Episode 52: Boosting Visibility for Online Coaches

The number one problem that I see for most entrepreneurs who are booking calls and they're like, I'm not making any money from my business or I could be making more money or I'm still playing small in some capacity, is that they are invisible online.

Welcome to the Start Tiny podcast. I'm your host Ali bjork, and in 2019, I launched my first ever tiny offer for $27 and have since launched generated over $5 million in revenue after starting an industry wide low ticket revolution. I've been helping other entrepreneurs launch and scale their own tiny offers. And on this podcast we pull back the curtain on exactly how they're doing it so that you can do it too.

What is up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Start Tiny show. And today I want to talk to you all about boosting your visibility as an online coach. So visibility is something that I hear a lot of people say, like, oh, I just need more visibility or I need to increase my visibility or I'm inconsistent with my visibility. Like there's this unknown, like, constant feeling that you have to be on and you have to be visible. But oftentimes we don't really know what that means or we make it mean something different or we don't. We don't really know for what purpose we need to be visible. So for this I want to first define what visibility means in the context of the online coaching space. So visibility is anything that you are doing on social media to potentially be found by your future clients. So visibility could be doing a story a couple times a day, it could be posting a daily reel, it could be doing a live stream, it could be being a guest coach on someone else's podcast or, you know, teaching a guest session for a friend of yours inside of a program of theirs. Visibility is really anything that you're doing to be visible, to potentially be seen and get more eyeballs on you and your business and expose more people to what it is that you have to offer the world. Visibility is crucial for building a successful coaching business for, number one, a lot of reasons. But number one reason is that if people don't know that your business exists, they can't hire you, they can't give you money, they can't help you grow your business by joining your courses, your programs, whatever it is that you're selling. So when I was first starting in the online business space, I was mostly focusing on Facebook groups as my form of visibility. I would go to a coffee shop on Sunday and I would sit and I would write you know, probably like 15 different long form value posts. Like no pitch. No, no, really focus other than posting them in the groups, hoping someone would see the post, that they would be curious enough about me or why I was posting that or what context was around my expertise on that subject. Curious enough that they would go click to my profile and they would see information about my products, about my coaching, about my specialty. And they would want to, you know, book a call or take the next step and learn what it would look like to work together. It's a funnel, right? It is a sales funnel to have content, curiosity, click, look at something, book a call, become a customer. Like it's just another type of funnel. And a lot of people don't really think about it strategically. They don't think about what they're creating or what, how they're showing up online. You know, they're like doing the lip syncing to other people's sounds on reels and without any really consideration of how that's going to help turn into more clients for your business. So there's a couple different things with visibility. The reason I wanted to do this podcast episode today is probably the last 30 days or so, we have been opening up our calendar for 15 minute calls and we've been talking to tons of entrepreneurs. We've been text messaging with tons of entrepreneurs. We've opened up all lines of communication so that we can really help people see what it would take to grow their business and from where they're at to get to their goals and just really unlocking their strategy for them and making sure that they're on the right track. The number one problem that I see for most entrepreneurs who are booking calls and they're like, I'm not making any money from my business or, or I could be making more money or I'm still playing small in some capacity, is that they are invisible online. They're not posting anything on their social media. I can go look at, say, their Instagram profile, for example, and it's been 18 months since they posted even a picture. And the number one way to start getting clients without any fancy funnels or ads or any of the things that I specialize in is to just start getting visible. Like, start, start, make a commitment to yourself over the next 30 days. And I could do this for myself too, even though I'm not just getting started right? Like I think anybody, no matter what level of business you're in, you can make a commitment to yourself to start showing up every single day for your business in some capacity. I post stories pretty consistently. Just that's kind of like the, the daily behind the scenes view of what I'm up to or what I'm doing. Sometimes it's business related, oftentimes it's not business related. But I make sure that I'm always staying visible with stories because that's the easiest for me to just grab a picture and post it with some anecdote or maybe some, you know, snarky comment, whatever I'm doing that day. And it's really easy to do to stay, stay relative and stay current. It's not necessarily turning into more clients because I'm not, I'm not promoting anything. It's not very strategic. It's just me showing up. But it's a comfort level thing where as long as I know that I'm showing up in some other capacity or I'm sharing my life or I'm getting, you know, people are getting to know me, building that know, like, trust factor. It's. If I do have something to promote, I'm not going to feel weird about all of a sudden appearing on social media and telling them what it is that I have for sale now. Cause it's not like I've been invisible or it's not like I've been hiding and now all of a sudden I'm just showing up to sell something way back. I don't know if all of you have heard this