About Geoff Young

You have a message you want to get out in the world.  That’s why you became a health coach in the first place.  You know that in order to attract more clients you need to build or join a tribe of people who know, like and trust you.  You’ve figured out who you want to serve and what you want to offer.  Now how do you get them to join your list so you can start the conversation?  Having an irresistible free offer on your website is great (and necessary), but unless you are getting a lot of traffic to your website it’s slow going, especially in the beginning.  How can you jump start your list building efforts more quickly?

One of my favorite ways is through some sort of public event.  This can be in person or online, the same basic strategy applies.  Whether you are doing a “sugar blues” talk or “How to fit in your bikini for the beach”, you need some sort of presentation you can give.  I prefer webinars since my business is mainly online, but everything I’m talking about applies even if you’re giving a local talk someplace where you need to find more people to join you.

This is how I have build my list as large as I have.  When I was about 3 months into my business I was growing discouraged at how slowly my list was growing so I decided to host a webinar.  I didn’t have many people on my email list or fan page and almost no money for advertising, but over the course of about 3 weeks I managed to get a couple of hundred people signed up for the webinar.  I don’t even remember if I made back the amount of money that I had invested in advertising on that webinar itself but I had 200 more people that were reading Health Coach Weekly and I was over the moon.  Each time I do this now it gets a little bit easier, since I have a larger audience and more followers on social media.

Step 1

Create a squeeze or landing page for your event.  This can range from a simple form on your website to a dedicated page that is formatted specifically to collect emails.

You can put a video on it if you like, or just a really short description and catchy title about what people will learn by joining you.

Bullets are good here, you just want to whet the appetite and make people say “I need to go to this…”

Step 2

Link to this page wherever you can think of.  Your website, facebook, twitter, pinterest, any groups or forums you may belong to where your peeps hangout.  This last one just make sure it is the appropriate place to share and that you are providing valuable content first.

This is really the whole key to educational based marketing.  You need to provide really great content to your audience well in advance of asking them to break out their credit card and buy anything from you.  Especially in these days of slick marketing messages and over-hyped sales videos, focusing on serving your audience is definitely the way to go.

Step 3

Buy some advertising.  I meet so many people that are either scared of this or just plain opposed to it.  In brief, you just need to get over that hurdle.  You can’t help anyone if you don’t have anybody to talk to.  People are out there searching for you right now, they just don’t know it.  If they click on your ad, come to your event and it starts their transformation, do you think they will care how it was they found you.  No, they just want to find the solution to their problem, which is YOU!

I usually recommend people start out with facebook advertising for a bunch of reasons.

• Reasonably low learning curve.
• Easy to use on a budget.
• Not as many restrictions as Google PPC. (pay per click)
• No up front costs
• Everyone is on facebook!

If you haven’t heard already, I am hosting a webinar case study of exactly how I do this.  I will give you a behind the scenes peek into the back end of my facebook ad account and show you the different options that are out there.  I’ll show you how to create a facebook event, what the best types of ads to run are and how to set them up, as well as share my results with you.  There are many different types of ads you can run and some get much better results than others.

If you are anything like me, you started writing a blog without really knowing all the ins and outs of what makes quality content, both in the eyes of your readers and in the eyes of the search engines… and how do blog comments come into play.  Most people focus all their energy on only 1 of these things.

If you are writing strictly for the search engines, you find yourself worrying about what is the right keyword, did I put it in the right place, what the hell are ALT tags anyway?  If you are just writing content for your audience (or potential audience) you focus on what would best serve them and what you can offer, but without anyone finding your wonderful blog post that beautiful piece of prose goes into the internet desert.  Maybe a couple good friends left some nice blog comments but you were hoping a few potential clients would read your masterpiece and decide to sign up for your newsletter.

If you’re interested in some of the more technical aspects, I wrote a series last year on health coach blogging, there are links to the next 2 parts at the end of the post.

In today’s article I am going to focus on blog comments and a few reasons why they are important.

