Over the past few months, I've been sharing some online strategies for growing your holistic health business, including why I deleted my $10,000 website, why blogging is the #1 biz building strategy you need to be doing, why you need a brand instead of a pretty logo, and 3 ways to grow your e-mail newsletter list.

It occurred to me the other day that I didn't start at the beginning! Here I am talking about some of the advanced strategies that I've been using when most of you don't even know where to start. That all changes today.

Before you can blog, before you design a pretty logo, and before you start building your e-mail newsletter list, you need a website where all those things can live!

It's like buying a new couch, new appliances, and a beautiful area rug, and not having a home to put them all in.

Your website is a digital representation of you, your business, and your holistic health practice. It's where new people who are virtually meeting you for the first time decide in under 10 seconds if they like you or not. No pressure.

How do you even go about setting up your website? You need 3 things:

When I started my business as a holistic nutritionist, there was no one doing regular blogging to build their businesses unless they were really techy. No Facebook pages or private groups. No Instagram, Periscope, or Pinterest. I'm sitting here wondering what the hell I did with all my free time!?

But there was e-mail marketing, which I wasn't doing until 2011. Even then, I wasn't doing it seriously until 2013.

I started tracking my newsletter numbers (along with all my other social media numbers) on March 18, 2013. I had 238 e-mail newsletter subscribers, 211 Facebook likes, and wasn't on Pinterest or Instagram.

As of today (February 23, 2016), I have 3,137 e-mail newsletter subscribers, 1375 Facebook fans, 984 followers on Pinterest, and 760 on Instagram.

The only number that matters is the e-mail newsletter subscribers, for reasons which I already talked about ad nauseam in another blog post (click here to read it, plus get a free blog planner with an entire years' worth of blog post ideas!), so I won't repeat here.

In that article, I talked about why the #1 non-negotiable activity to grow your biz is blogging + the newsletters you send from those blogs, but how do you actually get people to opt-in to your newsletter list from those blog posts?

It comes down to 2 things ...

I'm a total bookworm, and have been my whole life. My idea of the best day ever includes hibernating under a warm blanket, tea in hand, some dark chocolate covered almonds, and a book that I can devour.

Somewhere along the way, I lost the want and need to read. I suspect the birth of my son was to blame, but in reality, I wasn't giving myself enough self-love in the form of alone time and sleep to even consider reading new books. Now that I've put me back on the list of my top 3 priorities (the list now goes 1) me, 2) my family, and 3) my business ... instead of the other way around), my love of reading has come back with a vengeance.

I've already talked about how reading has increased my business profits a few months ago (click here to read the article), and I'm happy to report that the more I make reading and self-development a priority, the more my income goes up. In fact, my January income was at least double what it has been on a monthly basis in 2015. Did I hustle over the end of December? Nope! I had a fantastic holidays, napped, read, snacked, and spent lots of time with my hubby and son.

Some of you may be thinking that you absolutely hate reading or truly don't have time for it, and that may very well be the case. Let me introduce you to audiobooks. Boom, life changed.

I have a member on my essential oils team who works full-time, teaches yoga and personal trains clients part-time, runs her essential oil business part-time, and has a 5-year-old and husband. She really wasn't making excuses when she said she doesn't have time to read. However, she does have a 20 minute drive to and from work, during which she's now turned her car from a total time-suck into a university on wheels thanks to audiobooks. Last month she finished 3 new books this way that have been on her list for the past year.

It's not how you do it, it's the fact that you get over your excuses and just fucking do it already.

There is one-drawback to this whole investing time in book reading, though ...

Today, I want to share something with you that I wish someone would have told me when I first started my business. Hell, I wish someone would have told me this in my first two years of business.

It took 4 years and my first business coach to teach me this HUGE, monumental lesson about business. And this lesson is ...

YOU CAN HELP ANYONE, BUT YOU CAN'T HELP EVERYONE.

Please, for the love of business gods everywhere, pin this so you can remind yourself later (hover over the picture until you see the little red P show up in the top left-hand corner, and click it). If you want extra good karma, share it with anyone else you know who is an entrepreneur. It's that important.

I remember when I first heard this lesson about picking a smaller group of people to focus on helping, or what we in the biz world call a niche or ideal client, that the objections started flying out of my brain faster than a speeding bulletproof coffee. Objections like:

- but I want to help everyone!
- but how am I going to make money?
- isn't it the stupidest idea ever to turn away business?
- my husband is already harping on me to make more money. How is this going to help?

The answer is that it's going to help everything you're doing in your business. Your marketing. Your programs. Your profit. Everything.

But how could focusing on one group of people, and excluding everyone else, possibly help you do that?

Here are 3 ways that picking a niche (and sticking to it) will help grow your business by leaps and bounds:

The very first thing that I ever did for my business, back in 2008, was to choose the name and logo. This seemed very logical, since I was in the process of registering my business with the Canadian government, and the first required information on the form was "Business name".

I named the first iteration of my business "Pure Vitality". As I remember, the reasoning behind this was that I wanted the name to indicate how I was going to help people feel alive, full of energy and life, and overall healthier. I started writing down all the words that resonated with me, and then plugged them into an online thesaurus until I came up with something that sounded good to me.

