Ep. 122 - How Can I Make More Money as a Freelance Dietitian Without Working More Hours?

How can I make more money as a freelance dietitian without working more hours?

You can make more money as a freelance dietitian without adding more one-to-one appointments by creating additional income streams from your expertise. One of the simplest options is a low-cost digital product that you create once and sell repeatedly, supported by an automated sales system.

That means your income doesn’t have to be completely tied to how many clients you can fit into your diary.

What is passive income for dietitians?

 

Passive income for dietitians is an opportunity to make money from your existing knowledge and expertise without needing to personally deliver your time for every sale. A low-cost digital product, such as a guide, checklist or other useful resource, can be created once and then sold repeatedly.

The important distinction is that this isn’t about making money without doing any work. You still need to create the product, build the marketing and sales system, make decisions and add your professional expertise.

But once the system is working, it can sell your product without you manually handling every part of the buying process.

This is something I’ve become particularly passionate about because I know how easy it is for freelance dietitians to build a business where almost every pound earned is connected to another appointment in the diary.

Why do freelance dietitians reach an income ceiling?

When your income depends almost entirely on one-to-one consultations, there is a natural limit to how much you can earn because there are only so many hours available.

You might love helping clients but still find yourself looking at your diary and wondering how on earth you’re going to squeeze another appointment into an already full week.

I’ve seen this repeatedly with freelance dietitians who have years of expertise sitting in their heads but whose income remains closely tied to their clinical hours.

At some point, adding more clients simply means adding more work.

That’s why I believe creating additional income streams is so important. You can still offer one-to-one work, but you don’t have to make it responsible for every part of your income.

What digital products can dietitians sell?

The best digital product ideas usually come from problems your audience is already asking you to solve.

Instead of starting by asking, “What could I create?”, look at the questions you hear repeatedly from clients, the problems that appear in your DMs and the things people regularly ask you to explain.

A strong digital product solves a problem that is specific, feels important to your audience and has a clear outcome.

It also helps if there is a gap in the market.

When I created my £9.99 baby weaning guide, I discovered that there weren’t really any simple portion size guides specifically for babies starting solids. Parents had a very specific question: how much food should they actually be feeding their baby?

That combination of a problem people genuinely wanted solved and a gap in the market made it a strong digital product idea.

And it was only £9.99. Small doesn’t necessarily mean insignificant.

That guide consistently brought in between £400 and £800 a month for me, depending on how much I promoted it.

How do you choose a profitable digital product idea?

Start with what your audience already wants rather than what you think they should want.

Look for questions that come up again and again in your one-to-one work. Pay attention to your DMs, conversations with clients and recurring problems within your niche.Then ask yourself:

• Is the problem specific?

• Is it something people urgently want help with?

• Can I provide a clear outcome?

• Is there already a good solution available?

• Is there a gap I could fill?

You don’t need to invent something completely revolutionary.

Sometimes the most useful product is a straightforward answer to a very specific question that your audience is already desperate to solve.

How can dietitians sell a digital product automatically?

Creating the product is only part of the process. You also need a simple journey that helps the right people discover it and decide to buy. A basic automated sales system can look like this:

1. Create a free resource. This could be a quiz, checklist or another useful resource that solves one small, specific problem.

2. Create an opt-in page. This gives people a simple way to understand the free resource and enter their email address.

3. Introduce your low-cost offer. Once someone has joined your email list, your paid product becomes the natural next step.

4. Create an automated email sequence. Your emails explain the offer, demonstrate its value and encourage people to buy.

5. Add a second-chance sequence. People who don’t buy initially can receive more useful information and another opportunity to purchase.

The result is a simple sales funnel that can work in the background rather than requiring you to manually sell to every person who discovers your business.

What is a lead magnet and why do dietitians need one?

A lead magnet is a free resource that gives your audience a useful quick win in exchange for their email address.

The key is to keep the problem small and specific.

For example, rather than creating something broad like “Everything You Need to Know About Fussy Eating”, you could create something much more focused, such as “Five Iron-Rich Foods Your Fussy Eater Will Actually Try”.

Your free resource should also connect directly to your paid product.

Someone should be able to use the free resource, get a result and then naturally see your paid offer as the next step.

That’s how your free content starts to build a relationship rather than simply giving information away.

How can email automation create passive income for dietitians?

