it’s now growing by about 1000 subscribers a day for like the first week, the first few days, and then it kind of slows down to a few hundred every day. And it’s steady, right? We’re still, it’s still growing, it’s still growing. And it was really steady right up until the end.
So all told, I got 12,000 people who submitted nominations and ballots. But after doing some cleaning and scrubbing the list, getting rid of duplicates, getting rid of anything that was invalid, I ended up with 10,154 total. So just to recap, before this contest, I had no list.
I was absolutely starting from scratch. After cleaning up the data, I had 10,154 new subscribers. As the contest progressed, I got really excited and I started sharing my results in these different Facebook groups.
I wanted to share this with other people because it seemed really simple, create some nomination forms, create a ballot, tag the nominees on Facebook, and set up some email automations. This was nothing complicated. Just basic WordPress and email marketing.
It was essentially two opt-in pages and a bunch of emails cobbled together. But then something interesting happened. People started to come back to me and say, hey, I tried your contest strategy and it didn’t work.
I did everything that you said, but it just, I didn’t get any subscribers. And this was really weird to me because it seemed like a very straightforward process to me. Create a form for nominations, take in the data that the people submit, turn it into a ballot, let people vote, and then announce who got the most votes.
I really just did not get it. Why was this so easy for me, but not for others? What did I do differently? What had I failed to explain to them about my process? So I took a closer look. I realized that there were three elements to my contest that made it successful.
I put this together in a framework that I’ll detail more in the next section. But here’s the high level overview. First, it needs to have a purpose.
And this goes beyond just making money or building a list. Your contest needs to have a mission or an objective that’s bigger than just your business. It needs to create a movement or align with an existing one that clearly benefits your community.
And your messaging needs to communicate this with all of your posts and your emails. They should help your audience make the connection between their participation in the contest and how they’re going to benefit from it. Now, my contest tapped into the shop local movement, which was already well established.
And this gave me three advantages. One, people already understood why shopping local was important. So two, I didn’t have to spend the time educating them about the benefits.
And three, the messaging was clear from day one because we were already aligned in our mission. The second element is people. You can have a great mission and tap into a very popular movement.
But without your participants, your nominees, your voters, and your promoters, you will not have a contest. And third, there’s the element of your plan. And this covers all the logistics and I call it the when, what, and how.
So first you have timing. When are you going to run your contest and how long will it last? Think about your categories, how to group your nominees, and whether to focus on brands, products, or services, and how many categories you’re going to have. And the last part of your plan is your tech stack.
While this strategy doesn’t require really expensive or special software, it helps to use tools that integrate and that you can automate to streamline the entire process. In the next section, I’m going to get deeper into this framework and really show you exactly how to use it to create your own list building contest. Thanks for listening.
And if you liked this episode, go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when the next episode is live. Check out our show notes for this episode where you can find any of the links and resources that were mentioned during the show.
Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
December 11, 202423 min
30: How to Stop the Scroll: 7 Food Photography Tips for Instagram
In this episode:Meet MorganMorgan’s Tips for Taking Insta-worthy Food PicsFood Photography Tips – Episode Transcript
In this episode, we sit down with Morgan Beasley, a Women’s Health Coach who’s mastered the art of using beautiful food photography and engaging captions to attract new clients and boost her online visibility.
Morgan walks us through her journey of developing a unique style, sharing her best food photography strategies to help capture the perfect shot.
From the importance of natural lighting and ideal angles to selecting the best props and backdrops, Morgan offers practical advice for both beginner and seasoned food photographers.
She’s big on consistency, practice, and personalizing your own process! Whether you’re taking flatlay shots or side views, Morgan’s food photography tips can uplevel your skills and make your dishes shine online!
Meet Morgan
Morgan Beasley is a women’s Integrative Health Coach who’s mission is to help you make peace with food, so you can have your cake and eat it too!
Why she became a women’s health coach:
“After working as a Mental Health Specialist for 2 years, I decided to dive deep into my love for nutrition and mental health by helping other women reach their health goals both on and off the plate.
Why she focused on Instagram:
I knew that in order to grow my business through social media and reach my ideal clients, I needed to upload good-quality content for them to see. For me, this meant choosing a few social media platforms to use to my advantage, which were Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Food photography and lifestyle pictures can show so much insight into your life and business, especially a health business, so why not get creative and share your passion for health and nutrition with others?”
https://www.facebook.com/morganhealthcoachhttps://www.instagram.com/keepitpurely** Morgan is no longer online and her Instagram is now private
Morgan’s Tips for Taking Insta-worthy Food Pics:
Tip #1 – Location, location, location
Tip #2 – The Best Time to Take Your Pictures
Tip #3 – Use What You Have
Tip #4 – Invest in Some New, Fun Items
Tip #5 – Don’t Overdo It
Tip #6 – Add Interest to Your Picture
Tip #7 – Personalize Your Plate and Your Feed
Food Photography Tips – Episode Transcript:
(0:02 – 0:29)I’m Laurie Mallon and this is the Profitable Health Coach Podcast. The show where we’re all about creating a sustainable, enjoyable, and profitable online coaching business that gives you the freedom and flexibility that you want.
We’ll hear about strategies, systems, and solutions from experts and fellow coaches who’ve created the business of their dreams, providing amazing transformations, and connecting with clients across the globe.
(0:29 – 0:58) Laurie: I have Morgan Beasley with me.
She’s a Women’s Health Coach. I met Morgan, I think, just in a random Facebook group for health coaches and we connected. And I started following Morgan on Instagram and fell in love because her pictures are amazing and inspiring.And it made me want to learn how to do it. I still haven’t figured it out. Hopefully, I learned something today from Morgan.Morgan is going to share with us how she takes such amazing pictures.
Hello, Morgan. How are you?
Morgan: Good. How about you?
Laurie: I’m good, thanks. First, I want to share some of Morgan’s pictures in case you haven’t seen it. She posts recipes …you can see she’s got salad, she’s got a smoothie and smoothie bowl because Morgan loves to do smoothie bowls. And she does pancakes and waffles and she puts amazing captions that are really engaging. She is going to walk us through the steps that she takes to produce these amazing pictures.
(1:40 – 1:50)Morgan: Okay, so I want to let everybody know it’s just about making it your own and continually doing it. Your style is going to evolve. It takes a lot of practice.
Not every picture that you’re going to take is going to turn out like perfect and everything. It’s just going to take time and to not give up on it. Because once you capture the picture that you really want and you really love it, you’re going to feel so proud of yourself after you edit it. You’re just going to be jumping for joy when you get that picture.
The first thing is good lighting. Natural lighting is the best kind of lighting.I know when you get really professional, you can do artificial lighting, but I try to stick to just natural lighting. My biggest tip is to go around your house and find the room that you think has the best natural lighting. And that could be windows, you know, use the windows that you have.
