Struggling to turn your social media followers into actual clients? You're not alone, and that's exactly why I've dedicated an entire episode to unraveling the mysteries of lead generation for coaches and service-based businesses. Say goodbye to the frustration of a stagnant client list as I, Caroline Balenska, guide you through the nuances of strategic communication, especially within the tight constraints of a social media bio. With a focus on crafting calls to action that are not just catchy but effective, I promise you'll come away with actionable steps to make your online presence a lead magnet.
Dive into the heart of your business's online journey with our latest strategies, where we debunk the myth that a hefty Instagram following guarantees success. Instead, we explore ways to maximize your marketing with smart campaigns, even on shoestring budgets, and the power of automation to streamline lead capture. We discuss the benefits of customer journey experiences and why a clear marketing strategy—that's authentic to your brand—is essential. From podcasting to YouTube, we explore alternative avenues for lead generation that could be the golden ticket for your business.
Lastly, I'll share a case study that brings it all together, demonstrating the impact of a well-organized Instagram bio with tools like Linktree. Simplifying offerings and creating a seamless customer journey isn't just about keeping followers from feeling overwhelmed—it's about guiding them step-by-step towards that "buy" button. Plus, don't miss out on the transformative insights from Kaylee's coaching call, a beacon for those seeking personalized growth and support. Join us, and let's build a thriving business magnetized to attract just the right clients.
Struggling to turn your social media followers into actual clients? You're not alone, and that's exactly why I've dedicated an entire episode to unraveling the mysteries of lead generation for coaches and service-based businesses. Say goodbye to the frustration of a stagnant client list as I, Caroline Balenska, guide you through the nuances of strategic communication, especially within the tight constraints of a social media bio. With a focus on crafting calls to action that are not just catchy but effective, I promise you'll come away with actionable steps to make your online presence a lead magnet.
Dive into the heart of your business's online journey with our latest strategies, where we debunk the myth that a hefty Instagram following guarantees success. Instead, we explore ways to maximize your marketing with smart campaigns, even on shoestring budgets, and the power of automation to streamline lead capture. We discuss the benefits of customer journey experiences and why a clear marketing strategy—that's authentic to your brand—is essential. From podcasting to YouTube, we explore alternative avenues for lead generation that could be the golden ticket for your business.
Lastly, I'll share a case study that brings it all together, demonstrating the impact of a well-organized Instagram bio with tools like Linktree. Simplifying offerings and creating a seamless customer journey isn't just about keeping followers from feeling overwhelmed—it's about guiding them step-by-step towards that "buy" button. Plus, don't miss out on the transformative insights from Kaylee's coaching call, a beacon for those seeking personalized growth and support. Join us, and let's build a thriving business magnetized to attract just the right clients.
I want to remove all this smoke and mirrors of people just saying, well, really good program, she's got the right price points in there. Who to something? That's a really high ticket program. But when I spoke to her, I found out she's not getting any leads at all and you are sitting somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. Don't feel defeated. In each episode, we'll unravel the strategies, tactics and insider secrets to elevate your marketing to new heights From lead generation to automation, to positioning yourself as the expert to client retention.
Caroline Balinska:I've spent years in the trenches learning the ins and outs of the marketing world. Now I'm here to share my knowledge and invite other experts to help you create a thriving and fulfilling business that you're passionate about. This is the More Clients, less Hustle podcast. We'll be turning your business dreams into reality. Are you ready? I'm Caroline Balenska, your host. Let's dive in and transform your coaching business together. Welcome to the new podcast. I'm so excited that you're joining me here. If you are watching this on YouTube, thank you for joining me. If you have any questions, leave them below in the comments. If you're listening to this on Spotify, you can leave any comments there and questions, and if you're listening to me on iTunes or another podcast, then you can either get onto Instagram and come and join me, or you can send me private messages. All the information is in the show notes, so this is fantastic.
Caroline Balinska:The reason why I've started this podcast is because what I'm finding is that the coaching industry and service-based businesses online are needing a lot of help when it comes to lead generation. If you're watching this and maybe you feel like you're getting more leads than someone else, or maybe you feel like you're getting less leads than other people, I can guarantee you we all need more leads and I can tell you right now. If you're listening and you think that you're failing when it comes to lead generation, I can tell you right now that so are a lot of other people, because it's much harder than what people are trying to make it out to be, and it's actually something that you can get really good at and you can do it really really easily. I'm working with quite a few different clients at the moment, and some of those clients are getting leads like you would not believe, and they've come to me to help me automate their actual business, so the lead generation is easy for them. They're getting so many leads and it's gotten to the point where they're getting so many leads that they just cannot keep up with all the people that are coming to them. But then I've got a lot of other clients who are coming to me and saying, hey, I'm just not getting the leads at all.