1.  Building Your Tribe

The most important part of building your biz is either starting or becoming a visible member of a group of people who look to you as an expert and want to listen to what you are saying.  This is hands down the most important long term business building strategy.  Sure, it takes time.  Like all good things, there really is no shortcut.  By commenting on other blogs in your niche and sparking discussion on your site, you will increase the engagement of your audience and get yourself out there more.

This doesn’t need to be a huge deal.  But it should be part of your online strategy.  In  steps four and five I will cover some of the technical aspects of what are the best sites to comment on from an SEO perspective.

Make sure when people comment on your blog to comment back.  This is not just good for building relationships with your community, google loves to see engagement, it tells them you’re content is something people are interested in.

2.  Becoming The Expert

This goes hand in hand with #1, your whole goal in building your online presence is being seen as the go to person in your specific area of expertise.  Most people don’t want to buy whatever it is you are selling right now, but they are looking for information.  When you become their source for quality information, they will open and read your emails.  Then at some later point when you offer your product or service they will already have an affinity for you and trust your recommendations.

A key here is letting go of expectations.  It is perfectly fine for me if a ton of people on my list never buy any product or service that I offer.  You’re potential clients can feel when you are desperate, and trust me, it doesn’t feel good.  Remember, focus first on building relationships and giving top notch content and information.  I know, easier said than done, especially when you are first starting out, but it will benefit your handsomely in the long run.

3.  Connect With Other Experts

One of these easiest ways to get noticed by an expert in your field is to start leaving engaging comments on their blog.  Remember, just like with potential clients, offer value, not “what can you do for me” or my all time favorite.  “I want to tell you about this wonderful product that all your subscribers really need.”

4.  Getting Backlinks to Your Website

Getting backlinks from other websites to your site is valuable both for SEO purposes and if it is something that interests people, you will also get some traffic benefits, although that is usually pretty minimal.  In basic terms, a backlink is any link form another domain that links to your website.  I won’t bore you will all the technical jargon, just be aware that most popular sites have what are called no follow links.  This basically means that you don’t get any SEO benefit from them.

On my site, I use a wordpress plugin called CommentLuv.  This automatically generates a link back to your latest blog post if you put your website link in.  If you are using an IIN site, I think you need to put the raw URL in, not whatever domain you have redirected to the IIN site.  CommentLuv is a great tool for mangaing blog comments.

5.  Get Your Picture Online

Have you wondered how people get their pictures to show up on blog comments?  This is using an online tool called a Gravatar.  It is quick and free to setup, just make sure whatever email you use to register your gravatar is the same one you use for blog commenting.  Here is the site to grab your gravatar.  This is the same tool used to get your picture to show up in the author box if you are using a wordpress website.

The best sites to comment on are (in no particular order)

• Sites where your potential clients may be reading.
• Other authority sites in your niche.
• .gov / .edu sites are given higher SEO importance, but most are no-follow links and ones that are do-follow are usually spam ridden.
• Established websites, if you are going to get any SEO benefit, it won’t come from brand new sites or sites with a zero page rank.
• Your own website.  This is one of the places where you can start establishing relationships with your tribe.

I hope you now have a little better grasp of why blog comments are important for you to start thinking about.

I’d love to hear your comments and give you a link back to your site.  So after you go through step 5 and get your gravatar, click below and make sure to use the actual URL for your blog when filling out the form so I can give you some Comment Luv.

To read a recap of Day 1, CLICK HERE.

The second day of the Integrative Nutrition Live Conference March 2013 was just as IINspiring as the first.  Over 1000 IIN grads filled the Jazz at Lincoln Center for a day of community, connection and IINspiration.  Here are some of the highlights from Day 2.

Mindset Secrets for Health Coaches

Fabienne Fredrickson kicked things off by talking about our mindset as Holistic Practitioners trying to market a business.

Here are some of the highlights from her talk.

• We don’t always fit in when we want to change the world.
• We are here for a different reason, to make the world a better place, the way only we can do it.
• We are here to share our vegan, gluten free, organic “brownies”
• When you don’t share your brownies, you are not being of service to the world.
• We change the world one client at a time.
• Add a zero to that, and you can affect 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 people with your message.
• The more people you serve, the more money you make.

