In this episode of the Dietitian Success Podcast, I answer three questions that come up all the time for dietitian entrepreneurs: how to get clients as a dietitian, whether earning 100K as a dietitian is realistic, and whether you should be running paid ads.

We talk about why having a website and posting on Instagram isn’t always enough, how to think about your income goals using real math instead of guesswork, and what I’ve learned from running ads across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google for Dietitian Success Center.

Update: The Entrepreneur Office Hours on Paid Ads with Olivia Hudock are on Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 1PM EST / 12:00 PM CST

Inside, we cover:

• Why marketing is a learned skill and why we need to stop expecting to be great at it overnight
• The two questions to ask about your website before anything else
• Why Instagram may or may not be the right client acquisition channel depending on your geography and business model
• The most consistently effective way to get clients that comes up again and again when I talk to dietitians with full practices
• Why financial pressure on a new business can actually work against you
• The math exercise you need to do before deciding if 100K is realistic for your situation
• Why most dietitians earning six figures have more than one income stream
• The egg carton visual for thinking about multiple revenue streams
• When paid ads actually make sense and when they don’t
• Why paid ads work best when you already have something working organically
• A real example of how strong SEO generated client inquiries without any ad spend

Whether you’re just starting to build your practice, wondering if your income goals are achievable, or thinking about investing in paid advertising, this episode will help you think more clearly about where to focus your energy.

And if you’re looking for support as you build your business, this is exactly the kind of work we do inside the Entrepreneurship Tier of Dietitian Success Center. It’s designed to help dietitians with strategy, marketing, offers, and growth, with coaching, community, and practical tools to move forward with clarity.

Links:

• Check out the Entrepreneurship Tier of Dietitian Success Center: https://www.dietitiansuccesscenter.com/entrepreneurshipfordietitians
• Join the Dietitian Success Summit 2026 Waitlist: https://www.dietitiansuccesscenter.com/the-dietitian-success-summit-2026
• Follow @dietitiansuccesscenter on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansuccesscenter/
• Connect with @kristako.rd on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristako.rd/
• Free Starter Kit: https://www.dietitiansuccesscenter.com/

How to Get Clients as a Dietitian, Whether 100K Is Realistic, and When to Run Paid Ads

By Krista Kolodziejzyk, RD, MBA, Founder of Dietitian Success Center

These are three common questions I get from dietitians who are building a business, and they deserve honest, nuanced answers, not generic advice that could apply to anyone. Let’s get into it. Want help and 1:1 business coaching to build your dietitian business? Check out The Dietitian Success Center Entrepreneurship Membership. 

How to Get Clients as a Dietitian When You’re Starting Out

The scenario: you have your website up, you’re posting on Instagram, you’ve told everyone you know what you’re doing, and clients are still trickling in way slower than you expected. You’re starting to wonder if you’re missing something fundamental.

You probably aren’t doing anything wrong. But you may not be doing it effectively yet, and that distinction matters.

Here’s the thing about marketing that nobody in dietetics training really tells you: marketing is a learned skill. People spend four years getting undergraduate marketing degrees. So why do we expect ourselves to be excellent at it immediately just because we’ve started a business? The learning curve is real, and being on the early part of it doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re a beginner at a skill that takes time to develop.

With that framing in place, here are the specific areas worth examining honestly.

Your website: is it actually working?

Having a website is not the same as having a website that works. A working website means two things: people can find it, and people can easily figure out what to do once they get there.

The first part is about SEO for dietitians, search engine optimization, and increasingly AEO, which stands for AI engine optimization. This is how your website gets found by people searching on Google and, more and more, by people asking questions to AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. If your site isn’t optimized for these, it essentially doesn’t exist to new potential clients. There is genuinely no point in having a beautiful website that nobody can find.

The second part is about navigation and clarity. I see this pattern constantly with dietitians: a nice homepage, no clear services page, no obvious call to action, and no easy way for a potential client to actually book with you or reach out. In today’s world, if someone lands on your website and it’s even slightly confusing, they leave. They’ll find someone else whose site makes it easy. So ask yourself: can someone land on my website and within thirty seconds understand exactly what I do, who I help, and how to hire me? If the answer is no, that’s where to start.

