In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, Krista chats about what’s been happening with Dietitian Success Center over the last week. Specifically, how to organize your day-to-day tasks (whether you’re an individual or part of a team), what it takes to monetize your blog, building a brand that connects back to the deeper reason ‘why’ people purchase and launch updates.
Links:
- Connect with Krista on Instagram @dietitiansuccesscenter and @kristako.rd
- Check out the Dietitian Success Center membership here
- Check out our Freebies here – PES Statement Cheat Sheet, Client Resource Kit & Business Planning Workbook
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to the Dietitian Success Podcast. Here at Dietitian Success Center, we’re all about making it easier for you to build your confidence and expertise. So, whether you’re a dietitian or a dietetic student, we’ve got something for you. I’m Krista, your host and the founder of DSC. Now, are you ready to ditch the imposter syndrome and join our incredible, vibrant community?
If so, let’s jump in.
Hey there and welcome to a new episode of the dietitian success podcast. You might be looking at the title of this podcast and thinking, what is this episode even about? So I’m going to do a little bit of a different. Structure format for this episode. This idea came to me while I was actually out for my dog walk this morning.
I find that’s often where, when a lot of ideas. Come to me is during that time in the morning, when I’m just out for a walk, sometimes I’m listening to something this morning, I was listening to an audio book called building a StoryBrand, which I’ll talk about in a minute. but this idea came to me because. I’ve been, I think, fairly transparent over the last few episodes.
Just about how. One of the things that I’ve found challenging with being a newish mom now, and working is just getting these podcast episodes out. Cause getting some concentrated time to do a recording. Like this can be quite challenging. I do have more consistency in my schedule now because we’ve, we now have some part-time childcare, which has been. Great.
So I’m able to schedule a little bit better. But that’s part of the reason why I’ve been having a hard time getting these podcasts episodes out regularly, but also honestly, just feeling a little uninspired when it comes to what I want this podcast to be like, what is the evolution of this podcast? I have been sitting down at this microphone for 167 episodes now, which is a lot of episodes. And I’ve really been questioning over the last, I don’t know, six months, maybe even a year.
What do I want this podcast to evolve into? Because I want it to keep evolving and changing and growing. And I’m just feeling a little bit stuck with it right now. And so one of the ideas that I had, because one of the things that I struggle with is like a block around what am I talking about? Because I know I’ve covered a lot of topics in the past. And of course you can repeat things you can tell, you could teach things a different way. You don’t have to, not every episode has to be about something completely new and novel. But. I know that a lot of you have been listening to this podcast for a while and a lot of my older episodes are more for that, like beginner stage entrepreneur. And a lot of you are not necessarily at that stage anymore. And so I want to make sure that this podcast evolves to still stay relevant. Well also sprinkling in some of that, foundational stuff as well. So one of the ideas that I had when I was on my walk this morning is, well, what if, and I had actually scheduled to do a different topic this week, and I just I’m feeling excited about this.
So I thought, Hey, why don’t I run with it? Is. What if each episode. Aye. Just talk about what have we been doing from a business perspective? Over the last week what are we working on? What are we prioritizing? I find it so much easier to teach about stuff as it’s happening and just to share the learnings, share how we’re doing things.
I also find often that can be some of the most valuable content because there’s a lot of. I don’t know for me. I know. I love to. Learn about things from. Like how they’re actually happening in real life. And I love to hear stories. I love to understand inner workings. I love to. I just get that like behind the scenes perspective.
And so I thought, well, why don’t I do that for these episodes? And maybe it’s a mix of both, maybe at some episodes like this, which for now I’m calling behind DSE. Maybe I’ll come up with a different name. I don’t know. But I could do a little bit of that. And then a little bit of the more educating around a specific topic.
Maybe still some interviews. So I’m going to ask a favor from you. , if you are listening to this right now, can you please. Pull out your Instagram. And send me a DM. And tell me. What is it that you like listening to on this podcast? What types of episodes do you like? And. I just, I need to, I feel like I just I’m missing that.
