Hi there, wellness entrepreneur. Welcome to the Ignite Ur Wellness Business podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Alison McLean, physical therapist, yoga teacher, coach, massage therapist, and owner of Ignite Ur Wellness Business.
This is the podcast to help you as a wellness entrepreneur create an online extension of your in-person wellness practice so you can help more people without overextending yourself or relying a hundred percent on your body.
So grow your dream business to 100K and beyond using my proven systems.
Hey there, wellness entrepreneur. Welcome back. In today’s episode, we might get a little controversial here, a little bit spicy. In fact, it might be different than what you’ve told in the past or what you’ve heard from other business coaches or in other podcasts, but I’ll tell you, it’s the piece of advice that often sets people free and gives them so much creative power, and ownership and autonomy. And that is stopping niching yourself to death—why your Instagram audience is waiting for you and not your perfect niche.
What I see a lot of is very talented and skilled health coaches, yoga teachers, massage therapists, physical therapists, healers, and healthcare providers that can really help people, and they have the potential to grow on Instagram. They have a lot of skills. They have a lot of certifications and a small audience already waiting for them, but they’re not posting consistently because instead, they’re staring at their laptop, spending hours behind the screen trying to figure out if they’re a pelvic floor specialist for busy moms, or a nervous system support, a nervous system expert for burnout entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, colleagues seem to just post whatever or whenever and are already booked and filled out. So what gives? What should you do?
Here’s the truth that is controversial and that I fully believe—and I have helped several clients. In fact, they’ve told me, “Oh my gosh, Allison, you’ve freed me”—is that you can just get out there and start creating emails, start creating Instagram content, start selling your offer, and you don’t have to have a niche. You can just be a wellness practitioner, especially if you’re working one-to-one.
Because when someone comes into your world, and if you’re offering consultations, you can figure out what specifically they’re looking for. And then that person—you’re gonna create a niche for them with your offer in that moment on the call. And then the next person, it might be a little bit different.
But if you are theorizing and hypothetically trying to solve for your niche, but not posting, not making offers about your program, not connecting with people, or it’s really causing you to freeze and hold yourself back, you won’t show up. And then you won’t sign clients.
And so it’s a disservice to you because you are not growing your audience, you’re not growing your business, and it’s a disservice to your clients.
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Now, here’s what I’m not saying. I’m not saying to post general emails and general pieces of content that speak to no one, that say “thrive in your body,” or “improve your wellness,” or “get to the root cause of your health issue.” No. You want to be specific in your content, but you can still be broad in your niche.
Now, what does that mean? We’re going to get to it in this very episode.
So here’s what keeps happening. You spend weeks trying to create the perfect content calendar for this theoretical niche that you spent hours and even weeks trying to finally decide on. So maybe you land upon perimenopause for females going through transition that have children and yada yada yada.
You picked out this perfect person, an ideal client avatar. You haven’t worked with anyone in this niche yet, but you’re just landing upon it and hoping that it’ll work. And then you post once, and maybe it only gets three likes, and it’s kind of crickets, and you immediately think, “Well, maybe this niche is wrong.” Or you send an email and it gets no clicks, and you’re like, “Oh shoot, this isn’t the niche.”
Maybe you should focus on menopausal women that have already entered menopause and now they’re noticing big changes in their body and they want help sleeping through the night. Then you start the cycle all over again. And while you continue to do that—starting and stopping and freezing and theoretically trying to figure out who to talk to—you’re watching other wellness practitioners fill their practices, and you stay stuck.
What happens here is even worse because then you really start doubting yourself as an entrepreneur and as a practitioner, and you consider even stopping. And again, that’s a disservice because your people really need your help. You’re the only person with your health story and your special combination of expertise and certifications.
You are the only one who can help them the way that you do. And you’re not stuck because you don’t know enough about your niche. You’re stuck because you’re feeling like every single post has to talk to that one person, and your niche has to be very narrow because that’s what you’ve heard.
Now here’s the truth. When you are specific and narrow on Instagram, for example, your content will do better. But that does not mean that you have to narrow down your niche completely till you figure out what works.
So, how do you figure out what works? And this is coming from helping a lot of wellness entrepreneurs as well as going through it myself. Your niche doesn’t come from your head, it doesn’t come from academia researching. It comes from putting content out there and testing and interacting.
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So, how do I know?
I’ll give you a case study. My client, Katie, came to me with about 2,000 followers, and she has a book out there. She has a lot of great certifications. She listed on her Instagram bio that she’s an author, a yoga teacher, a somatics practitioner, and a mindfulness coach. She has a lot of ways where she can really help people, and she came to me and she was frozen.
