Make It Visible
You’re full of amazing coaching skills, ideas, and a desire to make a difference, but marketing your coaching biz isn’t your thing?
Meet Michelle, your new business bestie who knows exactly how to help coaches like you get seen, get heard, and get paying clients. This is where your voice (literally and figuratively) becomes visibility and visibility becomes clients.
No more feeling invisible. Let’s make marketing easy-peasy and magical.
Make It Visible
#235: Is That a Client Prospect… or Someone Else’s Funnel?
Today, we’re fixing something that’s been driving coaches nuts:
All the spammy “opportunities” that show up in your inbox, DMs, comments… and inside Facebook groups.
Because some of these posts look legit…
But in reality, they’re just the beginning of somebody else’s funnel.
So the real question is:
How do you tell if something is legit… or if you’re about to get pitched?
- In this episode, I’ll walk you through:
- Why coaches get targeted so much online
- The open-ended questions to ask before you say yes
- How to check audience quality (so you don’t waste your time)
- What to research before you hop on a call
- How to stop feeling like you’re “missing out” if you don’t respond
If you’re a new or newish life coach trying to get clients online and you feel bombarded by “opportunities”… this is for you.
Drop me a line and share your thoughts!
Meet Your Host:
Hey, I’m Michelle — The coaches’ coach.
I'm a Business and Visibility marketing Coach who helps female life coaches build a coaching biz, get seen at all the right places, and attract paying clients.
I believe your coaching business should feel beautiful and profitable — without sacrificing your sanity, your weekends, or your personality.
Using my 7-Step Client Enrollment Method, I help you build a coaching business that clients can’t help but say, “OMG, that’s who I need!”
More clarity, more clients, more champagne moments. 🥂
Because building your dream business shouldn’t be a nightmare — it should feel like coming home.
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This week, Shelly is clogging in to work and we're fixing spammy opportunity that coaches have keeps getting. Just the other day, I got an email from one of my subscribers to my newsletter, and he said that he was feeling tired of seeing all these ads targeting at coaches. And if you get into some of the Facebook groups or live coaches and just coaches community in general, you're probably also being inundated by posts that looks legit, but in reality, it's really a beginning of somebody else's funnel. So they show up in your email, they show up in your DM. If you're hanging out on LinkedIn, then that's another story for another day. Or it's inside your comment, people are reaching out, you're sitting there wondering if these are actually legitimate, real, potential prospects who are interested in your service. So the question comes down to how do you tell if something is legit or just somebody else's funnel? That's what we're going to fix today. Hey coach, welcome to Make It Visible Podcast. I'm Michelle Quay, your visibility marketing coach, and I help female life coaches to get seen in all the right places, attract happy paying clients, and build a coaching business that actually feels good to run. Even if you are still trying to figure things out. Each week I'm giving you visibility tips, simple marketing strategies, and showing you how to create the kind of content that connects with your audience so that you can stand out, build your authority, and attract clients who's already feeling like a yes before they jump onto your discovery call. So grab a notebook, pour yourself a favorite drink, and let's make your coaching business visible. If you are new or newish life coach, and you're a coach trying to get clients online or who feel who feel a little bombarded or maybe a lot bombarded by all these opportunities that you see on social and you're worrying that maybe it's a waste of time and energy to actually reach out. Do I even reach out? What do I say? How do I know? Is this real? Is this worth it? Or am I missing out if I don't say yes to their requests? Like, what is going on? And I don't think anybody had ever talked about this so openly in terms of what exactly should you do as a life coach when you come across this? And how do you tell if it's a legitimate prospect or it's a potential speaking engagement? How do I actually investigate and go about finding out? And before we get into that, let's talk about why this is happening first. This is happening because coaches are easy to target. If you think about the things that you do online, it there's a good chance that you're pretty actively looking for clients and you want clients, which makes perfect sense. You have a business to run. So of course you need paying clients. And where else would you look in terms of expanding your reach and reaching people globally than online? It makes perfect sense. But it also makes you becoming the easy target because you probably have listed yourself on LinkedIn, you probably have listed yourself on a Google page and Google Business. You probably have listed yourself unknowingly by listing yourself. And when you list it yourself, not only will your prospects have an easy way of finding you, there's also going to be marketers or people trying to sell to coaches. But not all of them are designed to help you. And some of them is because