Hey there, wellness entrepreneur. Welcome back. Today, we are talking about what happens—what to do—when you want to be on Instagram, but you don’t have time for it. Or you’re feeling like it’s just taking too much time and you’re not getting the results, a.k.a., you’re not getting people reaching out wanting to work with you.
Here’s what’s happening. I hear it all the time: “I don’t have time for Instagram.” But here’s the truth. I believe you. You don’t have time for Instagram the way you are currently doing it. Here’s what’s happening. You’re spending three hours writing the equivalent of a graduate-level dissertation for your Instagram captions, or you’re leading them through an entire workshop, trying to fit it in and squeeze it into a 90-second reel, or you’re answering every DM like you’re running a free consultation service—basically giving away and coaching them for free online. It’s no wonder you’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and not booking clients. Here’s the truth.
I’m going to show you how to cut your Instagram time in half. One of my clients, Dana—you might’ve heard her story before—we talked about how it took her 90 minutes to create one reel, so she was only posting once in a while. When we really chopped that reel up, it created four to five days of Instagram content.
And stay with me here because I’m actually implementing this myself. The last week or so, couple weeks, my reels have been doing really well—like 4,000, 5,000, 8,000 views. I’m getting a lot more followers. And here’s the truth: the reels have taken me just a few minutes to make. Once I really knew the process to get specific in the messaging, then my audience really responded to that. Also, I’m really understanding what my audience wants more of.
Okay, today we’re going to go over some time-saving content hacks that actually convert. Instead of writing a novel in your caption, you can start creating a caption formula or framework. For example, speaking to the problem that it solves, the solution, maybe giving a client story or testimonial.
For me, I love to give an implementable strategy in my caption. The call to action—this might be to book a consult, it might be to comment below for a freebie, it might be to follow, it might be to save, or two of those. But I use AI to help develop my caption. Then, if I just start with the process of creating the topic first of what I want to talk about, and then if it’s a reel, the text overlay—and get that dialed in so it’s scroll-stopping, has a strong hook, and is very specific to my audience—it might be speaking to a problem or desire or telling my story.
Then I can just say, if the caption framework is already in there and they have past captions that have worked well for me, all I have to say is, “Okay, now create me the caption and give me some hashtags.” And bam, there it is—created really simply and easily. That can save you a ton of time where you don’t have to write a novel each time, but it’s still valuable. And how do I know mine is valuable? Because people tell me, “Oh, I saved it,” “I screenshotted it,” “I sent it to my friend,” “I loved the last reel that you posted.”
Hack number two is thinking of your micro health and wellness personal stories, not just the big one. Because this is often where we end up creating very long pieces of content that take us a while to create because we’re bringing in all these different pictures and all these different clips from videos, and then we have to edit them all up and put them all together.
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If we can just tell a micro story—a micro transformation instead of a huge one—often, that even relates to our audience more because it’s tangible, it seems doable, and it often meets them where they’re at, where they can be like, “Oh, I think I can achieve that small win.” Where in your health and wellness journey might you have a small win that you can share with your audience?
For example, you can say something like, “How I used to go from not working out at all to now running five days a week. It started with this one small thing…” And you can just tell the small win. Maybe it was a quick hack of putting your workout clothes out the night before. Or maybe it was buying a new pair of shoes, and that just motivated you because you loved wearing them. Or maybe it was hiring that running coach and just getting that plan that you believed in and trusted. What was the small thing to get you started to be consistent, for example? And that consistency, right, led to the big result. But we’re just starting with the small win.
For me, I might tell a story of the one thing I started doing to get out of teaching 10+ yoga classes a week, to now being fully online. So it’s a part of my story, but I might just take one small behind-the-scenes moment. But I won’t tell the whole entire story in that one thing. Or one reel that did really well was using a trending hook.
So you can use trending hooks out there and relate them to your personal story: “She didn’t realize it yet, but the day after this workshop, she got a diagnosis…” That—for me, I forget the exact wording—but it essentially shattered my confidence as a wellness practitioner and made me feel like a fraud overnight.
That reel got over 8,000 views. And it’s telling this snapshot of the moment when I got my cancer diagnosis. Where can you think smaller in terms of dropping them into a moment in the day of your life? A moment in one micro health transformation that makes it super relatable and is something they might get a perspective on or a mindset shift from that will give them a small win for today?
Okay, hack number three—speaking of moments—is capitalizing on a problem that is very, very specific to a moment in the day of their life. For example, another reel that’s done really well for me recently—I’ll read it for you. It’s the POV when you’re leading a meditation class and suddenly your imposter syndrome shows up in the form of Piper’s mom saying, “But you’re not a Buddhist, right?” For me I love creating funny reels. It makes me laugh. And I created that reel so quickly. I just took literally a less than ten-second video of me sitting, meditating. I found the audio for Piper’s mom from White Lotus, and I used AI to help create that overlay. I had the idea, but I used AI to help tighten up the text on the screen to make it a little bit punchier and funnier and concise. And that reel did so well—I think it has over 8,000 views right now.
So it’s a small moment speaking to the imposter syndrome, which many of my practitioners and clients—when they first come to me—have imposter syndrome in various ways. Imposter syndrome around delivering results for their clients. Imposter syndrome moving from brick-and-mortar to online. Imposter syndrome posting content online. Imposter syndrome when teaching classes. Instead of speaking to all these different types of imposter syndrome in one piece of content, I just picked one specific scenario, and I spoke to that moment.