She hadn’t posted on Instagram in a while because she had actually hired a marketing agency, and they had done all this research on her niche and her marketing audience on what to say and had all this data, and then they were posting content for her, and it was really falling flat.
So she was really frustrated because she wasn’t getting the views or interactions that she wanted despite spending money with this marketing agency. And so she just basically stopped posting, except for a personal story about a vacation and such. But I saw the engagement, and I had looked past her previous posts, and I saw a ton of potential.
Her audience was about 2,000 followers, so still on the smaller side. But I saw that with that amount of followers, she had the potential to grow and still sign and work with people.
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So the first thing we did was free her from having to pigeonhole herself right there in that moment as the practitioner who helped people get their energy and time back—just mindfulness coaching or stress reduction. I gave her the freedom to talk about anything. She could use the research in any way. The only rule was the rule of one.
That each post or each email—at the time she was also doing retreats—each retreat would focus on one person and one problem. And that is truly how she freed herself. She just started putting content out there, speaking to one problem and one person.
And do you know what happened? Through testing, she began to discover that her audience loved hearing about trauma, and she loved speaking about trauma. And that is exactly the ideal client that she wants to work with and help.
And you know, it still incorporates all the other work that she does, except that it is the main umbrella. So she started posting more about trauma. And because she already knew that her audience was loving it, it took off like rapid fire. And she quickly went to 5K followers, 10K followers. And to this day, right now, she’s at like 12.8K or 9,000 followers.
So she has 10x-ed her audience in a few short months. So the process for her was starting broad, but each piece of content was using the rule of one. And then over time, when she figured out what her audience wanted and what she liked to talk about, and the ideal client that she really loved to work with, then her niche emerged.
So here’s what happens when you start implementing this.
First, you actually start attracting real people instead of theoretical avatars.
Second, you’ll discover what you love to talk about and what your audience loves to hear about. Maybe you think you want to be the hip specialist, but you find yourself lighting up every time someone asks about anxiety and movement. That’s data, not a mistake.
Third, you build confidence by actually engaging instead of perfecting. Every comment becomes market research. Every DM becomes insight into what people actually need. And it might even first start with just more likes—not even comments, not even DMs. But then over time, more likes lead to more views that lead to more comments, which lead to more DMs. And if you’re bringing this messaging now into your selling, and you have a very specific selling and launching plan—then into paying clients.
Fourth, you’ll start booking clients weeks or months sooner because you’re speaking to problems that they want solved, and you’ll be specific in your content. Plus, if you are diverse—maybe you’re a broad wellness practitioner and you have an audience full of theoretically broad clients, ideal avatars with broad problems—then each piece of content is an opportunity to speak to one person and one of their problems instead of speaking about the same problem over and over again and missing out on a lot of those people.
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Here’s the big one. You avoid the trap of building a business around a niche you end up hating. I can’t tell you how many wellness entrepreneurs I met who’ve niched down to something marketable, and then they felt trapped in their own business. They felt very claustrophobic and confined in what they could market and what they could say.
Here are some implementable strategies.
Strategy one: Start with the problem-first approach. Instead of starting with “I help moms who help busy moms to reduce stress,” start with “I solve…”
Instead, before posting a piece of content, think about the mom. Think about what happens in her day. What happens first thing in the morning? If she’s busy and stressed out, she might be quick to anger at her kids, yell at them. She’s not present during the morning routine. And instead of giving them—and them giving her—a giant hug on the way out the door to school, they’re arguing with each other, and she’s literally pushing them out the door and then slamming the door.
Completely different experience, right? And I bet the mom then beats herself up, feels a lot of shame and guilt the whole rest of the day. And now, all the plans she had to do during the day might be sabotaged, right? That’s a very specific problem you could speak on.
Now, often, what happens here—people get lost in, “Well, what do I put in the bio?”
If all my pieces of content are speaking to all these different problems, what do I put in my Instagram bio? Keep it general. The bio is a little bit of a teaser anyway, so just pick one thing to start and keep it broad so you have flexibility to talk about all these different things.
You can list maybe how you help people, list that you work in person and online. List client results. List your certifications.
I have an Instagram bio handout that I can gift you for free. Just head to the podcast link’s show notes. I’ll put it in there for you—the link—and that will give you some ideas for your bio on how to stay general but then give you flexibility to be specific in your content.
And your bio—remember, you can change it. So use ChatGPT and AI to help with this, and just pick something and put it up there. And if, over time, your content refines, then you can change it. Easy peasy.
