A successful business starts with the most basic ingredient: paying clients.

As a wellness professional, you learned how to assess health status, give guidance on lifestyle choices and design plans to improve health, using food as medicine. What you didn’t learn is the (super important) skill of attracting paying clients.

This guide is going to give you the basic skills you need to start attracting the right people who will help you grow your practice. When your business is thriving, you get to focus more on doing what you love: helping people.

In order to attract clients online, you’re going to need one thing: a lead magnet.

What is a Lead Magnet?

Let’s break it down…

A lead: a prospect who has shown interest in becoming a client and provided you with their contact information.

A magnet: an object that has a powerful attraction force.

Put together, a lead magnet is an item that will attract potential clients to provide you with their contact information.

Think of the last time you bought something online: The retailer probably offered you a 15% off coupon in exchange for your email address. That’s a lead magnet.

Types of lead magnets used by nutrition professionals include:

Recipe books
Short meal plans (3 to 7 days)
Nutrition tips
Shopping checklists

The options are endless, but it needs to be extremely valuable, and it needs to be FREE.

Your lead magnet should be targeted, and it should solve a specific problem related to your niche. The more specific, the better! For example: An Eczema-Healing Recipe Book or a 7-Day Bye-Bye Bloating Meal Plan.

Creating Your Lead Magnet

If you’re creating a recipe book or a meal plan, using That Clean Life will produce beautiful, branded e-books and meal plans with grocery lists, recipes and nutrition information. You can easily build an epic lead magnet using a database of beautiful, tried, tested and true recipes with high-quality images. You can filter recipes by diet type to create a lead magnet perfect for your niche, and also edit recipes or add your own. All you need to do is upload your logo, build the plan or curate the recipes, export a gorgeous PDF file and get ready to attract some high-quality leads.

If you’re creating a nutrition tips sheet or a checklist, write it up in a Word or a Google Doc, and then export it as a PDF. You can also use a tool like Canva to design visually appealing PDFs to use as your lead magnet.

How to Use Your Lead Magnet to Get More Clients

Once you have created your lead magnet, it's time to use it to get more clients. There are five simple steps to making this happen:

1. Create a landing page for your lead magnet, and pop-ups for your website.

Using an email marketing platform like MailChimp you can create a list specifically for your lead magnet. Set-up an automatic on-boarding email so that every time someone submits their contact information to the list, they receive a link to download your free resource.

Tip: Check out Mailchimp's free landing pages tool here.

Next, add pop-ups to your website to encourage leads to grab your lead magnet when they are browsing your site or blog.

Tip: If you are using Mailchimp, you can learn more about how to add a pop-up to your website here.

Share the link for your lead magnet on Facebook, Twitter, or any other platform you use, so that any time new potential clients find you, they can easily see that you offer this free resource.

Tip: On Instagram, you are only able to have one link in your bio. To take full advantage of this link, use LinkTree. This is a free tool that allows you to create a page which has all the content you want to drive your followers to. For example, you could create a LinkTree that directs people to your blog, appointment booking page and your lead magnet.

Promoting your lead magnet in Facebook communities can be an effective strategy, but it’s a delicate art. It’s important that what you’re providing is free, highly valuable, and relevant to the purpose of the group. If you come across as too sales-y or promotional, you’re likely to be deleted, so be very careful with your words!

Find the groups that relate to your niche, join them, and contribute in a meaningful way. If you're looking for in-person clients, make sure the groups are based in your city. When you post the links, make sure you’re offering value, without asking for anything in return.

Tip: Serve before you sell.

4. Follow-Up With Your Leads

Once potential clients have expressed interest by downloading your lead magnet, you’ll want to nurture these leads. Stay in touch with them on a consistent basis to offer even more value and allow them to know, like, and trust you.

You might want to write an on boarding sequence of emails that gets sent out to new email list members to introduce yourself and provide more valuable information related to your niche.

Tip: To see some examples of effective on boarding sequence emails, see here.

If you’re not there yet with the email marketing automation, don't worry! Instead, try to at least nourish your list with weekly newsletters, free tips and valuable resources to keep them thinking of you.

5. Ask Your Leads to Book an Appointment

Once leads have been on your list for a while, you've provided them with a ton of free value, and they know, like, and trust you, it's now time to encourage them to book an appointment with you.

You can reach out personally and offer a free discovery session, send special offers on your programs, or launch a group program and invite them to sign-up. As long as you’ve been consistently providing value to them, some of these leads will convert into paying clients. Always continue to offer free content, regardless of whether or not they decide to book with you. Long-term, it will pay off for you and your business.

Our challenge to you: If you don't yet have a lead magnet, we challenge you to get one up and working for you over the next week! If you do have a lead magnet but it's not working for you, it's time to revise your strategy. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below!

How to Create an Awesome Lead Magnet and Use It To Get More Clients