Hey there, birth nerd. You're listening to the Birthworker Podcast. My name is Kyleigh Banks and I am totally obsessed with birth and equally obsessed with business. And this is the show where I help women turn their passion for birth into a sustainable, profitable, and most importantly, impactful career. All right, let's get into it.

Welcome back to the podcast everyone. This is episode 34, and we had such a fun week. I say we, I guess I mean me especially and all the women inside my communities. We've been really excited because the Childbirth Educator Program released this week.

And if you're listening to this, on the day that it comes out, you still have a chance to join. So the doors close at 11:59 PM tonight, Eastern Standard Time, and that is a real deadline. I automated it this time, so there's no joining in the morning. There's no joining after.

You cannot join it 12:01 Eastern Saturday morning. You have to join on Friday before the end of the day Eastern again. So if you have been thinking about creating a childbirth education program, becoming a childbirth educator, hosting workshops, making eBooks, creating a coaching program, essentially anything beyond supporting birth in person, you need to jump in into this childbirth educator program.

It is phenomenal. I'm going to put a link in the show notes. You can learn more about it at birthworker.com/cbe, for childbirth educator. And again, the doors closed literally tonight. It's not the last time you can join though, by the way. You are going to be able to join later this spring.

Right now we are doing the pre-sale, and I always give the woman who join during the pre-sale an amazing discount for thanking them for jumping in early, for being the first people to take the program.

So if you want to save literally 50%, like over $1000, and if you want to get access to my personal entire childbirth education curriculum for you to use in your business, you can put your brand on it, you can make it your brand colors, you can change it, curate it into the perfect program for your students.

If you want access to that, again, go to the show notes or maybe DM me on Instagram, go to birthworker.com, whatever you got to do to get your hands on it before the end of the day today when this episode comes out.

And again, that's February 10th, it's a Friday and we're in 2023 right now in case you're listening to this years from now. So today is another three in 15 episode. I am answering three of your biggest and best questions and 15 minutes or less, or at least I'm trying, and let's jump right into it.

So the very first question is from Tiff. Tiff is the placenta girl. She is absolutely amazing. She's a student of mine inside the Birthworker membership.

And her question was, "I struggle with imposter syndrome and I hold back when it comes to my social media posts. I have so much to say, but I'm still afraid to say it. Do you have any tips for how to get over this so I can really start making connections with my ideal people and build my email list?"

So this is such a great question, Tiff, and you know, I don't know if I ever struggled when it comes to holding back for fear of what other people are going to say. And I think a big part of that is because I really trust and believe that everything I'm doing comes from love.

And I can say that, and I'm laughing because I definitely believe it's true. So even if someone's offended, what I said, the intention was love. And I'm always willing to have a conversation with someone even if they're offended.

So I don't want to be afraid to say it. I don't want to make decisions based on the perception of what other people might think because all of that is subjective too. There's always people be people out there who think you are the meanest, dumbest, worst birth worker in the world.

And I say that and it's kind of ridiculous because it is ridiculous, but there will always be people out there. And so I don't want you making decisions based on them, especially because birth work is so important. And if you are scared, Tiff, to share your passion and to share what you want to say, there are moms out there wishing you would say it.

So if you're scared to say it, and if you're not, to be honest, in some ways potentially, you're actually letting women down out there who need to hear what you have to say. And the other piece of practical advice for you, Tiff, is surround yourself with other people who are saying what is on their mind shamelessly.

And this is something that I actually taught my students inside my childbirth education programs when I taught moms. I said, "If you want an autonomous birth, if you want to be able to stand up for yourself and tell people to kick rocks and to make intuitive decisions, you have to be surrounding yourself with other people that are like that because that's going to wear off on you."

So you, Tiff, go out there and I'm sure you follow people who you're like, "Man, I wanted to say that. How did they have the bravery to say what I wanted to say when I'm holding it back?" Go follow them, surround yourself with them and slowly but surely start to post what's on your mind.

And I have a feeling once you do, people are really going to resonate with it. I have a feeling you're going to get more engagement, more likes, more followers, more people DMing you saying, "Oh my God, I just needed to hear that."

And then when you get that feedback from people, it becomes so much easier and it just snowballs and you just become more shamelessly authentic, the more you are shamelessly authentic. Such a great question.

All right, the next one is from Elizabeth and she says, "Can you talk about pick my brain sessions and what that offer can look like when you're just starting out?" And so pick my brain sessions are, that's what I really call one-on-one coaching calls.