Caroline Balinska:What I'm doing is that I've created this podcast because, when it comes to being a coach or an online service provider, we all should stand out. You should stand out and there should be something really special about you and you should be able to help people in a really unique way. So that's what this podcast is all about. I'm going to help you become a standout in your industry. You can be something unique and you can have a business that you really, really love. And you can have a business where people are coming to you and trying to work with you because you have proven to them time and time again that you are the type of business that they want to be working with, the type of person that they want to be working with. So whether you're only wanting five new clients a month, whether you're wanting 20 or 50 or 500 new clients a month, it really doesn't matter, because, at the end of the day, we all have to go through the same sort of process to get there.
Caroline Balinska:There is so much smoke and mirrors at the moment in this industry and it's really driving me insane. There's a lot of people out there that have got huge amounts of Instagram followers, but they're not really. First of all, they're probably some of them, I know for a fact are fake followers. There's apps that we can use to see the engagement rate of some of these accounts, and if you're getting a lot of people onto your Instagram account but they're not actually purchasing from you, they're not trying to work with you, then those are dead followers. Now you might have got them by a company doing you a bad service and giving you fake followers, or you might have gone out there and decided that you know just doesn't matter and you just want fake followers just to make your numbers a little bigger. That is not what the aim of the game is. First of all, I can tell you I used to have a really successful podcast that was all about Shopify and that I've actually sold that business and someone else has taken over and that particular business.
Caroline Balinska:We didn't have a huge following on Instagram. We didn't need that. We were getting our leads from other places. Just because people have got a lot of followers on Instagram does not mean that they're getting a lot of business, and the same the other way just because you don't have a lot of followers doesn't mean you can't get a lot of business on Instagram. All these big brands at the moment they're finding that micro influencers are the best people to be working with when it comes to influencer marketing. So that's between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. So if you are sitting somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, don't feel defeated because you don't need to have a lot of people on your Instagram For the same goals. You might have a huge amount of followers and that's fantastic. I've got some of my colleagues, I've got people that I'm working with and they've got 100,000 people on their Instagram and they're getting a lot of business. So it goes both ways. It doesn't mean that it's not going well. It doesn't mean that it is going well. So if you're looking around at what other people are doing in your industry, don't be freaked out. Don't think that you're failing. Don't think that you cannot get there.
Caroline Balinska:In this podcast, I'm going to be teaching you how to use social media to get you more sales, but I'm also going to be showing you how to do it in other ways as well, because it's not just about social media. I'm going to be showing you how you can use pay per click in a really, really smart way that you don't need to spend a lot of money. I've got a client of mine. On average, she's getting her leads in the email addresses in between $12 and $15. In her industry you could be paying $50 for an email address, so she could have gotten a dump for $12 for an email address. Now, there's ways to do that and there's ways to do it really well, and if you're doing really good pay per click, then it's actually very, very worthwhile. You might only be able to start with a $5 budget. That's okay too. So don't freak out when people say to you oh, do pay per click, because if you do it in a really smart way, you could start to build up your return on investment and you can keep on investing more.
Caroline Balinska:So this podcast is going to cover everything when it comes to lead generation and marketing for your business. Some really important areas I'm going to be covering off in this podcast will be customer journey experiences. I'm going to be releasing an episode of a coaching call that I did with the client last week and I'm going to be releasing that in an episode shortly and it's really interesting because understanding the customer journey is such a huge part of your business and there's a lot of people that have been told the wrong thing. This particular coaching client she says in the coaching that she has been coached by three other people. One of the people is a very, very big fitness person and they're giving her really bad advice for where she is in her business. It might work for him I don't know, but I know that it's not. Well, she tells me it's not working for her. But not only that. When she was telling me how she was going about her lead generation, I knew that it wasn't working for her before she even told me that it wasn't. So we'll be talking about customer journey experiences because that is so important.