Email automation allows you to introduce your digital product to people automatically after they join your email list.

In my nutrition business, I use a 72-hour flash sale sequence for my portion size guides. It consists of six emails sent automatically over three days.

The sequence is triggered when someone downloads the free resource, so it can run while I’m on client calls, walking the dog, having a bath or fast asleep.

You can also create a second-chance sequence for people who don’t buy the first time.

This is where the system becomes particularly powerful. You’re not repeatedly starting from scratch every time you want to make a sale.

Can a low-cost digital product help dietitians get premium clients?

Yes. A low-cost digital product can become the beginning of a much bigger customer relationship.

Someone who buys from you has already taken an important step. They’ve found you, decided that your solution is worth paying for and experienced your expertise.

That makes them a much warmer potential client for a premium service further down the line.

In my own business, 32% of my highest-paying clients bought something low-cost from me first.

So I don’t see a £10, £30 or £40 digital product as simply a small sale.

It can be the beginning of a customer journey that eventually leads to a much larger purchase.

Can digital product income help fund a dietitian business?

It can also give you money to reinvest into growing your business.

Rather than thinking about every sale as money that has to be taken out of the business, you can potentially use some or all of the revenue to fund activities such as advertising your free resource or getting support from a VA.

That creates an interesting cycle.

Your free resource helps grow your audience and build trust. Your low-cost offer generates revenue and introduces people to your expertise. That revenue can then help fund further growth, while your premium offer creates the larger profit opportunity.

You’re building an ecosystem rather than relying on a single income source.

Do dietitians need to be good at tech to create passive income?

No. You don’t need to become a tech expert to build an automated sales system.

You do need to be willing to learn enough to understand the system and make it work for your business.

I remember being scared of all things techie in the early days of my business. These days, I’ve become a bit of a systems and funnels nerd (which probably wasn’t the career trajectory I originally imagined).

I see the same transformation with my clients. They can start out feeling overwhelmed by emails, automations and funnels, and then end up with proper systems running in their businesses and digital products selling every day.

You don’t need to know everything.

You need to know enough to build the business you actually want.

How can dietitians use AI to save time creating digital products?

AI can help reduce the amount of time you spend creating the marketing assets around your digital product.

I teach my dietitian clients how to create their own AI marketing assistant that understands their business, audience and expertise.

Instead of staring at a blank page every time you need to create a lead magnet, opt-in page or email sequence, your AI assistant can do a large part of the initial heavy lifting.

You still need to make the decisions, add your professional expertise, review what it produces and ultimately set everything live.

AI can make the process faster, but it doesn’t replace your judgement.

How long does it take to create a new passive income stream as a dietitian?

I believe you can build what you need to create a new income stream in 90 days, provided you already have a business up and running, understand your ideal client and can dedicate focused time to the project.

For most people, I expect that to mean around half a day a week for 90 days.

That isn’t about cramming another enormous project into an already impossible schedule.

It’s about giving one important business-building project some consistent focus rather than collecting another 47 ideas and leaving them all sitting in a notebook.

At the end of those 90 days, you could have a digital product, an automated sales system and a new way of generating revenue from your expertise.

What do dietitians need in place before creating a passive income stream?

Before building an automated income stream, there are three important things I’d want you to have in place.

First, you need a business that is already up and running, including your legal and compliance basics.

Second, you need a good understanding of your ideal client. You need to know what they want help with and, importantly, which problems they are willing to pay to have solved.

Third, you need to be willing to do the work.

AI can save you time. Automation can reduce the amount of manual work involved. But neither replaces your expertise or your responsibility for making the right decisions.

What could a dietitian's business look like 90 days from now?

You could still have a business where every pound depends on another one-to-one appointment.

Or you could have a business with another income stream sitting alongside your clinical work, with a digital product and an automated system helping you sell it.

That’s the reason I’m running my Idea to Income 90-day sprint, starting on 21 September.

I’ll be helping a small group of freelance dietitians take an idea for a digital product and turn it into an income stream, including the sales system behind it.

By the end of the sprint, the aim is to have more than just a product sitting on your website. You’ll have a system that takes someone from discovering you, to joining your email list, to buying from you, with much of the process automated.

I’ll also show you how to create your own AI marketing assistant, with different levels of support available depending on how much help you want with the tech and implementation.

