Have you ever wished you could attract a steady stream of clients directly to you…

Without having to rely on referrals or spend endless hours hunting for leads? 

Imagine having potential clients lining up to work with you.

People who already know, like, and trust you before you’ve even had a conversation.

Sounds perfect, right?!

 

I’m here to reveal that it’s entirely possible for you!

And the key lies in mastering the art of attraction. 

 

Jump into this blog today, because together, we’ll walk through the single most effective strategy for attracting clients to your business…

Building an email list! 

I’ll also show you how to supercharge this strategy to create a consistent flow of people eager to work with you.

 

By the end of this blog, you’ll be crystal clear on:

1. Why email list building is essential for the growth of your business
2. How to create a high-value lead magnet (that people can’t resist!)
3. How to use content to position yourself as the go-to expert in your niche.
4. Why nurturing your audience is the secret to turning subscribers into paying clients

Let’s dive in!

 

Why Social Media Alone Isn’t Enough

When I first moved into the online space in 2017, I had big ambitions. 

I’d built a respectable following on Instagram (I’d just hit 10,000 followers!) and I was collaborating with a well-known cookery book author, which helped me grow my audience even more.

 

Feeling confident, I decided to create an online course. 

I poured hours into developing it.

I recorded videos, hired an editor, and invested in course software. 

Then I launched it to my Instagram audience, expecting the sales to roll in. (Yippee!)

But urgh – they didn’t.

 

So after a few days, I offered a 50% discount. 

And…still nothing. 

In the end, I sold just two spots, making less than £100.

For ALL that hard work!

It was heartbreaking. 

 

So what went wrong? 

I had an audience, but I didn’t have a reliable way to turn them into paying clients. 

 

Back then, I didn’t understand that social media isn’t enough.

 

The Problem with Relying on Social Media

Social media is a fantastic tool for building visibility, but it has its limitations:

• Algorithms control who sees your posts, and at the time of writing, it’s estimated that only 6% of your Instagram followers see your content  
• Platforms change constantly, and updates can impact your reach overnight  
• You don’t own your audience – if the platform disappears, so does your access to them.

 

But don’t panic, health business friends! 

This is where email marketing comes in.

 

Why Your Email List is a Goldmine

Unlike your social media following, your email list is something you DO own. 

It’s not affected by algorithms, platform changes, or Google updates. 

It’s a direct line of communication with your audience, and when done right, it’s one of the most powerful tools in your business. 

(So please don’t overlook it!)

Let me share a couple of examples to show you EXACTLY how effective email marketing can be.

 

 

• The Membership Spike

In March 2022, I ran a promotion for my toddler nutrition membership. 

I sent two emails to my list over four days. 

Those emails generated £1,050 in sales – a 200% increase compared to my usual daily income from membership sign-ups.

From just two emails!
 

 

• The Webinar Follow-Up

 Earlier this year, I launched my Fussy Eating Fixed programme, a high-ticket offer priced at £997. 

During the live webinars, I sold just one spot. 

But after following up with attendees via email, I sold 30 spots, generating nearly £30,000.

These results didn’t come from complicated marketing strategies. They came from having a well-nurtured email list.

And this is possible for you too.

Let’s discover exactly how…

 

How to Build Your Email List

The foundation of a successful email list is a high-value lead magnet.

This is a free resource that solves a specific problem for your ideal client in exchange for their email address.

 

What Makes a Great Lead Magnet?

Here’s my best advice!

A great lead magnet should:

1. Solve a Specific Problem: Address a pain point your ideal client is struggling with and provide a quick win

2. Be Easy to Consume: Think simple checklists, templates, or audio files – not 200-page e-books that overwhelm the reader (or take you ages to compile)

3. Align with Your Paid Offer: There should be a clear “golden thread” connecting your lead magnet to your service or product, making the transition from free to paid seamless

 

The Right and Wrong Lead Magnet: My Example: 

When I started out, I created a Baby Superfoods Cheat Sheet. 