The windows that are the biggest in my house are in my living room, in my kitchen. So that’s where I like to take pictures is my kitchen, like right beside my kitchen table and right on my kitchen table. That’s where I get the best lighting.
So use what you have and just try to find the best natural lighting. And I want to go over what angles you want to use. So there are like four different angles.
Two that I mainly use are an overhead shot, and I’m going to say flat lay a lot, but usually that just means like where you would have all your food laying out. So an overhead flat lay shot would be wherever you have your food laid out with all your ingredients, you know, make it look pretty, little, you know, utensils, whatever you want to use. And you could take it overhead and that’s one of my favorite ways. If you have something like a salad or oatmeal, usually if you’re doing like a stack of pancakes, maybe you want to show like the drizzle of it and the thickness of it. Then you can use a side shot.
(3:32 – 4:02)And whenever I do side shots, I always make sure that the sun is coming in from the side rather than from taking it in front of it. So those are the two that I don’t recommend is taking a picture with the sun shining in front of your food or behind your food. And what I mean by that is if you have, say, the stack of pancakes and you’re trying to get a picture of it, you don’t want to take it to where the sun’s shining like right here in your window and you’re in front of it and taking a picture of your pancakes.
(4:02 – 4:24)By doing that, you’re letting in too much lighting on your pancakes, and it’s going to be too bright and too overdone. It’s going to drown out all your colors. So again, whenever you’re doing pancakes or something like that, always try to do like a side angle or semi-side, you know, to where the natural lighting is hitting, but you’re not all the way turned.
(4:24 – 4:40)It’s going to produce too much light on that picture. Whenever you’re taking a picture of, again, the stack of pancakes, you don’t want to take it to where the sun is shining behind the food. By doing this, you’re going to create sharp and, like, harsh shadows all over the food to where it’s going to look dark.
(4:40 – 5:04)And what I like to compare this to is if you’re taking a portrait of somebody, if you’ve ever taken a picture of somebody and they’re behind, like, the sun is shining behind them and you’re in front of them trying to take the picture, you can’t make out their face and all the details that you want to capture because, again, the light is coming behind them, and it’s going to make their face look dark. So it’s the same with food. You want to take it from a side angle or overhead.
(5:05 – 5:19)So if you get anything from that tip, it’s try to take it overhead or from the side to where the sun is shining on the side of your food. That’s the best way to get, like, the natural lighting. So my second tip is what times take your photos.
(5:20 – 5:41)And I’ve found that the best times to take your photos are either in the morning or in the evening. And this is because the sun is coming up, you have all these natural pretty colors, or the sun is going down and you have all the orange, the pinks. The best times now to take pictures where I live are, like, 9 o’clock to 9.30, and that’s because the sun has just risen.
(5:42 – 5:54)It’s not too much. If you wait until later in the day, like whenever the sun’s the brightest, you’re going to get too much lighting to where it’s going to drown out your picture. So in the morning, it’s kind of, like, dewy outside.
(5:55 – 6:04)You still have the clouds kind of covering the sun. So, again, you have that natural color and it’s not too bright. My third tip is to use what you have in your house.
(6:05 – 6:19)This literally was my first backdrop, and I still use this sometimes. This little cloth thing that I have that I found at the thrift store, and I just found this in my house randomly, and I was like, I’ll just use that. You can also use linen napkins.
(6:20 – 6:28)You can lay it flat, and this will really bring out your food colors. There’s different things you can find around your house that you can use. You can use silverware that you have.
(6:29 – 6:39)Maybe you have some pretty gold silverware, pretty dishes, plates, bowls. You know, use that and add it to your picture. You can even add greenery to your pictures.
(6:39 – 6:59)Maybe if you have, like, some flowers or something that you want to use, you can always add that. You know, there’s just so many different options that you can try, and my best advice for getting inspiration is to go on Pinterest or somewhere like that where they upload recipes, and every day I try to look at different recipes to get inspiration. Look at different stuff.
(6:59 – 7:14)Look at different food photography, and you’ll just get inspired by all the different colors that they use, all the different ways they lay it out, because it kind of, like, motivates you to take better pictures, and you can try to replicate it. You can try to make it your own. You know, there’s so many different options.
(7:14 – 7:27)I’ve noticed in your feed you tend to go with a lot of neutral backgrounds, and it really helps the food pop. Anything that’s fruity. I think this is a salad with pomegranate seeds.
(7:27 – 7:57)Like, it just pops because of that neutral background, and I just love that. It doesn’t take away from the food that’s in the picture.
Morgan: And that’s what I like to do because I always remind myself, like, what am I trying to capture? You don’t want to overdo it, especially if it’s a very colorful plate, because if you do a colorful plate with tons of fruit and all that kind of stuff and you do a colorful background, well, that’s not going to blend really well, because, again, you want the focus to be the food and not necessarily the entire layout.
(7:57 – 8:18)You want it to be mainly the food. So that’s when sometimes I will even use a very simple layout because then it’s not going to take away from my picture, and whenever somebody sees my picture, they’re mainly drawn to the food and not, like, everything else happening around. So my fourth tip is to invest in some pretty bowls, pretty spoons.
(8:18 – 8:34)This doesn’t mean you have to go all out and spend all this money, because I did that, and I regret spending half the amount that I spent because your style is going to evolve. Like, what you like now may not be what you’re going to like later on, and you may never even use it. So slowly add more things.
(8:35 – 9:00)For example, I got this, and as you can see in this one, I don’t know if you can tell, but this is a very glossy bowl. It’s very shiny, and it reflects a lot of stuff. And the other day, this kind of reminded me why I don’t want these kind of bowls, because you can take a picture with it, and the sun will shine on the opposite side of the bowl, and you’ll have all these different lights shining and stuff, so you don’t want that.
(9:00 – 9:09)You can even see how bright this is, like, because the sun is just, like, gleaming off of it. This one gets matte. It’s not going to have all these different reflections coming off of it.
(9:09 – 9:17)Find what you like. Like, I like gold, so I use gold spoons. Wooden bowls, wooden spoons are my favorite too.
(9:18 – 9:34)Just things that are simple. You don’t want plates that have all the designs on them either because it would be too distracting and take too much from your food. So try to just keep it simple, plain, and if you can, semi-matte to matte finish when it comes to dishes.
(9:35 – 9:53)And number five is to not overdo it. I know sometimes we think, like, more is better, but when it comes to food, focus on what you want to capture. What’s my goal of taking this picture? What do I want people to see whenever they see this picture? My favorite tip is to add ingredients, cooking utensils, silverware.
(9:54 – 10:11)I always ask myself whenever I’m creating my flat layer, I always ask myself, what did I use to make this dish? So say you’re making oatmeal. Use that pot with oatmeal in it that you used to cook in, or you can use a prettier one that’s clean. Put that on the corner.
(10:12 – 10:26)You know you can add some silverware, some cooking utensils that you used. Maybe you added some blueberries to your dish or chia seeds or peanut butter or something like that. Add that to your dish so it looks homier.