it's part of their funnel system. That's how they create these funnels to have clients, which is you. So it this is why you keep seeing it happening over and over if you're trying to get clients online. Now, if you do it offline, are you still a target? Of course. It's just a different way of how people sell you their business. You may not realize, but you're being sold every single time you attend a networking event or you're connecting at a business networking group. But the way that we sell, it could be a little more authentic and true to ourselves. So if you're not resonating with the way that these sneaky tactics, then don't let it be part of you. Just know that that's not what I'm here for. That is not my way of doing business. That is not the way I'm going to provide service. That doesn't have to be you. But I think I feel like there's a lot of I don't know, like negative vibe around the word of selling. Selling itself is just a terminology, just like it's a label. And if you rip off that label, it's the act of service. And at the end of the day, if you need something and somebody else happened to have it, then there's transactions involved, and that is the act of selling. So call it whatever you want. I digress a little bit. So let's come back. So some of these opportunities, they may not be opportunity for you. The issue is not the opportunity, the issue is how do we discern which is the true opportunity that we want to go after or that we want to engage. Just because something exists doesn't mean that it is aligned with who you are, how you do business, and what you're trying to accomplish. So you don't have to say yes to everything. Every opportunity that pops into your email, you don't have to say yes to it. You don't have to respond to it. And the DM that fly into your LinkedIn profile, you don't have to answer them at all. It comes down to discernment. So how do we discern? So I have a couple of tips. And by the way, I'm saying this because I hang out inside Facebook group, I get emails, pitches all the time. And like I said, coaches are just easy target. My business is listed everywhere. I'm on every social media platform. So it's very easy to find me. If I can stop them, the very least I can do is to learn how to differentiate those that are real opportunity versus the one that is not true, real opportunity. So, how do we go about doing this? If this is something that you have never done before or this is new and you're feeling tired of where are this opportunity coming from? And how do I tell if it's actually real? What if I miss out something? So here's how you tell. The first tip I have for you is you want to ask questions. You are a coach, you're great, you're excellent, you're trained to ask open-ended questions. And that should be the very bare minimum that you do is asking some open-ended questions. So, what are some of the open-ended questions that you can ask? First of all, who is this for? Is it for yourself or someone else? Like what is it, what is it regarding? So ask them who is this for? And you wanted to ask if it's a possible speaking engagement. You always, you always want to ask them who is your audience that you're trying to reach. If they come back and they say, my audience is for everybody, guess what? You wanted to ask who is your target audience so that you can make sure that the target audience that they're focusing on is also aligned with your target audience. So let's say I want to be able to speak in front of a woman entrepreneur. So when someone reaches out to me and say, Oh, I wanted to invite you to come and speak at this event, great. Who are you targeting? These are for college students and they're going through a career exploration. That would not be my ideal client. So I may not want to speak in front of that audience because it's not aligned to my business vision and goal. But Michelle, it's a great opportunity that I will be in front of the audience. Yes. But you also have to take into consideration of the time and the energy that you have to prepare your topic, your speech. And then if it's an in-person, then you actually have to travel to that place. So, what is the return on that for you? Just to get an experience? Or are you looking to get more clients? That's two different goals. If you just want to get experience and get a taste of what it feels like to be in front of a big audience and by all means, go get the experience. But if your business goal is to get clients through the speaking engagement, then you want to be more conscious and intentional about where and how you're going to deliver that speech. So that's the second question. Who is your target audience? And this usually commonly shows up when you get speaking engagement invite, or maybe it's a podcast interview or a YouTube channel interview, things like that. The other open-ended question that you may want to ask is why are they reaching out to me specifically? Why are they reaching out to me specifically? If you're just barely started, your name is probably not out there yet. So the fact that they're reaching out to you specifically, you probably have to be a little more skeptical about how they find you. So the first question I will probably ask in that case is, how did you find me? How did you come across my name? And if they gave you a vague answer, then you want to explore a little bit, and chances are it's a red flag. Other questions, it may be, what