It was hugely popular and grew my email list quickly. 

But you’ve guessed it – there was a problem.

Because it attracted parents who were already well into their weaning journey. So when I excitedly offered them my Baby Weaning Course, they weren’t interested. 

They didn’t need it anymore.

The lesson? Your lead magnet must align with your paid offer to attract THE RIGHT audience. 

 

Common Mistakes to Avoid

 

1. A Generic or Low-Value Freebie

Your lead magnet needs to be genuinely helpful. 

If it feels rushed, generic, or unhelpful, people will disengage and won’t trust your ability to deliver value in a paid offer.
 

2. No Golden Thread

Your lead magnet should naturally lead to your paid services. 

If the connection isn’t clear, you’ll struggle to convert subscribers into clients.

 

3. Inconsistent Communication

 Building a list is just the first step. 

If you don’t email your subscribers regularly, they’ll forget who you are, and you’ll lose the trust and connection you’ve worked so hard to build.

How to Attract People to Your Lead Magnet

You’ve created an amazing lead magnet. Well done!

Now…

How are you going to get it in front of your ideal audience?

 

Leverage Long-Form Content

Consistent, valuable content – such as blogs, YouTube videos, or podcasts – is one of the best ways to attract new people to your business. 

Not only does it show you off as the glowing, go-to expert, but it also gives you a natural opportunity to shout about your lead magnet.

 

For example, you can:

• Embed your lead magnet in your blog posts
• Add it to the descriptions of your YouTube videos
• Mention it in the show notes of your podcast episodes

By surrounding your lead magnet with helpful content, you’re much more likely to attract sign-ups from people who value what you offer.

 

Use Social Media Strategically

Social media is still an important tool for visibility. 

Share posts, stories, and reels about your lead magnet, explaining how it solves a specific problem for your audience. 

Use clear calls to action to invite people to grab it.

 

The Importance of Nurturing Your Email List

When someone joins your email list, the relationship doesn’t end there.

That’s just the beginning!

 

Email Regularly

Consistency is key. 

Aim to email your list weekly, sharing valuable insights, tips, and stories that resonate with your audience. 

This makes sure you’re top of mind (when your readers are ready to buy!) and builds trust in the meantime. 

 

Build Relationships

Your emails should feel personal and chatty.

Share stories, address common challenges, and provide actionable advice. 

That way, you’ll deepen the connection with your audience, making them more likely to say YES when you pop up with the perfect offer!

 

Action Step: Create or Refresh Your Lead Magnet

I would love you to take 30 minutes to brainstorm lead magnet ideas – that address a specific pain point for your ideal client. 

If you already have a lead magnet, I encourage you to review it!

• Does it solve a specific problem?

• Is it easy to consume?
• Does it align with your paid offer?

If it’s not hitting the mark, consider giving it a freshen up.

 

Final Thoughts

Building an email list is THE most effective strategy for attracting clients directly to your business. 

 

By creating a high-value lead magnet and consistently nurturing your list, you’ll:

• Position yourself as the go-to expert in your niche
• Build trust with your audience
• And create a reliable way to bring in more clients…and more income!

What’s Next?

Have you ever wondered How to Make Money from Affiliate Marketing Without Compromising Your Integrity. 

I know this is something a lot of health business owners feel nervous about…

So I’m addressing those common concerns about ethics and legality. 

Then I’ll show you how affiliate marketing can boost your health business in a way that’s authentic and aligned.

 

Grab The Master Plan!

Ready to build the business you’ve always dreamed of?

This step-by-step workbook will walk you through exactly what you need to focus on and when. You'll get my expert knowledge as a health business strategist.

