I bet you’ve had an amazing idea come to you for an online health program at least once. You got a gut feeling that it’s the next level of your business and you were super excited to get it into the world … but then you spent months (or years!) thinking about it, then came the months creating the program itself. The worksheets, the slides, the videos. They took so. much. time. to create.

Then you tried “launching”, which was really just 2 posts on social media, a handful of Instagram stories, and an email to your tiny list that resulted in a few hundreds of dollars of sales.

Then you probably felt like a failure and that “great idea” started looking like a total waste of time and energy, and so you holed up on your couch eating dairy-free ice cream for a few days while binge watching “The Office”. Totally not worth it, right?

But what if I told you that your great idea was great, and if you just reversed the time you spent creating the program with the time you spent launching it, you could have had a super successful online health program that you can use to create income for years to come?

That’s exactly what my client Laura did, and she ended up going from no program to $4,134 in sales during her 7 day launch, and she did it within 40 days of the initial idea and without an email list. Oh, and during a global pandemic, homeschooling her 2 kids, husband has his own business, no ads, and no experience with online marketing or launching.

Do you LOVE the idea of having consistent, recurring income you can count on every single month in your nutrition business... but it seems like the only way is through network marketing or product sales?

Or, even better, you are all-in on network marketing but it's not bringing in the consistent income every month that you thought it would?

Yep, I totally get it, and I’m right there with you, which is why I’m here to offer you another solution to the “I need to make some income I can actually count on!” problem we all face in our businesses.

In fact, I’m going to give you 3 simple suggestions for how you can create consistent income in your nutrition or wellness business right now without selling anyone else's products, whatsoever.

This post should really be called “How to find your first paying client within 30 days”, because honestly? It’s not just about launching a business, it’s about finding paying clients … otherwise you don't even have a business! The idea for this post came from a Facebook group discussion over the summer that stemmed from this question:

…

For someone who’s been in the industry for 10 years, and who launched her business before social media was so integrated into our daily lives (I know, I can’t remember what that was like, either 😂), this question really made me think long and hard about how I would do this myself if I had to.

I put up a super long answer to this sweet lady and her question, but I wanted to expand on it and share it with you all, because I know that so many are in the same situation.

P.S. I would use this system to launch any business, not just a wellness business. The marketing principles are the same, no matter what niche or industry you’re in.

Without any more preamble or wasting time, let’s hop right into your 30 day “Finally Launch your Business” plan:

You're probably reading this because you're either really interested in essential oils as a healing modality and want to start using them with your health coaching clients, but have no idea how the business side might work OR you're already sold on the business side but you have no idea how to bring essential oils into your client work without looking like you're jumping on a trend. That or you see all the health coaches around you starting to use them and you're like "what is up with these essential oils? They're like the green smoothie of 15 years ago!". Amiright?! No worries, because I'm here to help with 4 easy ways to naturally incorporate essential oils into your health business without looking like a sell out.

If you're reading this, chances are good that you're either in school to become a nutritionist of some sort (dietician, holistic nutritionist, holistic health coach, etc) OR you've already graduated and are ready to start working with clients ... but you have no idea how to start a nutrition business!

Our schools teach us how to be amazing stewards of health for our potential clients, they just don't teach us how to actually organize our appointments, programs, websites, marketing, and everything else that goes into running a successful nutrition business.

Learning how to start a nutrition business that's successful is well beyond the scope of a single blog post, but we can definitely cover the easiest and quickest way for you to start making money as a nutritionist: one-on-one clients.

I've been asked over and over again about how I launch my online programs, so today I'm spilling the beans behind the $10,036.80 launch of my Brand, Build, Blog course (BBB: A branding & blogging course for holistic biz owners) to an email list of just 400 people. This course has since sold another $4,049.59, since it's an evergreen course and is available year round (numbers up to date as of Oct 11, 2016), bringing it's 8-month total to $14,086.39.

I'm going to break down the timeline of the course creation, launch timeline and sales, plus my secret weapon to creating this profitable online course.

I've often been asked how I come up with my ideas for online courses, and to tell you the truth, the idea for them usually comes to me fully formed in my head ... but only after years of developing my own personal skills and knowledge in the area that I'm going to teach and being able to break large concepts down into easy to understand steps.