I then took that name, registered for the domain, and designed a logo by typing "Pure Vitality" into Microsoft Word, playing around with fonts until it looked pretty. Here's what it looked like:

How many times have you heard that if you're not on social media, your business won't grow? Or read an article or someone's Facebook post detailing how Instagram/Periscope/Snapchat is the new social media platform you MUST be on to generate new clients?

Better yet, do you feel like there is not enough time in the day for social media because there are just too many places you feel like you're supposed to be at all times?

I do.

It's so hard to try and live in a biz bubble where you can focus on your own stuff, without all the noise from other holistic biz owners sharing what made them successful.

One was successful on Instagram, and make thousands from it each month. Another couldn't have had a 5-figure launch with Periscope. And don't forget how Pinterest brought someone else 50 new e-mail list subscribers every day of last year!

It's. freaking. overwhelming.

So, in 2015, I decided that I was going to forget about Facebook and Pinterest, I deleted my Twitter account altogether (*gasp*!) and just focused on Instagram. I invested in a program to teach me how I could grow my following and income from it. I upped my game in picture taking and styling. I blocked off time each week to take said pictures and to interact with other holistic nutritionists. I shared my little heart out with personal stories that generated tons of likes and comments. I doubled my followers. I included CTA's (calls to action) to click to read my blog posts and to get my free 2016 blog planner (which was super popular, by the way). I Instagrammed my little heart out.

And then, I was listening to a webinar on creating income on Instagram, and it reminded me that I hadn't checked my Google Analytics lately to see how many people were actually visiting my website from Instagram. Do you want to know what the grand total was in the last half of 2015?

This is how business went WAY back in 2008 when I opened my holistic nutrition doors:
- rent an expensive office space that didn't send me any referrals back (because I thought it wasn't professional to have a beautiful home office).
- spend hundreds of dollars buying furniture and office supplies to fill said office space.
- open up a business bank account.
- get a logo designed.
- buy a website domain.
- build a website that described how important I was and why people should pay me hundreds of dollars at a time, even though they had no idea who I was and what I could help them with (other than the phrase "holistic nutrition").
- get 500 business cards printed with said logo and website domain.
- set office hours because, hey! I have a life, too.
- open doors and wait for the clients to flood in.
- make tons of cash doing only what I was passionate about.

This pretty much covers my first 2 years of business, other than the making tons of cash part. I don't see any marketing at all in that list.

Since then, I've taken many courses from copywriting to online launching to branding. And do you know what the #1 thing they all have in common for recommending how you grow your business and have successful launches?

Blogging, and sending newsletters from those blogs.

Earlier this year, I decided to mostly step away from my main holistic nutrition practice into business coaching, because I couldn't stifle my passion for it any longer. Since I had the chance to this new business from scratch with 7 years of business experience and course knowledge behind me, what did I do that was totally different from my health biz?

1. I've been blogging and sending newsletters FROM THE START (instead of 3 years later)
and
2. Offering regular webinars with my one-on-one services pitched at the end

To be fair, back in 2008, practically no one in the holistic health niche were doing online businesses or webinars. Oh, how the world has changed!

So what does blogging really have to do with having a successful business?

I remember the exact moment that I learned about this new thing called "Facebook", kind of like how we can all remember where we were when 9/11 happened or when Princess Diana died. I was studying for the month of August 2005 at the University of Hawaii's Center for the Study of Active Volcanoes with students from all over North America. Only 2 of us in our group were Canadian, and we spent the month having arguments with the Americans over how to say words like nuclear, about, and bagel. For the record, nuclear is 2 SYLLABLES, not 3, despite how George Bush pronounced it. It's nu-clear, not nu-cu-lar. I digress.

We were in the lab one day checking our e-mail, and all the U.S. students started checking their "Facebook" pages. Us Canadians were like "what's Facebook?", so they sat us down and showed us how they could keep up to do date and interact with all their friends in their "newsfeed". I distinctly remember thinking "what a waste of time! Why would anyone want or need this?". That makes me literally laugh out loud now.

As far as I can tell from looking back through my über embarrassing and mostly drunk pictures from university early posts, I joined Facebook on February 27, 2007. That means that I've been on social media for almost 10 years.

I think we can all agree that how we interact with our social media has changed. Gone are the days when we used to like and comment on every single one of our friends posts. Also gone, and thank God, are the days when we all used to post in 3rd person because the status box said "Ashley is ...". Posts from my early days on Facebook includes "Ashley is bored out of her frickin mind" and "Ashley is attempting to read Charles Darwin's "On the Origins of the Species'". Seriously, I thought that posting about reading some super old but groundbreaking science was going to make me sound super smart.

Almost 10 years on, most of us are done interacting with everyone. We mindlessly scroll away hours a day on multiple social media platforms just to see what everyone else is up to. Most of the time the only thing that makes us stop is seeing a picture of puppies and kittens with babies, because they're puppies and kittens with babies! As business owners, that's what we're competing with nowadays.