How to play a bigger game.

• Create a message around your “brownies” – story, message, mission
• Create a clear marketing message around it, get out there in a much bigger way.
• You then multiply your income dramatically.

 

So why isn’t every entrepreneur doing this?

• “Who am I to be really successful?” – felling of not being good enough or knowing enough
• Feeling of not deserving abundance
• Playing too small – what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
• Self sabotaging behaviors. Things we do that go against our goals.
• A very loud inner critic.
• Using excuses to not take action.
• 1. I don’t have money.
• 2. I don’t have time
• 3. I’m not ready, fear
• 4. It’s too hard
• Must say yes to the new opportunity that shows up as the answer to your dreams.
• Perfection paralysis
• Analysis paralysis

You were never taught that to experience abundance 3 things need to be congruent.

1. Thoughts – takes same amount of effort to play big or small.

2. Beliefs – if you have fear of success or abundance

3. Actions – you can say “I want a 6 figure biz and I believe I can, but even if they are congruent, if your actions aren’t lined up, nothing will happen.

Thoughts (conscious)+beliefs(subconscious)+actions(behavior)= congruence.

Mindset is 90% of the reason for your success or failure, because it controls your actions.

Your subconscious mind(what you believe and fear) holds the trump card.

If you want to succeed, you must look inside.

The inner game of abundance

Step 1 – Dream bigger

Step 2 – Clear and upgrade your belief system

Step 3 – Act with faith

Have courage in taking action in spite of your fears

Stretch beyond your existing comfort zone.

Goddard College to Offer M.A. Degree Program for IIN Graduates

Dr. Greg Braxton Brown announced a M.A. degree program with Goddard College.  By fall, there will be a special M.A. degree program specifically for IIN graduates.

36 credits, 3 semesters

Create your own unique education around health and wellness.

http://www.goddard.edu/iin

Dennis Kucinich Shares His Personal Health Journey

Another unique aspect of the IIN experience is the diversity of supporters the program has.  Former U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich was joined by his wife, Elizabeth Jane Kucinich, who is the director of public affairs for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

After talking about the state of the healthcare system in the U.S., Mr. Kucinich shared his struggle with Crohn’s disease and his personal journey to health.  After spending years struggling with Chron’s, he discovered a plant based diet and transformed his health.

Elizabeth Kucinich from http://pcrm.org/ reminded us that every time we choose the food we put into our bodies, we express what we want to be in the world.

Our food choices determine agricultural policies, what foods are in our supermarkets, etc.

Think about the larger consequences of our actions.and even larger issues like climate change, since industrial animal agriculture is the largest cause of greenhouse gases.

Mr. Kucinich closed with talking about whether or not many hereditary diseases are not actually created by the food and lifestyle choices we inherit from our family and culture..

Path and Passion

Marilena Minucci from http://quantumcoachingmethod.com/ told us that the current state of your path is a direct reflection of your relationship to your passion.

Then she shared some tips for turning your scared places into sacred spaces.

• ask for help
• get out of your own way
• none of us are ever alone in this work
• collaboration gets us farther than working alone, need to jump into the river
• Whatever you are stuck on, do it, deal with it, or delete it from your list

She gave some questions to ask yourself daily:

• What is the very next step I need to take even if it scares me?
• Even if I have no idea where it will lead?
• Even if it upsets the order of my life?

Are you going to listen to the fear or follow the flow?  The only way to get 100% on the test is to not get 100%.  This was a good reminder for those of us that get stuck wanting everything to be perfect before we get started.

One of her secrets to get back on the path of your passion is to couple self compassion with self care

• Are you making self care a priority?
• Remember that healing the world starts with you.

Candice Kumai gets Sexy in the Kitchen

Celebrity chef Candice Kumai from http://www.candicekumai.com shared tips on how to cook yourself sexy from her new book “Cook Yourself Sexy.”

She had the crowd in hysterics with her impersonation of her more traditional Japanese mother and grandmother, apologizing each time she finished saying “I can’t help myself”

A term that Candice coined in her new book is FWB – foods with benefits.