You can find out more about the sprint here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/90-day-sprint

And if you’d like to chat to me about whether it’s right for you, you can DM me the word “Sprint” on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/

 

 

The Master Plan:

Helping you build the business of your dreams. Get your 22 point step-by step workbook here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

 

 

Connect with me:

Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/

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

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

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/beyondtheclinicbusiness

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

 

Episode transcription:

Sarah (00:45)

What if there was another way other than one-to-one sessions to make money from all the knowledge and expertise that you've built up as a dietitian? Well, good news: there absolutely is. In today's episode, I'm gonna share one of my favourite strategies for creating a new income stream in your dietetic business, including all the steps that you need to take in order to do it.

 

I see so many freelance dietitians with years of expertise sitting in their heads, but their income is still almost completely tied to one-on-one sessions. Maybe that sounds a bit like you: Is your income tied to how many one-to-one clients that you can fit into your diary? Yes, you love helping people, but you can't just keep squeezing more appointments into an already full diary.

 

And I bet you have days where you look at your diary in the morning and you see a 4pm appointment sitting there and you think, 'Ugh! Do I really have to do that session?'. We've all been there. And it's not because you don't care. You're just tired. Tired of having to bring your full clinical brain to every single appointment, every single week. At some point, you hit a ceiling.

 

This is why it's so important to be able to create other income streams, and income streams that don't require more of your time. What's great about things like low-cost digital products is that you create them once and then you can sell them repeatedly without doing any extra work. And what makes this even better is when you have a system in place that handles the selling of that digital product for you in the background, meaning you don't have to do anything manually. Does that sound like a bit of a dream?

 

In today's episode, I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. And I have to admit, I've gone from being the person who was scared of all things techie in my early days in business, to now becoming a bit of a systems and funnels nerd. Once you see how simple this can be, when you know all the steps and what it can actually do for you and your business, you'll see why I get so excited about this stuff.

 

So, today I'll be breaking down how to choose a low-cost digital product that people actually want to buy and the simple sales system that you can put behind it to turn strangers into customers without you having to manually sell it every step of the way. And make sure you stay until the end of this episode because I've got something really exciting happening in September that I think you're going to love. I'm running a 90-day sprint, where I'll be helping a small group of freelance dietitians turn an idea into a profitable digital product and build the entire sales system behind it. So that, by the time you're putting up your Christmas Tree, you'll have a brand new income stream sitting inside your business and ready to make you lots of sales all throughout 2027. I'll tell you a bit more about the sprint at the end of the episode.

 

The first thing it's worth mentioning is why you want to be putting your time and energy into low-cost digital products in the first place. Firstly, as we've already said, it gives you a great way to make money from your expertise without adding another one-on-one appointment to your diary. Also, because it's something affordable and easy for your audience to say yes to, so even if someone doesn't know you very well yet, they're still much more likely to buy from you.

 

But there's also a much bigger reason you want to be doing this. That low-cost purchase can be the start of a much bigger customer relationship. It can become the first step towards premium clients because someone who buys from you, gets value from what you've created and has a great experience, is much more likely to trust you when they're ready for more support.

 

The money that you make from your low-cost digital offer can also go towards your marketing budget and help fund the growth of your business. But we'll get more into that in a moment. Basically, what I'm saying is don't sleep on a low-cost digital offer idea that you might have in your business. My £9.99 baby weaning guide sounded like a really small product, and you know what? It was.

 

But that one little £9.99 guide consistently brought in anywhere between £400 and £800 a month for me, depending on how much I promoted it. So, where do you actually start with all of this? Well, let's start with the idea for the low-cost digital product you're going to sell. Because the first question you're probably asking yourself is, 'What on earth am I going to create?'.

 

There are digital product ideas hiding all over your niche. You just got to find the most profitable ones. The first place I'd look is the problems that your audience is already asking you to solve. So, not the things that you think they should need help with.

 

Look at what your audience is already telling you that they need. Think about the questions you get asked over and over and over again. What are your clients consistently ask you in one-to-one sessions or what keeps popping up in DMs? What problems do they desperately want a simple answer to? And I'd pay particular attention to the problems that are specific, urgent and easy to solve with a clear outcome.