And this is something I teach my students inside Birthworker Academy because I don't just teach women how to support birth in person, though of course I do, but I also teach them the other ways that we can have an impact on women's lives like through the birth process.

And one of those, which I think is really important, and I think everyone should really have this on their website as a service, is the one-on-one coaching call or the pick my brain session. And so Elizabeth, where I see a lot of new doulas go wrong is they try to fit these sessions into some kind of box.

And so I did the same thing. So I made this mistake too. So when I started, I had something called a birth debrief session or a birth coaching session, and people would book on my website and then the automation would go off, it would send them some information to fill out and it would send them some emails that were perfectly curated for these birth coaching sessions.

But what I noticed is actually the majority of people that were booking these sessions with me, they just wanted to pick my brain. And so sometimes people would DM me on Instagram, they would say, "Hey, do you do one-on-one coaching?" And I would constantly be like, "Yes, I do, but here's a link to my birth coaching."

"Just ignore the email you get. Just ignore the PDF that I want you to fill out because all of that is for pregnant moms or people wanting to do birth coaching calls. Ignore all of that and let's just jump on Zoom."

Because what would happen is these people would come to me, maybe they weren't even pregnant yet and they wanted to do some preconception coaching, or maybe they were in really early pregnancy and they wanted help finding a provider. And then even postpartum, maybe they wanted to just process their birth.

And I was trying to fit all those people into a box, into a birth coaching session. And so I'm just like, you know what? That's actually not serving me and that's not serving them. And to be honest, it's the same with my business coaching now.

I have essentially, when people book business coaching with me, I do one hour or three hours. It's literally come, I have no agenda. Kylie has no agenda, except my agenda is to help you with whatever you want help with.

And so I go into all my calls, whether they're business coaching calls with doulas or birth coaching calls with moms, or just preconception, birth trauma release, whatever it is, and I go in with absolutely zero agenda. So I don't make them do homework before. I send very broad and basic emails with reminders.

My booking page talks to all different kinds of pain points. It's not specific to one type of person. And the reason that I do that is because I want to really be able to serve whoever wants my help. And there's a limit to that, of course.

I definitely don't want to serve everyone, and you guys know that too, but I'm just talking about the women who are my perfect client, the autonomous mom who wants to make her own choices and not really listen to anybody else besides her intuition.

Those kind of moms, even though they're the same kind of mom, they want me in different ways. And so I like making those pick my brain sessions more broad rather than narrowing it down to say, a birth fear session or a preconception session or whatever that looks like.

And so something else that I do is I make them 40 minutes to 45 minutes. And the reason that is is because it gives me a little buffer at the end. And so typically what I do is I do that call with them for 40 minutes, and this is when I coach moms.

It's a little bit different when I coach doulas, but when I coach moms, it's 40 minutes on Zoom with them, and then I spend the next 15 to 20 minutes writing up an email immediately with notes from the call and I send it to them.

And that's something I do really intentionally. So the whole time that I'm working with them is about one hour, but it's about 40 to 45 minutes on Zoom and then 15 to 20 minutes writing that follow up email. Because if you're working with pregnant moms or postpartum moms, everything might go out in one ear and out the other if you're on a Zoom call.

So you could either record the call or take notes and send it to them, follow up with them. Most of the time I also include any resources that we talked about. So if someone books a pick my brain session for birth support, if I have a video in one of my courses that would be perfect for them, I send them the link to the video.

If they're looking for referrals for maybe therapy or something else, meal prep, whatever it is, I send them the links. And I do that within that 15 to 20 minutes after the call. And that's the boundary that I put on it. So that call, I charge $75 for moms for that session.

And again, 45 minutes on Zoom and then 15 to 20 minutes writing that email. All right. Question number three today is from Alexis. And she says, "I would like to do frequent webinars that lead to my high-ticket coaching package. I want to do the monthly or even weekly. How should I approach the email sequence since the webinars will be so frequent? So a vague welcome sequence or a whole new sequence each time with each different topic."

So Alexis, really the way to make recurring webinars or frequent webinars sustainable would actually be to do the same topic over and over and over. So if you're doing weekly calls, I would absolutely do the same topic over and over.

And if you're doing monthly, it definitely allows more time to go in and change the registration page and change the email so the copy makes sense and the copy reflects what the actual topic is. But something else that might work well is doing actually more like a mother's circle or something like that because then your copy can stay the same always.

It can literally be the exact same, the invitation emails, you'll never have to change the registration page. And then once people actually get into that virtual mother circle, you can open up the floor chat with them, but then you can also do kind of like a webinar.