This guide really is your master plan to business success! Grab your free copy, right here…https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

 

Connect with me here:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

 

Episode transcription:

 [00:00:00] Sarah Almond Bushell: Welcome along. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about how to attract more clients directly towards you so that you don't have to go hunting for them or rely on referrals from other people to sustain your business. I'm going to explain to you the number one attraction strategy and why this needs to be the single most important thing that you focus on every single day in your business. 

[00:00:25] Sarah Almond Bushell: And then I'm also going to give you some hot tips for amplifying your attraction strategy so that you have a steady stream of potential clients queuing up waiting to work with you. Sounds good? I know it does. Let's dive in. 

[00:00:41] Sarah Almond Bushell: When I first started venturing into the online world, I created a course. It was back in 2017 and I was ghostwriting at the time weaning books and toddler nutrition books for quite a famous cookery book author and I decided to take my knowledge that was really up to date and the research that I'd been reading and turn it into an online course for parents. 

[00:01:06] Sarah Almond Bushell: I created slides, I recorded videos, I employed an editor to make my videos look really professional with music and voiceover and captions, I invested in course software, and I put my brand new Toddler Food and Nutrition course up on my website. I had a pretty good social media following at the time. I'd just hit my 10, 000 followers on Instagram and the cookery book author that I was working with was really happy to promote and collaborate with me. 

[00:01:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: My social audience actually grew quite quickly. I told all everyone on Instagram about my brand new course. I thought I'd priced it quite competitively, but no one seemed to be interested. So after a few days, I decided to offer a 50 percent discount, just for the first few people, but still nothing. 

[00:02:04] Sarah Almond Bushell: And then eventually I sold Two places and made less than a hundred quid. What I know now, and what I didn't know then, is that social media alone just isn't enough. Now, at that time, I really didn't have much of an audience anywhere else. Sure, I had my website and that got a few thousand monthly visitors, and I had a very small email list. 

[00:02:29] Sarah Almond Bushell: Now, I'd started an email list because people said, you need to have an email list, but it was very small. And I wasn't actually very good at emailing. People might get a newsletter from me once a month or so when I remembered. Fast forward seven years and this is what I now know. You need to have an email list in order to have consistent and predictable revenue in your business. 

[00:02:59] Sarah Almond Bushell: Your email list is actually a gold mine. Social media has a forever changing algorithm, and nobody knows quite exactly how it works. And at the time of this recording, it's suspected that only 6 percent of your followers actually see your posts on Instagram, and less than 1 percent see your Facebook page posts. 

[00:03:23] Sarah Almond Bushell: Your website, if you've utilized SEO effectively, means that you can be found in Google. But again, Google's been rolling out several core and helpful content updates over the last 18 months or so, and people's website based businesses are just crashing and burning. However, your email list is a list of people's contact information that you have collected and you own. 

[00:03:50] Sarah Almond Bushell: Nobody else does. It's yours. There's no algorithms to try and work out. There's no Google updates or new SEO tactics to keep up with. It's completely within your gift to nurture the relationship with the people on your list. And then when you need to make some money in your business, you simply just email your list with your offer. 

[00:04:13] Sarah Almond Bushell: And you'll make some money. So I want to share with you just a quick story here. In 2021, I launched a membership site for parents of toddlers. It was all about food and nutrition and managing the typical toddler eating behavior stage. Now, most days I would sell one or two spots in the membership, making somewhere between about 50 or a hundred pounds a day from new members coming in. 

[00:04:42] Sarah Almond Bushell: And then I sent an email out to my list on the 4th of March, 2022, telling them that I was going to be offering a promotion on my membership site that expired four days later on the 8th of March. And that resulted in a huge spike in sales, making me 1, 050, which actually is a 100 to 200 percent increase on what I was making before. 

[00:05:09] Sarah Almond Bushell: And that was just off the back of two emails. And then in January, just this year, I delivered two webinars to pitch my brand new Fussy Eating Fixed programme. It was quite a high ticket offer, costing 997. So live on that first webinar, I made one sale and then I made nothing on webinar two, but I followed up with the webinar attendees via email and guess what happened? 