(10:26 – 10:59)So add different things that you used to make it, and it makes it look kind of comfy and people can, like, see, like, the process that you went through to make that dish. If I made oatmeal with, like, strawberries or chia seeds or hemp seeds or something along those lines, I can lay that flat on my background, and then on that I’ll add my bowl along with I’ll probably lay, like, a linen napkin, lay my bowl on there, and then add, like, some chia seeds. I could sprinkle those somewhere just to make it look like this is what’s in the bowl, you know.
(11:00 – 11:12)You can add a spoon in the dish, or you can add a spoon, you know, sitting outside the dish. Different measuring spoons, different cooking utensils. Maybe you used a grater to make zucchini, you know.
(11:13 – 11:26)Put the grater in there, like, in the corner or to the side. Or maybe you used tahini. Put it in a wooden bowl, put my tahini in there, put a spoon in there so it looks like I just drizzled it on my pancakes or whatever you made.
(11:26 – 11:50)Something that’s kind of hard to capture are smoothie bowls and smoothies because they melt really quickly, and the toppings kind of go all, like, into it. So if you’re going to do something, like, cold that’s going to melt, work as quickly as possible and have in the back of your mind what you want to do and what you want to capture. It doesn’t have to be exact, but just an idea so then you know you can work fast and add different things to it.
(11:51 – 12:02)And then my last tip is to personalize it and make it your own. Not everything is going to look, you know, like so-and-so’s. It’s about making it look like how you want it to look.
(12:03 – 12:15)My pictures and my editing is not going to look the same as yours because, you know, we’re two different people. I’ll have a different style than somebody else. It’s all about finding what works for you, what editing style works for you.
(12:15 – 12:35)Laurie: Back to your point about it being a process and something that you learn, I just want to share this, and I hope this is okay, but these are some of Morgan’s pictures when she first started, and you can see a big difference between these pictures and – I don’t even remember those pictures. They’re from the very, very beginning. But you can see the difference now.
(12:35 – 12:45)She’s developed her style. She’s got her neutral backdrops. She’s got props and, you know, a signature look, you know, with the drizzles and the ingredients.
(12:46 – 13:07)And, I mean, you’ve really come a long way with developing your style with your pictures.
Morgan: Yeah, and like I was telling you the other day, it’s like just – I may look at my pictures now and be like, I’m so glad I learned, you know, from my mistakes because you’re constantly learning new stuff. You’re constantly learning new ways you want to add, new techniques, new angles.
(13:07 – 13:29)And it’s, again, about working with what you have and just, like, practice. That’s all you can do. You can only practice and not be too hard on yourself whenever it doesn’t look picture perfect because sometimes, like I was telling you, it pays off to look perfectly imperfect, kind of like what you said, like a messy type perfect to where the picture looks like you really want to eat it.
(13:29 – 13:55)Sometimes when it’s too perfect, it doesn’t come off as authentic and it looks too fake and it doesn’t look – you can’t really notice the textures in it, if that makes sense. So sometimes I try to make sure that it looks a little – like if I do a drizzle, I add it around the plate. Like sometimes I just flop the spoon places because I want it to look messy but not too messy, kind of like professional but yet yummy, like something somebody wants to eat.
(13:55 – 14:03)So I was going to talk about, like, the editing apps that I use. I have three different apps. One is the Lightroom CC, and for that one I use presets.
(14:04 – 14:22)You pay for presets. I already have some that are geared towards the pictures in my editing style, but the ones that are free that I wanted to show you all are VSCO, and Snapseed. Those are my two top two favorite food editing apps.
(14:22 – 14:42)I was going to show you all a video of how I actually edit. First one I go into after I take the picture is VSCO, and you just click this little plus sign once you get in there and you add your photo. Once I click on the photo, you can see that there are different presets that you can do, A4, A5, A6.
(14:43 – 15:00)I always go with A6, so if that’s what I’m going to click on is A6, and it kind of gives you a scale. It starts at 12. I think it was 12 right here, and you can slide it down at how edited you want this picture, like the editing style for this one.
(15:01 – 15:13)I kind of just went around. I think I kept going a little bit lower, and then I went, you know, just kind of play around with it, kind of slide it up and down to see which kind you want. And then, again, you just save that to your camera roll.
(15:13 – 15:23)I always do actual size, and it saves it. And then you X out of that, and then I open it up in Snapseed. I get in there, and I push the editing one.
(15:23 – 15:31)In this one, you can change, like, the brightness, the contrast. So I went for brightness first. I kind of like a brighter color.
(15:32 – 15:46)So I kind of just moved it up, and then you can go into contrast. For this picture, I didn’t do any contrast because the papaya was already really orange. So contrast kind of makes it a little, adds a little more color, makes it a little darker.
(15:47 – 15:55)So I didn’t want that one. I went in ambience because that makes your food look brighter, and I really like that one. But, again, don’t overdo it.
(15:55 – 16:09)And then I did a little highlight, and by highlighting it, it kind of brings out all the colors in the picture a little bit more. And then you also have shadow. And shadow is used whenever you have a lot of shadows in your food.
(16:09 – 16:17)It kind of hides those off. But I don’t necessarily use those a lot because, again, this was shot overhead. So I didn’t have any harsh shadows.
(16:17 – 16:29)And I just clicked to show you the difference in between. And then you just save it, and you modify it, and it’s done. And you just upload it to Instagram or wherever you’re going to upload it.
So, yeah, that’s the process of the editing that I do.
Laurie: I also was going to ask you a little bit about captions. Some you give the recipe, and some you kind of direct them to your website.How do you decide which ones to share and which ones to put on the website?
Morgan: Well, the way I decide that one are my favorite ones I kind of put on my website because I want my website to look really good. So I’m like, some of the ones that I’m – I never – I’m a perfectionist. And when it comes to pictures, I try to never upload ones that I’m not – I’m kind of iffy about.
And if I’m like, I don’t really know if I like this picture, I usually don’t upload it, honestly. If I really like the picture, I’m going to upload it to my website and to Instagram. And the reason I don’t upload the recipe on Instagram or Facebook is because I want to bring people towards my website so they can go on that.
It takes me a while sometimes to come up with some. And then sometimes it kind of just pops to my mind. I try to just let your personality show when it comes to captions.You know, be yourself. Talk about – people actually like to listen to your story. They like to hear stories.
They like to know about you, what’s going on in your life. You know, what did you do today? What was going on whenever you were taking this picture? You know, like, for example, with the oatmeal thing, you could describe, like, what else you had with – if you had a matcha latte, you know, or what you’re going to do that day. Like, this is my pre-workout, you know, about to go to the gym, about to spend the day doing some work or going to a yoga class this evening.
(17:55 – 18:06)Just let people into what you’re doing that day. And even some things you’re struggling with, you know. If you’re struggling with something, so people can relate to you, that you’re also human. They like a story.
