The internet is absolutely drowning in marketing tip lists. Ten tips for coaches. Fifteen strategies for healers. Twenty one ways to grow your audience. And somehow, miraculously, they all say exactly the same thing.

Find your why. Know your avatar. Show up consistently. Batch your content. Build your email list. Be authentic.

Cool. Cool cool cool. Super helpful. Very specific. Definitely not something you've read forty seven times already this week. ☠️

What actually bothers me about most of these lists: the advice isn't wrong exactly, it's just so basic it's essentially useless. Like someone checked their brain at the door, picked the ten most obvious things they could think of, and posted it anyway. Either that or they somehow think you can't handle anything more complex than "know your audience" which, if you're running a business, is a little insulting honestly.

You're not an idiot. You've read the basic stuff. You've tried the basic stuff. And you're still here reading my lengthy ramblings, which means the basic stuff isn't cutting it.

So here are ten things that are actually specific and actually useful.

1. You already know your why. You've always known.

Stop letting business coaches gaslight you into thinking you don't, and go build the thing you've been circling around for months.

Seriously. The find your why exercise has become such a staple of the coaching world that people spend entire retreats and mastermind days trying to unearth something they already know. You started this business because something mattered to you deeply enough to build a whole life around it. That's your why. It's been sitting there the whole time. The endless excavating isn't clarifying it, it's just making you second guess what you already knew. Stop looking for it. You have it. Go use it.

2. Stop trying to squeeze your big work into someone else's tiny category. You're better than that.

The pick a niche advice exists because it's easier to market a specific thing to a specific person. That part is true. But the way it gets taught turns into squeeze yourself into a box that already exists so you can compete with everyone else in that box. Which is... not great advice for someone who doesn't fit neatly into a box to begin with.

The coaches and healers who build something lasting aren't the ones who found the perfect niche. They're the ones who became so specifically, unmistakably themselves that their niche found them.

So go freewrite or journal about what you actually do. Not your job title. Not your modality. The real thing. Because you're not just a life coach. You're the person who helps the woman who has read every self help book ever published, done the therapy, done the retreats, done the breathwork, and is still lying awake at 3am wondering why she can't make herself feel okay, and you're the one who finally figures out why and helps her fix it for real. Or you're the somatic practitioner who works with the high achieving women whose bodies have started staging a full revolt against the life they built because nobody ever taught them that their nervous system has opinions too. Or you're the business mentor who specializes in the formerly burned out corporate woman who left a six figure salary to do something meaningful and is now trying to figure out how to make that pay her actual bills without becoming the thing she left.

See the difference? One of those is a category. The others are a calling. Go write yours down.

3. Someone has already learned the marketing you hate, loves doing it, and is really good at it.

Find that person. Let them do their magic while you get back to the work you actually love.

A lot of us hold off on getting help because we've told ourselves we haven't earned it yet. Not big enough, not successful enough, not making enough money to justify bringing someone in. And sometimes that's a real practical constraint, money is a real thing and not everyone has it to spend.

But if you've got clients coming in through sheer hustle and force of will, which hello, that's most of the people reading this, you're already proving you can sell. What you haven't built yet is the system that lets you stop hustling quite so hard. Investing in that system, the brand, the website, the funnels, the infrastructure, is what creates the capacity to grow without running yourself into the ground. You make more by doing less. You stop spending time trying to become a marketing expert in seventeen different disciplines and start spending it doing the work you're actually brilliant at.

Instead of spending months learning reels or ads or funnels or email sequences or whatever the thing is that you hate, forcing yourself through it, producing mediocre results because your heart isn't in it, and then concluding that marketing just doesn't work for you... find the person who loves it. Marketing works. Marketing you hate doing, done badly because you hate doing it, doesn't work. Those are different problems with different solutions. Find the person who loves the thing you hate. Pay them. Move on.

4. Maybe it's not a mindset block. Maybe it's resistance you should listen to.

Sometimes your brand just doesn't fit and your nervous system knows it before your brain catches up. Trust that resistance. It's telling you something important.

The coaching industry has a tendency to pathologize perfectly reasonable responses to bad situations. You avoid posting because your brand doesn't feel like you, and someone tells you it's a visibility block. You dread getting on sales calls because your offer isn't quite right, and someone tells you it's a money mindset issue. Sometimes those things are true. And sometimes the avoidance is just accurate information about a real problem that needs a practical solution, not another round of mindset work.

And think about this: you know that feeling when you meet someone and something in you goes hmm, something's not quite right here, but you push through it because they seem nice enough and maybe you're just being weird? And then three months in they do exactly the thing your gut was whispering about from day one. Was that intuition? Confirmation bias? Honestly, who knows. But what I do know is that if your brand, your website, your copy, your whole online presence is creating that vague something's a bit off feeling in the people who find you, you've already lost the sale before the conversation even started. Before you hire another coach to help you push through the resistance, ask yourself whether the resistance might actually be right.

5. When the person you actually are doesn't match the person you're performing online, people feel it.

They can't name it but they feel it. That quiet incoherence is costing you trust. Just be genuinely, unapologetically yourself. It's the most effective brand persona you've got.

Trust is built on consistency and coherence. When your website sounds like one person, your Instagram sounds like another, and the actual you shows up on a sales call sounding like a third person entirely, something feels off. People can't articulate why they didn't book. They just know something wasn't quite right.