For example, in 2014 I launched Mama Mojo, an 8-week online course for busy moms who want more energy, balanced hormones, and to calm their digestive systems. While the idea of the course hit me like a lightning bolt, it was based on my 6-month program that I took one-on-one nutrition clients through for 5 years before that. I guess you can say it was 5 years in the making. I knew the 6-month program worked, so I just translated it into an online version. That course went onto sell $11,114.90 with 2 launches spaced 6 months apart.

For BBB, I had been doing one-on-one Biz Strategy Sessions where people kept asking me about their websites. They didn't know how to design them, they needed help with the copy, and just generally wanted to know how to use SquareSpace better. This is where I started feeling that there was a need for this sort of information so I wouldn't have to waste my time repeating myself over and over again.

So, back in 2014 before I launched Mama Mojo (at least an entire year before BBB landed in my brain), I invested in a branding course that was the base of my $20,000 re-brand. A year after that, I invested in a different course that taught me branding AND website development. 4 months before the course idea came to me in late 2015, I had invested in a copywriting course. All of these courses taught valuable and needed lessons in a general sense, but nothing that was geared just towards holistic health practitioners.

There were no copy templates just for us, and unless a fellow holistic practitioner was really interested in design and web development like I was, it would be hard for most nutritionists or essential oil advocates to take the same courses and translate them into a finished profitable website. I knew there was a need, and so I took the best, most actionable concepts that I had learned from those 3 courses, added my own personal spin and experience with them after developing my own website on SquareSpace, and voila, Brand, Build, Blog was born in my head.

Then I just had to get it into a form for others to learn from and formally launch it. No biggie 😳.

Here's the timeline so you can follow along my course creation journey:

This article is going to ruffle some feathers, I guarantee it. Some of you are going to read it, roll your eyes, and immediately look for the unsubscribe button.

I'm sharing this information with you because I wish someone would have genuinely, and without an ulterior motive, shared this with me years ago ... but I wasn't open to it.

If you're not open to it right now, all that I'm asking is for you to read this article for the sake of learning another way to make income in your business, so that you can keep doing what you have a passion for. You don't have to action it, just file it away under "good to know" and move on with your day.

I realize that this introduction sounds super defensive, and it's only because I know how I used to think about ...

duh, duh, duhhhhhhhhh ...

NETWORK MARKETING. I despised it. I avoided it like the plague. I dismissed anyone who approached me about joining their team, esppecially when they phrased it as an incredible opportunity". To be fair, it might have been the way that they were approaching me, with a cold e-mail from someone who I've never met, asking me if I've ever heard of "nutritional cleansing" or "the best supplements on the market today".

There was no genuine want to know more about me. The trust was broken before it even had a chance to grow. There was no "hey, I've been following your business for months and I dig your vibe! I just wanted to introduce myself" or "Hey, in your last blog/Instagram/Facebook post, you mentioned how you've been struggling with _____. I came across this article and it made me think of you. I thought I'd pass it on ... enjoy!". Just a cold, hard business pitch when I was already overwhelmed in my business and working 24/7.

No thank you.

However, after one whole year of incorporating network marketing into my holistic nutrition business (my anniversary was Oct 18th), I've learned a thing or two, not only from my own business, but from how my direct upline has seamlessly incorporated network marketing into her holistic nutrition biz.

I want to share these with you to shed a little light on how you can authentically use network marketing to create another stream of income in your business, without feeling salesy, pushy, or sleazy. Because that's just not cool.

Here are 5 ways to smoothly add network marketing into your holistic biz:

Starting up the first iteration of my holistic nutrition practice feels like a lifetime ago. In reality, it was 2008, and if I had to count the business lessons that I've learned since then, I think it's been approximately 592,603. Not that I'm keeping track or anything.

Back then, I was fresh out of nutrition school, having just graduated as a Registered Holistic Nutritionist (RHN) from CSNN. Me and my then boyfriend (now husband) decided that we were going to move back to our hometown. There weren't a ton of job options for me, so, by golly, I was going to start my own business!

For the record, I don't say 'by golly'. I swear like a sailor, but 'by golly' seems to sum it all up as to how utterly and absolutely naive I was about being an entrepreneur.

I read, let's say, 3 online articles about opening a business. The first one I think was called "How to open a business in Canada". That was the extent of my research.

I committed every single common mistake that a ton of budding entrepreneurs make, not because I was ignorant or dumb, but just because I didn't know what I didn't know! I figured that since I was moving to the heart disease capital of Canada (I wish I was joking with that statistic), people needed to be healthy. And I was a Registered Holistic Nutritionist, wanting to help people be healthy. How could I fail?

Well, let's look at the numbers, shall we?