 

It also really helps if you create something that isn't already on the market. And that's exactly why my £9.99 portion size guide worked so well. It solved a very specific problem that parents were desperate to solve. 'How much food should I actually be feeding my baby?'. And when I researched it, I realised that there weren't really any simple portion size guides specifically for babies on solids. So, I had a problempeople really wanted solved and a clear gap in the market. And that's a very good combination when you're choosing your digital product idea. Once you've got your idea, the next question becomes, 'How do we actually get people to buy it?'

 

Because you can't just create a digital product, plonk it on your website and expect people to buy it. How great would it be if it was as easy as that, eh? If you want to sell something successfully, there needs to be a journey happening behind the scenes. Someone has to find you, become interested, realise they have a problem, trust that you can help, understand what you're offering and then eventually decide to buy.

 

Now, this might feel a bit foreign at first because you're probably used to a much simpler business model. Someone finds you, they book an appointment, you have the consultation, they pay you for your time. But what we're talking about today is a very different way of doing business. Creating something once and then selling it again and again, without you having to personally sell it or follow up with every potential customer or be there for every step of that buying process.

 

Once this system is all set-up and running, life and business will become a hell of a lot easier for you. Trust me. Now, one of the simplest sales systems that I use in my own business is built around just a few key steps. Here's what that system looks like step-by-step in the simplest possible terms. So, step one, you create a free resource, also known as a lead magnet. You've probably heard of those. This is what allows someone to discover you and enter your world.

 

You then offer them something genuinely useful for free. It could be a quiz, it could be a checklist, in exchange for their email address. Now, the main goal of this freebie is to build trust with people because when someone comes across you for the first time, they don't know you from Adam yet. Your freebie needs to do two important things. First, it needs to solve one small specific problem that gives them a quick win instead of something broad like,

 

I don't know, 'Everything you need to know about fussy eating'. You want something much more specific like, 'Five iron-rich foods your fussy eater will actually try'. And secondly, your freebie needs to be directly related to the paid offer that you will eventually sell. So, your paid offer, or paid offers, need to feel like the natural next step. Okay, step two, you need to create an opt-in page.

 

So, this is basically just a simple page about your freebie that gets someone to type in their email address. It needs to quickly tell them what they're getting, how it will help them and an easy way to enter their email and get it. It's really easy-peasy. Most people get this 100% wrong. Step three, you create your low-cost offer.

 

Once someone has downloaded your freebie and joined your email list, you've now got a lead. Someone interested in the problem you helped them solve. So, this is where you introduce your low-cost digital product. And remember: this needs to feel like the natural next step from the freebie. They've just solved one small problem. Your paid offer helps them go one step further.

 

Step four, you set up a series of automated emails. Now, these emails are designed to introduce your low-cost digital offer to show people why they need it and give them a reason to buy now, rather than later. So, in my nutrition business, I use a 72-hour flash sale sequence to sell those portion size guides. This is six emails, sent automatically over a three-day period and it works an absolute treat. And before you run away thinking, 'There's absolutely no way I'm going to be writing six sales emails', don't worry. You can create your own AI marketing system to write things like this for you. I'll come back to that again in a second.

 

But the clever thing is this email sequence is triggered when someone downloads your freebie. So, it can run 24/7 while you're off on client calls, while you're walking the dog, while you're soaking in the bath or fast asleep. You can then go one step further and set up what I call a 'second-chance sequence' to anyone who didn't sign up for the offer the first time. This just gives them more value in some emails and then gives them one last chance to buy. And that's it. You've now got a really simple sales funnel, for your digital offer that can run in the background and turn people who've never heard of you into paying customers. But here's where it gets even more interesting. The money that you make from that low-cost offer isn't just money to pocket. It can actually help fund your business growth because you can reinvest some, or all of that revenue, into things like running ads to your freebie or getting help from a VA.

 

And then there's another layer to this that we mentioned briefly earlier, if you remember. The people who buy your low-cost offer, well, they're your warmest leads. They've found you, they've trusted you enough to give you their money and experienced your expertise, which means they can become the perfect people to introduce your premium offer to, further down the line. So, you're not just building a £10 to £30 to £40 digital product.

 

You're building the beginning of a customer journey that can eventually lead to much, much, much bigger sales. And I've experienced this in my own business. 32% of my highest paying clients bought something low-cost from me first. So, essentially, your lead magnet earns trust and grows your audience. Your low-cost offer generates quick revenue, pays for the growth and opens the door to your premium clients.

