EP 364 - Coaches: The Real Reason You're Not Getting Clients (Hint: It's Not The Algorithm!)

MarketingCoaching Lifestyle
Written By Debbie Shadid
 

I surveyed my clients and one question kept coming back. How do I get clients without relying on the social media algorithm? So let's talk about it, because here's the truth. The algorithm was never the thing standing between you and your first client.

If you're new to my channel, my name is Debbie Shadid. I'm a Business Growth and Life Coach and the founder of the Business Building Boutique. For over two decades, I've helped women learn how to become coaches, get clients, grow their businesses, and create meaningful income doing work they love.

An algorithm is just a sorting system. There's no person in there judging your work, nobody can fully explain how it functions, and it changes constantly. So instead of trying to crack a code, let's build something sturdier.

Imagine never again refreshing a post and wondering if the algorithm buried you. When you build on real conversations, real rooms, searchable content, and an audience you own, your business stops depending on a machine nobody understands. That's how you build something that lasts.

🚀 Ready to build a business that doesn't depend on the algorithm? Book a call with me here: https://debbieshadid.com/schedule

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Transcript

I just surveyed our clients, and a question that came back is one that you are gonna want the answer to. How do I get clients without relying on the social media algorithm? I read that question, I was like, "Oh my goodness, we have got to talk about this." So I'm gonna get into the five ways that you can get clients without the algorithm because here's what I wanna say up front. Let's forget about the algorithm, and I know that's not what you wanna hear. We're gonna talk about it in detail, but here's what I want you to know. We don't have to worry about it. We don't have to beat it. You don't have to crack a code. It is not the thing that is standing between you and your first client. That's the thing that you need to know. Hey, I'm Debbie Shadid. I'm here to be honest with you and straight with you right now. I have built a business with over $10 million in sales with a very small following, no complicated funnels. I wanna share with you exactly how I've done that today, and this is one of the ways that I do it. So if you are not subscribed, hit the button and subscribe, and I wanna share with you what you do to get clients without relying on the social media algorithm. Those five points that I'm gonna share with you, they are gonna be good. And I have to tell you right now, stay with me to the end because the fifth one is going to be the easiest way to get clients, and it's gonna surprise you. So let's start with what the algorithm actually is, and this would be on all social media platforms we hear about this. I think we throw that word around, and half the people are really not sure what it means, and some people have one idea, and some people have another idea. An algorithm is just simply a system for sorting things. That's it. It is a set of rules that a platform uses to decide who is going to see something. There is no person involved, which is why none of us know really what it's all about. There's nobody that is judging your content. It is really just a machine that is doing its job. It's saying, "Show this one to this person because we think they're gonna be interested in that." So it doesn't care. Doesn't care what you are putting out and how much effort you've put into it, so we can't take it personally. And also, what we should know is we cannot control it. There really is no way to crack the code because as soon as you crack the code, something is going to change. So not one person, I don't know anyone, in fact, can tell you exactly how it works, because, like I said, it is changing all the time. Even the people that work for the companies, they actually can't give you a straight answer either, which is crazy. What I wanna talk to you about is what you can do to get clients. So the distinction really is this, and I want you to hear this. There is a difference besides using social media and depending on it. Using it is fine. I use it. I'm on YouTube. I'm on TikTok. I write on Substack. Those are all great places to be. And I have to tell you, every client that I've had comes from social media. And I know you might be like, "That can't be true." I mean, let's say there's a handful of clients who haven't, but literally everybody, because you either find me on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Substack. That's it. So anybody that you know, chances are is gonna find you there, unless you take some of the steps I'm gonna tell you about today and utilize those to grow your business faster. I meet women all the time They post, they wait, they check the views, they feel bad, they post again, or else they just stop. Is that you? That's actually not a marketing plan. That is your mood doing its job. That is you not staying consistent. It's you being affected by the results that you are seeing right then instead of the compounded results. We talk about that a lot. Most coaches are treating their content as their entire marketing strategy, like social media is it. And I hear this all the time, like,"What are