Ep. 124 - Why Isn’t My Dietetic Business Making More Money?

Why isn’t my dietetic business making more money?

If your dietetic business isn’t making the money you want it to, lack of income is probably the symptom rather than the actual problem. Somewhere between a potential client discovering you and eventually buying from you, people may be dropping out of the journey.

And until you know where that’s happening, changing your offer, rewriting your website or posting even more content is really just guesswork.

I know how frustrating that can feel.

You’re creating offers, writing content, answering DMs and doing all the things you think you’re supposed to be doing. Yet the sales either aren’t happening, or they’re coming in so inconsistently that you can’t rely on them.

As a registered dietitian, that can feel particularly galling. You’ve spent years studying, training and building your expertise. You started your business partly because you wanted the opportunity to make a good living from everything you know.

And somehow you find yourself working harder than ever and wondering why the numbers in your bank account don’t reflect the effort you’re putting in.

So instead of asking, “Why isn’t my dietetic business making money?”, I want you to ask a much more useful question:

Where in my customer journey am I losing people? There are five stages I look at: Be found. Be followed. Be trusted. Be chosen. Be loved.

Find the gap, and you have a much better idea of what actually needs your attention.

How do I know if enough potential clients are finding my dietetic business?

Potential clients need a reliable way to discover your business when they’re looking for help with the problem you solve. That could happen through Google, AI tools, social media, recommendations, blog content or other channels where your ideal clients are already searching.

If very few of the right people are discovering you, you have what I call a be found gap.

Think about what you do when you have a problem.

My husband and I recently went to Rome for a long weekend. We'd never been to Italy before, had just three days and knew there was an awful lot we could potentially squeeze in.

So what did we do?

We went to Google. Then ChatGPT. Then TikTok.

Your potential clients are doing exactly the same thing.

They’re searching for answers to their specific problems. If you’re a paediatric dietitian, that might be “Why won’t my toddler eat anything?” or “Iron rich foods for fussy eaters under five”.

The question is whether your business appears when they go looking.

One number I mention in the podcast is that if you’re sending people from your content to a freebie, you might expect around 2% of the people who see that content to click through to the opt-in page.

This is a reference point, not a target you must hit. If you’re getting much less, it gives you somewhere to investigate.

Verification note: In the episode, I describe the benchmarks in this article as reference points based on published industry data combined with my experience across my own businesses and client businesses. Individual sources are not named in the transcript, so these figures should be source-verified before being presented as independently sourced industry benchmarks.

How do I turn website visitors and social media followers into leads?

Give people a clear next step that moves them from simply consuming your free content into a closer relationship with your business. A useful lead magnet, email opt-in, newsletter or community can help you turn passing visitors into people you can continue communicating with.

If people are finding you but not taking that next step, you may have a be followed gap.

This can happen even when you have a decent-sized audience.

You might have plenty of website traffic or social media followers, but if there’s nothing connecting that audience to the next part of your business, you can end up with lots of people consuming your expertise for free without moving any closer to becoming clients.

I sometimes call this the influencer problem. You’ve accidentally trained your audience to expect everything for free.

For an opt-in page, I mention around 40% as a reference point for the proportion of visitors who might leave their name and email address.

If your figure is nowhere near that, have a look at your page.

Does it immediately communicate the specific problem your freebie solves?

Would your ideal client see it and think, “That is exactly what I need”?

Or is it more of a “Hmm, that sounds quite nice” before they wander off to make a cuppa and promptly forget about it?

That difference matters.

How can email marketing help a dietitian make more money?

Email marketing helps turn someone who has shown an initial interest in your expertise into someone who knows you, understands how you can help and has opportunities to buy from you. Collecting email addresses alone isn't enough. You need to continue the relationship after someone opts in.

This is the be trusted stage.

If you have a freebie collecting email addresses but no welcome sequence, useful follow-up emails or logical next offer, people can go cold remarkably quickly.

I saw exactly what a simple email journey could do in my own nutrition business.

I created a free quiz called Fussy Eater or Problem Feeder, which brought 5,382 parents onto my mailing list.

But getting those email addresses wasn't the important bit.

What happened next was.

After receiving their quiz results, parents automatically moved into an email sequence where I shared more useful information and eventually introduced them to a £9.99 portion size guide.

More than 300 people bought it from that automated sequence alone.

They'd moved from finding me and taking a free quiz to receiving useful information and trusting me enough to make a small purchase.

That's what I want email marketing to do.

Not just grow a lovely big list that sits there gathering virtual dust.