Caroline Balinska:We're going to be talking about automating your business. This is a huge area for me. So while clients of mine come to me for lead generation, automation is key because other clients of mine that are getting so many leads and they just they can't keep up with the business because they haven't got enough automation in place for that, and putting those systems in place at the very beginning will help you grow faster and more effectively, because one thing that I hate seeing is people that are getting a lot of leads and then just leaving those leads on the table and not actually getting in contact and not following through on those leads. So I think there's two huge problems You're either not getting enough leads or you're getting so many leads you can't keep up with them, and what you want to do is have a nice balance of enough leads to keep up with the actual journey of getting that person from being a cold lead into being a client and understanding. That process can be done mainly by automation. These days. We're going to be talking about AI.
Caroline Balinska:I'm going to be interviewing amazing guests about all of these topics as well. If you have any questions that you want me to cover off, please leave them below, because I'm happy to cover off anything when it comes to lead generation and marketing, and another big area that I want to be covering is actually looking at other people's funnels and letting you know what those people are doing. This coaching call that I'm doing as an example, she has gone to a guy who is a fitness coach and he says to do a particular type of business strategy and as she was telling me about it, I was like no way, that is just not going to work for you. She has about 3000 followers. I knew that the guy. I didn't know how many followers he had, but I was assuming around a million. She says it's about 600,000. And I explained to her yeah, what he's doing at that large amount of followers compared to what you're doing, it needs to be two different strategies. So what I'd like to do is find some really big people doing amazing things in their business and show you their funnels and explain to you what works, what doesn't work, depending on the size of your business as well. So I'll be breaking that down.
Caroline Balinska:If you have got something that you want to be doing in your business, when it comes to, like me, my child, that's number one for me. Since I finished my time, believe for me, being with my daughter is so important to me and as much as I love my business, as much as I love my clients, I don't want to look back in five, 10 years and think I should have spent more time with my daughter. So what I want to do is automate as many areas as I can, and what I teach people is how to automate authentically, so it doesn't look like a bot, a robot, and it's not about creating a factory business. So, while you need to automate certain parts of your business, there's certain parts along the way that shouldn't be automated and I teach you how you can integrate into your life in a really nice way. For example, one of the strategies that's working really well now is that we create these little videos for our funnels as leads come through. Then my clients are actually creating videos to send to leads that are personalized for that person Hi Sarah, how are you going? And they can actually talk to that person personally, one-on-one, from the lead generation, where it's an automated funnel, but jumping in with some personalized touches. These are all things that I'm going to be teaching along the way as well. They're really cool strategies. They work really well. I'm going to be showing you how they work. If you're not watching this on YouTube, I recommend there'll be a link in the actual show notes if you're listening on a podcast. But also this is also going to help you if you're doing what I do going for a walk, driving the car and then listening to podcasts as well, so you can learn a lot that way as well. Another key thing that I want to be covering off when it comes to building your lead generation funnel is understanding the process. It's part of the customer journey. It's the know, like and trust, and understanding how to post on social media to get people to know, like and trust you. I'm seeing so many coaches out there that are posting a lot of content on social media but it's not getting them sales.
Caroline Balinska:I was talking to a lady the other day. I looked at her website. It's fantastic. She's got really good programs. She's got the right price points in there. She's got the from the very, very, you know entry level come and try me out through to do something that's a really high, high ticket item, high ticket program and she's got everything in between. So she's got all the packages set up properly. But when I spoke to her, I found out she's not getting any leads at all and I was blown away because she's fantastic on camera, she's fantastic with her marketing on her website. She does a lot of content, but she's not getting the leads and when I looked at her actual content, I could see straight away why, when I explained to her, you know you're not actually getting the message across of come and buy from me, so we have to teach people how to know, like and trust us. What is that customer journey experience? How do we get people from the side of the funnel to the end of the funnel in a really nice way, where you don't have to feel like you're selling? Because I think that's really important. If you have got good information, if you're teaching people something that they should know, then you're not really selling them. What you're doing is giving them an opportunity to work with you. Whether you are a life coach, whether you're a personal trainer, if you can help people understand why you are going to give them the results that they want, then they want to work with you, and then you're there for your no longer selling anything.
Caroline Balinska:So today I want to start off with your Instagram. I touched on it before. I'm going to go into it in an episode. If you have a large amount of followers, fantastic. If you have a low amount of followers, no problems at all. I will be teaching you how to get more followers and then also get those followers to engage with you. But today I want to start with bios, I'm going to read out a couple of examples of what I think doesn't work and ways that you can spruce up your bio. So I've got some things on my screen. So, if you're watching this, I'm just going over to a few tabs and I'm going to read some out to you. So this particular life coach I don't want to read out names because I'm not here to put anyone down or talk badly about someone, so I just want to read out some things on there and give you some advice on what to be better.
