What To Do If Your Post Goes Viral: Doula Edition
Hey Doula, ever had a post go viral and you thought, “Okay, what now?”
If you’ve been wondering how to capitalize on viral posts, navigate busy mom life, or operate a two-audience business, then get out a pen and paper, this blog post is for you.
The 3 questions we answer in today’s blog:
“How do I capitalize on a social media post going viral as a doula?”
“How do I manage a career in birthwork as a busy mom?”
"I have two separate halves to my doula business, how should I approach the freebies, the website, the mailing lists, everything?"
Every Friday, I answer your biggest questions right here on the Birthworker Blog AND the Birthworker Podcast.
To submit a question for next week’s podcast, click here.
Question 1: “How do I capitalize on a social media post going viral as a doula?”
Don’t ever ignore a viral post. The very first thing you should do is make sure there is a clear call to action in the post. If it's an Instagram reel, put that call to action as the very first sentence. Most of the time when people are watching reels, they're not clicking to read the caption. So if a reel starts going viral, edit the caption to have a clear CTA right in the first sentence.
Keep in mind that posts can continue to get traction way down the road, especially reels. I have made reels that keep getting traction for months on end. My most viewed reel has almost two million views, and that did not come over a weekend, that came over several months. So every so often, I would go back and update the CTA to something relevant to what I'm working on right now.
Another viral post “best practice” is responding to every single comment, especially the people who seem like they would be great clients. DM them to open the conversation, but never start off with a sales pitch. Focus on creating a connection, building your community, and finding friends online.
The last viral post “best practice” if you have a post that's currently going viral is posting content on your stories that's related the viral post. When someone sees that viral post, they're going to click on your profile and check out your stories. That's when they're going to decide if this is someone they want to follow or not.
And of course, never be afraid to sell on your stories. Take advantage of the new people viewing your stories, or just seeing your page in general. Whether it’s your stories, highlights, bio, do not be afraid to sell because that is why you're here. That is how you help moms, by getting them inside of your offers, packages, or programs.
Question 2: “How do I manage a career in birthwork as a busy mom?” -Gina
If you are a busy mom and if you want to attend births in person, go listen to Episode 3, My Best Tips for Being a Doula When You Have Babies at Home. It lays out a variety of ways to attend birth in person if childcare is a little bit hard to navigate, or you have your own nursing, co-sleeping baby at home.
I’ll answer this question a little bit here too. I bet if you've been around for a while you can guess, but my answer is that you shouldn't depend on attending births in person as your only source of income. That's how I have managed a career in birthwork as a busy mom. I found alternative ways to make income beyond just supporting births in person, which allows me to work from home more and attend fewer births.
I'm at a point now where I don't need the money from physically attending births, so when I do choose to attend a birth, yes, I charge, but I don’t consider it a major source of income, which takes away a lot of the pressure. If I want to say no to a birth, I can with no pressure. If I want to take a vacation, like I'm on right now, I can with no pressure.
Setting up your business to make income beyond attending births is one of the best ways to manage a career in birthwork as a busy mom. It creates so much flexibility in your work schedule. You want to work only nap times? Awesome, do it. You want to work after your kids go to bed? Do it. That is totally fine.
There are so many ways to make birthwork fit your lifestyle as a busy mom. One of my biggest tips is don't feel like you have to make your business look like somebody else's business. You don’t have to wake up at 5:00 AM and do XYZ to have a successful career in birthwork. Create a career that suits your lifestyle rather than the other way around. This was one of the reasons I built a business beyond only supporting birth in person. I thought to myself, the only way I can make this work is if my partner can quit his job and stay home with our daughter. So I busted my ass, and within less than a year, I made it happen.
I replaced not only my income but his income too. I started incorporating one-on-one virtual coaching, virtual doula support, and mainly, online childbirth education. I created a childbirth education course once, launched it multiple times, and sold it over and over and over. Not only did that allow me to impact lives across the world, but I created a passive income stream.
Question 3: "I have two separate halves to my business, I'm a life coach and I'm a birthworker. Should I have one website for both of those, or should I have two separate websites? Ideally, I want my birth clients to transfer into life coaching clients, so how should I approach the freebies, the website, the mailing lists, everything?" -Kristen
This is a very big-picture question, which means you are envisioning where you want your business to go 6 months, 12 months, or even 5 years from now. I don't see a lot of people doing that. That is one of the first things I have my students consider when I teach about websites, freebies, mailing lists, and things of that nature. It's so important to envision where you want to go and then work backward to make that happen.
My very first thought is that life coaching and birthwork have a lot of overlap, and I think they work really well together. I suggest keeping them on the same website, but create separate freebies since they are different audiences with different goals and pain points. Goals and pain points are the two aspects you should consider when deciding on what freebie to create for your audience, and if the goals and the pain points are incredibly different, then create two separate freebies with two separate funnels. As far as the email list goes, I suggest hosting it all in the same email list. I recommend MailerLite.
If you want a list of all of the different tech and software I recommend, click here. You’ll enter your name and email, then I'll send you a list of my 13 favorite tools, MailerLite included.
When you are creating your email list, be careful about how you sort subscribers. Create different groups so you can keep track of who has downloaded which freebie, who's currently pregnant right now, who is interested in your life coaching content vs birth coaching content, etc. Create as many groups as you need to keep track of everything on the backend.
A really quick way to have people unsubscribe from your email list is if you're sending all of those birth emails to everybody, including your life coaching clients who will be thinking, "What? I did not sign up for this. I'm not even pregnant. This is so strange." Maybe not so much the other way around, because if someone is pregnant and signs up for a freebie relating to pregnancy, they're probably still going to be interested in life coaching content. They're probably looking to better themselves because that's what happens when we get pregnant, we want to do everything we can to better our lives.
Remember that there will be some emails that can relate to both of these groups, the life coaching clients and the doula clients, so in that scenario, just email them to both. That's what I would do with my weekly newsletters, and potentially my blog, or my podcast. Whatever your long-form weekly content is, create that with both of these different types of women in mind.
I love the big-picture vision this question creates, so good job zooming out and figuring out how you're going to serve both groups of clientele, and also how you're going to transfer them from one group to the next. Don't want you to look at them like two totally separate audiences. Maybe they start as doula clients and turn into life coaching clients, or maybe they start as life coaching clients and when they get pregnant and turn into doula clients. Always look for ways to bring people from one of those communities to the next.
It's the same with me at birthworker.com. I serve everyone from aspiring doulas who've never taken a training before, all the way to doulas who are totally booked out, nailing the doula stuff, but they just need to figure out how to make it sustainable because they feel burnt out. I help both of those people. Do I send them different emails? Sometimes. Do I try to make the content on this podcast content that would be great for both of those people? Yes, absolutely. When someone enters my world, when they join my email list, they are not stuck in one category.
I've built my funnels in ways that bring people from one step to the next because I've created offers in my business that serve both aspiring birthworkers and experienced birthworkers, no matter what stage they're at in their business.
If you're reading this and thinking that you also want to figure out where your business is going in the next 12 months, 2 years, 5 years, even 10 years, and if you're thinking, Kyleigh, I want to ask you my questions all the time, I don't want to wait until next Friday to get my questions answered, and if you are ready to just package up your obsession for birth and impact lives across the entire world, then you are completely ready for the Birthworker Membership. Click here to learn all about it.
If you are ready to go from side-gig doula to full-time birthworker (with a full-time salary), if you are ready to quit your job, stay home with your kids, and impact lives all across the world, then this membership is absolutely for you.
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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.