And so a webinar would be where you walk them through your process, your method, and then at the end of that, you invite them to join your high ticket coaching package. So I love the idea of frequent webinars, but I don't want you to set yourself up for failure from the beginning.

And anyone else listening who is thinking about running a webinar, I teach my students that webinars are fantastic for that mid-level offer, meaning anything maybe over $100 up until about $500, maybe $1,000. So anything below $100, you don't need to do a webinar.

You could just sell that straight from your Instagram. When it's a little more expensive, $200 to $1000, you're going to need something extra and that's something extra is that webinar. And then actually, once we go above $1000, that's when we get into the space where we actually probably should be doing some sort of sales call or consultation call.

And so you can call that whatever you want. With your in-person doula clients and your virtual doula clients, you're probably calling it a consultation call, but maybe on the back end to yourself, you understand that that actually is a sales call.

And I just have to say that I'm absolutely obsessed with webinars and the key with webinars and making them convert well and making them sustainable is doing the same one over and over, tweaking it over and over, just tweaking little things here and there until it works really, really well.

And then you can just keep running that same one over and over. And so that's something I do pretty much anytime I launch a new offer, I'll do a huge free webinar. I'll actually do like three in one week typically. And that's something that's really fun and it's something that I've really honestly perfected.

So I know if I have 1000 people come to this webinar, I know 100 people are going to buy the program that I sell at the end of it. And it's not that easy at the beginning. A lot of times our conversion rate is not very good at the beginning, but that's okay.

And that's something that I teach everybody inside, both the Birthworker Academy and the Birthworker Membership. And to be honest, I'm going to teach it inside my childbirth educator program too. So I teach this to everybody that the goal is not to be a wild success at first.

The goal is just to do it because once we do it once, now we have a baseline and now we have something that we can compare to. And every time after that, we're just going to try and get a little bit better and a little bit better and tweak and get a little bit better.

And let me tell you, that is so much easier if you have a mentor helping you understand what's working, why it's working, what didn't work, what you can get rid of, how you can actually make your life easier going forward.

And I just have to say, I just saw one of our members post on Instagram, she is absolutely amazing, and she made me laugh because she posted a reel. It was a reel or a story, and she said that she just set up her very first Zap. And so we call them Zaps. It's from a company or a software called Zapier, and it's an automation software.

And so not only do I help my students really pick the perfect strategy and track the analytics and tweak and tweak and make better and make better, but I help them make it easier by implementing things like automations using Zapier.

And if you're interested in what other tech and tools I use, I actually have a free resource on my website that you can download. It's 13 of My Favorite Tech and Tools that I Use in My Business. It has the links, it has what I actually use it for, the benefits of it. It is absolutely phenomenal.

And I just have to say that nearly every single one is free because when I was starting out, you bet I did not have any money at all. I was renting out the rooms in my house because I couldn't afford my mortgage.

So you bet I bootstrapped this business from the ground, which means at the beginning I needed everything to be free or very, very cheap. So if you want to get that free resource that I have, again, it has 13 of my favorite tech tools systems, it is a no-brainer. It's free.

Go to birthworker.com/tools or we'll actually put it in the show notes too. So you can just click to the show notes, click to that, download all of them and have some fun. I guarantee you're going to love it. And hey, I just want to say again that this is the last day to join the Childbirth Educator Program.

So if you are looking to start implementing some passive or recurring revenue streams in your doula business, if you want to create a childbirth education program, if you want to host workshops, create a group coaching program, whatever you want to create beyond supporting births in person, definitely check out our Birthworker Childbirth Educator Training Program.

And I have a feeling that your mind is absolutely going to be blown. We already have over 60 women who joined this week, and I'm super excited to see how many join by the end of today. All right, everyone, that was super, super fun. I love these three in 15 episodes.

Hey, if you have a question too, remember that I actually answer your questions and you can submit them. So go to birthworker.com/ask, or again, just go to the show notes if you have a question for me that you want me to answer on one of these episodes.

All right, next week on Wednesday, on February 15th, we have an amazing episode with Ashley. Ashley is Mind Online Therapy on Instagram, and she is a sex therapist and couples therapist. And we are going to be talking about one of the dark sides of birth work, actually, which is emotional scamming and birth kinks.

So there are actually people out there who scam doulas into thinking that they're pregnant so they can, like I said, emotionally scam them and it really is a birth kink.

And so Ashley's going to talk with us about why that happens and what to do if that actually happens to you as a doula. And so check back next week. I will see you right back here and have a wonderful weekend, everyone.