[00:05:39] Sarah Almond Bushell: I sold 30 more spots making just under 31, 000 in January in a seven day period. Just from sending emails. That is how powerful emails are. So now that you can see that your email list is truly something you want to invest in building, let's talk tactics and let's go through exactly how you do that. So how do you attract people to you and then get them to leave their name and address in order to join your list? 

[00:06:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: You've got to do this by giving them something highly valuable in return. And that's because Gone are the days when people were happy just to leave their email address in order to join your newsletter and receive really useful tips and advice. People are really precious about their email addresses now, and they're particularly cagey about handing it over because of the amount of spam in our inboxes. 

[00:06:42] Sarah Almond Bushell: You'll likely get this from your own experiences with your own inbox. And so what we've got to do is we've got to offer a fair exchange by giving them something of high value. You may have heard of this being referred to before as a freebie or a lead magnet. Now, if you've been in business a while, you may have already tried to build an email list and created a free Eurolead magnet and found that maybe not as many people signed up for it as you'd hoped. 

[00:07:12] Sarah Almond Bushell: Or perhaps they did sign up, but then none of them actually went on to buy your services. And that may well be because you've likely made one of the very common mistakes that most people who are new to online business make. I'm going to explain More in a moment and I'm going to tell you how to list build effectively and share what those common mistakes people make are, including me when I was new to business so that you can avoid them. 

[00:07:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: So your freebie or your lead magnet needs to be something of really high value. It also needs to solve a problem for your ideal client, but it also needs to be a quick win. It needs to be really easy for them to consume, to digest. Now that sounds like a lot of stuff, doesn't it? But, for example, people love a checklist because they're super easy to follow, they just work their way down the list. 

[00:08:09] Sarah Almond Bushell: Workbooks are really great as well, where your potential clients can take some time and sit through a very structured exercise to help them move forward and stop being stuck. Likewise, in the nutrition space, people love a meal plan that's tailored to their specific dietary needs. It provides them with a quick win because they don't need to think about what to cook for an entire week because you just told them. 

[00:08:34] Sarah Almond Bushell: And if you can link out to recipes, even better. It could be an audio file, like a recorded meditation. That's super valuable and it's really accessible. All your ideal client needs to do is press play. Sit back and relax. We want the people who are downloading our lead magnets to think, wow, this is so good. 

[00:08:59] Sarah Almond Bushell: Just imagine if this is what I get for free, what's working with that person going to be like? So your lead magnet needs to meet your audience where they're at in terms of how they're struggling. So really spend some time to think about what your potential client's problems are and how you can help them with a quick win. 

[00:09:19] Sarah Almond Bushell: And the word quick here is key as well because people will pay for a shortcut. They don't want to wade through your 200 page e book to find the answer. Otherwise, they just end up overwhelmed or worse, they'll say no thank you when you pitch your offer because they're still working through your free stuff. 

[00:09:38] Sarah Almond Bushell: Okay, I said I'd let you in on a couple of common mistakes that people make with their lead magnets and the first one is not having the golden thread. What do I mean by this? Your lead magnet needs to be related to your offer, and the golden thread is the thing that connects everything together. It sounds obvious, doesn't it? 

[00:09:59] Sarah Almond Bushell: But you'd be surprised at how often people create a freebie that doesn't naturally align with their paid offer. And actually, I did this myself. I had a Baby Superfoods Cheat Sheet. Now, don't worry, it was a play on words and I debunked the word superfood off the bat. But anyway, this Baby Superfoods freebie, it was so popular, loads of people downloaded it and they It meant I grew my email list really quite quickly, but none of those people then went on to buy. 

[00:10:32] Sarah Almond Bushell: And that was because I was trying to sell a baby weaning course, but by the time they got my cheat sheet, they were already two or three or four months into their weaning journey, and so they really didn't need my course. And then the second mistake that I see often is, and I'm going to be blunt here, their lead magnet is rubbish. 