you doing to get coaching clients?" They're like, "Well, I'm on Instagram." That one piece is not it. That could be part of the piece, but it's not gonna be it. Let me give you some context on why that is. There's some research out by Google. In twenty twenty-six, Google did this study, and this is gonna help you understand why a quick social media post is not the answer to getting a client. It is part of the answer. They did a study, and it's called the seven eleven four study. Seven hours of engagement, people need to have with you. That means they need to watch you. It's not a thirty-second video. And by the way, on social media, they're watching the first couple of seconds as they scroll by. So can you imagine getting seven hours of social media content viewed by one person? I don't know anyone that I've watched seven hours of content from. There's people that I've definitely watched a lot of Instagram or TikTok from, but seven hours? That's a lot. Eleven different touch points. This is again what Google said. four separate locations. Not just Instagram or not just Facebook, but four different places. So seven hours of content, eleven different touch points in four different places before they will trust you enough to buy from you. I'll tell you, when I saw that number, I was like, "Okay, that is legitimate to me," because what happens is, and you probably are doing this right now, people will come to YouTube, they find me, and they binge. I do the same thing, right? You start on one thing, and you keep watching and watching and watching. That's how you get seven hours of content with somebody. So how long would it take somebody to engage with you and learn from you on Instagram, right? Or on Facebook? This is why the algorithm doesn't matter as much as you think. You could post every single day for an entire year and never get seven hours. So even if the algorithm loved you and you did all that posting in a year, it's not gonna show that post to every single person. It's just not. That is not the way that it works. Posting alone is never gonna get you there. And that is not an algorithm problem, that is a strategy problem. The good news is the strategy is something you can fix. And let me just say, it's not that hard. So let's fix it. I'm gonna share with you five ways to fix it, okay? All right. Number one, we're gonna get into the strategies. This right now is the most important strategy, and I don't want you to turn this off because I have a feeling you're gonna say, " It's too simple, Debbie." But I am talking about having real conversations with people every single week. This is the one I talk about most, and it's the one that coaches resist the most. So I wanna spend a little bit of time here talking about this. I wanna challenge you to really hear me on this. I want you to get with people and talk to them. I call it the 5X Challenge. Tell five people what you do this week. Five people this week. That's it. That would be the whole thing. If you tell five people every single week for the entire year, 260 conversations. And I know what you're saying, like, " Debbie, I don't know five people a week that are interested. They're not my clients." All of that stuff. But those people know people. Two hundred and sixty people in a year, I can tell you, your coaching business would be full. It would. I want you to really sit with that number because when you are thinking about that, I know what you're thinking like, "Oh, that's too hard." But it is hard to be on social media every single day and worry about the algorithm. This is so much easier. It requires no tech. It requires no, scheduling, writing, figuring out did you get it right? No videoing yourself. You don't have to just put it up there and hope and pray that it works. When you talk to somebody in person, your business changes. I wanna tell you about a client named Jenny. Jenny had been posting for months. She got nothing. Nothing really going on. And by the way, she is still posting, and her content is beautiful, and I know that it's compounded. But in the beginning, she was like, " Okay, this is just hard. It doesn't seem like it's working." And the crazy part is she had heard me say, " You've gotta talk to people," and she had not done it. And then one day, Jenny's neighbor asked her, "Hey, what is it that you actually do?" And Jenny said, "I heard your voice in my head." And she was like, " I am a coach. I help people who have pre-diabetic conditions. That's what I do." Okay, long story short, Jenny's neighbor was in HR, human resources, for a big company. You know what she said? She's like, "Oh my gosh, we gotta talk. I need you to come in and talk to our employees." Jenny ended up getting referred to another company and to another. She got hired. This is crazy. It was her neighbor that was twenty feet away that she had not told. How many times is that the case for you? I'm sure that Jenny thought,"Oh, what am I gonna do? Talk to my neighbor in the hallway?" But here's the deal. Jenny's neighbor worked for a company, and they wanted to hire her. So Jenny had done something that we all are guilty of doing. She had prejudged her neighbor. She's like, "I don't wanna tell her what I do," because also Jenny works full-time, and her coaching business is her side hustle. So it's like, "Oh, you know, we just pass and say hi." How guilty are you of