Caroline Balinska:Finally, the number one thing that I see that most coaches write is the following personal development, life coach or life coach only, and then they go into other things that they like to do, their hobbies, their likes, and one thing that I recommend is that that's not the place for it. So I would not be using. You only get what is that? 150 characters. You only have 150 characters to share really, really vital information, and this particular person says that they're a traveler, they say that they're a model, they say that they're a twin and that information is not a mum. This information is not relevant unless that account, you know, if you say that you're a model and you're trying to get your business from modeling, then that's you know, fine. Is it just a flex? I don't know, because I haven't looked into her account, but she does have a website that's about being a life coach.
Caroline Balinska:We don't care about if you're a mum, I'm a mum and it's not something that I need to put onto my bio. If it's your personal account and you're trying to use it and this is where we have a little bit of a crossover If it's your personal account and you're a personal brand and you're trying to promote yourself as a personal brand, there's a little bit of a crossover there and a little bit of a problem. And I don't want to tell you not to ever say I'm a mum or I'm a traveler. However, what I want you to understand is what are you trying to do from your bio? What is your main goal? I've got so many people coming to me and saying look, I'm just not getting the sales that I want to be getting. I'm not getting the people signing up, I'm not getting people getting to know me, and it's fine if you want to put that information, if you want to say I'm a mum, I own a Lamborghini, whatever you want to tell people, but if you are not getting the sales, that's your personal billboard.
Caroline Balinska:So what are the 150 characters that you can put there that can get people to know, like and trust you more? If you're a mum and that's something really important to you, then you know. And if that's your business, if you're a life coach for mums, then maybe saying you're a mum does help, because I don't want to get life coaching from someone that's not a mum, about mum, about mum things. But is that the most important thing that you need to put in your bio? I'm going to read you out some really good examples that work really well and you can always make posts about this stuff. So you can always create posts. You can make your photo you know you with your child in there.
Caroline Balinska:If you wanted that to come across, there's other ways to use it. I just want you to think really smartly about your 150 characters. Here's another person that they're a life coach. They wrote, wrote Life Coach, grateful, love Inspiring others, love to laugh, I love coffee, and how can I help you? But it's still a little bit weak. So you know to me okay, you're a life coach, but you know what exactly? What's the goal? Well, what are you going to actually do for me, and I think that's important. So really think about how those 150 characters come across. Here's a good one. I help highly driven, ambitious women expand their potential and create their wildest dreams. That's wow. Hey, okay, I'm a highly driven, ambitious woman. I want to expand my potential. I want to create my wildest dreams. So that's a really good one. Then she's got a thing join my membership. And she's got fingers pointing down. I've got that in mind as well. You know, free audit pointing down.
Caroline Balinska:The idea is it's your billboard and you want to get to get people to take action. So what's your call to action and what is the 150 characters of words that really express who you are? So enough about the ones that don't work, because you might be listening to this thinking, hey, mine actually doesn't sound as bad as you know I thought it did, or I'm actually covering up those points. Here are some examples of what are some good other bios. So, transforming bodies and lives. Fitness coach, a motivator your journey to strength starts here. That is a call to action. It starts here, okay, starts here, great. Then you're going to have, like a click below to start your process.
Caroline Balinska:Certified personal trainer I think that's a big one, because there's a lot of people out there that are personal trainers but they're not certified, so saying that you're certified also helps. Let's crush goals together. Confidence, sculpting strong and confident bodies that's a really good one. So if you're dealing with women, sculpting strong and confident bodies would be good. Maybe you're coaching. There's that personal trainer, that personal trainer for nerds or something like that. I heard about him recently, or him or she, I can't remember, but they're a personal trainer and they just personal train nerds, and so the confident bodies would be really good for nerds, because a lot of nerds don't feel that confident, so that would actually help. So, join the movement. I think I read one of those something like that before Unleash your inner athlete.
Caroline Balinska:If you're doing something about athletics, unleash is a really good word because that's really a action word. So personal training, action words. Elevate your fitness game. Mind, body and soul connection, sweat, smile, repeat, and then you've got to add more things into that. So I'm just giving you some really good words that really work Transformation, transformative workouts and lifestyle hacks and now I'll read out some actual call to actions that you could add into it. I'm going to go through some life coaching ones as well. I just want to get you really thinking so, ready to crush your fitness goals.