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Now, you don’t have to be funny. I love to be funny sometimes. Not every single reel of mine is funny, but if you do feel called to be a little controversial or funny, or you can educate on that very small, specific moment, there are different ways that you can play around with it. Create a carousel. Find a meme for it.
But the point of it is that you’re using that small moment as a chance to show your expertise. Because if you read the caption for that one—I’ll drop it in the show notes—you’ll see that I delivered value in the caption: strategies on how to overcome imposter syndrome while being more visible while teaching.
So you can still deliver value and be funny, and it doesn’t have to take a long time to make. And I got a consultation from that one because they just related to it so much.
So those are the three hacks I want to give you today. I want this episode to be implementable so you can get out there and try it and have fun and laugh and show your true personality and vibe because I know you’ve got it. I know your audience loves you. They do want to be educated, but also they want that education to be in bite-sized, digestible format that they understand because it’s remembering, like, they’re not going to Instagram — now, I’m saying this with love because I literally had a coach tell me this — like, “Alison, they’re not going to Instagram to go to the library.”
We’re not going to Instagram to go to the library. We’re going to Instagram to connect — it’s social media — or to be entertained, or zone out. But if you’re able to catch their attention in that scroll with a bite-sized hook and a bite-sized piece of content that is very relatable to a struggle that they’re going through in a moment in their day-to-day, and then you’re bringing your spin on it or bringing a funny spin to it or a quick, bite-sized educational piece of information or perspective, that’ll give them a win. That’ll make them want to watch it all the way through, send it to their friends, save it, share it, and that’ll boost your views — maybe even DM you and tell you, “Thank you for posting this today, I really needed to hear it,” which will start the conversation. Then that — all of that — will lead to more followers and then hopefully for you, your next paying client.
Now, if you’re having trouble thinking of the bite-sized micro stories from your own life, or the bite-sized moments from your client’s life, then what I do is I get myself comfy. I will literally sit on my couch or I just got this new chaise lounge chair for the she shed, and I’ll make myself comfy with some tea or relaxing music.
And I’ll just start a conversation with ChatGPT, being like, “Okay, here’s what I do, here’s how I help people.” If you save your forms from your consultations, you can even drop that whole document. I actually save the forms — not the names, but what they write on the forms — in a document and every so often I re-upload it to Claude. I have a project in there, or ChatGPT, if I’m working on a reel, where I can say, “Reference this document, help me pull out some specific struggles.” And if it still seems broad, then say, “Get more specific. Get more specific.” That’s one way to get some ideas. Then you pull one of the ideas that it has listed and say, “Okay, let’s make a reel for this specific idea.”
So just start with one and then create it. You can do it that way, and you could potentially create five in an hour that way — just recording real quick, if you’re doing 10-second videos, right there from your couch.
Another way to do it is — now you have to be careful here, set a timer — you can research content that is going viral in your wellness niche from other content creators to give you ideas. The meditation and the Piper one for me, I didn’t see another content creator doing it that specific way (because I don’t recommend copying them), but I did see some — a lot of people when White Lotus was going on and especially when it ended — using the audio from White Lotus. And I had saved the audio, and I had seen people going viral from it.
And then the idea came to me about the meditation. You can research other pieces of content that are going viral to help you figure out, “Oh, okay, what types of content are doing well?” “What are audiences responding to?”
With my personal story, right, the “she didn’t realize it yet” piece of content, I saw that it was a trending hook from various other content creators. Not in the wellness niche, but I saw them using it for various other stories, and I was like, “Oh wow, people are really loving that way to share a bite-sized piece of their personal story.” I’ll take that hook and that format and bring it to my own piece of content.
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So that’s what I did, but I just related it to my story. And I used B-roll from a past workshop I taught, and told my story of how I taught a workshop, and then I got imposter syndrome because of a scary health diagnosis right afterward. And that did really well for me.
Research — I just say be careful there, so you don’t end up mindless scrolling or doom scrolling instead. That’s happened to me before. You’ve got to set a timer and just be aware that research doesn’t turn into an hour of scrolling and not having ideas from it. Be mindful there. Be productive. Be focused. Set a timer so you don’t do it much longer than what you originally had planned for. And then you’ll get some ideas that way. And again, you can take those ideas and drop them into ChatGPT or AI to create your bite-sized pieces of content to then throw out there into the world and test.
And that’s how I really got to find some funny pieces of content that my audience is really loving. And it’s allowed me to create content that is doing really well, and it doesn’t take that much time to create at all.
All right, there you have it — some content hacks for this week to get you out there creating more content when you really feel like you don’t have the time, so you can actually do it. Because yes, if a piece of content is taking you 90 minutes or longer, you won’t have the time to create consistent content — that is a true circumstance for you.
So I do want you to create more content because I just know the potential out there on Instagram for wellness practitioners to grow their audience and sign a lot of clients, and really grow a massive audience.
I have many clients who have doubled, tripled their audience, more than quadrupled their overall views, and have started signing clients. If they can do it, you can do it too. I know you can. I know you have a wealth of information to provide. It’s just making it bite-sized and digestible.
All right, give it a whirl. And then message me on Instagram or leave a comment here on the podcast, or share it with a friend who needs to hear this today. And let me know how it works for you.
All right, I’ll see you next week. Bye for now.
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