story. Maybe not. Probably not. When I was still a service provider and I was building funnels for other people instead of building my own or coaching on funnels and ads, I had a client who was kind of in that cycle of doing an annual launch, right? Like she had her one big launch and she would make enough money historically from this one launch. She made like $150,000 from this one launch. And that's what she would live off of the whole year. Her strategy was that she didn't show up, she didn't email her list, she didn't do anything outside of these launch periods. And then all of a sudden it was launch time and she's super visible and she's everywhere and she's emailing all the time and she's on social media and she's doing live streams. She would be pretty much missing from the Internet except for this period of, you know, like the two, two to three weeks that she was in launch mode. It worked for her in like 20, I'd say like 2016, 2017, before this industry was really taking off and there were, you know, a lot less Coaches at the time. There was a lot. A lot less competition at the time. So 20, I think it was 20, 19 rolled around. She hadn't talked to her list, and she had hired me for the second year in a row to help help her launch. So we did all the same stuff as the previous year. We, you know, had the same webinar series, the same strategy, and this year, she only made $40,000 from her launch. So she was mad at me. And this was like, this is kind of the end of. End of me working with clients or end of me building funnels. She got mad at me and was like, what went wrong? Well, what went wrong was that you didn't nurture your audience at all. You weren't visible. They forgot about you. And then all of a sudden, you show up and you're trying to sell them something. Well, like, the reciprocity isn't there and the mutual respect isn'. Anymore. They've. They've paid attention to somebody else through the rest of the year because they were showing up consistently. They were there for them. And she was only. Only showed up when it was time to ask for money. Right. So I tried to explain that to her, and I was like, you know, let's. Let's try it again in, like, three months, six months. Get visible. Nurture your audience now. Like, show up with value. Really go get in your free Facebook group and, like, talk to people and build relationships, and we can do this again, and you can have another launch and, you know, make another. Another amount of money to live off of. And instead, she asked for a refund, and I said no. And then she did a chargeback, and then I launched a tiny offer two weeks later. So that's kind of the. The story. If you've ever heard me talk about the chargeback, that was like, my back against the wall moment where I had to. I had to get a funnel working or I was. I was going to basically go out of business. I think all entrepreneurs have had a moment like that where sink or swim, you know, you finally have to do the thing that you've been avoiding and the thing that really catapults your business into its next level. That was my moment. But what I've really learned from this experience is that it doesn't work to just show up when you feel like it, when you feel like you have something that you want from your audience, their money, it doesn't work like that. So the commitment that I am asking for you guys in the upcoming month, whenever you're listening to this episode right now it's in April, so I'll say in May. Can you be visible or do something that has to do with your visibility every single day in the month of May? Like, what would that look like for you to show up for yourself every single day? Can you choose one type of visibility that you're going to go all in on? Maybe you start doing a daily live stream that's, you know, like five minutes. Not even. You can just show up really quick and talk about something and then pop off. But people will see your face. They will be grateful for the value. You know, their attention span probably can't handle much more than that anyway. So think about that type of strategy. Like what can you do consistently to show up and serve? Could be, could be you do a reel every single day, but instead of like using someone else's audio, maybe you create your own reel. For example, I have a neighbor who lives down the street and she's getting into coaching and she's sharing her journey with me and she ended up joining this coaching program. So someone else's. And I'm only slightly offended, but that's okay. I didn't, I would have just given her everything for free, but. Because she's my neighbor. But she joined another coach's program and I think the focus of this coach's program is all about organic visibility and it's all about social media. So she's doing reels and she is showing up on, on social media consistently every single day. And all of a sudden I'm like, oh my gosh, I do need help with the thing that she's promoting. Maybe I should hire her. But I never would have thought that if she wasn't showing up and sharing her authentic voice and her story and the background behind why she started her business. And especially for, you know, entrepreneurs who have been doing this for a while, I think we get sick of our own stories and we stop sharing our story and we kind of forget why we even started in the first place. You know, if you're, if you are in the multiple six figures, seven figure business owner, you get into the, the grind of funnels and ads and like sometimes you forget why you even created this business or what you're really, you know, what your purpose really is or you get a little bit beyond where you started. I heard somebody say this past week somewhere that we are usually working with a version of ourselves. If we're in an expert space or the coaching space, we usually work with ourselves about where we were about five years ago. So if you think about you when you were five years ago, what would you have needed to see in a reel? Or what would you need to see on social media to feel like you could change where you were at, or to see that there was a different path, or to see the new opportunity ahead of you, that there was a new and different way that this coach can help you with. But what would you, what content would you need to