doing that same thing, right? You just don't tell people what you do. But there she was, she told her what she did, and who would have known that this lady worked in HR and that they brought people in to work with their employees. That is crazy, but that's how it happens every time. So are you the best-kept secret in your neighborhood? Have you been posting and wondering why nothing's working, and yet you're not telling anybody what you do? Does your dentist, your hairdresser, the women you go to church with, at the gym, the book club, any of those places, do they really know what you do? Have you really taken the time to tell them? I'm gonna leave a link for Jenny in the show notes. Jenny helps people very clearly with pre-diabetic conditions. It's a very specific niche, and if that was not you, but Jenny had told you, and your friend was just diagnosed as pre-diabetic, what would you do? You'd be like, "I know this person. Her name's Jenny Pina, and she helps people with this one thing." This is why you've got to tell people what you're doing. So every person that you tell is the doorway to somebody else. And I want you to do it without hesitation. I want you to do it without getting all worried about what you're gonna say. This is just you telling people. It's not you selling people. It's you telling people what you do because you love what you do. Imagine it's like Jenny took a coffee break in the hallway with her neighbor. I love to think about that 'cause so many of us don't work in an office anymore. We work at home, and so we're not there standing by the coffee pot in the break room having this conversation. Instead, we're having it with somebody in line at Starbucks or at the grocery store or wherever it might be. So this is not a pitch. It's just you telling somebody what you do. I wanna challenge you. That's what I was talking about. Five times a week, who could you just tell what you do and explain it to them? I think you're gonna be so surprised that when you do start telling people, people are gonna be interested and curious, honestly. I went to pickleball, and instead of going into all this stuff that I help people with strategies and business and tech and all this stuff, I just said I'm a life coach. And people were like, "She's a life coach?" There's like forty women there all talking about life coaching, and wow. Do you know what an opportunity that could have been for me if I actually did life coaching? I am a life coach, but I don't take life coaching clients on. But that's just an example of how excited people were. They wanted to talk to me about it. You're not giving yourself the opportunity to be the person who has people talking about you because you're not even talking about yourself. You don't need a script. You just need to put yourself out there and just see where it leads. You don't even have to invite them to a free coaching call, okay? You just have a conversation with people. five people a week, it starts this week. All right, Strategy number two, speaking and workshops. One talk, I'm gonna tell you what, one talk will change your entire business. One single talk could be equal to three months of posting, and I have to say it again, there's no algorithm involved. So let me give you the real numbers. The Design Live Thrive Summit, which is our summit. We had coaches that grew their email list by three hundred and twenty-seven people from one event. We had people who booked forty calls from one speaking event. We had somebody who sold ten thousand dollars after never selling anything. That's what happens when you speak, and you don't need a room that is packed full of people. I have built my entire business on a very small following, and you can do the same. So that can happen in one day. Thirty people could opt in that heard you speak that are warm because they heard you explain what you're doing. This is part of the seven eleven four strategy. So now you know why this works so well. imagine this. They spend time with you, they get to know you, you get to have their attention, build that know, like, and trust, answer follow-up questions, give them a gift at the end, grow your email list, and voila, you have calls booked. When you speak and stand in front of an audience, you build credibility. You become the expert. And you know what else happens? They talk about you. You have opportunities to gather clips from that and photos. It's actually content that you can use on other platforms as well. So I would love for you to consider speaking at the Design Live Thrive Summit, but also to speak at any other summit or just locally at a yoga studio or partner with a friend or collaborate with another coach and you guys talk on YouTube. No kidding. It can be that simple. All right, that's number two. You're gonna speak or do workshops. That's number two of number five. Number five, I promise you, is gonna be the easiest and best one. Strategy number three is to search instead of scroll. This is YouTube. This is a blog. This is Substack, and here's why it is different. There's an intent. When somebody is scrolling and stumbles on you, they weren't looking for you. They were killing time. They were waiting in a waiting room in a doctor's office. Somebody searched by typing a problem into a box. This is what happens on YouTube, okay? That's why I said, this is YouTube. This is a blog. This