Getting Serious About Your Doula Business, Starting a Facebook Group, and Launching a Birth Course
Have you been thinking about creating a course, Facebook group, or membership for your doula business?
If you’ve been wondering how to really get serious about your doula business, then get out a pen and paper, this episode is for you.
Things you’ll learn in this episode:
How working backwards might help you achieve your business goals faster…
The first steps to attracting your dream doula clients…
The sales strategies I have used to make over $100k from my online birth courses …
… and a whole lot more!
To submit a question for next week’s podcast, click here.
Question 1: Since it's a new year, I'm ready to finally start taking my doula business seriously. What are the first steps I need to take?
The first thing to do is think about where you want to be 12 months from now. What does your family life look like? Are you on call all the time? Are you traveling the world? Are you homeschooling your kids? What does your family life look like?
And then of course, what does your business look like? What offers do you have? How many births are you attending? Do you have any online offers? Do you have any coaching programs? Are you hosting workshops, online courses?
Then after you have that nailed down, then we will start working backward to figure out how to get you where you want to go. If your goal is, let's say one year from now, you want to be attending 1-2 births per month with only your dream clients while also coaching women virtually in some way. If that's you, here's where I would start. (I'm just guessing that's you, because I feel like that's most people. At least that's most of the members in the Birthworker membership.)
After you figure out what offers you want to create in your doula business, get really clear on your messaging to make sure that you're only attracting those people.
Then once you've nailed your messaging, then get really consistent on social media.
PS: I teach all about effective social media strategies for doulas inside the Birthworker Membership… And social media is everybody's favorite thing to learn because it feels really good to get off the “content creation hamster wheel.” It feels good to start making content consistently and authentically, and then to see those results immediately.
Once you've done that, the next thing you need to do is create an email list.
The purpose of an email list is to get your followers off of social media and into your world. Once all that is set up, you will then be able to systemize social media and consistently build your community online. When that happens, that's going to free up a lot of time for you to create the thing that's going to make you money. And at the same time, you'll have an audience that actually wants to buy from you when the thing is created.
Where a lot of people go wrong is they jump straight to making something like making an online course or a birth coaching program, but they don't have anyone to sell it to because they skipped the foundational parts. So don't do that. Go back to square one and set it all up in a really sustainable and strategic way from day one.
And of course, when you're ready for help with all of that, I can literally show you exactly what to do every step of the way. So if you're ready for some help, or if you want to follow my step-by-step framework, DM me the word “sustainable,” and we can chat about your next steps.
Question 2: I want to start a Facebook group for local moms to help me grow my doula business. How niched down should it be? Should I let other local birth workers join? Can I advertise my services inside the group? Tell me everything. – Amberly, member of Birthworker Membership
If I could go back to my early days as a doula before I even had my first clients, I would definitely tell myself to start a Facebook group. And so here's what you need to know…
If you are building an in-person business, you absolutely should create a Facebook group for your local community. I would niche it down enough so that it's only actually attracting your perfect clients. For instance, me personally, I would've created a group called “Homebirth Moms in Southwest Florida.” If you're a doula who supports mostly VBAC moms or military moms, then that’s perfect, right? Make a VBAC mom group for your local community, military moms stationed in the US, or military moms stationed abroad.
The key here is that you only want to attract people who are your perfect clients.That is for your benefit in many ways, but the huge one is because it doesn't feel very good to lead a group of people who don't relate to you on any level. Don't let that happen.
Here's what I would avoid when creating a Facebook group to help grow your Doula Business.
I would avoid making a super general group for pregnant women. So don't call your group, “Pregnant Women in Southwest Florida,” because you actually want to create a group where people stay beyond pregnancy.
You want people to join preconception and then stay through their pregnancy, birth, and all through postpartum… and maybe even into motherhood. You want to help foster those lifelong friendships. You don't want to create just a place for people to come and get information for free for a few months before they just leave the group and never talk to anybody again.
Always remember that the benefit of a Facebook group is the community.
So instead of posting in the group once per week about your services, engage with the community every single day and help the other women engage with each other and become friends too.
So why is starting a Facebook group a good idea for your Doula Business?
Because through running a community like a Facebook group, you are going to be seen as a leader in the birth space. When that happens, you find more clients, you help more people, and you make more money.
But don't start a Facebook group as a way to make money, please, because it's not going to happen like that. Don't start a Facebook group as a way to make money. Start a Facebook group to build an authentic community, and then you can watch your entire business grow sustainably over a long period of time. That's the magic.
Question 3: I want to create an online birth course. Since I work with pregnant women, they need my course all the time, and I don't want them to have to wait until I launch again. Can I create it and just sell it from my website all year long?
So this is a really good question, and such a common thought! People often think, "Well, women need my course all year so it's not fair to close my doors to people who need me." And that makes a lot of sense.
You might even think, "If my course is always for sale… I'll sell more and I'll make more money!" But I'm going to tell you why that's not necessarily the case.
If you’re considering creating an online birth course, here's what I recommend.
When you create a course for the first time, it's really important to know that you need to create a buzz to get it off the ground and make your first 50 sales. That's why I recommend launching your course with a full-on promotion (which means you're going to have an open cart day, a ton of promotion for a week, and then a cart closed day).
After your promotion, I want you to close the doors, turn off the registration page, and work with those students for the next 4-12 weeks. When you close the doors and focus 100% on your students, you're going to get invaluable feedback that will 100% make your course better. You are going to get amazing results for your clients, and with that comes some amazing testimonials.
During the process of launching a birth course for the first time, you'll also collect all of your data and create your first baseline. Then you will document your results, and go through the process of launching your course at least 2 more times. So then you've launched it 3 times. And every time you're going to try and tweak your sales process to make it a little bit better!
Let’s say during your first launch, you did a webinar. (If you don't know, a webinar is like a free class to your audience, and then you sell your course on the back end of that. That's my favorite way to launch.) Let’s say the second time, instead of a webinar, you're going to do a three-day challenge. And then maybe the third time, instead of those, you're just going to do an email launch.
And all the while, during each of these three launches, you're continuing to make your course better and better, and you're collecting testimonials from your clients.
After that third launch, that's when you're ready to take all of your data, pull together all of the best pieces, and then build what we call an evergreen funnel. This is a strategy that sells your course all day, every day. You can't just put it on your website, I have to let you know that. There's a lot of strategy included, and actually way more strategies needed with evergreen courses than doing a live launch. So just know that for when the time comes. It involves a lot of tweaking and trial and error. Then after you make that funnel, and only after you do that, will you open up your program for people to join at any time.
Sometimes we have this false assumption that we can just create a course and put it on our website and it's going to sell… but that is absolutely, 100% not the case. You'll actually, more than likely, see a conversion rate of 2x higher when you launch a program live.
So as an overview, picture this: you need to create a course, live launch it at least 3 times, gather data, and figure out your best sales strategy by pulling pieces from your last three launches. And then, and only then, do you put all of that together in what we call an evergreen funnel.
If you were reading this blog post and you were thinking, "I just want to find a way to package up my obsession for birth and find a way to impact lives all over the world…"
And if you have been thinking, "I am ready to build a freaking legacy," then DM me on Instagram @birthworkerpodcast with the word “SUSTAINABLE,” and let's chat about how you can get there faster and with a whole lot more fun!
If you are ready to go from side-gig doula to full-time birth worker… and if you're ready to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and make a lasting impact on lives all across the world… DM me the word “SUSTAINABLE” because I cannot wait to hear all about your goals!
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.