Caroline Balinska:Join my next challenge and then put a link there. Transform your body. Grab your free workout guide now and then a link. Elevate your fitness game. Book a free consultation to start your personalized plan. Fuel your wellness journey. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter and tips. Let's sweat together. Join my virtual workouts every day. Master your nutrition. Download my free meal planning guide. Ignite your potential DM fit for a personalized workout recommendation. Now I'm going to go into the DMs, like how to actually use comments and DMs. That's going to be more episodes. There's so much about that and that's really an area that's working in 2024 is knowing to get people a DM and comment words. But yeah, ready for a fitness adventure. Check out my online program and then a link for exclusive workouts and coaching. Putting the word free in there. Click here for a free download or click here for a free trial period. Commit to your fitness future. So there's lots of great things there that are actually going to help you get people interested.
Caroline Balinska:Okay, and I'll give you some examples of call to actions when it comes to business and life coaches, so you can always adapt these. But just really think about is your bio really doing you the most service it can be? Because without this sort of information, without a call to action, people don't know what to do next. They land on your Instagram account and then they're looking at your bio and going, okay, they're a life coach, okay, they're a business coach. And then they go and it becomes a very weak message. They go and look at some pictures and then they just go away and they think of something else. So having a really strong call to action in your bio is really good. I recommend changing it all the time. I change mine all the time, so you know I can have different.
Caroline Balinska:I'm going to go into link tree, some sort of like linking up, and I'll explain that as well in a little bit of detail. But first of all, let's talk about the first thing they see the bio. So here are some examples for business and life coaches. So, ready to transform your business, pull for a free discovery call to start your journey. I'm not seeing that on life coaches and business coaches, but yet most business coaches and life coaches are trying to do that. They're trying to do a discovery call with people, but their bio is not saying that they can do that. So I highly recommend putting into your bio book a discovery call with me.
Caroline Balinska:I don't know why they think hiding it, because if you set up your discovery call properly and you actually have the right questions to ask in your discovery call form, then you're going to be able to get rid of a lot of people that you don't want, and I think that's something that people are scared of. They think if I put it in my bio, then I'm just going to have all of these people that are just signing up for a free discovery call and they're wasting my time. But they're not wasting your time because, first of all, you're not going to be getting. You know it's a numbers game. So if you've only got a thousand people on your Instagram, you're not going to get a thousand people filling out that form. So it's a numbers game. If you've got a thousand people on your Instagram, then you're going to be getting maybe one or two percent of them asking to be on your discovery call. Ask the right questions in your discovery call and then you can easily, once you get those emails of the calendar booking. You can easily just write them back an email and say look at this time, I don't think that you're suitable to be doing a discovery call. Here's a free PDF download that I don't hand out to anyone I'm going to give you. Or here's a free workshop that I can give you and you can send them a recording of a different program. You can send them a recording of some sort of free training because you don't have to follow through and do discovery calls. You can just say no to them. So, putting that into your bio, it's a great place to put that information.
Caroline Balinska:Some other calls to action so you could have is unlock your potential. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Elevate your business strategy. Download my free guide. Ready to launch your business dreams? Join my online workshop. Embrace balance DM the word balance for a personalized life coaching exercise. Drive into your personal growth. Explore my recommended reading list business breakthrough awaits. Enroll in my mastermind program for entrepreneurs. I've got more so. There's so many great ones there, but having a call to action in your actual bio will take your business to the next level, and this is what I'm seeing a lot of people missing out on this potential.
Caroline Balinska:This is a spot where you can actually screen whatever you want. It's not about selling. It's about you providing people with the help that they're looking for. If you're watching this on YouTube and you want an idea for you, put your information in the comments below and I'm more than happy to get back to you and give you some suggestions for your business. So in the comments, write your Instagram handle there and I will go and check out your Instagram account and I will give you some ideas for your business and help you come up with some ideas, and at the same time, you should be coming up with some great freebies. Do you have a downloadable PDF of something? Do you have a masterclass that you're doing? Do you have some sort of video training? So there's so many great ways that you can get across to people without you even needing to get to the discovery call. I'm going to be doing a whole episode on discovery calls to help you understand how you can create better discovery call flow and how to automate that system properly.
Caroline Balinska:I don't want to go into my particular the marketing hub, my system that I actually recommend for all my clients and what I'm so passionate about. I do a 14 day trial for free and the reason why I do that is because I know that the tool that I offer will help people do all of this and so much more. So what we actually do is that we can help you with calendar bookings. We can help you with the DMs and the comments. We can help you with putting your content some way. We can help you. It has an email system in there. It helps you build learning pages. It helps you with SMS Everything you can imagine with marketing. It's all in one place. So go on to the days of needing to go to Zapier and integrate your mail chimp in with your calendar booking, in with something else, and trying to make them all talk to each other. And then what I have been doing for years going to Calendly to go and look at my when I had my old podcast, going to Calendly to go and look at my podcast interview list and then having to go back over to my emails to send them another email and that whole mess. This is all in one, so you no longer have to do that.