The fix isn't more polish. It's less performance. The version of you that shows up when you're talking to someone you actually like, about something you actually care about, is the most magnetic version of you that exists. Lead with that one. Have a system that helps you show up to both halves of your marketing, the finding and the catching, that you actually want to enact because you love what you've built and you're not embarrassed to share it. Live the full expression of your business. That's where the magic lives.

6. Your vibe finds your people. Your website and your systems keep them.

Both halves matter, and when they're working together, the right clients show up already sold.

Most coaches and healers are pretty good at one of these and completely neglect the other. Either they're great at showing up, creating content, building relationships, being visible, but their website is embarrassing them into hiding and their funnel doesn't exist. Or they have a beautiful brand and website that nobody is finding because they've done nothing to get in front of new people.

Content and connections find your people. Your brand, website, and systems catch them when they arrive. If either half is missing, you're working twice as hard as you need to be. The goal is a system you actually show up to enact and a brand you love sharing and aren't embarrassed of. Both. At the same time. That's the full expression of your business and it's completely buildable.

7. Before you invest in the next thing, ask yourself one honest question.

Will this actually move my business forward or will it just make me feel like I'm doing something? You already know the difference.

There's a specific kind of expensive procrastination that masquerades as strategic action in this industry and it's worth naming directly. It's the rebrand you do for the sixth time because you're terrified to launch and changing your colors feels safer than putting your work out there. It's the magic pill course you buy, throw yourself into for three weeks, declare useless, and abandon, without acknowledging that real marketing takes months to work, not weeks. It's the coach hopping, moving from one mentor to the next because none of them are doing it right, when the real issue is that you haven't stayed still long enough to let anything work.

Before you invest in anything, sit with this question honestly: is this filling a real gap in my business or is it filling a gap in my confidence? Both are valid. But they have different solutions. A coach might help the confidence problem. Rebranding for the sixth time probably won't. Staying in the thing long enough to see results almost certainly will.

8. Consistency without a system isn't discipline. It's punishment.

Build the infrastructure that makes showing up feel easy and watch what happens to your follow through.

The just be consistent advice drives me absolutely insane because it treats consistency like a character trait rather than a structural outcome. Consistent people aren't more disciplined than inconsistent people. They've usually just built systems that make showing up easier than not showing up.

Nobody talks about the fact that systems don't all look the same. Especially for the neuro-spicy, the burned out, the ones whose energy comes in waves rather than a steady predictable stream. A rigid content calendar might be exactly what one person needs and a complete disaster for another. Maybe your system is picking a day when inspiration strikes and going on a three hour creative tear, forgetting you have a body, producing enough content for a month. Maybe it's loose ideas you riff from rather than specific prompts. Maybe it's that your brain only works at that one specific coffee shop where something about the ambient noise and the particular latte tells your nervous system it's go time. Maybe it's the 2am writing streak when everyone is asleep and your thoughts finally get quiet enough to hear.

Stop shaming yourself for what you need and start working with it instead of against it. That's how you build your system. Not by copying someone else's, but by paying attention to when you actually show up and building the infrastructure around that.

9. The time you spend doing the things that light you up isn't time away from your business. It's fuel.

Protect it like it's billable, because in every way that matters, it is.

The hike. The pottery. The garden. The book you're reading. The long conversation with a friend that goes nowhere and everywhere at the same time. These aren't indulgences you've earned by finishing your work. They're the source of the work.

Artistic and joy-making outlets fuel creativity in ways that staring at a screen simply cannot. They get you out of the obsessive loops of thought running through your head about what's going wrong. They break the workaholism before it breaks you. They let you see beauty in the world again, which turns out to be pretty essential when your whole job is helping people build something they love. They make you feel human, which is where all your best ideas come from anyway.

If you're waiting until everything is done to do the things that fill you back up, you will wait forever. Put them in the calendar first. Everything else fits around them.

10. The best business decision you'll ever make is deciding what you're not willing to do anymore.

Not what to add. What to finally put down. Build from there.

Every business owner I've ever talked to who finally found their version of flow got there not by adding the right thing but by removing the wrong things. The offers that drained them. The clients that exhausted them. The marketing formats that required them to be someone they're not. The software they hated but kept paying for anyway.

Something I do for myself when things start to get heavy: write down everything I hate but am currently tolerating. All of it. Like, I have to post on social media but I genuinely don't enjoy being on there, it just never makes me feel good. I do it because it's a business necessity and I've made peace with that. But naming it? That's useful. Because once you know how you actually feel about something, you can do something about it. You can find a way to make it easier, hand it off, systematize it, or decide it's genuinely not necessary for your business after all. Rinse, repeat.

You don't have to figure it out alone either. My whole business is being my clients' second brain, collaborating on the systems and strategies and workarounds we need so they can actually be in flow. Which means you don't need to know everything that's bringing you down before we start. You just need to start noticing. We'll tackle it one by one as they come up. That's a far more manageable task than solving everything at once, and honestly more effective anyway.

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Save this for when you need it. And share it with the coach or healer in your life who needed to hear it today.

What I actually believe after years of doing this work: the coaches and healers who build something sustainable aren't the ones who finally figured out the right marketing hack. They're the ones who stopped trying to do it someone else's way and built something that fit who they actually are.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

If this sounds like your kind of marketing, you know where to find me. Let’s talk→

Kara Jordan has spent over a decade building marketing systems for coaches, healers, and service providers who are brilliant at their work, but their businesses feel hard. She's the person you call when you want someone who actually gets it before you finish explaining. She's a little woo, deeply practical, and allergic to marketing that makes people feel bad. Also: kiln owner, tea enthusiast, cat-obsessed, suspected witch