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.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome back to the Birthworker Podcast. My name is Kyleigh. This is episode 46 and it is Friday, which means we are doing a 3 in 15 episode where I'm answering three of your best questions in 15 minutes or less, sometimes more. If you want to ask a question for one of these episodes, if you're dying to get my eyes, an opinion on something you're dealing with, just go to birthworker.com/ask. You're going to see the link in the show notes of this episode and submit your question because we love answering your questions. We literally take the questions that you submit and those are the questions that I answer here on the podcast.

And so, let's start with question number one. This is from Shea, and Shea says, "What is your favorite type of long-form content from a creator's standpoint versus a consumer's standpoint?" Now, before I answer this question, I want to say I've done an entire episode on long form, what is long-form content before. It's something that I teach inside the Birthworker Membership. I teach it inside Birthworker Academy. What long -form content essentially is, is content that you're making week after week. It's a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a YouTube show, potentially sometimes an Instagram live, but what it is, is it's long-form content. It's longer than you can post on a TikTok or an Instagram grid post or Story or whatever.

And so, the question is what is your favorite type of long-form content from a creator's standpoint versus a consumer's standpoint. So, my favorite type of long-form content from a consumer's standpoint, meaning what do I personally like to consume, podcasts by far. And so, honestly, that's one of the reasons I chose a podcast. When I am home, I am listening to a podcast every single day at least, and I have probably about five to six, maybe seven podcasts that I listen to every single episode they ever release. That's how I love listening to podcasts.

Also, I'm obsessed with business. That's why I'm here. And so, I basically listen to business podcasts, podcasts about marketing, about growing your business, about messaging, branding, that kind of stuff. Love it. So, I wanted to mention though that my favorite type of podcast from a consumer's standpoint is super subjective, right? It's essentially what is my favorite podcast, or sorry, what is my favorite content to consume. That's not going to sit... I'm not saying that objectively from everyone, right? I was just talking to Lillian. Lillian is my new executive assistant, super excited to have her on my team now, and I asked her last night, "Do you listen to podcasts?" and she's like, "Nope, I am not a podcast type of person." So that just goes to show that not everyone reads blogs. Not everyone listens to podcasts, and not everyone watches YouTube. Me personally, I love podcasts.

And then my favorite type of long-form content from a creator's standpoint, as someone who's creating content, it's got to be the same for me. I love a podcast. I love creating a podcast. Now, again, this isn't saying that this is exactly what you should do. This is very subjective to my personal thoughts. So, the reason that I love podcasting for my creator's standpoint is I could do it at any time throughout the day. With YouTube, you essentially have to have great lighting, you have to be presentable. In a lot of cases, sometimes people are doing more vlog style, but I don't think I could see myself doing a vlog style YouTube channel where everything's just real and raw, because honestly, my life is freaking boring. So, that would not really be interesting for anyone, I don't think.

And so, I didn't want to do a teaching YouTube channel because honestly, sometimes I'm only able to make content very quickly, without any prep, without setting up anything, without putting on makeup or doing my hair, putting on clothes even, and then sometimes I only have time to make content at night. So, there's really not good lighting at all. It's pitch black in my house. And so, that's why I don't do YouTube. In my business, we create this podcast, but we also turn the podcast into a blog. It's not just the transcription of the podcast. We take the podcast, take the information, and create a really, really phenomenal blog. And so, that's another reason I love podcasting is because creating the blog is way easier if we are creating it from an audio recording essentially.

I create this podcast, I record the audio, Shea is someone on my team, and she actually takes the audio and she turns it into a phenomenal blog post. And so, if we were only creating a blog, that would just be one type of content that we can create every week, right? But we are creating a podcast which means very easily we're actually creating a podcast and a blog. So, we're doubling up on our long-form content. So, that's why I absolutely love podcasting. It's fun for me. It's easy for me. I'm able to produce two episodes per week really fast. It only takes me a couple hours to create those episodes, and we've really streamlined the backend of the podcasting which is something that I promise I'm going to teach you guys soon.

Part of me hiring Lillian as my assistant is we're going to increase our capacity to deliver amazing courses, content, workshops for you, for our podcast listeners. So, one of those workshops that we're going to create is how to launch a podcast, how to create a podcast. We'll give you all my templates, everything I use in the backend, absolutely everything, and super excited for that. I'm super, super, super excited. I can't even put into words how excited I am.