Caroline Balinska:And the other great thing is that I'll be sharing as well other ways that you can get leads without needing to even use Instagram. You should have a great Instagram. You should have a place that people can come and see you on social media, because it helps people trust you more because you are actually seen in the public. So having an Instagram account is really important. But I help people build their own podcast funnel so they have a podcast. I have people that I build their YouTube channel up so then they can actually get their leads from YouTube. Having a lot of followers on Instagram does not mean that you have got a successful business. Having a few amount of people on your Instagram doesn't mean you've got a failing business. At the end of the day, your numbers are the only thing that matter to you and it should be the only thing that matters.
Caroline Balinska:Don't go and look at what other people are doing and think, well, I need to be like that, because they might be doing things that don't feel authentic to you. It's like for me. I don't really like blogging. I do do it and when I do write a blog, it's because I really want to write that blog. But I know other people that love blogging. It's just not a thing for me. I prefer to create videos like this. I prefer to do a podcast, I prefer to interview other people and I prefer to be on other people's podcasts. That's the way I prefer to do things. Some people prefer to be on Instagram Not a huge place for me.
Caroline Balinska:I'm there and I do my thing on Instagram. I've got my team to help me with Instagram, but for me, instagram is not the place that I get my clients. It's part of my funnel and part of my automation, but for me personally, it's not my number one place to get my clients. I help other people use their Instagram to be able to do that, but I also help my clients get their leads from other sources. If you're doing pay per click, it's not that you failed because you're using pay per click. I've seen that like. You don't need to use pay per click. Well, at the end of the day, if you want to grow fast, pay per click is a really great way to get new leads. So using pay per click can be helpful and you can do it by having a really good Instagram account and getting people over to Instagram as well. It does not mean that those people need to be liking all your photos to become your client.
Caroline Balinska:So I want to remove all the smoke and mirrors of people just saying, well, you have to have, like you know, because I've got 100,000 people on my Instagram, I must be successful. Therefore, listen to what I say. There is so much more to it and you need to work out what works for your business and you need to stop looking at just what other people do. While I'm going to share with you what other people do, I want to break that down and make it yours, and that's why all of my clients do things in their own unique way, and I don't have two clients doing the exact same strategy. I don't believe in that. People that are selling you on one strategy this is the only way to do it are people that have only ever known one way to do it.
Caroline Balinska:I've been doing this for over 20 years. I build all sorts of strategies. I work with all sorts of different businesses I work with. I'm currently working with a food meal prepared company that makes pre-prepared meals and they deliver them to your home. I work with fitness coaches. I work with other coaches. I work with e-commerce businesses. So every single business has a different way of doing their lead generation and I'm going to be showing you all those different ways through this podcast and specifically helping services and coaches online. So keep listening.
Caroline Balinska:We've got so many more things to go through, and the last thing I want to touch on today in this episode is your link. Whether it's a link tree or there's link fly, there's all sorts of apps that do this. Link tree is great because it's actually there's a free version of it. You don't need to pay for it. If you want to get some more customization with colors in that, you can pay for it. But I'm such a big believer in people spending too much money on different tools that are just not necessary and trying to cut down on all the things that you don't need. The free version of link tree is more than enough for 99% of businesses. So just start off with that. Sign up for it, and what I recommend is that you don't put too many links in there.
Caroline Balinska:The coaching call I'm going to be sharing in a couple of episodes actually goes into a little bit of details about that, because what a lot of people do is that they put too many links in there and it confuses people. So be really, really careful with what you do in your link tree information. So I usually say to a threat If you can do like two. The whole idea of having it is having more than one link, because if you want one link, you just want one link in your bio, but by having the link tree it's for two or three extra links, maximum four. If you're going into more than that, then that's something that I need to have more information on why. So I don't want to say never, ever, do more than four, but three should be a good number to put in there. The reason why is, once you get too many links in there, then you start to confuse people if you don't have a really, really strong structure of why you're doing it. So I've got four in mind and I'm really clear about why I have four in there, and what I write in there makes it really clear.