do you what are you trying to accomplish by having this conversation? If somebody is inviting you to a call and say, hey, if you're interested, let's explore this more on a call, then you wanted to ask, because your time and my time are valuable. So you wanted to make sure that you ask by the end of our conversation, what is our goal on this call? Because then you don't want to waste your time. Your time is valuable. You could use that time to look for your clients instead of sitting there and hearing a sales pitch. Just because someone presented an opportunity for you doesn't mean that all opportunities are created equal. So be careful with that. You're great at open-ended questions. So use your skill as a coach to start engaging these types of conversations. Don't get too excited like I did, don't get too carried away. The second tip is to look for audience quality. Now, earlier I talked about you always want, especially the podcast interview or speaking engagement opportunity, you always want to ask them like who are you trying to reach? Who's your audience? And you also want to look at their audience quality. Now, this is something that you might need to take some time to do a little bit of research on your own because when you get email or when you get a someone slide into your Instagram DM, which I gotten a lot lately, they come in waves. I don't know if anybody else noticed, but they come in waves. There's certain months or weeks they just show up all of a sudden and they just flooded my DM with all these speaking engagement invites. And when you really go and do your research, it's it's a pay-to-play. So just be upfront about it. This is a pay-to-play, there's a small fee, then I will give you a like a true, genuine answer of yes or no. And typically it's a no. So the other tip is looking at their audience quality. You wanted to ask them who's who are your target audience and looking at the audience that they told you. If it's for everybody and we reach globally, then be a little more skeptical about it because, again, you want to be intentional of your time and energy and your visibility to make sure that you're in front of the right audience. I have this principle, and this is something that I tell my client all the time: the energy that you put in for creating that visibility to being out there, the exposure, you want to make sure that there's an outcome that you can measure at the end. And that outcome could be a collaboration, a mutual benefit in the future. It could be a connection, a business collaboration, affiliation in the future, or a friendship. That could be the start of a friendship. The other return is that it may turn out to be a client generating method that you use. So are you getting the proper return of your investment by being in front of that audience? If the answer is no, then you have to ask yourself: is my time worthy enough to be in front of the wrong audience where they're probably not ever going to engage on my social or follow me or actually sign up to my coaching program. So you wanted to be very conscious about your time and energy and where you spend it. And this is why looking at their audience quality is really important because if it is not your right people, then what are you doing there? You're just wasting time. Okay, now the next tip is pretty simple and pretty straightforward. I covered this already, is that you want to do your own research. If you come across a Facebook comment or a post that talk about looking for life coaches who need five to ten clients in the next month, that's a red flag immediately. I just don't believe that people are still using that tactic. So if you see comments like that, or if you see a post like that, the first thing that I would do is I will click on that person profile and you can do your own research behind the scene without actually commenting on it. So you can go and click on that person profile and check out that person and see what that person is about. And most of us, we tell our clients so well that you want to use and leverage all the assets that you have on your social media. So chances are the banner will tell you a lot about what that person does, who that person is, and if you continue to read the bio, if you continue to read their post, it'll give you a pretty good sense of who that person is. Now, that's one scenario where you can go and that person may keep their profile open so you can do your research. The other scenario, it might be a little more shady because when you click on their profile and nothing is visible, everything is locked. In that case, I would be careful. If you do decide to engage, just know that there's a good chance that you might get a DM slide into your message. So if it's locked, that's kind of 50-50. Maybe they're not comfortable sharing their personal stuff on social. That's also a possibility. But that's entirely up to you to whether or not you actually want to spend the energy and time to engage something that you don't have a whole lot of information behind. You might possibly send that person a DM and say, Hey, I noticed that you're posting this. I just want to get a sense of what exactly are you looking for, and just leave it at that so that person will give you some like context in terms of is this legit or is this something that's a little bit shady, and you might enter a spam funnel. That's something that you can always do. You can research before