All right, let's jump into question number two. So, this is from Christine, and Christine says, "What do you do to get back on track when you get totally derailed with life? Family stuff came up and now I'm behind on literally everything that I had planned for last week and the week before that. So, what tips do you have for resetting and refocusing?" So, this is an amazing question, Christine, because this happens to everyone often is where we have these weeks where either we are burnt out so we don't do anything or something comes up. Maybe, for instance, you have to get surgery, right? Maybe you give birth. Maybe you have a bunch of birth clients in-person back to back to back, and you can't do any of the online business stuff that you wanted to do that week. So, this applies to literally everybody listening. This applies to you listening right now.

So, what I do, Christine, when I am off track and I want to get back into business stuff is I do a huge to-do list. To be honest, I throw out all my old ones that I missed and I create a new one from scratch and I just brain dump literally everything that I need to do or want to do. Then you look at that and you're like, "Okay, well, that's really, that's hard to look at. I feel like I'm standing at the bottom of Mount Everest."

And so, what I then want you to do is actually put them into categories. For instance, you could do this however feels authentic to you, but what I like to do is put them into a category of what makes me money and what's going to make me money and what doesn't make me money but still needs to be done, because there are things that of course make you money, like putting together a landing page and checkout page for one-on-one birth coaching. That would make you money. So, I would put that in the this is the list that makes me money. Then something that doesn't make you money would potentially be like changing or updating the privacy policy, the disclaimer, and the terms of service on your website. That does not make you money.

And so, when I'm getting back on track, I make this huge list and then I have my two separate lists, what makes me money, what doesn't, and then I put everything in order of the order I want to complete it, and then I start with the list that makes me money always, because this is a business, we're not going to continue doing this if we are not making money. If we're just spending way too much money, it's not going to be sustainable. Christine, I want you to focus on doing the things that make you money. So, that could even be posting on Instagram because Instagram is a way that we can drive clients to our website. Or, maybe they're skipping our website. Maybe they're just DMing us and saying, "I want to book you for a birth doula. I want to buy your workshop. I want to take your childbirth education course." So, in that list that makes you money, I would have things like creating pages on your website that directly lead to services, posting on Instagram, especially with a call to action that leads to one of your offers.

And then in the list that doesn't make you money, that could be like check your email because that's something that typically when we get off track, we're not checking our email. It could be updating pages on your website that aren't super important, potentially the About Me page, which honestly is really, really important, but it's not a page that's going to make you a ton of money right off the bat. It could be updating a freebie with your new brand colors. That's not going to make you money. So, just get it really clear on what your next tasks are going to be. Then when you do that, I think you'll be right back on track within the week.

All right, we have one more question today, and this question is, "I feel really led to provide scholarships for my birth doula services, but how do I make it work? Do we just use outside sponsors like for college scholarships? Do we just take the brunt and provide the service for free? What do we do?" So, there are a couple ways to offer scholarships. One of the ways would be to essentially turn your business into a nonprofit or to create a nonprofit section of your business. That would be a way to do it where you could offer, you could have sponsors essentially like the college scholarships and those people could donate to your business. It's a tax write off for them, and you could use that money to essentially provide support for free, give people free doula services.

Now, I didn't want to go through all of that, and so I essentially told myself, "I want to make enough money that I can give away things for free, and it's still going to feel really good, and I'm still going to be able to pay my bills, and I'm going to be happy giving away things for free because I make enough money." And so, that's what I set out to do essentially.

And so, the way I do it is, let's just take my online courses, for example. So, I used to have a course called Autonomous Birth Academy. It was an online childbirth education course. We closed that down at the end of last year because we are going to take that and use the curriculum for that and give that away as part of our Childbirth Educator Training Program. So, the people who join our Childbirth Educator Training Program are going to get the complete license and access to use our curriculum in their own courses. They're going to be able to essentially take all of the courses and resources that I've created over the past several years, put their branding on it, put their brand colors, their logo, and essentially teach it like it's their own without having to go and actually create all that curriculum.

So, I used to have all these birth courses for moms. I used to have eight courses for moms. We closed those all down to build up this Childbirth Educator Training Program. So, when I had Autonomous Birth Academy, every time I would open it, I would launch it, and essentially what I did is I said 25% of my sales, it's going to turn around and essentially sponsor other people to get in for free or for discounted. It's going to go into this scholarship fund. So, if I had, let's say I had 10 people join, or let's do a number that makes more sense, let's say I had eight people join the program. I essentially said, "Okay, eight people joined. That means I'm going to let two more people in for free on a scholarship." Or, let's say I made $8,000. Now I would say, "Okay, 25% of that, so $2,000 is going to go to this fund to offer scholarships to people."

