Why Her $15,000 Website Didn’t Earn a Dime
Credit: H. Koppdelany
Your money and time are very important to me. That’s why it’s hard to hear stories where people try to grow a spiritual business in ways that don’t work.
For instance, one woman I spoke with recently spent over $15,000 on a beautiful website that didn’t work. The graphics were awesome and the design was slick. But it didn’t bring her a single client.
Other times, it’s been time invested. It’s painful to focus years of your life energy and have nothing to show for it.
What’s the difference between spiritual people who grow a successful business and those who burn through their resources trying?
Know What Your Potential Client is Asking
Despite their good intentions, most coaches, therapists and healers take a misguided approach to sharing their message. They focus on techniques, training and experience.
In other words, they tend to talk about how awesome the techniques they use are, what kind of training they have and how long they’ve been at the work.
While these are important, they’re not the most pressing questions for your potential client. It’s like a sales person launching into a lecture about their engineering degree when someone wants to know if a car they are considering drives well in the snow.
This is exactly how to create the experience of investing $1000’s and many hours of work without seeing your business grow.
On a heart and soul level, your potential client is asking 2 questions:
- Does this person understand my situation?
- Can she/he help me?
Most coaches and therapists don’t pass the first question. They don’t build empathy. So people click away from your site or throw out your brochure – no matter how much time, energy and good thinking you’ve invested. OUCH!
How to Build Empathy Quickly
In order to establish a heart connection in a fast paced world, you need an effective way to say, “I’m here to serve people exactly like YOU.”
When you do this, magic happens. Your desire to help them reaches off the screen or piece of paper and touches their heart. Their curiosity is engaged. They WANT to know more.
The best way to do this is to be very clear about who you are focused on serving. That’s why I always encourage my clients to get clear on this question:
Who can you best serve?”
Spend time with that question BEFORE you invest lots of time, energy and money on marketing. Because everything in a successful conscious business starts with being clear about who you are there to serve.
How clear are you about who you can serve the best? What are your questions about how this can help you attract more clients? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the form of a comment below.
Aloha Paul! Great post today 🙂
It is amazing how long it can take to actually “get” this part of marketing ourselves. What I saw happen organically was the positive comments coming in via clients, blog comments and emails were different than what I thought I was focusing on.
What people were coming back for was the compassionate heart (I was trying to go more medical based).
I’ve realized people made the changes I was originally focused on when they felt heard and held NOT when they learned a new skill or technique. They needed both and letting MY heart open has made all the difference in the world.
Thanks for holding the space for me!
Gina,
YES! YES! Did I say YES?!? 😉
“What people were coming back for was the compassionate heart” – when we start leading with our compassionate hearts Gina, spiritual entrepreneurs really start to shine. It’s when we resist our natural strengths that we get into such stuck places. I really appreciate you sharing your experience!
I am very clear about that! This is because I have walked in my clients’ moccasins. I know exactly what they are thinking and what they are feeling – and I can help them using this wonderful tool called EFT.
My question would be how to reach more potential clients who do not know what EFT is (as we know, we can teach them easily even over the phone).
Hi Carna,
Thanks for stopping by. Glad you’re vibrating clarity about this. In terms of “how to reach more potential clients who do not know what EFT is”, I would agree with EFT founder Gary Craig. Grow the number of people who see you as a resource in your chosen area: in your case, people who are dealing the emotional after effects of having missing or unavailable parents. As more and more people who want help with this start to trust you, they will ask for help clearing these issues. Then you teach then EFT.
That’s exactly what Gary Craig recommend and it’s worked beautifully for me. I focus on being the best resource I know how for spiritual people wanting to grow a helping business (coaching, therapy, EFT practitioner, etc). With 95% of my clients, we run into mindset issues. Then, if they don’t already know it, I teach them EFT. My business grew 61% last year and I turned a whole bunch of people onto EFT. You might notice that the words EFT are nowhere on my homepage ..
Big hug Carna!
Thank you, Paul, makes perfect sense. I suppose I have been too focused on EFT (since it is such a wonderful tool :-)). However, it never really is about the tool, isn’t it.
Carna,
Glad it makes sense. Yes, I LOVE EFT. And, for me, the energy is MUCH more important than any tool. Even EFT. 🙂
Have a wonderful weekend!
Nice discussion Carna and Paul. I love your Clarity on this, Paul. This post has given me an ah-ha moment. 🙂
Linda,
Gotta love those “ah-ha” moments! So glad this blog has helped you experience this. Thanks for sharing your ah-ha 🙂 with us.
Thanks Paul for this post.
I still don’t know on what to focus…
I had clients with so many various issues and I can’t pinpoint any specific area…on the other hand I know exactly what kind of issues I won’t handle – at least for the moment –
For month I stopped posting on my website out of frustration not knowing what to post…..
Adi,
Thanks for sharing your situation with us. It sure can be frustrating sometimes, huh? One thing I’d suggest right off is tapping on the frustration. Your inner clarity is MUCH more likely to come through when you’re relaxed.
After you are a bit more centered, I’d suggest exploring who you might feel comfortable exploring this with. Most of the people I know with really clear focuses in their EFT or coaching businesses have had support in doing that. A free way to do this is to set up a Mastermind buddy for yourself – that is, find another person who’s working on growing their EFT or coaching business and starting meeting regularly to work on these kinds of issues. Another alternative is join a professionally led Mastermind group. I lead 4 of them currently – feel free to email me if you’d like info about them.
Warmly,
Paul