Laurie: I have found the posts where I’m most kind of vulnerable about, like, things that are going on with me get the most engagement. And that’s been really an adventure for me because I’m not really used to sharing a lot of stuff like that.
(18:21 – 18:26)Morgan: Yeah. They see you as, like, a friend. They want to, like, know about your life, you know.
(18:26 – 18:33)It’s not as engaging whenever you just see a picture with the recipe. Switch up the length of your captions. Sometimes do short ones. Sometimes do longer ones. Play around with it and see which one gets better engagement on your page. Sometimes it takes me over a day to write a caption.
(18:41 – 18:54)And I’ll just sit there and, kind of like a blog post, I’ll write some of it. And then sometimes it’s just not coming naturally, so I’ll go do something. And then it’ll pop in your mind, like, this is a smart thing to say.
(18:54 – 19:08)I’ll, like, hurry up and go get my phone because I’ve got to write this one down.
Laurie: I feel like a lot of those things come to me when I’m either washing dishes or in the shower. For some reason, those are two places that I, like, get a lot of inspiration.
(19:08 – 19:15)Morgan: Or, like, cooking or, like, laying in bed. You’re like, “this is clever. That was really clever.”
(19:17 – 19:41)Laurie: Now, do you come up with your own recipes or are they just kind of a lot of things that you either derive from other recipes? Or what’s the process that you use? Because, honestly, I’m lazy in the kitchen and I’m lazy about what I eat. So, for me, it’s, like, anything more than, like, three ingredients, I can’t be bothered. So, I’m always inspired by, like, your dishes that have, like, fun stuff in them.
(19:41 – 19:55)Morgan: Since I just now turned vegan, I like to do plant-based versions. And even if you aren’t vegan or anything like that, you can go online on Pinterest, just add different things. Sometimes it’s a hit and a miss whenever I’m messing with stuff.
(19:55 – 20:05)You know, like, you’ll make something, like, this is not, nobody, I’m not going to share this recipe. You know, and you’ve got to still work on it. And you just practice, kind of like with the picture-taking.
(20:06 – 20:22)You just throw some stuff in there and see what you got. And if it doesn’t turn out well, well, then, oh, well, try again next time, you know?
Laurie: I’m going to look at your pictures differently now, now that I know, like, what goes on behind the scenes now. It’s going to be a little bit more like, “oh, there’s the jute mat.Oh, there’s her white napkin. There’s her gold spoon.”
Morgan: I need to start investing in some new ones because I’m, like, I feel like I’m using the same ones.
(20:29 – 20:37)I’m, like, I got to step it up for something.
It’s part of your signature look. And, I mean, I think that it’s good to have that continuity.I really love that gold spoon, though, that’s in that, I think, the smoothie bowl picture here.
Laurie: Where do you look for, like, kind of interesting pieces to put, like, little, your props to get to put in your pictures?
Morgan: Home goods has some good options. Thrift stores have some good ones.
(20:56 – 21:10)Like, if you’re looking for stuff that’s, like, boho, I guess you would say, like, rattan-type stuff. Most of mine are from, like, Marshalls, home goods. I actually went into a store in my hometown, and I found two wooden bowls.
(21:10 – 21:15)I’m all for wooden stuff. Like, I love wooden spoons, wooden bowls, wooden plates. I found those at a local store.
(21:16 – 21:26)You can find them a lot of time, like, at stores that have homey stuff. Dollar Tree, you may not think they have some cool stuff, but you can always see what kind of silverware they have. Just keep your eyes open.
(21:27 – 21:43)Laurie: I don’t know if this is a Southern thing, but the antique stores, those, I mean, those are just, like, they give me a little bit of anxiety because there’s just so much, like, stuff in a small place. But we always find, like, the most interesting pieces. And my husband collects antique mixing bowls.So anytime we go into one of these stores, he goes straight for the kitchen stuff because we have to look to see if, you know, they have one of these bowls that, you know. So we have, like, a whole collection of these bowls. But, you know, it’s just always, like, the most interesting stuff.But I never cared because I never was taking pictures of food and things like that. But now I’m going to be on the lookout for interesting pieces. I’m totally inspired now, Morgan. So I’m going to try to step up my Instagram.
We’re going to wrap up. And I want to thank you so much for sharing all your tips with us.
(22:15 – 22:27)And if you want to follow Morgan on Instagram, her handle is @keepitpurely. That’s the name of her coaching business. And I’ll go ahead and add that into the show notes as well.
(22:28 – 22:35)But thank you so much. I really appreciate the time that you took to come here and share this with us. And it’s been very inspiring and very motivating.
(22:36 – 22:40)Morgan: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on here.
April 20, 202434 min
29: From Solo to #squadgoals: The power of connection, collaboration, and community for online business owners
The secret to a sustainable online business is being a part of a community for online business owners who can support you in your journey. Get yourself a group of ‘biz besties’ who get it because they know what it’s like to ride the highs and lows of online solopreneurship.
Table of ContentsMeet Jen and JessicaEpisode Transcript:Want to learn more about creating community for online business owners?
In this episode, my guests Jen and Jessica met each other – and their soon-to-be band of besties – at a marketing conference and created a bond that extended far beyond business, all while ….hunting for a Maribel dress from Encanto? YUP! They share the story of how a shared mission to find a very specific souvenir over the course of a weekend brought them together and forged invaluable connections. Their chats went from group texts to monthly Zoom calls, and they realized their connection was having a huge impact on their business success.
From this they created a mastermind community for online business owners that isn’t your average networking group; it’s a unique blend of trust, referral relationships, and connections that celebrates every member’s success.
Meet Jen and Jessica
Jen is a Nationally Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC), Mayo Clinic Certified Wellness Coach, Certified Cycle Instructor, mom, and wife living in Minneapolis, MN.
With over 10 years of experience in Marketing, Project Management and Leadership for corporations, Jen became passionate about helping others through their health and wellness journey after overcoming her own health challenges.
Jen has since helped hundreds of others create healthier, happier and more fulfilled lives through her caring and strengths-driven approach to coaching.
Connect with Jen: https://wellspired.co
Jessica is a featured Kartra Certified Partner, as recognized by Kartra (Genesis Digital), a three-time Kartra Community Member of the Month (September 2021, July 2022, & January 2024), A Funnel Gorgeous Certified Master Marketer and has been featured on numerous business and marketing podcasts such as Flip Your Marketing Flops, Superwoman Soul, VA Tips, Tricks + Advice, and The Styled Mind, and was a top 10 Launch Gorgeous participant for Spring 2022.
Connect with Jessica:Pineapplerelations.com
Episode Transcript:
Welcome everyone. I am here today with Jen Wright and Jessica Scotten, and they run a community for digital entrepreneurs who want to find connection with other entrepreneurs who understand how isolating and lonely it can be in the online business world. Jen is a business and marketing strategist, and she’s also a nationally board-certified health and wellness coach. She helps her clients create and grow businesses that align with their values and strengths, so they can avoid burnout, have more energy and build the business they want. Jessica is a Kartra top expert in automations and funnel specialist and a certified master marketer. Welcome, thank you so much.