see? I think for a lot of us, we overthink how to show up and we think we have to be polished and we think we have to be perfect. And we just, we, like, overanalyze and we think about, oh, someone said I needed to have content pillars. Well, I don't know what I could talk about or I don't know all the different topics that I should be talking about, but you can figure it out as you go. One of my favorite quotes and the whole reason why I keep going on about this tiny offer thing, is to start tiny in everything. No matter what you're doing, just start tiny. If you can only get yourself to post one selfie a day on Instagram and you even feel ridiculous doing that in your stories, if you're like, ah, people are going to think that I'm obsessed with myself or that this is cringe, like I'm a narcissist and I'm taking these selfies and these selfie videos. People aren't going to find you unless you're doing that stuff. So on one hand, it's like you kind of have to get over yourself. I say that with as much love as possible, but it's not about you. It's about the people that you serve. It's about the people that you want to help that won't know you can help them and won't see your message and won't know that you're the person for them if you don't get over yourself and start showing up. And same with people who are at the next level of business and maybe they're only doing ads. It's not a good idea to put all of your eggs in just the ads basket, right? Like, you should be creating videos and warming people up and building an audience of organic traffic in addition to what you're doing with ads. So everybody who's listening to this, no matter what level you're at, I challenge you to be visible every single day in May or whenever you're listening, every single day for from here on out, at least give yourself 30 days. Mark it on the calendar. You Know, give yourself a checklist like, did I do something to show up for my audience today? You can educate them, you can share funny stories, you can share customer stories, you can answer frequently asked questions. You can do all sorts of different things around your business and your topic. And if you're still trying to figure it out, content is the absolute best way to get clarity on what it is that you want to sell or what it is that you want to create. If you just show up and you start talking in my favorite places on Instagram, I know I have some clients that say their, their audience is only on Facebook if you're on TikTok. I'm sorry, I've heard really bad things about how negative it is to have spent all that time building an audience on TikTok. And now it might all be going away. That sucks. I'm sorry. But pick a, pick a solution, at least one that's available now until it isn't available, and go all in on just that one place. If you're waiting for customers to just come to you and to just volunteer and start buying your programs, it's not usually how it works. You can't just build it and expect them to come, right. Like, you have to be visible. You have to look at who's responding. That's kind of the next level of visibility. Look at who's liking your posts, look who's commenting on your posts and start talking to them. Start. Every single person that sends us a message or that starts following me, we send, send them a DM and just start a conversation. Not everybody answers, but some people do answer and we have a great conversation with them. And some people even become customers after just following because of the conversation that we had with them. So for the people that feel like I need to have my website done or I need to have my funnels finished, or I need to have my whole value ladder created, I need to have all of this stuff done and you're just procrastinating all over yourself. Just go be visible. Just talk about your stuff. You don't even need a website. You don't even need your funnel done. You don't need your products created because you could always just get on calls. You could sell your time on a call, you can sell consulting, you could sell your highest ticket from these conversations. You just have to start being more visible and really look for the platforms where your audience is the most active and then ask them for engagement. Because you never know what's going to happen if you just ask questions, questions at the end of what you're saying, or you just try to get people to talk back to you and you say, have you. Have you ever experienced this? Is this something that you've gone through? If you look at my Instagram and you look at how I ask questions, like, I might have an inspirational story or whatever, but at the end, I'm always like, do you relate? Is this something that you've been through? How did you handle this? And it's kind of like I'm asking people for advice or asking them for feedback, but it gets them talking. And it's. It's massively beneficial because people always take always about. Our brains are always like, what's in it for me? If we read something, we're trying to apply it to our own lives. We're trying to understand how it helps us or what we're going to get out of it. So at the end of something, if you put it back in their court and say, you know, have you ever experienced this? People love to talk about themselves. It was Napoleon Hill who said, people's favorite word is their own name. Because we love ourselves. We love to talk about ourselves. We. We think people. You know, when people show interest in us, we. We just love it. And if you haven't read the book how to Win Friends and Influence People by Napoleon Hill, I highly recommend that book. It's one of the best out there to start learning about just how people's brains work. You know, it's like a very basic psychology book on how to be likable, on how to be personable, relatable. And it's a huge, huge way that I learned, or I learned a lot from that book. And I probably based a ton of my brand building on the principles in that book. So that's just a side note, but I know a lot of people have challenges around just making time for it, and just make it the first thing that you get done in your morning. You know, you sit down at your desk, check it off right away, and then you're done for the day. If you put it off and you put it off, you know, then it's the kids