In this post: Not that long ago, the only way to get clients was to comment on blog posts. Questions we’ll tackle today are:
Which platform should you be putting the most focus on right now?
Will Social Media disappear?
How to best build for the future, while maximizing what is here NOW
Watch this post by clicking the image below or keep scrolling to read.
(This video is hosted in the Healthy Wealthy Society, a free group for health coaches & wellness entrepreneurs. If you have trouble accessing this video, you may need to join the group first.)
Which Social Media Platform Should You Be Focusing on Right Now?
A conversation that's been on my mind that was brought up in the Healthy Wealthy Society Facebook group a week ago was whether we should be building a following on social media or on a blog that we own for ourselves. Many of you will know I've been in online marketing for 19 years now. And I've seen every iteration of this conversation over the years, for sure.
The general rule of thumb in marketing for the best part of at least the last 10 years has been, "The money is in the list", which means you can build your social media profile or your blog or whatever that might be, but make sure you're getting people on your email list because email is considered something we own if the day that Facebook goes down or on the day that the blogs go down or there's always something that could go away.
And the reality is they do go away. Only about five or six years ago, the way to get clients would be to get up on the day that a popular health blogger blogged, and you would be the first one to put your comment. The way to get clients was literally to be seen commenting on other bloggers comment threats. I mean, that is just such a farfetched concept now, and it's not even that long ago that that's how we were getting plans.
Things do change. So the conversation is always going to be there. There are no guarantees. The thing is that nobody knows what will change or what.
So for many years, the mantra has been the money's in the list. And everybody has focused on doing, you know, their free opt-ins and getting people on their email list or social media and that's great. But I can tell you as someone who has a business with a large email list, email open rates are low, partly because of their service providers. There's a lot of detail around why that happens. Partly because human society, human nature has evolved. We don't really like email as much anymore.
A lot of people put all of their efforts into growing their email lists and our finding several years later that actually they have got numbers, but people aren't opening them.
So email's not a golden ticket, but you know, I'm always the first person to say if someone's building a business on Instagram alone is pretty dangerous. It is highly likely that Instagram won't be there in its current form in current years. There are already countless stories of people who are losing tens of thousands a month, just purely by their algorithms.
Building a business on one platform is not the answer.
I totally agree with that in every sense. The piece that I don't necessarily agree with is that building a blog or a website or anything SEO based is safer than social media or is even a better option. To start with, who came up with this notion that they won't go away? There's this kind of story and I know that there are people who sell courses around this, et cetera, that claims that if you have a blog, you've got a website, your social media can be blown away in the social media storm, but your house, your own website, you'll own your SEO. It might be true.
Websites are never a guarantee.
Who knows? On the internet, we don't own any of it. But the most important piece that I normally focus on is that people don't buy health coaching from websites. I mentor hundreds of health coaches a year and I have done for many years, I know that for a fact. Most people are wasting their time doing all of their day-to-day marketing and business building, sending people to a website, hoping that the website is somehow going to be strong enough to get people on the phone, on a call like a discovery call, health history call, whatever you want to call it.
Many people will spend a lot of money on trying to get the fanciest website, the right logo, a really good copywriter who can explain what they do and they hope that the magic of that website is going to get people on the phone and then they got to convert into clients. Whereas what I have seen and proven time and time again is that those marketing efforts are much better used getting people straight on the phone.
The website is a big excuse. It can come in, we can have them. I'm not saying never. I do teach them in my UPswing Mastermind, but most people do it for the completely wrong reason. All of your marketing efforts are going to a dead-end, to a website. There's no point saying you're going to have a website and not social media, because how are you going to get traffic to the website when we are in a social media age right now, I know it's changing, everyone knows it's changing, but we don't know what to. And right now there is something like 10 billion active users on Facebook a day.
We're trying to constantly jump into this fear loop of what-ifs instead of staying present and maximizing what's here right now.
You can be on social media right now getting clients, or you can be stuck in this loop of trying to prepare for an Armageddon day when social media might go down. I have clients who are making $5,000-$10,000 a month on Instagram. Yeah, Instagram might go away, but at least right now they are building their business, they're serving people and they're getting clients.
What's most important is that those who were in the game showing up on social media right now are building connections, building a following. There will become a time, not that far from now, where you will no longer be able to do so for free. It doesn't matter what platform comes in, what platform gets blown down by the big, bad wolf.
The connections in the community that you build now are your opportunity to do so for life. And the way to do that is on social.
Anyone who was in my mastermind programs even a couple of years ago knows that I wasn't even really that into social. The way to do that is right now on social media. If you want to send people to your website from there, great. Ideally use a formula system, like the UPswing system and get people on the phone and helping them and start coaching them and keep that going and sure, build a website on the side if you want.
This came to my awareness yesterday because we have had conversations around earning a website, blog and SEO. And this week, I don't understand the full detail but what I know is Google has drastically cut many, many health sites. Many of you might've seen them, there are graphs going around the internet of well-known health sites. Some health coaches whose SEO searches were like up and down, and then it is blank for the last week. It doesn't surprise me. We've seen waves on the internet before where the government body shut things down or people aren't liking natural health or whatever that might be. Today as we speak, building something on Google or a website today is riskier than building a business on Instagram, which in my opinion, is the riskiest social media platform of all.
So what I'm really saying is we don't know. We can't pretend to know. I'm an experienced business coach who mentors hundreds of people a year. I see what's happening in business, and I'm in business for many years, but I don't know.
Don't let anyone tell you they know. None of us knows what's coming, but we know what's here today.
And so if we can use our time and energy to stay present, the best thing we can be doing on the platforms that are given to us for free today is start building community and connection.
Start building your brand as an expert. Start showing up and speaking about what you want to be heard for. We have these free platforms right now. We can say what we like. We can do what we like. Maybe they'll get cut off. But this is what we have right now.
If there was one core thread that I would say coaches with million-dollar businesses up to $10 million businesses, everybody is talking about the importance of using the time now to grow a connection, to grow trust. Anyone in my programs knows that right now is mostly happening through video. But also through, thoughtful posts, heartfelt posts et cetera.
Anyone that knows me, I'm never going to sit here and tell you, build a business this way or that. In fact, I just did an interview this morning with a good friend and we've built our business on completely opposite principles. You can learn all the principles you like, build the kind of business coaching you like, but you got to learn to listen to you. The way that you can learn to listen to yourself, build the business that's trying to come through you, that's meant to be out there in the world is to stay super present and to show up today and serve with what's in front of you.
Don't wait for the fair. Don't build something for the one day when everything's going to crumble. Focus on what is working, focus on what you can do today, and start being seen.
Start getting your message out there. Start asking people to work with you. The way that you built trust is actually by showing up, it's actually by being consistent, it's by being willing to add your thoughts to a conversation, you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to be unique and original. Just add to the conversation of health. Let us all have conversations about health together online, and the way you will build trust is by showing up consistently. People will learn to trust you in their nervous system when they've seen you about 19 times. So never feel that you are being too much online.
Start showing up on these beautiful free platforms that we have. And I'm really grateful for our platforms. I'm grateful that I got to connect with you today.
I hope many of you enjoy this. Loving our Healthy Wealthy Society group vibe and buzz lately. I hope this conversation has been helpful. Anyone who wants to add anything to the conversation, I'll keep an eye out for your comments later. Have a beautiful day!
Love,
Amanda xx
P.S. The next step is to communicate the value of your health coaching services with your potential clients. Click here to get FREE instant access to my simple 7-step sales script and get a taste of how I teach my VIP clients to host sleaze-free sales calls.
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