Feedback with this podcast. It’s really interesting because I think with. A lot of other pieces of media. Or with marketing, you get a bit more of that feedback. Like for instance, with Instagram, you can sense what engages people, because you get engagement or, if you put out an Instagram story, you’ll get a lot of responses back or whatever, but a podcast is different because it’s you just put it out there into the world and you don’t really know. Who’s actually listing. Because a lot of times I know for me, I have a number of podcasts I subscribe to and they’ll just like download to my podcast app, but I don’t actually listen to them.
And so the download numbers are not necessarily the people that are actually listening. And so anyways, I would so, so, so appreciate if you could pull out your Instagram and either at dietitian success center or at Krista code dot RD, send me a DM and please just tell me. What do you enjoy listening to on this podcast?
That’ll really help me. Understand how to shape content moving forward. That would be amazing. I would. So, so, so appreciate that. Or shoot me an email. If you have my email Krista dietitian success center, whatever’s easier for you [email protected]. Whatever’s easier for you. I would just love to hear from you. As I’m thinking about how this podcast evolves, but anyways, so for today’s episode, I thought, Hey, let’s just, we’re doing a lot of really interesting things right now.
And so. Why not go back over the last week and talk about what are we working on? What are not everything obviously, but just some of the key things that I think will be interesting, helpful. That there’s things to take from that and apply to other businesses. And so here it goes. So let me know again, if you like this type of this structure of episode. Okay. Very first thing that is top of mind, I feel like I’ve talked a lot about. Productivity and systems.
And maybe I haven’t talked enough about that because I think that. That is something that I love. It’s a topic I love to talk about. So productivity systems, how do we organize ourselves in our businesses? And I feel like this year, we have really an even, I don’t even want to say this year. I think over the last two months, We’ve it feels like we’ve cracked the code a little bit in terms of coming up with a solid streamlined organizational system.
And for content and also for task management. And by the way, as I’m talking about these topics, I know that not everyone is at the same stage of business and that’s okay. I do think that there will be, I’m going to try and pull out. Pieces nuggets of information, learnings from each of these topics that I think can be applied to any business. But obviously we are in a situation where we have a team. And so having systems, organizational systems, task management as a team, but then also as an individual is such a process. It is such a process. Of figuring out what you feel like works best for you.
So one of the things that we were struggling with before, there’s a few things. So number one was. Personally. Okay. Well actually, I’ll start by talking about myself. Is like for me task management. So I’m a big proponent of having some sort of a digital task management tool. So in the past, I’ve talked about programs like a sauna. I’ve talked about monday.com.
I’ve talked about click up. We have a training in DSE that nutrition plus business membership, all about how to use, click up to manage your tasks. I really am a firm believer that especially when we’re just getting started in our businesses and we’re trying to get used to marketing ourselves regularly.
We need to have a digital task management tool. To track and monitor, like what do we have to do today? And what do we have coming up? Reason being, and reason why I don’t usually recommend at the beginning to use like a paper and pencil to do list, even though I know you’d love a paper and pencil to do list. A digital one is really helpful because then we can. I get in the habit of scheduling out our marketing efforts, as opposed to just having to try and remember to do them on a day-to-day basis.
This is one things I feel like really shifted and well, I think just honestly, But full stop. This is when things will shift in your business is when you learn how to market consistently. And so that consistency needs to be built into processes and habits on a day to day basis. And we really need to take the guesswork out of that process.
We need to make it really easy for you. So that each day. You have a solid plan where you know exactly what’s happening, you know exactly what you’re going to do. And so what I teach them, what I typically recommend is like, when we’re thinking about our marketing plan, So let’s say for example, we have said to ourselves, okay.
As part of my marketing plan, I’m going to be sending out an email to my email list every week. Well, we can just schedule that out in a system like click ups that it shows up in our calendar every single week. And we have that on our to do list automatically. We don’t have to remember to do it.
So. Anyways. That is a platform we have used in the past click up, but one of the challenges we have had as a team is like, So. How do we organize ourselves beyond just day to day tasks? And one of the issues that we have is we use Google docs for everything like Google docs. Not for everything I guess, but for anything that’s like written content, we use Google docs, Google sheets, the Google system. And we each have different Google accounts.
And so of course we share documents with each other, but at the end of the day, different documents will, would be shared in different people’s Google accounts. So things were getting lost. Like it’s hard to keep everything organized, especially for us now that we have so much content on our site, we have hundreds of videos.