0:01:36 – JessicaI’m so excited to be here with you.
0:01:39 – LaurieThis is a topic we have not yet covered on the podcast, and this is all about collaboration, community and basically having that group of biz besties that you can connect with and lean on and support and help you grow in your entrepreneurial journey. This is such an important topic.
0:01:57 – JenHonestly, like it’s sort of like a little kept secret. Like, if you think of like Amy Porterfield and Jenna Kutcher, think about their like relationship circles and networks that they have, like that is really what has built them into who they are today, but like no one talks about it, and so it is sort of this like little kept secret. They’re starting to come out, they’re starting to have more conversations about it, but it’s just been really recent, and so we feel like the idea and the topic of relationship marketing is going to in year.
0:02:24 – JessicaYou’re gonna start hearing a lot more about it from some of these bigger names what we’re seeing, and probably for a week in our text message thread that is still going from a year ago. Um, for like a week everybody kept sending screenshots of this big name is doing a community. This big name is doing a community. No, like curriculum style, there was no teaching involved. It was everybody kind of at the same time. For us, we might have been a little bit ahead of it because we started putting this together. We had our August brainstorming weekend and then, coming into the end of the year, just starting to see so many places are doing communities and so many big names are just doing no, this is just community. This is just for to see so many places are doing community and so many big names are just doing no, this is just community. This is just for building relationships. So there’s something there.
0:03:10 – LaurieRight, like the network is your network Exactly, and so there’s really more attention that needs to be paid and more conversations around having opportunities and what this looks like to be a solopreneur, and how can we come together? Why don’t you tell me how you met? Oh yeah, it’s such a good story.
0:03:28 – JessicaSo eight unknowing people went to a marketing conference almost exactly a year ago today and we all went in knowing nobody and there’s a little bit of solopreneur social anxiety, a little bit of that apprehension that hits in the pit of your stomach that you just say I don’t know anybody, how am I going to do? Do I have a quiet space to go to refresh and shut down? And in the community Facebook group for this event, somebody had put up hey, I want to start a text thread of people going by themselves.
And a whole bunch of people ended up in it and I didn’t pay any attention to it until like the day before, and there was one that said hey, after everybody gets registered, do you want to meet for a drink? At the place around the corner. And it was like well, I should go, I’m going to meet people, I’m going to have new experiences, I should get over myself and go sit at the table. And everybody was great and everybody was wonderful. And then there was eight of us who split out of that and said, well, let’s go get dinner.
So we were in Orlando, we were at a Disney property, we got on the bus, we went to Disney Springs and somebody said one of the girls said before she got there. She said my daughters are really, really, really looking for the Maribel dress. Encanto had just came out. The Maribel dress was all the rage and I was like, oh, I was here three weeks ago, I know exactly where the dress is. And we walked over to the place and the dress isn’t there because Encanto is on fire.
The staff was like we don’t have any. We get shipments every day, but it’s really first come, first serve. Okay, we’re here for three days, we’ll come back tomorrow. So we went off, we had dinner, we shared food around the table which is like the secret of how you make friends and how you introduce yourselves to new people Took the bus back, had really amazing conversation, did it again the next day and she goes. Can we go look for the dress again? Like, yeah, we’ll go for the dress, jen. Did we get the dress on the third, second day or the third day?
0:05:28 – JenI think it was the third day. It became this like thing that we all just really connected around and it was great because it was just like brought up conversation. We were talking about it every day hey, we’re going to get over there to like go see at what time are we going to go off there. And day, hey, we’re going to get over there to like go see at what time are we going to go off there. And it just like created that like a common mission, right, Just in that moment, totally unrelated to business, but super fun at the same time, Cause it got us out to Disney Springs and it got us walking around and also having these side conversations and learning about each other kind of, while we had something else to focus on and I think that was like a huge thing for me and some of the other girls.
You know, I tend to be like a little bit on the high anxiety kind of scale of things and it was great to have like a mission for us to like focus in on and not it wasn’t high pressure, Like we were sitting down at a table doing this like speed networking type situation that can feel really high pressure. This was like fun and so it was different for us and we created this relationship that really blossomed into something more.
0:06:28 – JessicaAfter we came back, we started a text thread and I drove from Orlando to South Florida and I think there was like 175 unread text messages by the time I drove two and a half hours home of just everybody’s ideas and this feels really good. This feels really great.
These are women that I’ve never had this kind of connection with before. Nobody is in a competing industry. Everybody does something a little different, so there was no weirdness between everybody while we were building these initial connections and the conversation came up is I want to keep this going, so we put on the calendar hey, we’ll do a monthly zoom where everybody’s just going to come in and maybe we have challenges or things that we need to get out of our system, that the people in our lives aren’t really the best suited for.
Your sisters, your brothers, your spouses they don’t know what it means when you say things like, lori, what you said to me the other day your SSL certificate is not working properly. Or somebody who’s in my Dream 100 shared a post that I wrote and that means the world to me.
Or I’m having challenges with my client and I don’t know how to properly express it as a solopreneur, which is what we all identify as you don’t.
It doesn’t come with a built-in support system, so when you have those really tough challenges, who do you go to? Your husband doesn’t want to hear about it. Your wife doesn’t have any clue what you’re talking about. Your friends are like I don’t know what you mean by all of this.
And it’s hard because you go from having wanting to have these conversations to almost training yourself to not having the conversations because people look at you really strangely.
0:08:26 – LaurieOr you have to give like a 10 minute backstory to explain all of the terms that you’re going to be using, what this all means, kind of give the context, and by the and by the end they’ve got like that glazed look on their face and they’re like when does this end? What is?
0:08:40 – Jenshe saying Just smile and nod and pray it’s over soon too, because we all have that in common, like a common challenge, and it’s and there is something when you can come together as a group and say like, hey, we’re all experiencing this and now we don’t have to give the backstory on everything. It’s like a breath of fresh air. You know you’re like, oh my gosh, it didn’t take me 10 minutes to explain what just happened in my business. When I say SSL certificate, all of us know what happens. Or when I say my you know first name on my email didn’t populate right and now everyone got hi, first name right. We’ve all been there Like it’s. You know, it’s one of those things where you can all like kind of commiserate on together and be like, oh yeah, that’s happened to me.
0:09:30 – JessicaThe one that really struck the chord with me the most was something that none of us did. I was in a Facebook group and somebody posted I just had the best month in my business and I have no one to celebrate with. And I about cried because I’ve been there landing big clients, hitting metrics that you didn’t think were possible, meeting the goals that you wrote out for. Well, nobody knows what it means when you say, like I’m so excited that I have 500 members in my private Facebook group now.