Everything you consume should give something back to you.

I think everyone in the audience resonated with the subtitle of her book, sexy is made in the kitchen not in the bar.

Gabrielle Bernstein Tells Us We are all Miracle Workers

Gabrielle Bernstein of http://gabbyb.tv/ took the stage fresh off of graduating from her Kundalini teacher training.  One of the cool things about watching people travel the spiritual path on the public stage is seeing them mature.  You can really feel the shift when someone is talking about being of service to the world and actually in alignment with what they are saying.

Here were some nuggets from Gabrielle’s talk:

• My bottom was my greatest gift. I know what it was like. That experience of knowing is the greatest gift.
• Your greatest gift to the world is to learn how to carry the message of transformation.
• You came to IIN to be a miracle worker.
• We go from body identification to spiritual identification.
• All your client’s want from you is your authentic truth, your true story, that you struggle too, how you recovered.
• If I’m going to serve I need to have a clear container, helps to put down bad habits and behaviors and start taking better care of self.
• We don’t have time to compare, attack and judge.
• You can go big, or you can get stuck.

Your body is the container through which you serve. How can you treat it with more love and respect.

You don’t need to figure it all out, all you need to do is ask.  “How may I serve the world? How may I serve my body?”

Dr. Frank Lipman Teaches The 4 R’s

Last up was Dr. Frank Lipman from http://www.bewellbydrfranklipman.com/.  He opened by sharing about his experience of becoming an acute care physician in South Africa under apartheid and how sometimes the sangomas, or witch doctors(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_healers_of_South_Africa) were able to help patients that he couldn’t.

He talked about the Functional medicine tree and the basic difference between western and functional medicine:

• Western – treat the leaves – disease model
• Functional – look at the trunk – underlying dysfunctions
• Need to look at the root causes.
• Inflammation – common mechanism of many diseases

We play “Whack-a-Mole” medicine in western medicine, moving from one symptom to the next without dealing with the root causes of the problem.

He said that when he doesn’t know where to start, he starts with treating digestive dysfunction.

• 70% of immune system in digestion, 2^nd brain
• Imbalance digestion common cause of inflammation.
• Digestive tract, skin of your internal system
• 10x more organisms in digestive system than cells in your body.

The 4R program

Remove – the foods that could be triggering inflammation, elimination diet, sugar, gluten, dairy, soy, eggs. The key, removing bad bacteria, parasites in gut. Grapefruit seed extract

Replace – Replace enzymes, HCl, GERD often from too little acid. HCl or apple cider vinegar

Re-inoculate – microbiome,

Repair – the lining of the gut, glutamine

Make sure to tune in on Wednesday when I will share another article on my takeaway’s from the conference, these were meant to be more of a recap for all of you that couldn’t be there with us.  Hope to see you at the next one.

Geoff

 

To read a recap of Day 2, CLICK HERE!

Another IINspiring live conference at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  The location has moved back to Jazz at the Lincoln center in NYC.  This is a very intimate venue with not a bad seat in the house.  If you are an IIN graduate and haven’t made your way to one of their conferences yet, I highly recommend you make it to the next one.  This is one of the many things that is unique about the IIN education, a strong, connected alumni community and continuing education.

The conference opened with Joshua Rosenthal in his typical understated style.  He is a man whose mission is to change the health and well-being of this county and the world.  He shared some inspiring words to encourage all of us to help with this mission.  This is a welcome message to all of us that are aspiring to affect great change but tend to get lost in the minutiae of starting and running a business, sometime losing touch with the greater vision of why we started this work.

Nisha Moodley of http://fiercefabulousfree.com/ shared some insights into how to have an effective email newsletter for your health coaching business.