Instagram: is it actually the right channel for you?

This is one of the most nuanced topics in dietitian entrepreneurship, and I want to be honest about it rather than just saying “yes, Instagram works.”

Whether Instagram is an effective client-getting tool for you depends significantly on your geographic location and your business model.

For example, if you are a Canadian dietitian who is registered in one province (or you have a local in-person practice in a small town in Illinois) and can only see clients who reside in that province/state/small town, posting on Instagram, a global platform, may not be the most direct route to getting those clients. It can still be valuable for building your email list, driving traffic to your website, or selling digital products that aren’t restricted by registration geography. But as a direct client acquisition channel, the math doesn’t quite work when your reach is global and your available client base is provincial/state-wide .

On the other hand, if you work with clients across provinces or states, if you have a signature program or group offer, or if your model lends itself to working with people outside your immediate geography, then Instagram can be a genuinely excellent platform for growing your practice.

This is why blanket statements about what works and what doesn’t are so unhelpful in dietitian entrepreneurship. The right marketing channels depend on your specific business model, location, niche, and goals.

Word of mouth and community connections: the most underrated strategy

After interviewing hundreds of dietitians on this podcast and working with dietitian entrepreneurs across a huge range of practice models, one thing comes up again and again as the most consistently effective way to get clients: building genuine connections in your community.

This means building relationships with other practitioners, physicians, physiotherapists, personal trainers, naturopaths, and other referral sources. It means showing up in the communities where your ideal clients already are. It means making it easy for people to refer to you by being clear about who you help and how.

Word of mouth is also incredibly powerful, but it takes time to build. Every client you serve well is planting a seed for future referrals. Business is a snowball: it compounds slowly at first, then faster over time as more people know you, trust you, and send others your way.

A note about financial pressure and timeline expectations

If you are feeling significant financial strain and putting enormous pressure on your business to generate income immediately, I want to offer a reframe that I think is genuinely helpful rather than discouraging.

The best time to start a business is when you already have a job. Building your practice as a side hustle while maintaining another income source removes the desperation that can sometimes come through in your marketing and gives your business the time it actually needs to build momentum. If you’re in a position where you need clients immediately for financial reasons, it may be worth exploring part-time clinical work or other income sources while you continue building, rather than forcing timelines that the business isn’t ready for yet.

Is 100K Realistic as a Dietitian? Here’s the Honest Answer.

First: yes, it is absolutely possible. But it requires some intentional thinking about how you’re going to get there, and the first step is math.

When we did market research for the DSC Entrepreneurship Membership, we surveyed dietitians about their business revenue. Fifteen percent of respondents reported annual business revenue between $100,000 and $200,000. So we have real data confirming this is happening. It is not a fantasy. But it is also not automatic.

Start with the math

Before anything else, do this calculation: take your current hourly rate or per-client rate, and divide $100,000 by that number. How many client sessions would that require in a year? Is that number actually achievable given your available hours?

This exercise is clarifying in a way that no amount of motivational advice can be. If you’re charging $70 per session and accepting insurance, the math might tell you that hitting $100,000 in client revenue alone would require a schedule that isn’t physically possible. That’s useful information because it opens up a different conversation: not whether the goal is achievable, but what the path to it actually looks like.

Multiple revenue streams are usually part of the equation

Most dietitians I know who are earning at or above $100,000 are not doing it exclusively through one-on-one client sessions. They have multiple revenue streams, which might include any combination of the following: one-on-one work, group programs, online courses, consulting, freelance writing or content creation, brand partnerships, corporate wellness, speaking, or media work.

I love the visual of an egg carton for this. The full carton represents your total business revenue. Each slot represents a different income stream. No single egg fills the carton. The goal is to add streams over time until the whole carton is full.

This doesn’t mean you need to build all of these at once. But if your math tells you that one-on-one work alone won’t get you to your income goal, then the question becomes: what’s the next stream to add, and when?