That’s a win for some people, but like to somebody else, they’re like I don’t know what that means, but yay, I guess. And then you don’t feel good about your win. So as we came together and as we started doing these what started out as monthly conversations, which then turned into weekly conversations we all started to notice that we were getting better independently and we were all getting better together.
0:10:25 – JenI would say as myself. I’m a nationally board certified health and wellness coach and coaching. It can be really a very solitary business, right and same with solopreneur, right. And so isolating is usually the word that I use, because you are either speaking to someone one-on-one in a coaching session and then as soon as you’re off, you’re by yourself again. Right, and it can feel really isolating and alone.
So to have that community to be able to come to it just changes the game, because when you’re by yourself, you know there’s self-doubt that pops in.
There’s a lot of questions you feel like you can’t answer, maybe there’s roadblocks that you feel like you’re so close to the problem. You just cannot get over that hump to like figure out, like what do I do next? And just being able to come to a group and be like blah, like this is what’s happening, and someone outside of the box is like, oh well, why don’t you just go ahead and do step one?
And you think to yourself the first time why on earth did I not think about that three hours ago? You know, and like that in the moment, I think just shows you the power of the community. When stuff like that happens, it just it’s like it, like expedites so much of what you would normally deal with on your own. When you can have, you can say like hey, I have this idea, I’ve been thinking about it, it’s been stuck in my head. I can’t get rid of it. Do you think this is a good?
0:11:35 – Laurieidea, or do you think?
0:11:35 – Jenit’s going to turn into like this big monster that’s going to become a bigger thing. We call those demon babies in our community and when they’re all like, oh my gosh, that’s such a good idea, you need to move forward with that. It gives you that sense of confidence to be able to just do some really amazing things, or they’re like put that off to the side. There’s something so empowering to be like. You’re totally right. I’m so glad you said that I’m putting it off to the side and moving forward that you could have otherwise just completely derailed yourself and your business, not having kind of that extra input or somebody outside of the box to give you that.
0:12:09 – LaurieOkay. So just to recap, having this group is kind of like a sounding board. There’s validation, there’s some reflecting and there’s some what I call like the shiny object protection squad. They’re like nope, we’re not going to do that, stay over here. But you’re right when it’s just you and you’re doing your own thing and you’re like is this a good idea? I think I should do this.
I don’t know, and I personally I have ADHD and I always feel like the new idea is the best idea because it’s shiny and it’s fun and there’s so much possibility. I would love to have somebody like kind of sit next to me going Laurie, all right, get back over here, yes, yes, get back on the road here, do the thing that you don’t really want to do, and you know which is why you’re distracted to do this other fun thing.
So you found that having this group helped you personally, helped you professionally, because you were growing your businesses. You had that support, you had people to bounce ideas off of. That kind of kept you from getting sidetracked, distracted. That kept you on track with the goals that you would have already set, kept you on track with the goals that you had already set and moving and making progress.
0:13:18 – JenYep, absolutely.
And as we became more comfortable and felt that safety net with each other, we were able to open up and even become vulnerable, right, and I think that really took kind of this community to a whole.
Nother level is when we were able to jump on and shed some tears or say I’m having a really terrible day or week or month or whatever. It is Right, and having us all be either like oh my gosh I’ve totally been there before in my experience.
Here’s something I did to be like, oh my gosh, thank you, I needed that like extra push to say like I can get through this. Or for someone to be like, hey, I’m going to sit down, let’s just cry together, because sometimes we all just need that too.
And especially as a solopreneur and a coach, as when you do feel so isolated, that can feel really, I mean there’s like a healing element to it, right, when you feel like you you’re at it all at your own and then suddenly you have this group together, that’s kind of giving you like a virtual hug to say like, hey, you’re having a crappy day and that’s okay and we’re here for you and it doesn’t need to, we don’t need to fix it, but we’re just letting you know like we’re here.
0:14:22 – LaurieTell me how this evolved into creating Kaleidoscope.
0:14:26 – JenWe realized that this group of eight was really something special and we were getting so many benefits out of it. We knew that there were more kind of solopreneurs out there that were dealing with the same challenges that we were dealing with, and we didn’t want to just kind of keep this to ourselves.
We thought it was really important to be able to help other solopreneurs going through those same exact challenges, and so we decided to really like make something of it. I think, jessica, if I remember, like the first thing we did was we were like let’s all get together. We’re going to fly out for a long weekend in Chicago and let’s mastermind on it. And so we got together. We did this like mastermind weekend where we were like what are we? What are we doing? Like where are we going with this?
We a couple of our members went down to a conference and came up with this idea that like wow, wouldn’t it be so great to like create a community or a conference? And it really was like okay, let’s, let’s plan it. So we spent this weekend together. It was so much fun and we came up with some like great ideas, and one of them was basically what is now Kaleidoscope Co, and it’s this community of solopreneurs that are really all about connection, collaboration and community.
Those are our top three kind of values and focuses and it’s just been the most incredible kind of experience of seeing this community come together and grow and continue to just like strengthen, even as we get to know new members and things like that. So it’s been so much fun.
0:15:53 – JessicaNow there’s a private mastermind for the year and now we have people that were passing those principles on to through training, through collaboration, through connection, through building really strong relationships with others.
It builds your network and now we’re starting to see the spider web of people mixing and mingling. And this person’s talking to this person and this person’s chatting with one of the core the founders and now they’re collaborating and now they have projects going and they’re building this web of people that they know really well. And that’s the most magical part of it is members of the mastermind organization that are saying I had a call with this person and it went really well and I’m going to hire her to do this thing.
Or I had a call and she really helped me get unstuck, which is one of the properties of a collaboration, and the collaboration calls is properties of a collaboration, and the collaboration calls is let us help you get there. Whether it’s you have an idea that you need to work out, whether you’re stuck in something, whether you’re having trouble with something, there’s a community sounding board for you to let those things go, and seeing that be changed in other people is really magnificent.
0:17:16 – JenWe sometimes get compared to like a networking group or a networking community, and when I entered into the solopreneur world I joined a ton of networking like local networking groups and things like that, and they’re great, they have their purpose for certain reasons. But after meeting with like so many people in those organizations and not truly feeling like I got to know them all that well, I kind of knew what they do, but what I found was they would be really interested in developing a referral relationship with me, which was super great. I would refer people to them.
But I would always feel a little let down because maybe the experience wasn’t something that I kind of envisioned. It should have been for my person that I referred over to them, and so for me I really struggled to develop a sense of trust in those referral relationships where here we’re so tightly connected and we get to know each other on such a close community sense that when I refer to someone it’s because I truly believe that that is like the solution that the person needs, and so there’s just something so much different and I know when people refer to me it’s the same way, and so we have this like exchange of trust that is different than any other kind of network or community that I’ve been a part of.
And also, we give each other feedback, which is so great, right, like you know, if someone was to refer to me and something happened, they would be like hey, I touched base with so-and-so the other day and you know they were, you know they gave me some feedback. Would you be open to hearing it?