is Substack. Somebody types in what their problem is, they're not just scrolling, and you come up. You only come up if you've been putting out content there. That is how you become the person who now has authority. They searched and your name came up. You become the most qualified person to talk to them because your name just came up, okay? They already know that you understand the problem because your name came up in the search. They are looking for a solution, and you raised your hand without ever being there. So I know what you might be thinking, "Okay, Debbie, YouTube has an algorithm too." And you're right. So does Substack, so does a blog, so does Google. Everything does. But the difference here is social media posts have a lifespan that is very short, and I know how hard you work putting together a post. You publish it, and then tomorrow it's over, right? Unless they go to your actual profile and look at your posts, they're not probably gonna see that same post again. YouTube, you can put a video up, and three years later people are still looking at it. I have a video that is probably three years old that's one of my most viewed videos today, and it never gets old. It's a topic that people are really intrigued by. It sits there, and it keeps working. It works around the clock while people are searching for it. So that becomes a real asset. So think about 15 minutes on video. That's 15 minutes of somebody really getting to know you, learning from you. And what happens after that? They stay, and they watch more. That's typically the pattern that happens. When I get on a call with a woman who's found me on YouTube, it's like we've already met. They know my stories. They know my dogs that are gonna be in the background barking. They're down here in their bed, right? They know that I am with my grandkids a lot. They get on the call, and they trust me already. They know that I'm a no-nonsense person that's like, "Look, you gotta put some work into this, right? Here's how you're gonna build your business." Building your business for the lifetime, let me tell you, it's so worth it. And the women that get on the call with me, they already know that. It's like I don't have to explain anything. They possibly even know about my programs because they've listened to something like that. So I really wanna encourage you. I'm gonna link below the complete beginner's guide to YouTube for coaches. This is something we put together, and there's also a playlist that I'm gonna link there. It is a how-to series for coaches, it's very simple, of how to get started on YouTube, and that beginner's guide is a really great complement to that playlist. So go watch the series and then listen, let's get your seven hours in, okay? Seven hours of content so people can begin to really trust you. All right. Strategy number four is your email list. This is the only audience that you actually own, and it doesn't matter how challenging email might be, like writing the email, learning the tech. It's not that hard, you guys. It feels challenging because you've never done it, and then making sure that you get your emails opened. But in the end, email marketing is the path to clients. It really is. It is the one way that you're gonna reach somebody to get their consultation link to them, right? To follow up after a workshop, to get the Zoom link to the workshop. We email market every single solitary day. It's the only thing that I have more control over, and I'm not gonna say I have complete control over it, because once the email goes out from your system, there's a little algorithm going on too, like which is gonna go to what place. Now, that's not what they call it, but you guys know that because sometimes your emails end up in promo folders, sometimes they end up in the inbox. So there's some sorting that is going on there as well. But just know that you want to be growing an email list. when somebody gives you their email, they're committed. They've said, "Look, I'm interested in you. Here's my email, and I want to invite you to stay in contact with me." You're not bugging people by emailing them. You are really doing what they have requested, which is,"Give me more information." When I started working with coaches, I went from zero to a hundred email addresses, and I made a hundred thousand dollars. Now, I'm not saying you're gonna do the same thing, but I'm telling you what, email marketing is of high value. So I really wanna encourage you to be growing your email list and then staying engaged with them. So when you send an email to somebody that's already interested, guess what? They engage with it. So build a list, talk to your list, and then sell to your list. All right, strategy number five. I know I told you to wait for this one. It is so much simpler than you think, and it is referrals. If you do not tell people what you do, and I know we've already talked about that, talk to those five people this week, but the second part of that strategy is you have to ask people to refer you. That's the second part of the strategy. Yes, go meet people, tell them what you do, have conversations with them, but then you need to take the next step and say, "Would you please refer me to anyone you know that happens to be pre-diabetic? Would you please refer me to other HR professionals?" This is what happened for Jenny, right? She got a referral