We have hundreds of client handouts. We have probably not hundreds, but like maybe almost a hundred evidence summaries at this point. So. It was really important for us to try and keep everything organized in some way. So. We have started to use a platform now called air table and air table. We’re actually using as both our task management platform and also. Our sort of like central database for important information within the business. So air table works.
And honestly, I think we’ve probably utilized like 10% of the capability of air table. It seems to be a pretty amazing, powerful platform. It’s a little overwhelming, just warning you. And so we have only just scratched the surface, but. I think we’ve now it’s cool because we feel like now we have a central spot for important information.
So for example, if we’re like planning out. Launch or we want to track how a launch is going or even just things like business metrics, like what’s happening in the business. What are the metrics we’re tracking? What is our content plan, those things that are like, we all need to contribute to that all now lives within air table. And then we have this really great. Spreadsheet.
I don’t want to say a spreadsheet. I’m not really a spread. Looks like a spreadsheet, but I don’t even remember what they’re called. It’s called a base in air table. Your table has a lot of jargon that. I don’t know. I think they think people understand what they’re talking about. They don’t really, so it’s, again, it takes a bit to wrap your head around.
And by the way, I think a lot of us can get away with. Click up, like I’d probably recommend starting with click up. You don’t need to jump to air table, but air table is interesting. You can definitely check it out. If you feel like it could fit your business needs. But So, we have a base now where we have weekly team meetings every Monday.
And in that base, we are able to each put in what we want to talk about during that meeting, just to keep us really organized. We go into the meeting, knowing exactly what we want to talk about. We have an agenda. It’s just so much more streamlined. So that has been a really great development. Prior to making this switch, it was more so just Hey, let’s meet every Monday and let’s go around in a circle and everyone. Ask, whatever questions that you have.
And sometimes our meetings would go on for way too long because. It was just, and we never knew how long the meetings were going to go. And now in my life, obviously I just can’t do that anymore because there’s a baby. Who needs. Who needs me, Who needs. my attention. So I have to make sure that my, my meetings are efficient and they are, they run for a set time.
So anyways, that has been a really great change for us. That’s helped to make us a lot more organized, a lot more efficient in our day to day. But I think the learning there is setting yourself up with some sort of a digital task management tool.
The other cool thing that we have been exploring over the last week is so. If any of you are followers of Katy Dodd or in Katy Dodd’s world, maybe you have already heard about this. But so if you aren’t familiar with Katie’s work, she teaches dietitians, basically how to create a moneymaking blog. So as part of that process there is something called a so basically how that works is you start a blog. You contribute to your blog regularly.
Once you have a certain amount of traffic coming to your blog. So people landing on your blog, reading your blog posts. Then, what you can do is you can apply to something called high end ad networks. And the one we’re talking about in this scenario is media vine. You can apply to media vine. And basically what that means is that you can get ads on your website now. You may hear that and think, wait, what. But what I’m talking about is like those banner ads that run along the sides, the sidebar of your blog.
Because you’ve definitely landed on a food blog that is like way too intense when it comes to ads and you don’t even know where the recipe is because there’s just like ads everywhere. I’m not talking about, like in your face ads, I’m not talking about like ads overkill. I’m just talking about some tastefully placed. Ads on the sides of your blog posts that allow you to be able to start making some money off of your blog and making some passive income off of your blog. So I do believe that these can be done in the right way so that they’re not like ruining the user experience at all, because that’s not what we want at the end of the day.
That’s the most important thing. Is that our content is readable. But this could be a really great way to fund your blog right. To. Monetize your blog to start making a little bit of passive income off of your blog. And so previously, In order to apply to media vine, you had to have 50,000, at least 50,000 sessions per month. And we are not at that point, but that was going to be our goal within the next three to five. Two. Two to four years, let’s say. Cause it does take time to get there.
Absolutely. And we are in a pretty specific niche, right? Like I think. If you are someone who is, if you’re a dietitian who talks about let’s say plant-based eating or sports nutrition, your audience is going to be a lot larger. So your potential to reach more people. To have more blog. Traffic is probably going to be a little bit greater, but because we have a. Pretty specific audience.
It’s, not a huge audience. I don’t expect that our blog is going to grow to 50,000 sessions super quickly. That’s okay. That’s not the intent. It does what we need it to do at the volume that it’s at right now. But. Media vine has just announced that they’ve lowered their, threshold. Too.
