It Doesn't Start With Social Media

On a question-and-answer call earlier this month, a coach asked me something I've been asked a hundred times. They want real human connection with the people they serve. They know those people go looking for help on social media. And they can't stand being on it. How do you find coaching clients without social media taking over your day, and stay visible in a way that feels real?

I told them I'm the same. I loathe social media. I hate it with a passion. And I know that to bring people into my orbit, I need to be visible as a coach. That's the paradox. You know you have to do it, and you have a tension about how you feel about it. If you feel both at once, that's normal.

The answer I gave is the one I built my own practice on. It doesn't start with social media. It starts at the center of your practice, what I call the nucleus. That's why you coach, what you do, who it's for and how you help.

The nucleus

Get clear on why you're here to do this work. Then get clear on the what, the who and the how around it. Why do you coach? What do you do? Who is it for, and who pays for it? How do you solve their problem? Those four answers are the nucleus, and everything else grows out of them.

Once you have that, you create content around it. Your perspective on the coaching problem you solve. The things that matter to you. The way you see it. That's your intellectual property (IP), the thinking that's yours and nobody else's.

Once that exists, you've got assets, pieces of your thinking you can publish. You've got IP you can push to LinkedIn, to a blog, to an email list, to whichever social channel you choose. Social media is a byproduct of the nucleus. It comes afterward, as a channel for thinking you've already done.

Read that last sentence again, because it reverses the order most of us were taught. The platform comes last.

How I got coaching clients without social media

When I say I was an overnight success in five years, this is what I did. I didn't do social media. I went to the library, sat down, wrote a blog post and optimized it for search. Then Google brought people into my world.

When they arrived, they'd find a free thing. If I'd written about email marketing for coaches, the free thing was a nurture sequence they could download. That's a series of emails written to build trust. The series brought them closer, and in time into a conversation about coaching with me.

Blog post, search traffic, free resource, nurture, conversation. That was the whole pathway. There's no single fixed way to do this, and I'm sharing mine because it shows the order. The clarity came first. The IP came out of the clarity. The channel was whatever carried the IP to people. It happened to be Google. It could have been social media, and the order would've been the same.

When AI gives you too much to say

Another coach on the same call had what looked like the opposite problem. No shortage of content. Years of client stories, and with AI the production is fast. The question was where to start. What do you publish, and what do you leave in the pile?

That's a great position to be in. It's also where a lot of coaches find themselves now that AI makes producing content quick. And it has the same answer as the first coach's problem, because it's the same order.

A publishing schedule won't solve it. The last thing you want is to blast out content at random from your collection. Ask one question first. What do the people you want to coach need to believe in order to say yes to coaching with you?

Every piece you publish should move a stranger a step closer to becoming a client. I call that content with intent. I teach the full method as the Chain of Beliefs, a map of every belief a person holds on the way to yes. The content that does the moving is the content you publish. The rest can wait, however good it is. So the belief question sorts the pile for you, before you've opened a single app.

Be the truest expression of you

The coach who hates social media had a follow-up. The world runs on snippets, and they knew they were wordy. Should they learn to be succinct?

Let go of all of that worry about length. I don't want you thinking "I need to be less wordy." What I want for you is to be the truest expression of yourself. That's how you attract the right people. The filtered version of you, the one you think the world expects, attracts the wrong ones or nobody. The true version is the one the people you're here to serve respond to. That's what this work is for.

What to do this week

Do the first step this week, before anything else. Pick up a pen before you open any app. Write four lines. Why you do this work, what you do, who it's for, and how you solve their problem. That's your nucleus. It'll be rough, and rough is fine.

The rest follows in order, at your own pace. Write down one thing those people need to believe before they'd say yes to you. Make one piece of content about that belief, in your own words, as wordy as it needs to be.

Only then choose where it goes. A blog post built for search, an email to your list, a LinkedIn post, a conversation with one person. If it ends up on social media, you'll be posting something you already believe, which feels different from feeding a platform.

Once you're going, create every day. I work in 25-minute blocks, and two a day, four or five days a week, is the rhythm I suggest. Keep putting what you know into words, so there's always something real to send.

I still loathe social media, and I still need to be visible. Both are true. The part that's mine is the nucleus and the IP, and that part I can do every day. Start there.

If what's stopping you is the fear of pressing the button, that's a different problem. I wrote about it in The Send Button Is Still Yours. For the wider picture of using AI in a coaching practice, start at AI for Coaches. Once the IP exists, AI can turn one piece into many formats. I cover that in How to Use AI to Improve Marketing and Visibility.