[00:10:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: Okay. Okay. I am being blunt, but I'm sure you will agree. You've probably downloaded other people's lead magnets before, hoping for something really helpful, and it's pretty useless. It's not worth the megabytes it's taking up on your computer or the paper you print it on. Being of high value is really important in a lead magnet because it's your first experience or your client's first experience. 

[00:11:22] Sarah Almond Bushell: of what it's like to work with you. Okay, moving on. So once you have your amazing lead magnet, you've got to get it in front of people. Now, you can absolutely post about it on social media, but actually the best way is through your regular weekly content. I strongly advise you to be creating valuable content every single week, whether that's in the form of a blog post, a YouTube video show, a podcast. 

[00:11:54] Sarah Almond Bushell: You need to have some kind of long form content that's super, super helpful. Something that people can type their questions into Google or YouTube or their podcast app and Your stuff comes up. And then all you do is you embed the link to your freebie into your blog, or into the video description, or the podcast show notes. 

[00:12:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: You're much, much more likely to have people sign up because you've just surrounded your freebie with something that's actually been really quite helpful for people. They've consumed it, they've enjoyed it, and so the next logical step for them on their journey to becoming a client Is to see what else has she got for me? 

[00:12:34] Sarah Almond Bushell: And guess what? Your freebie is perfectly positioned just there. And if you want to see a working example of this, just take a look at the show notes under this episode, where you'll find a link to my lead magnet for you. And that's called the master plan, which is a step by step guide to helping you build your business. 

[00:12:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: But that regular weekly content also serves another purpose because in addition, you'll have something. To email your growing list about every single week, you'll be able to tell them about this brand new piece of content that you've just published. You'll be able to give them the link so that they can listen or watch or read. 

[00:13:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: And by doing so, you're nurturing the relationship and deepening the connection between the two of you because you're helping them by sharing something of high value. And of course, As that relationship deepens and they begin to trust you more, when you do go to present your offer to them, they're significantly more likely to say yes and purchase. 

[00:13:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: So this leads me to the final big mistake that I see people make with their email marketing, and that is not emailing their list often enough. I don't know where it came from, but someone somewhere told healthcare professionals to send a monthly newsletter. 

[00:13:58] Sarah Almond Bushell: I do not know where this came from, but it is not good advice. If you only email your list once a month, the people on your list won't remember who you are. or how you can help them. You won't have built any sort of relationship with them and there certainly won't be a connection. They just haven't had the opportunity to get to know you and so if this is you and you've ever tried to sell something and wondered why no one has bought This is exactly why. 

[00:14:31] Sarah Almond Bushell: Consistency with this will lead to traction. You just need to be predictable. I know you're busy, but I'd argue that what you're busy with is not nearly as important as your email marketing. Make it a priority and I promise you, if you do this well, it will pay off. Okay, so now you know the single most effective strategy for attracting more clients directly to your business. 

[00:15:01] Sarah Almond Bushell: It's email list building and it starts with your highly valuable freebie, Lead Magnet, that gives your potential clients a quick win. You also know the importance of creating regular weekly content for your audience so that you can firstly share your lead magnet by getting it in front of new people and also nurture the relationship of those already on your list by telling them about your brand new blog or video or podcast. 

[00:15:30] Sarah Almond Bushell: So your action step from this episode is to make a list of possible freebies that your ideal customer would find super helpful. If you already have a freebie in your business, just take a look at them with a critical eye. Are they really helpful or could they do with a little bit of a spruce up? Now join me next week where we are going to be diving into how to make money from affiliate marketing but without compromising your integrity. 

[00:16:00] Sarah Almond Bushell: Affiliate marketing is all about earning by recommending Other people's products. And I know this can feel unethical and sometimes illegal to some people, so I'm going to be unpacking all of this and addressing all of your worries and the ethics surrounding this topic. Bye for now.