So they’ve come out with a new program for smaller blogs that have 10,000 sessions a month. So we have gone through the process of applying to media vine. So we’re going to see what happens there. We’re going to see about placing what it is like to place ads on our blog. If we even want to do that, what does it look like?
What does it feel like? How does it impact the user experience? Does it. Have any significant negative impacts. And like how much money can be made off of that process, because I don’t really know at this point and I would listen to, if you’re interested in this, Katie did Publish a great podcast episode.
I don’t have the number in front of me. Let me see if I can pull it up quickly whilst still talking. But she published a great podcast episode where she short talked about it. Okay. Episode. 180 9. Of dietitian side hustle podcast. Anyways, she talks about this and she said for. I think it was, I think it was for 10,000 sessions. , it could be anywhere from, it could be around like $250 a month in passive income. Which is pretty good. So, and obviously that’s going to grow as your blog grows, your blog traffic grows.
So anyways might be worth, it might not. We’ll go through that process. I’ll keep you posted on how that’s working for us. So that’s another thing we’ve been working on. Something I have been doing. As one of my, one of the things that I’ve been working on over the last year is transitioning my role into more of that. Strategic bigger picture thinking about the direction, thinking about bigger picture things. Planning role versus the like super day-to-day stuff. , like email marketing, social media, customer service, et cetera, slowly, but surely that those things have been outsourced to others on the team. And so, one of the things that I’m trying to get back into is like listening to more audio books, listening to more podcasts, things that will help me.
Help me think about those bigger, higher level things. So one book that I’m reading right now, not reading, listening to on the library app, which if you don’t have the library app for audio books, highly recommended because you can get free audio books. Every library I think has, well, I don’t know.
In Canada we use Libby is the library app. But in the U S I don’t know what that would be. I don’t know if there is a national one. Maybe it’s state by state. I’m not too sure, but anyways, look it up because having free access to audio books is amazing. So I’m listening to building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. And wow, lots of learnings from this around branding and how we communicate with our audience and the. So it’s really an interesting story and I would highly recommend reading it or listening to it.
I actually, I’m 30% of the way through the audio book and I just actually ordered the hard copy book off Amazon because. I feel like I need to like highlight pieces of it because there’s stuff that’s just super impactful that I need to take and. Study and figure out how I’m going to implement. But the whole gist of. This book is around. How do you clarify a message?
So simply that it resonates so deeply with your customers. And that message can then be used. , on your website, when you’re talking to anybody about your business, when you’re marketing your business, et cetera, like it all comes back to that one message. And he really goes into detail on the psychological primitive reasons why people. I make purchases. And why people make choices. And how do we actually link our. Our business back to those reasons. And yeah, it’s just, it’s honestly really fascinating and it’s really all about how are we. We need to make sure that we are positioning our businesses in a way that truly addresses the customer’s problem. We need to talk less about what we do and what we offer. And we need to talk more about how we help. Address. A specific problem for our customer. And we need to drill it down so that it’s so incredibly simple. So incredibly simple. So anyways, I am going to, I’ll continue to take you on a journey with me of this process of branding.
Again, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of branding within DSE, but. Things can always get better. We can always refine our processes. We can always add more focus. And so, yeah, and I think, for me, I always want to think about cause I think one of the most, one of the things that resonates a lot for people when they choose to join DSC is just linking it back to the origin story and the why behind. Why I started DSE because, I was a practitioner who was entering the field feeling like I needed to be a generalist and know a little bit about everything. Feeling a lot of imposter syndrome when I would go into client sessions. People would ask me about things that I hadn’t learned about in school and I’d ask myself, well, how do I learn about stuff?
Picky eating or baby led weaning or women’s health or, digestive health, all those topics that I was like, I didn’t learn about this in school. \ I don’t know where to find and source really good quality evidence-based information on these topics. That’s actually designed for me as a practitioner, not just your everyday person on Google. And so, and also feeling frustrated that I was spending hours of my life, creating handouts for clients and handouts and resources for clients and thinking, Hey, somebody has probably made this before, but I don’t know where to find this.