Just like my client Katie did. If you look at her bio now, it doesn’t say mindfulness coach, yoga teacher, and author. It says trauma, somatic and foreign practitioner, or something of that nature.
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Strategy two is a post-test.
Here’s what I have my clients do: Create three different types of content around three different problems that you solve—again, using that rule of one. Post them over a week and notice which one gets more engagement. Which one was the easiest to create? Took less time? Which one really lit you up? Which one had the most DMs or questions?
That’s your starting point. If one really lit you up to create and your audience responded in kind—meaning that there was more engagement—I would double down on that one. Start creating more content like that one. And then you can still add in other posts to test other topic materials, so you don’t have to stay rigid or glued to your content calendar.
For example, a post about hip pain on Monday—speak to a person with hip pain. Maybe give them some tips or exercises, or provide an insight that they might not realize. You can speak about reducing stress and inflammation on Wednesday, sleep hygiene on Friday, and let your audience vote with their engagement.
And here’s the key. Don’t overthink the content creation. Use this simple formula:
Start with a hook: “If you experience X problem, this might help,” for example. Or you can be a little bit spicier or controversial. That, for sure, will help stop the scroll.
Then bring in a story—a quick example of how you or a client dealt with this. Then, if you worked with a client or your story, give an overview of the solution, which will help to solve their problem.
And then call to action: “Follow [your handle] for more tips on overcoming that problem.” So you wrap it up in a bow. That’s it. No fancy graphics, no perfect niche positioning—just helpful humans helping humans.
And then the video—you can just use B-roll. Maybe it’s a quick ten-second or less B-roll piece of content of you walking outside, holding your phone, being pain-free or stress-free.
Now, here’s a common question. Often I hear, “Won’t I confuse my audience if I’m not super specific?”
Here’s the thing. Confused audiences don’t engage, but bored audiences scroll right past. And sometimes in the beginning, you will confuse your audience. You might even anger them or turn them off. But again, you have to keep testing to figure out what will land for them.
Plus, if you’re so niched down that only three people on Instagram relate to your content, you’ve gone too far.
And another question I get is, “What about being seen as an expert?” You become an expert by helping people and helping them get small wins from your Instagram content or emails right away. And I don’t mean value where you’re describing an exercise all the time.
It’s also by telling stories and sharing experiences, and showing them how you understand their problem—not by declaring yourself a guru of ankle mobility for left-handed Pisces.
The truth is people follow humans, not niches. They want—especially in this day—the vibe is you, and your experiences, and your certifications, and bringing that into it. And you can see the past episode about sharing your messy story. They want to know how you can help with their specific problem. They want to know that you’re legitimate and that you will understand them because, possibly, you’ve gone through something like this too.
They want to connect with you. Some of my most successful clients talk about everything from breathwork to business strategy to their sourdough starter. The audience loves the whole human.
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If you’re stuck in niche analysis paralysis, every day you spend trying to figure it out is a day that someone else is booking a client that you could have booked—because you haven’t posted content. You haven’t posted an Instagram reel, or carousel, or sent an email, or showed up where someone could know that they could work with you.
So while you’re researching whether to focus on pelvic floor or fascia, Sarah down the street is posting about both and building relationships with real humans.
Six months from now, you could have hundreds of engaged followers who actually know what you do. Or, like Katie, have 10 times your audience, a waiting list of people ready to work with you, clear data on what content your audience loves, real revenue from real clients…
Or you could still be tweaking your bio and wondering if “holistic movement specialist” is better than “integrative wellness coach.”
This is the start of it. This is the start of the work. If you want to add fancy funnels or go through big group launches or membership launches, it all starts right here.
So here’s your challenge. This week, post about one problem in one piece of content. You know you can help with it. You know you can help someone.
Don’t overthink it. Don’t research it. Just post it. Watch what happens in your DMs. Pay attention to comments. Let your audience tell you what they need.
If you want help implementing this niche-less approach and creating Instagram content and emails that actually convert, then just book your free consultation call with me, and we’ll talk about which program is the right fit for you.
Or you can get right into the Instagram Message Makeover workshop. It’s a $27 workshop that you can get right on demand, and you’ll get that Instagram bio automatically. Plus, so much more.
All right, I’ll see you on a consultation call, in the workshop, or in next week’s episode.
Bye for now.
Important Links to Visit:
Grow Your Wellness Business to Six Figures Without Burning Out
How Katie Delimon Stays Consistent with Instagram Content Using AI Tools
Tips to grow Your Wellness Business with a Repeatable System