you say yes. Whether if it's a speaking engagement, you can look up their past event. If it's a pay-to-play, chances are they have all the information there, and it's going to tell you, like, hey, hop on a call and we'll talk more about it. And chances are that call is a sales call. So look at their past event, look at their previous speaker. Do you recognize any of the speaker when you go and check out these past speakers? You look at their profile. Are they legit? Do they look like they're also struggling? Then that will also give you a hint whether or not this is a speaking engagement opportunity that you want to go forward. And also you wanted to look at people showing up, especially the speaking engagement. You can look at their Facebook profile, their business page, and that will give you a clue of are people engaging. It is something that's very active. If they're also struggling with engagement, then chances are by you going there and speaking, you might not have the audience to speak in front of. So again, that comes back to the return of investment. And this case, it's your time and energy that you put in to prepare your speech. So just do a little bit of research before you say yes, and don't feel if I don't say yes, I'm missing out on this. No, you're not. Those are the tips that I have in terms of how do you tell if someone is legit, if the opportunity is legit, or is it just another way of getting you to be part of their funnel? Is it an opportunity, or is it just something that you continue to get inundated by being on social? Here's my personal belief. I feel like a lot of these spammy opportunities exist. It's because a lot of coaches are trying to get their word out, but they don't know how. And when it comes to finding and seeing and getting opportunity online and putting yourself out there, you end up feeling overwhelmed by people trying to sell to you. Here you're struggling to get clients. And I have a belief that when you can find things out there, then what you do is you create your own. I'm going to pick one place, one platform, where I am seeing myself as the authority on that platform. So I am going to leverage every opportunity I have. I'm going to post regularly. I'm going to publish regularly. I'm going to go online or creating video regularly so that I become that authority on that platform. If the right opportunity comes along, great. I will look at it, I will research it, and I will reach out and I will get back to that person if it is legit. If it is not, I don't have anything to lose because I'm still creating content that position myself as the authority on the platform that I'm taking ownership of. Instead of looking at all these different opportunities and wondering if there's a shortcut to it, to your visibility. There isn't any shortcut to your visibility. You have to show up and just taking ownership and creating content, create delivering. If you're gonna put out video every single week, then your audience is going to expect that you're putting out video every single week. So you wanted to own that platform and be the authority on that platform and forget about what other people are doing because there's always going to be competition. There's always going to be like people who's doing it way better than you. Do, but that's not you. What we all need to start focusing on is what can I contribute in this little world of my. This is my headquarters, and this is fine. This is perfectly okay. If I can just take ownership of what I have, use what I have, then I don't need to worry about the spamming opportunity. If the right one comes the right way, they pitch me, then sure I might say yes. But if there's not a single one that comes, then over time that's going to help you to attract better quality client than the one that just like you're using a shortcut to get there. So that's my personal opinion. And hopefully by sharing this, it's helpful to you to discern what are some of the true opportunity versus some of the fake opportunity or the spammy opportunity. If it doesn't serve your ideal client, then don't do it. If it's not supporting your current business goal, then don't respond. If it doesn't fit your capacity and you're at your limit, your time, then just say no. There's nothing wrong with saying no and you're not missing out on anything. It just means that you're more focused, you're intentional, you're purposeful, you're putting out your content with substance. And that's a good thing. Drop your case in a comment down below. Let me know have you come across recently with a legit, or did you find out later that it was part of somebody else's funnel? Hopefully, this gives you a little bit more filter in terms of the opportunity on social, online, and basically everywhere where coaches go. Alright, Shali clocking out. Bye. Thank you for listening to Make It Visible Podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support for your coaching business, head over to elevate lifecoaching.org and see how we can partner together to turn your passion into a profitable business. I help female coaches launch and scale their coaching business faster than ever without wasted time and money, filling the gaps in your marketing strategies, creating a simple and easy to follow system so you can accelerate on the path of coaching business that you love to wake up to. Head over to elevatelifecoaching.org and grab a free strategy out of today.