So anyways, Connecting it back to those feelings of like confidence, imposter syndrome. Time sucking activities. Et cetera, those are all the there. Those are the core components of the origin story. And I think those are the things that people can actually do. And I think we can do a better job of talking about that stuff.
So. Anyways, I will keep you. I will keep you informed as I follow this StoryBrand journey and I. I start to craft what are maybe even a new mission statement is for DSE. I will let you know how that. Continues to evolve. And then last but not least, I thought I’d talk about, we are in the midst of our launch for. The count, the nutrition, counseling and coaching certificate of completion program. Which has been great.
If you are somebody who has never done a launch before in your business, basically what this means is if you have a product that you sell and this can be a digital product, so like a course or an ebook or something like that, it can also be one-on-one services or a group program or whatever. Launch is basically where we pick a concentrated period of time where we do heavier promotion for that thing. And, you may have it, so that your thing is only open for enrollment during that launch period.
So that’s how we run things currently for the counseling and coaching program. We only open enrollment during specific periods of time. And then at the end of that period of time, at the end of that launch window, it’s, the doors are closed until the next launch. And so the reason why we do that is because, well, it allows us to. I think it allows us to really concentrate our time and effort onto like the sales and marketing process of a product. Versus just trying to sell something all the time. Now we obviously for dietitian success center and the membership, we don’t use the launch model.
So we it’s open all the time. People can join at any point throughout the year, but we still do use principles of launching. So every once in a while, we will do a three months at 50% off promotion or something like that. And I would consider those to be launched type activities. Because we’re putting concentrated time and effort into promoting that one thing, that specific thing. And so. I feel like launching over the years has gotten a lot easier only because. Ah, man, I struggle so much with. Pre. I struggled a lot with like pre-planning things. So for example, like with a launch, we need to make sure that we have. \ We have regular content that is going out about our offer during the launch period.
And these are what I’m talking about here is mostly emails to our email list or social media content, but we really focus more on emails. And so, we need to make sure we have regular emails going out to our email list that they’re written strategically, et cetera. And I have always had a really hard time.
Like pre-planning those out? I’m so much better at sitting down day of. Writing out an email and just like sending it out. That’s way more. My vibe I’m pretty good at and actually, no, I retract that. I’m not pretty good at this. I know I’m not good with dates. Like not good with dates.
I don’t know what it is, but for some reason my brain cannot see past like the next day. And so I really struggle as well with like mapping out launch dates. So as part of that, self-awareness. I have learned. To outsource that process. So now I have outsourced that process to Maria. And what I mean by that process is like planning out our launch and actually scheduling our emails out and all of that stuff.
Maria now takes care of that. She is our operations manager. And so that has just made things so much easier. Because it’s just all, it’s all planned out. It’s all mapped out. It feels so much easier. It feels so much more seamless. It feels so much lighter for me. So this is the first launch that I’ve actually ever gone through. Where I feel like it’s very light. Which is a great feeling. And I think that it’s, it has to be an evolution to get there.
Obviously I’ve been doing this full time for. I think four years now, and this it’s now, I’m only now at the point where I feel like it’s feels seamless. And so it’s taken me a while to get here, but. That’s been nice. It’s been nice to feel more organized. It’s been nice. Feel like everything is laid out and. The other part of that too, is like, it gets easier.
The more you launched the same program because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. So like for us, we have a lot of the emails written from the last launch period and we can recycle those and we can reuse those. So it gets a lot easier to. Go through that launch process. Okay. Wow.
Talks a lot there, but that was a fun one.
I enjoyed talking. I tend to enjoy more of those, that sort of more like informal, just telling you what’s going on type conversation. So just as a reminder, if you don’t mind. Popping onto Instagram. Send me a message. With. What you like to hear on this podcast? I don’t need specific topics. If you want to send me topics, you can, but if you think. Back to episodes that really resonated with you or ones that, you enjoyed. What was it?
Was it because it was an interview? Was it because I did an episode like this, where it was a little bit more informal, the day-to-day stuff. Was it more structured teaching on a topic? What was it. I, that would be so helpful for me. So pop on to Instagram at dietitian success center or at Krista. RD, you can send to either account. You can also email me [email protected].
I would. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so appreciate that it would be incredibly helpful for me. So. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you have an awesome week. I’ll see you next Thursday.