1. Have them “opt-in”.  Just having people subscribe to your list doesn’t give you the ability to communicate with them directly.  Putting an opt-in box on your website is the first step towards building your email list.
2. Create Evergreen Content.  Try to share much content that is not going to be irrelevant next week.  You want your articles on your blog that go into your newsletter that will still be relevant to your audience a year from now.
3. Write where your tribe hangs out.  A great way to get exposure is to find guest posting opportunities on other blogs.
4. One clear call to action.  Only ask your readers to complete 1 task after reading your newsletter.
5. Pay attention to details.
6. Never add people and don’t freak.  This is a big one, never add people to your email newsletter list without their permission.  Doing this will greatly increase the likelihood of getting your messages marked as spam.  Also, don’t freak out when someone unsubscribes.  I know the first time someone unsubscribed from my list a few tears were shed.  Now I realize that is just the way it is, and really, you only want people on your list that are interested in you and your message.

Next was Robert Notter of

http://www.bookclientsnow.com/

.  His main topic was on our relationship with money.  Some of the key points from his talk were:

• You deserve to succeed because your work is important.  You can’t change the world if you play too small.
• Model prosperity for your clients
• Everything you want in your business and your life is just outside your comfort zone.
• The more income you have, the more you can give away.
• Successful people take action in spite of their fears

Robert closed with an inspiring quote “I am worthy of very good income. I do not have to struggle to achieve it: it comes easily to me.”  Good reminder for all of us.

Next up was Carey Peterson and Stacey Morgenstern of http://www.holisticMBA.com.  They urged all all health coaches to stop playing the waiting game to take your business to the next level.

Stacey asked “Are you attacking your clients with recommendations? Stop playing the hero, it’s your EGO trying to feel validated as a coach.”  You will be much more attractive to your clients when you don’t fall into this trap.

Carey urged you to have fun while you’re changing the world.

The two areas they recommended for all coaches to become confident in are your coaching skills and in closing the deal.

They then talked about 4 kinds of people in your life.

1. People who suck from you

2. People who support you

3. People who spy from you

4. People who stretch you

Coaches need to learn how to stretch their clients, not just be a friend who supports them.  Sometimes your clients will need you to challenge them.  Do you know when your client is likely to fall off track with things like self sabotage and old behaviors?

Here are some places in her programs that Stacey noticed her clients sabotaging themselves.

1. Closing the deal – “I should be able to figure this out on my own.”

2. On session #2 – They start second guessing themselves. The fear is that they won’t be able to follow through or made a mistake.

3. Session 4 or 5 – Old behaviors resurface an internal dialogue of I’ve been bad or I will be judged or not liked by you

4. Session 10 or 11 – They start to panic, think the relationship with you is coming to end, which can bring up fears of loss or abandonment

They suggested to use a coaching skill called Pre-framing.  This means setting the clients expectations before a challenge happens, so they recognize it and can navigate it with curiosity.

“You’re doing so great and I want you to continue to do great.  Next week is classic self-sabotage week.  If it does happen, it is totally ok.  It may look like…I figure if I tell you about it now, you will recognize it. No judgment, only curiosity.  No matter what happens, I encourage you to show up for our session.”

Day 1 of the Integrative Nutrition Live Conference closed with Danielle LaPorte of http://www.daniellelaporte.com/.

She opened by saying that our culture is suffering from an anemia of encouragement and told us that we are here to love the person we are with.  Make every being the ultimate object of your reverence.

She continued the theme of the day of feeling the fear and doing it anyway by telling us to “Throw the dream out in front of you and walk into the dream, because you’re never ready.”

For the work that we do passion is a qualification.  You have to want what you want with all of you.

“Your desire is like a cosmic pheromone that you’re emitting.”

Danielle then went into her Desire map.  I won’t do her the disservice of trying to explain this, but it was a very inspiring talk.  You can find out more at http://www.daniellelaporte.com/thedesiremap/.

One of my favorite suggestions of hers was to create a stop doing list. Make a plan to get what you’re resentful for off your plate.

A couple of other high points that she talked about for me were:

“Generosity is the next frontier in business.” and  “When you’re in your joy, you’re in more service.”

She closed with a beautiful piece of spoken word.

“Decide to rise, not out of obligation. Because you want to expand your possibilities, explore your place in the universe.

You have to lean in, listen up and get closer. This is your soul talking to you.

Make the decision to rise.”

Make sure to share your favorite moments from the Integrative Nutrition Live Conference March 2013 below.