get picked up from school or whatever, and life gets crazy and you've got a bunch of activities in the evening, and the easiest way is to just get it done right away or record it and schedule it for later, or even just record it and hire a social media manager to help you get it posted, if that's what it's going to take. Just commit to yourself to make this a Priority. And I promise you, it will help your brand so much more than you could ever realize. Just increasing your visibility and the impact and the relationships that you can build from that increased visibility. Uh, it doesn't have to be complicated. Just take the lowest hanging fruit, like the minimum viable product. What can you get yourself to do for five minutes every single day? Even when I do create reels, I look for the easiest, fastest path to getting it done. I don't do a lot of complicated, you know, production on my reels. I don't put a lot of effort into them. I just show up and record something and then post it. You know, put a message to it. And I'm the other secret. If you're looking for secrets on how to create content, I'm always thinking about content and my brain. I mean, I think all of our brains are just kind of running all the time about our businesses and about what people want to hear, what they. What story I would share or what, you know, like, lesson I would want to share with people. So I'm always typing things up in my notes app on my phone. Like, I might be on the stair climber at the gym and some idea hits me and I'm like, writing it up while I'm on the stair climber or in the kids pickup line waiting to pick up my kids from school or even in the grocery store. Like, I'll jot down notes for myself as I'm shopping and I, like, have an idea. If you're always kind of creating content, it's way easier to piece it all together. When you do need to sit down and you need to create a post. If you've got all these different ideas that you can, you know, put into one thing, because you've been creating all the time. And I'm always taking pictures and videos of my life that I can put together as content too. So it just. If you're always creating and you're always thinking through that lens of what can I share? Or how would this apply to my audience? It makes it way easier to sit down and actually get it done when it's time to create the content. So if every day you take the 15 minutes, 10 minutes, you know, maybe get it down to five minutes and just post something and then go off on your day, it will be massively beneficial for so many different reasons. So let me know if you're gonna do this. Send me a message if you are gonna take me up on this challenge. If you are, like, yes, tomorrow's day one. I'm Going to do it. I'm going to make it happen. Let me know. I would love to hear how it goes for you. One time I ran a challenge called the Courage to Captivate challenge, and it was a visibility challenge. It was 21 days of committing to get visible for your business. And I probably have those prompts around somewhere. They probably make a really good thing to put in the show notes. So maybe if I find them, I'll put them in the show notes for you guys and you could download these 21 days of visibility. It was really great challenge. It was a lot of like journaling and like digging in a little bit deeper into the mindset of visibility. Visibility and looking at maybe why you're not visible. Send me a message if you want to do it live. Because I haven't run that since like 2019, but it was a ton of fun. When I did run that live, it was a longer visibility challenge that was pre tiny offers. That was like a different world. But anyway, I'm glad you're here. Please subscribe to this podcast. If you like it, if you've enjoyed this episode or any other episodes, make sure you leave me a review. And if you're not already following along on social, where I'm the most visible would probably be Instagram. So head over to LeBeer. Eric on Instagram is my username and I can't wait to connect with you over there. I'd love to hear what takeaways you have, what inspiration you have. If you're committing to this, please let me know. I can't wait to hear about all of your social media plans and I want to follow along too. Anybody who's in my coaching programs, I tell them this every single week. I'm like, I stalk you guys on social media. I follow all of them and I'm always getting ideas about, oh, well, you should use this as an ad and I'll like message them a post and be like, this would be a great ad. This is a great angle for a sales page because I can learn so much about their businesses and, and hold them accountable too, to being visible because I know how much it does to really grow their businesses. So if you're stuck or you feel like you're not getting the clients that you want, that's the first thing that I would do is just. Just commit for a month. See what happens. If you hate it, you can quit after 30 days. But I bet you that you will see so many results from this visibility that, that you'll want to keep doing it because it really does pay off. Not just in the connections that you make, but financially as well. Because you'll attract so many more clients. You'll get clear on your voice, you will trust yourself, you will build confidence. Like, there's so many amazing things that happen from this daily visibility. So I refresh it. If you haven't done it for a while, hop back in and I'll see you on the next episode. Love you guys. Thanks for being here. Bye Bye. Thank you so much for listening to.

Another episode of the Start Tiny podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it. And you can check out our show.

Notes, which will have links to all.

Of the things we discussed. And of course, if you have any.

Questions for me or you want to.

Tell me what you loved about the.

Episode or anything that stood out, I.

Would love if you'd send me an.

Instagram message over at Ali Bjork. That's where I hang out the most. And if you're interested in learning more about implementing tiny offers inside of your business, make sure to check out the Start Tiny Society, our membership for tiny offers and all things digital marketing.

Don't be a stranger.

I'll see you inside of the Start Tiny Society Society or over on Instagram.