Caroline Balinska:There are different types of free offers and I'm just trying to get people into different areas, and that's based on what I'm putting into my content. But I do see people putting too many links in there that send people in the wrong direction and then end up sending people off to places. That is not part of the journey. So think of your journey. I spoke about it. I'm going to do a whole episode about it. Think about your actual customer journey, and that journey needs to be actually part of your link tree strategy as well. So I speak about it on the episode that I'm going to be releasing, when I actually talk to Kaylee about her business, and she has all different links.
Caroline Balinska:I can't remember exactly off the top of my head, but she had a link in there for recipes. Now there was a few issues that I had with that was, first of all, she's got lots of other things that she should be promoting besides her recipes. First of all, her recipes were not a recipe book, it was a recipe pack. I think she called it, and I actually said to her that using the word recipe pack is a little bit confusing. Once you actually went to the pictures it was. The pictures were great and I'm sure that all the recipes were fantastic, but the fact that it just was a little bit confusing is not a book, it's a pack. What is a pack? It doesn't explain what a pack is. It was 20 something dollars, I can't remember exactly, but what is it Like? It didn't really help me understand what it was, and because it was so confusing, then what she's doing? She's losing the chance to turn that person into a lead in another way.
Caroline Balinska:So the idea of your link tree from Instagram you want to get people to be to know, like and trust you, so you want them to be communicating with you on Instagram, but you also want them to get to your website to sign up for something. The idea is we want to try to get their email address. So when you understand that I'm going to go into a lot more detail in other episodes as well, but if we want to get people from Instagram over to our website, the main goal is, what we want to do is we want to try to get their email address. And the reason for that there's only one reason is because once they get away from our profile, our profile account of our Instagram, then we're very likely that we can lose them to something else. So, about ringing kids screaming, they turn off their phone, then they go and they forget all about us. Or they go and they look at our website and then they're like oh, that reminds me, I've got to go check out, and you know, jenny's Chinese shop down the road because I've got to order some Chinese tonight, or whatever it might be. So then they go off and they look at some other website. We just really want to be really strict on DMs as much as we can. We want to try to get them to either comment or DM us on Instagram and then we want to try to get them across to our website If we get them across to our website, to get their email address.
Caroline Balinska:So that, going back to that example, she had her recipe pack on there. So now what we've done is we've got someone from Instagram that interested enough us enough to go and look at our website, but she sent them off to a recipe pack. She had some other links in there which were great, and if they go and look at that recipe pack, it was confusing. What's a recipe pack? What's inside? I don't know how many recipes. Is there one recipe in there? Is it 20 recipes? Is there 400 recipes? Is this $20 going to be good value?
Caroline Balinska:What's a recipe pack? Is that something that I have to open on my iPad? Is that something I can open on my phone? Is that something I need some sort of app to use? What's a recipe pack? What do I actually get? Is it a pack that they deliver to my house or is it something I look at online. So there was no actual explanation there. And then what happens? When someone's confused, then they leave. Yes, some of them will come back and they'll look at something else on your website and then they'll tell you oh, those recipes look good. And then it makes you think, oh yeah, so that's actually doing okay. But the truth is it's not doing well, because how do you know how many other people left and never came back because they were confused. So we want to try to keep that funnel really, really tight. We want to keep them on a journey, on an actual track, where we get them from A to B to C to paying you money.
Caroline Balinska:And in her case, what I recommended to her just take those recipe packs off. First of all, change the name to recipe book. It can be e-book, it can be book, but at least it means something more. Put more descriptions in there, put some more photos in there. But what I also said to her, that should just be your legion.
Caroline Balinska:Giving away recipes of one recipe at a time is a really good way to then say, hey, to get the whole book. You can buy here or get the whole book. Give me your email address and I'll give you the whole book and the, but also you can sell it. I'm not saying that you can't sell it, but then what you're going to do is, if you're giving away the blueberry pancake recipe, then you can say link in bio. They go over and then there's in the link tree bio pancake recipe. Here they click on that, they go to the free recipe or get the full e-book here too and downloaded here. They have to give you an email address or buy the full recipe book here with all my other 25 yummy recipes and then they can go through and they can buy it and then you can make a sale.
Caroline Balinska:But you've really got to think through that strategy and I see too many people not thinking through the strategy, just saying, oh, I'll just throw off a few things, oh, the more links I have the better, and it's just not true. Strategy is trumps over number of links. So if you have questions about your link tree, leave a comment below. I'm happy to go check it out. I would love to go and check it out for you and let you know what I think. If you want to DM me privately, dm me. If you want to send me an email, send me an email.