I’d be like, absolutely, I want to make my business better, right, and I don’t feel like I’ve been able to do that in any other community to be able to help each other, actually, like make each other’s business better. It’s not just solely about referrals, it’s about all the angles of business, which is, I think, what makes us different.
0:18:50 – LaurieSo, I can relate to that because I know that I have joined networking groups in person and online, and it almost seems like people conflate networking with promotion. They come into these networking groups thinking how can I benefit, how can you help me, and it’s very much a push, like they just give you their information. Here’s my card, here’s my website, here’s this, and I’m like, well, I need to know something about you, I need to know, I need to develop some trust with you before I’m going to send someone to you. Like, cause, it’s going to reflect poorly on me if I send someone to you and you are just you know, it’s not a great experience and guess what? I’ve lost that relationship now too.
So you know, there’s gotta be some kind of connection, like you were saying, on a personal level and professional right. So you have to trust that they are good people, they’re, they’re ethical, they’re going to do what they say that they’re going to do. I trust you to take care of the people that I’m sending you so that I’d feel good about it.
0:19:48 – JenWe have a pretty large, it’s growing free Facebook group, which is great. It’s just a great way for people to kind of step into our world, be able to understand. We actually offer once a month collaboration calls with that community, just so that they can kind of get a taste of like, let’s see what it’s like to be in a community like this and then if they’re interested in really, you know, meeting on a more regular basis and getting a little bit more of that sort of like mentorship from a business side, things like that, then that’s where our mastermind group comes in. Kind of officially I’ve called it a mastermind, even though I would say it’s a little bit more of like this hybrid experience of what it actually is.
We get together on a weekly basis for different style calls and then we actually are so excited we have coming up a in-person mastermind like conference that we’re doing with these members, where we’re going back to Chicago with them and we’re going to do a little mastermind week with everyone who is now our members.
So it’s kind of fun because it brings it back full circle from like the moment we sort of created it, which was in Chicago, and now we’re like back again with our bigger group doing more masterminding, if someone wanted to just be a part of the community, check it out and sort of jump onto those monthly collaboration calls. We just want to be able to connect anybody that we can, which is why that free group is there. But for the person who really wants to kind of take it to that next level, get really involved and be a part of this sort of deeper community, that’s where we have the mastermind.
0:21:08 – LaurieSo Okay, now talk to me about the real 50 and how that works.
0:21:19 – JessicaReal 50 is the idea that if you had 50 close people that you knew the ins and outs of their business, what they offered, what they did, and you can refer business back and forth. That’s all you need. You can actually really do okay with 10, but make it aspirational and make it 50 is where that all comes in.
There’s a lot of talk about your dream 100. A lot of times on people’s D100s, I see Tony Robbins, I see Oprah, I see Russell Brunson. I see people that are so far removed from where they are that there’s not really a chance that you’re going to meet that person. I would love it if Oprah was referring business to me.
So what we talk about when we say the real 50 is a closer knit connection to people that you know. I know. If I need somebody for a WordPress website, I know there’s only one person that I’m sending that to. We have somebody in our group who is a spectacular graphic designer.
If somebody is coming to me looking for a graphic designer, I know exactly where I’m sending them to. It’s not. Oh, you should check out this weird Facebook group and put a post in there. No, I have a name, I have personal experience and that’s the person that I’m going to send you to.
0:22:31 – LaurieI like that. We’re taking it from. You’re probably never going to get to you know, oprah, saying you get a client, you get a client here, you go, here’s some work, but it’s you’re bringing it down to like it’s realistic. So bringing it in a level or two and saying, instead of the aspirational this many, let’s make it realistic, this many, and that’s all you need and that can actually take you pretty far.
0:22:58 – JenHugely far Like, if you think about it, like what would 50 close people who knew exactly what you do in your business knew you were accepting new clients, knew that you, you know, helped a very specific type of ICA or, you know, ideal client, whatever and they knew all of that about you? You know to the point where, as soon as they bumped into someone, they’re like, oh my gosh, I need to introduce you to Jessica. She’s super, she’s the Kartra queen. Like I need her, you know.
So I mean, you know what kind of power would that have? It’s, it really is a huge impact on your business and we are literally seeing that come to life right now, which is so much fun. We have, like some really fun statistics as we’ve been going.
One of the great statistics we love to have and Jessica, you’re going to have to tell me, because I know that you know it better than I do has been like the total dollar amount that we’ve been able to refer like in our group. Every time I hear it, I’m just like what Are you serious? That’s amazing.
0:23:51 – JessicaSo within the eight of us that originally started, we could put actual measurable numbers. From November to October, when we put it all together, we had referred and passed $50,000 worth of business between us to each other Amazing. Now, that’s not necessarily me hiring Jen, but I have hired people within the group. It’s also me saying to somebody that comes into my world I need help with something and then sending that client to them. And that was only with the eight of us, for a six month period, that we measured it.
0:24:25 – LaurieWow.
0:24:26 – JenYeah, incredible. And the thing I think that is really important to note from that is that wasn’t our goal, right, and that’s always the thing for us is like we’re not that group. That’s like focusing every single month to be like how many dollars in referral dollars did you pass this month? Right, we didn’t. We don’t do any of that. It just happened to be a question six months later to be like you know, we really have been referring a lot of business to each other. I wonder how much that would be in total if we calculated it up and then we sat back and we looked at it, right? So at no point was that actually a focus for us during those six months. It just happened to be something we were curious about at the end of it.
0:24:58 – LaurieSo that’s just like a nice added bonus, right? So now you’ve got this core group of people that you know you can depend on, you can lean on, you can collaborate with, and then having that additional revenue being created as a result of this connection is just, it’s just frosting. I love that. That is great. I have two things that I just I have to ask, because this is how my mind works. One is what if you have jerks? How do you screen people to make sure jerks don’t get in? Or like people who are just going to come in and be spammy and gross and like screw everybody over and ruin the party.
0:25:35 – JenWe build the relationship before someone’s coming into this mastermind, and so it would be very odd for us to have someone just like suddenly sign up for the mastermind without any of us, like have are keeping it limited to, like a certain number of people, which I also think helps to, you know, make sure that everyone is playing nicely.
0:26:06 – LaurieSo you kind of have a subtle vetting process in that it’s not just an open door and they can just join and then they’re part of the group and they’re here and they can do whatever, but they kind of have to show who they are before they can be in the group and part of the network.
0:26:19 – JessicaYeah, it’s not so much like invitation only, because it definitely is public and it is available to anyone who wanted to be a part of it. I think Jill, who’d absolutely get the hat tip for writing the best, the most incredible copy for the offer, has really helped in manage the expectations of people. We talk about acting heart forward. We talk about doing the right thing, being a community, being support for others and getting support in return, and in knowing how great copy works. Great copy also deflects the people that you don’t want.