Now, I just want to say, this is something that needs to be said, sometimes when people aren't paying for something, if they're getting a scholarship, sometimes they actually, they're not going all in. They're not actually going to show up like someone who paid thousands of dollars is going to show up. I want to be clear that this isn't always. Some of my best students, for instance, from Birthworker Academy, our first couple cohorts, some of our best students are the students who received partial scholarships. So, it's not always, but if I look at a big overview of all my students who ever received scholarships, I'm not going to lie, there's a really large majority of people who literally did not even log into the course platform at all.

So, it's a really interesting thing that you should just be aware of. I'm not saying this to say don't offer scholarships, but I am saying this to maybe tell you to put some boundaries about when and where and why you do offer scholarships. And so, a really easy way to do scholarships is just at the very bottom of your website pages in the footer, let's say you have a page for your birth doula services or you have a page for your online childbirth education course, at the very bottom in the footer, put a little button that says Scholarship and link it to an Airtable form.

Airtable's like Google Sheets on steroids. It's phenomenal. It's free. Go to birthworker.com/airtable and get your free account. We use it everywhere in our business. Remember when I told you that we're really good at planning our podcast and doing backend organization for our podcast, that is also all in Airtable. So, everything that we organize in our business is pretty much in Airtable. You're not going to regret it, especially because it's free.

So, what I would do is create a scholarship application form on Airtable, and I would have them put things like their name, their email, their phone number, what offer they're hoping to get a scholarship for, and then little things like maybe why do you need this scholarship, or how is this scholarship going to change your life, or are you 100% determined to show up as much as you can, and do you need a full scholarship or do you need a partial scholarship, how much of a scholarship would let allow you to actually join this program.

That last question is one of my favorites, how much of a scholarship would allow you to join this program and be okay financially, because honestly, most of the time the answer is not a hundred percent scholarship. Let's say I have a program that costs $2,000. Maybe someone says they just need a thousand dollar scholarship and then they'll join. That's a really awesome question because that actually allows me to give people the scholarships that they actually need, and that way, I actually still have more money in my scholarship fund to give to the next person. So, when I started asking that question and doing partial scholarships and full scholarships and all in between, that's when I actually was able to offer scholarships for way more people.

Again, I can do this because I've set up my business in a way to make enough money so I can offer scholarships for free, partial, full, anything essentially. I've just put boundaries around it to make it still feel an integrity for me and still be able to support those women who need that extra financial support because that was me at one point too. There's no reason that I don't use the privilege I have from having a very successful business and turn around and help women with that. So, it's something I'm really, really proud of doing, really happy that that's something that we offer for the majority of our programs, not for all of them, but for the majority of them. Yeah, it feels really good.

So, if you have any questions about setting up your scholarships, if you have any questions about getting back on track when you've been derailed or even questions about long-form content, I would absolutely love to see you inside the Birthworker Membership. So, the Birthworker Membership is where you essentially get access to me. We do live coaching sessions on Zoom. You have the community that you can ask questions to. You can tag me in the group and get your question answered. So, it's just a really fun space filled with other Birthworkers who want to take their business full-time, who want to make a full-time income while staying home with their kids, who want to potentially retire their partner in the future so they can stay home.

So, if that is you, if you have a huge dream like making a childbirth education course, like creating a phenomenal website and booking yourself out in-person and becoming like a go-to leader in the birth community worldwide, then you belong in the Birthworker Membership. Now, I wanted to tell you too that we have a VIP option. I call it my VIP Mastermind, and not only do you get access to everything that's inside the Birthworker Membership, but you actually get weekly small group coaching sessions with me.

So, we actually have two spots open for the VIP Mastermind. It is a 12-month program. It is just $250 per month. Again, you get me every single week, week after week, on Wednesday nights. We meet Wednesday nights Eastern Time, eight o'clock Eastern, and it's a small group of women. So, there's never more than 10 people right now. Right now we're capping it at 10 people. And so, if you are like 100% ready to take this business full-time, if you're already making some money from in-person clients, and you just really want to get your online stuff set up, so if you want to optimize your website and your freebies, and if you want to create passive online courses that you can sell at any point, then our VIP Mastermind is 1,000% the place for you. If you're interested in joining the Birthworker Membership or the VIP Mastermind, just shoot me a DM on Instagram, let me know, and we can chat a little bit about what success might look like for you inside of our programs. All right, I will see you right back here next week.