Caroline Balinska:If you have questions about anything I spoke about, please let me know and I can expand on that. So everything I speak about in every episode I can definitely go into more detail, I can screen share and I can go through different things. If you want to be on a free coaching call with me, there's a link in the description below as well, and I'm happy to do a free coaching call with you and share it as one of the episodes, because other people would love to know what you're experiencing and how that can actually work in with their business. So I'm welcoming anyone who wants to do a free coaching call with me. You can click the link below and sign up for a free coaching call, and if you want to know about my marketing hub it's a 14 day free trial Please check out the link below for that as well. That has got access to everything. There's a video there that you can watch exactly what's included, what I actually do, the thing that really makes my marketing hub really unique Is that I actually create the templates for everything that you need inside your business.
Caroline Balinska:So, for example, any of these funnels that I talk about, we actually have created them and you just fill in the blank. So I've got video training on how to do that. I've got videos on explaining to you how the actual system works. I've got lots of free guides on this. But, for instance, if you want to create a funnel where you get people to come through from an Instagram account to being your customer, then we actually have the funnel that you just fill in the blanks along the way. So you just change. Where it says your name, you put your name in there. Where I write put in a link to your PDF here. You put it into your PDF or your website, a webinar or your website, whatever it might be. But the templates are all built out for you and for our 14 day trial.
Caroline Balinska:You get access to all of this. I'm not hiding anything behind a paid thing, so you don't have to pay to see all of this. You can try it all out and you can set up everything. We actually do free onboarding as well, which is worth $300. Normally it would cost $300 for someone to sit down and onboard you. We help you set all of this up. We walk you through all of this. We don't charge for this because we know once you're actually signed up and you're doing a trial. You're going to love it so much that you'll have no reason to leave us.
Caroline Balinska:So I want to show you that, because what I found for 20 something years in this industry is that there's a lot of systems out there that tell you they can do things and then you sign up, you pay money and you go to all the headache of signing up and then you find out it doesn't do what you want it to do, and when you spend money on it it's the worst thing. So what I want is that you are going to have to put your trust in me that it actually will do everything that I say it's doing, and you're going to have to take your time. While it's not a lot of time, but you will need a bit of time to set up, and it's way less time that if you were setting up a mail chimp or a calendar or anything like that, but it still will take a little bit of your time. So if it's going to take you one or two hours to set up because you're putting your trust in me to try it, I want to give you that for free. So you try it out for free and I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I'm letting you try it out because I know that you're going to get the results that you're that I'm promising that you'll get. So try it out for free. There's a link below you can find out exactly how that works.
Caroline Balinska:You're going to see an episode with Kaylee where I actually go through and coach her through her situation, and everyone is unique, but there's something that you can learn from all of my coaching sessions. Kaylee was in an interesting situation when she came through to do a coaching call with me. I I looked at everything, I checked out her business before we got on the call and I had made assumptions on where she was with her business and ended up she was in a different personal situation, so she wasn't in a situation where she was going to go straight into the next level of her business, but I did give her some advice on what she should be doing now in her personal situation to make sure she can move on and progress to the next section. So it's a really interesting coaching call just based on that, because I find that a lot of people are in that situation of you know, a bit of fed upness, a little bit of personal things going on that you know, that play into what we need to deal with.
Caroline Balinska:I think we as women have that problem more so than men, and I don't want to, I don't want to get into this whole sexism thing and things like that, but a lot of women, you know, we, we do feel things strongly and we are in situations a lot of the time we bear the burden of looking after children, looking after home, dealing with other things, and we might end up in a situation where we, you know, carry more stress in certain areas than men do.
Caroline Balinska:So for women it makes it, you know, an extra layer of our business that, while it's not fair in some ways actually makes us better at what we do and more resilient and makes us better at being, you know, in the business that we're in.
Caroline Balinska:But when you get a chance to listen to Kaylee's coaching call, you'll see what I mean and you'll find that there's certain snippets in there that will definitely resonate with you and your situation, because I think we've all been in that situation and in some ways we've all. You know, we all have these sort of things going on in our lives as well. So thank you for joining me today and I really hope that I get to meet you in a private coaching call where I can help you like I said, totally for free, because I'd love to know more about your business. Especially, if you're here listening to me and you're taking your time to actually put your trust in my advice and my help, then I would love to be there for you and help you in a more personalized way as well. So look forward to meeting you in a private coaching call and, until next episode, have a great day.