0:27:00 – LaurieSo you’re attracting and repelling at the same time. So if somebody’s got it in the back of their head that they’re going to join the group and scam the hell out of it, that copy is going to be like oh no, this is not the place for me, no thanks.
0:27:14 – JenYeah, exactly, and also just with our regular calls that we do. So we do weekly calls with the community and they’re on different kind of focuses, so whether it’s a collaboration call or celebration call, but we also do training calls with them, and all of our training call topics have kind of a focus in on how do I do this with the idea of relationship marketing in mind, right? So how do I do social media with the idea of relationship marketing in mind, relationship marketing in mind, and so those are all just like really great trainings that help to just kind of almost further develop the skills of our mastermind to say, here’s how we do this as a relationship, as a group, as a community, and so we’re continuing to even help each other like hone those skills in along the way.
So so it’s like a development process, all like, every step of the way is is is kind of getting people in mindset of if you’d like to be part of this.
This is who we are, this is how we act and this is kill the fun for everyone. And so it’s really important to us that we really do maintain that Also, just because, like I mentioned before, like the feedback that we’re open to giving each other, like if someone we know that everyone is the first and foremost right, we have to kind of assume everyone’s there for positive intent and they’re just, you know, doing it because maybe they just don’t know of a better way. Like there would be no reason why one of our members wouldn’t be able to reach out and say, like hey, let’s have a conversation. You know, what you’re doing is a little bit. Maybe, you know, maybe it’s offending some people or whatever it is. Let’s talk about a way. Or you know how do we bring that to be able to help nurture those relationships a little bit better. Like, hey, let’s talk about some ways we can do this a little bit more effectively. And I’d love to help you out, and we have all offered to do that for our mastermind members that come on.
0:29:06 – LaurieSo that’s a good point. They may not even realize that what they’re doing is out of alignment with how you want it done right. Because in online business I’ve seen from one end to the other of the spectrum of how to behave and promote yourself and get clients and do business people just may not even be aware that what they’re doing is offensive or inappropriate or spammy, and so you call them in and you say, look, you know, let’s just have a conversation. This is how we feel about what’s going on. Can we talk about it?
0:29:36 – JenYeah.
0:29:36 – LaurieYeah, I love it. Okay.
0:29:39 – JenAnother thing I was going to ask was is it specifically for women or we don’t have any specific rules that says, like it’s only women, anybody can join it. Just through our sort of you know, ideal client development, we’ve kind of realized that that’s just where our branding leans.
0:29:56 – LaurieGot it. Okay, I thought of that and I was like it sounds like it started with a group of women, but I don’t know where it’s going, so I didn’t know if that changes the dynamic.
0:30:06 – JessicaWhen we’re planning all of this. The conversation was is this for only women? Is this for men? What about the non-binary community? There is no designation on the sales page, on any of our verbiage, through anything that designates that this is a women’s only experience. That being said, this year’s cycle is women only. If a male were to join, that’s wonderful and we’re very excited that you’re here and we can’t wait to see what you bring to the community. We knew going in that we probably weren’t going to attract that audience, but if it happened, we would be very receptive to it.
0:30:42 – JenWe all kind of collectively agree that we want to be really inclusive and kind of all are welcome, all are loved, kind of a group, and so I think that’s going to maintain, you know, probably through the next year and again, you know, our branding kind of hits one way, but everyone’s able to come.
0:30:59 – LaurieSo yeah, perfect, awesome. Thank you so much. You have something for our listeners, which is awesome. This is the seven ways to build connections that grow your business, and I’m going to be putting the link in the show notes as well. Can you tell me, but just like a little tease of what they’re going to get?
0:31:16 – JenYeah, it’s a really great tool we put together just because we wanted to help people get started on this journey if they were interested in relationship marketing and understanding how that all works.
0:31:26 – JessicaThis guide gives you seven actionable steps that you can put into your business that help you build that connection piece from in-person events to digital events, those little tips that if you’re doing this by yourself, you might not be getting. We know a lot of people that are moving to a solo business haven’t done this before. One of the things that’s in the guide that we found really helpful was digital business cards, something that you can show up with and say, oh, here’s a scan, here’s all of my information, but actually use it to follow up and show up with intention and show up in a valuable way that says hey, I’m really glad we got to chat last week. Your dog is so cute, because that might be the little bit of personal that you got out of it. Can we have a coffee conversation to further our relationship and follow up on those things and show up for yourself.
0:32:21 – LaurieAwesome, I love that. Okay, I’m going to be putting that in the show notes and all of our listeners can grab that. So let’s talk about how listeners can connect with both of you. Jessica, where are you? Where can they find you? Sure.
0:32:33 – JessicaSo my business outside of Kaleidoscope is Pineapple Relations pineapplerelationscom, instagram and Facebook it all runs under Pineapple Relations and I work with individuals looking to grow and scale their businesses using the Cardtrip platform. And then you can also find us in the community connections and collaborations Facebook group that is open to anyone who wants to join and be a part of our little world.
0:32:56 – LauriePerfect and Jen, where can our listeners connect with you?
0:32:59 – Jenworld Perfect and Jen, where can our listeners connect with you? Yeah, so, outside of Kaleidoscope I am, you can find me. I own wellspiredco, so Wellspired Collaborative, and we are a training and development company for health and wellness coaches and professionals to help them either grow and deepen their skills as health and wellness coaches and professionals or to help to grow their business. So, and you can find us at Wellspired Co, pretty much all over the social medias or wellspiredco.
0:33:25 – LauriePerfect. I’m going to be putting all of your links in the show notes so people can find you wherever they hang out and connect with you and find out more about Kaleidoscope, join your free group, et cetera. Awesome, perfect, well, this has been fantastic.
Thank you so much, both of you, for coming by today and talking about everything that you’re doing about Kaleidoscope and the Real 50 and sharing your free gift with us.
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November 25, 202325 min
28: Attracting Abundance with Heart-Centered Business Alignment with Pipsa Valkeila
In this episode I chat with Pipsa Valkeila, a business mentor who helps conscious and compassionate women entrepreneurs go from overwhelm, burnout, hustle and scarcity to authenticity, peace, excitement and abundance.
Going from being one of Finland’s most influential sustainability advocates with over 10,000 active readers and mentions from the biggest media platforms of the country, she has grown to become a mentor, helping entrepreneurs get incredible results in alignment, impact, wealth and happiness.
Meet Pipsa
Pipsa is a mentor for conscious and compassionate women entrepreneurs, helping them create aligned businesses full of heart, impact and abundance.
Pipsa lives in a small countryside town in Finland with her partner and two little ones and can be found swimming in lakes, breathing in the fresh air of the forests and basking in the wonder of it all.
Pipsa’s website www.pipsavalkeila.com
Her online course: Aligned & Abundant:
Free gift: 6 things blocking your abundance and how to fix them – A guide to the conscious and compassionate entrepreneur.
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