from one HR person to another one. So you have to ask for referrals. When you send out your email and you tell people, "Hey, I just started a coaching business. Here's what it's all about," you have to say, "Please reply back. Tell me who you know that could use my help, who should I connect with," or,"Please forward this on to a friend." Every time I talk to a coach that is new in my world, I'll say, " Hey, is there anybody you can refer me to?" Yeah. That's so easy. That's all you have to do. Your past clients can be great referral sources for you. The women that you have coached for free could refer you. That is how I went from zero to 100 email addresses and made $100,000. I coached somebody for free, and then I said, "Who do you know that also needs help that I could give another free coaching call to?" And then I got their email address, I connected with them, I coached them, and I went on and on and on. And those people wanted to buy coaching from me. After I had coached them for free, they wanted to buy. So there are people in your world that you've never even asked to refer you. Other coaches can also refer you. I know we have this idea that other coaches are competition, and I'm just telling you what, they're not. Other coaches are collaborators. What you can do with other coaches is get to know them and say, "Listen, when you run into somebody who's grieving, refer Lisa Kelly, because she helps people who have grief in the workplace. Yeah. She helps companies understand what that looks like. Refer Lisa Kelly." By the way, I can leave her link in the show notes as well. That is how it works. Lisa and Jenny could collaborate together, and probably have, and they can get in front of each other's audiences because there's no overlap I could have a workshop with another coach. There's no overlap. People are either drawn to me or they're drawn to another business coach. It is that simple. So make sure you are talking to former colleagues, former friends, anybody that you know. This is the fastest way to get a client. When somebody refers you, when I get on a call and I say, "Hey, Thais referred me to Beth," you know what happens? Beth is like, "Oh, okay." And maybe she's even checked with Thais to say, "Well, What is it, Thais, that you think about Debbie?" That's how referrals work. So you don't need seven hours of time with somebody when they've had a referral, because a referral basically steps above all of that and really sets you up for success. So you don't have to do any convincing, okay? You just meet people, ask for referrals. So here's the homework. Again, I made that recommendation to you, the five people that you're gonna meet every single week, and the second part of that is you meet them, you get to know them, and you say, " Can you refer me?" That's the second part. So you can tell people, "Look, I'm taking on new clients," or, "I have a new… I have an opening, one opening for a new client. I thought about you. Who could you refer me to?" That's it. That's the whole message. Most coaches will spend months trying to grow a following on social media. And they're never gonna tell 10 people what they do in person. I'm gonna challenge you. Let's make that different for you, okay? Don't be that coach who never gets their business growing because you're not telling people what they do. So let me pull this together. The algorithm is not the problem. The algorithm is going to be there no matter what. Some people can beat it sometimes, okay? Some people can beat it sometimes, but trying to get it beat every single time, it just doesn't work. You go look at some of the people that you follow that are wildly successful, and you look and see. actually know somebody who's been very viral on TikTok, and if at her posts, it's like one post a month that's viral, and the rest of them are hardly any views. You cannot build a business depending on the algorithm. So build a business depending on everything else, okay? So yes, YouTube has an algorithm, but what an incredible place. It is there forever, and people are searching for you. Yes, email is controlled a little bit by email but it is a phenomenal place because people said, "I wanna hear from you." Telling people, meeting people, well, I've been over that one. It's, it is gold. It's where your business really will take off if you do that. That is it. Stop worrying about the algorithm. Get on social media, but also do those other things that I've told you. There is not one single way to build trust. There's not. Remember, it's the seven-eleven-four study, seven hours, 11 touchpoints in four different locations. And I've shared more than four places here, It could be on social media. It could be email. It could be YouTube. Meeting people, that's another one. Networking, okay? And then getting referrals. That's five places right there. So it's going to be more than one place that you have to expose yourself, right? get in front of people, but none of it is hard. All right? Thank you so much. Grab my YouTube guide for coaches. Make sure you check out that playlist, and I wanna invite you to stay connected with me. Make sure you subscribe, and I'll talk to you guys soon. Have a beautiful week. Bye-bye.

Debbie Shadid https://www.DebbieShadid.com
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EP 363 - Why Coaches Burn Out (It's Not What You Think)