 

And your premium offer is where the profit comes from. Pretty clever, hey? You can see why I love to geek out over all of this stuff now.

 

So, at this point, you might be thinking, 'Well, okay, but there's absolutely no way I could set all of that up.' or, 'I'm a dietitian, I'm not a techie person'. And a lot of my clients tell me that exact same thing at first. They tell me they hate the tech. They feel completely overwhelmed by the idea of emails and automations and things that they'd need to set up. But now they're doing it. They have proper funnels running in their businesses. They are selling their digital products every day. They have emails and automations running in the background, doing the work that they used to think was far too technical for them. You've got to remember: if you want to build a business that works differently from the one you have now, you've got to be willing to step outside of the way you've always done things. You might have to learn something that initially does feel uncomfortable. You might have to get your head around some tech. You might have to do things you've never done before. But you do not need to become a tech expert. You just need to be willing to learn enough to build the business that you actually want. If my dietitian clients can do it, so can you. The other thing you might be worried about is, 'When am I actually gonna find the time to create all of this?'. Now, I know you're busy between seeing your clients, creating content and everything else that sits on your to-do list. But you know what? This is where AI can completely change the game.

 

One of the things that I teach my dietitian clients is to create their own AI marketing assistant. Basically an AI assistant that understands your business, your audience and your expertise and can help create absolutely all of the assets that you need. So, instead of starting with a blank page every time that you need a lead magnet or an opt-in page or an email sequence, your AI assistant can do a huge chunk of that heavy lifting for you. Okay, there's just one last important thing I want to mention before I go. Yes, I recommend every one of you has an automated sales system like what I've just talked about set up in your business. But, and this is a big but, there are a few things you need to have in place before you can build this kind of income stream.

 

First, you actually need to have a business up and running with all your legal and compliance basics in place. Secondly, you do need to know your ideal client actually really quite well because you need to know exactly what your people want help with and most importantly, what problem they're willing to pay to have solved. And then there's the other thing you need: You have to be willing to actually do the work. Yes, AI can save you loads of time and do a good chunk of the work for you, but it still needs you to make the decisions, to add your expertise, to review things and to set it all live. I genuinely believe you can build everything you need to create a brand new income stream in just 90 days. And that's why I'm running my 90-day sprint in September. But you do need to give it some focus time. For most people, I expect that to be around half a day a week.

 

So, if you have those things in place: a business up and running, a clear picture of what your ideal client wants and the commitment to dedicate a few focused hours to this each week for 90 days, then you can have something very different sitting inside your business three months from now. Something you create once, something that can bring in sales without taking up more of your time and a system working behind the scenes to help make those sales actually happen.

 

And that's when this starts to get really exciting. So the question is: Where do you want to be 90 days from now? Do you want the same business that you have today, still relying on one-to-one sessions for all of your income, still having loads of ideas in your head, but never implementing any of them, still feeling scared of tech and letting it stop you from creating the systems that your business needs to grow? Or do you want a business that feels easier to run?

 

And gives you more passive way to make money from your expertise. Well, starting from the 21st of September, I'm running a 90-day sprint called, 'Idea to Income'. Over 90 days, I'll be helping a small group of freelance dietitians take an idea for a digital product and turn it into a really profitable income stream. I'll walk you through every step you need to take, which we've talked about in this episode, so by the end of the sprint, just before Christmas, you won't just have a new digital product to plonk on your website. You'll have the solid sales system, taking someone from discovering you, to joining your email list, to buying from you and all completely automated.

 

I'll also show you how to create your own AI marketing assistant so you can get AI to do a huge amount of the work for you. And because I know the tech side can often feel like the biggest hurdle, there are different levels of support available inside the sprint, depending on how much help you want from me. I think the most exciting part about this is that you'll go into 2027 with a completely different level of confidence in your business, knowing you can build a digital product, you can set up the systems and you can repeat this process again, whenever you're ready to create another passive income stream. If this 90-day sprint sounds like what you need, but you want to make sure it's right for you, you can DM me with the word 'Sprint' on Instagram. can find my Instagram handle in the show notes of this episode. Or if you're ready to do this thing and sign up now, the link to join is also in the show notes. Bye for now.