Build before you leap

If you are currently in a salaried hospital position and dreaming of eventually running a six-figure private practice or online business, my honest advice is to start building now while you still have that stable income. Get a few clients. Build your email list. Test your offer. Let the business start to generate some revenue before you make the leap.

Leaving a salaried job to immediately try to replace that income through a brand-new practice is one of the most stressful ways to build a business, and the financial pressure it creates often works against you. Build the runway first.

Should You Run Paid Ads? Here’s What I’ve Learned.

I want to be upfront: I am not a paid ads expert, and we actually have a paid ads specialist coming into our DSC Entrepreneurship office hours specifically to address this topic in detail. What I can share is what I’ve learned from running ads for Dietitian Success Center across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google.

What paid ads actually are

For anyone who isn’t familiar with how this works at a basic level: paid advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram means creating visual content in something like Canva, defining a target audience you want to reach, setting a daily budget, and publishing sponsored posts that get shown to people outside your existing followers. LinkedIn works similarly. Google Ads places your website at the top of search results with a “sponsored” tag when someone searches a relevant term.

The goal with all of these is reach: getting your message in front of more people than organic content alone would.

The most important principle I’ve learned about paid ads

Paid advertising works best when you already have something that is working organically and you want to make it work at a larger scale.

Here’s what I mean. At DSC, we use paid ads to drive people to our Starter Kit, our free lead magnet. We know from organic traffic that it already converts well: people who find it sign up for it. Because we know it works, it makes sense to put money behind it to reach more people. We’re amplifying something proven.

What doesn’t work is using paid advertising to test whether an offer or a lead magnet is viable. If you don’t have organic evidence that people are interested in what you’re offering, spending money on ads to find out is not a good use of your budget. Test first, then amplify.

Paid ads are not a substitute for organic marketing

I haven’t come across a scenario in dietetics where paid ads work as a replacement for organic marketing. The most sustainable and effective approach is to have a solid organic marketing foundation, which includes SEO, consistent content, community relationships, and word of mouth, and then layer paid ads on top of that to accelerate growth.

If you’re still in the early stages of building and haven’t yet found the organic channels that work for you, paid ads are likely premature.

A real example: SEO vs. paid ads

When we were building out a concept for a telehealth branch of Dietitian Success Center, we invested heavily in SEO for that site rather than running paid ads. Within about two months of launch, we were getting organic client inquiries through Google search. No ad spend required. That’s the power of strong SEO, and it’s a channel that continues to pay off long after the initial investment.

This isn’t to say paid ads never make sense for dietitians. For local service businesses, Google Ads in particular can be effective because people searching “dietitian near me” are already high-intent buyers. But even then, strong organic SEO is the foundation that makes everything work better.

The bottom line on paid ads

If you’re asking whether you should run paid ads, ask yourself these questions first: Do I have an offer or lead magnet that is already getting organic interest? Do I have a solid website with strong SEO? Am I consistently showing up in my organic marketing channels? If the answers are yes, paid ads might be a smart next step to accelerate what’s already working. If the answers are no, focus there first.

The Bigger Picture: Building a Business Takes Time

These three questions, how to get clients, whether a certain income level is achievable, and whether to invest in advertising, all circle back to the same truth: business builds over time, and you cannot skip steps.

The dietitians who are earning 100K, who have full client rosters, who have the marketing engines running, got there by planting seeds consistently over months and years. Every piece of content, every referral relationship, every SEO-optimized blog post, every client served well is a seed. The snowball builds.

If you want support building your dietitian business with personalized coaching, a business education library built specifically for the dietetics profession, bi-weekly office hours with expert guests, and a community of dietitian entrepreneurs, the DSC Entrepreneurship Membership was built for exactly where you are.

👉 Learn more about the DSC Entrepreneurship Membership

Come find me on Instagram at @kristako.rd — I read every DM and I’d love to hear where you’re at in your business.

Krista Kolodziejzyk is a Registered Dietitian and MBA, the founder of Dietitian Success Center, and the host of The Dietitian Success Podcast. She has supported over 600 dietitians in building and growing their businesses.