For context, I mention email open rates of around 20% to 40% and click rates of around 5% to 7% as rough reference points in the episode.

Again, these aren't pass or fail numbers. They're clues that can help you decide where to look more closely.

Why are people interested in my content but not buying my offer?

If people trust your expertise and have the problem you solve but still aren't buying, look closely at the offer itself. It needs to solve a sufficiently specific problem, be easy to understand and give the right person a compelling reason to choose it.

That's your be chosen stage.

One of my clients, Laura, is a paediatric dietitian who had spent years creating content around children's nutrition and had built a large, engaged audience.

Creating a digital product seemed like the obvious next move.

So she created Nourish and Thrive, a 72-page guide covering everything a parent could possibly need to know about feeding children under five.

She launched it. And sold six copies.

Two went to direct competitors, one to a health visitor, one to a speech and language therapist and two to NHS dietitians.

Not one parent from the audience she'd created it for bought it.

At first, Laura thought she had a marketing problem and needed to create more content.

She didn't. The product was simply too comprehensive.

As health professionals, we're trained to be thorough. That's incredibly important in clinical practice, but it can trip us up when we create digital products.

Your client doesn't necessarily want to know everything you know.

They want help with the thing that's bothering them right now.

So instead, I helped Laura create The Fussy Eater Fix, an AI-powered weekly meal plan generator for children under five.

Rather than teaching parents everything about children's nutrition, it focused on one practical problem: what on earth do I feed my fussy eater this week?

It was priced at £97 full price with a £37 flash sale price.

Specific person. Specific problem. Specific solution.

That's a very different proposition from “here's everything I know”.

What is a realistic sales conversion rate for a dietitian’s email list?

For a newer or smaller email list, I use around 1% to 3% of the list buying an offer as a rough starting reference point. It does not mean your business is failing if you're below it, and it shouldn't be treated as a universal target.

Why so few?

Because everyone on your email list isn't ready to buy today.

I think about subscribers as broadly including buy-now impulse buyers and buy-later consideration buyers.

Some people see something that's right for them and make a decision relatively quickly. Others might need to hear from you for months before the timing, trust and offer all come together.

In the episode, I also explain that I've seen buying behaviour slow considerably over the last couple of years, with more buy-later buyers than before.

That makes nurturing your audience even more important.

Verification note: The 1% to 3% figure and the statement about changes in buying behaviour are given in the episode without a named external source. They should be verified before being presented as independently sourced industry data.

Why are existing clients and customers important for growing a dietetic business?

Existing customers can generate repeat purchases and referrals, which means the customer journey shouldn't stop after the first sale. A strong customer experience gives people a reason to return, progress to another offer or recommend your work to somebody else.

I call this final stage be loved.

Unlike the other stages, I don't think there's a particularly useful universal benchmark to apply here.

Instead, track your own numbers over time.

Are people buying once and disappearing? Do customers progress from one product or service to another? Are happy clients recommending you?

If that's rarely happening, I'd look more closely at the experience after the sale rather than automatically assuming you need more followers at the beginning of the journey.

Do I need a big audience to make more money as a dietitian?

No. You don't necessarily need a huge audience to build a profitable dietetic business. You need enough of the right people entering your customer journey and an effective way of moving them from discovery to trust and, eventually, the right paid offer.

I tracked 120 of my premium clients over six years, and 32% of my highest-paying clients had bought something low cost from me first.

My VIP clients, who were paying upwards of £1,000 a month, typically bought two or three lower-cost products before considering working with me at that level.

They didn't discover me on Monday and suddenly decide to hand over £1,000 a month by Friday.

There was a journey.

That's why low-cost digital products can play such an interesting role in a dietetic business.

They give someone an easier opportunity to become a customer, experience your expertise and get a quick win before deciding whether they want more support from you.

They can also generate revenue that can be reinvested into marketing, while your main offer is where the larger profit opportunity sits.

How can I work out what is stopping my dietetic business from growing?

Look at your customer journey in order and identify the stage with the biggest unexpected drop-off. Check whether enough of the right people are finding you, following you, trusting you, choosing you and ultimately becoming happy customers who return or recommend you.

Don't try to fix all five at once.

And please don't immediately decide you need to post on Instagram seven days a week because sales have been a bit quiet.

Look at the evidence first.

You might need more visibility. You might have plenty of visibility but no effective way to turn that attention into leads. Perhaps people are joining your email list but not hearing enough from you to build trust. Or perhaps you have an audience that trusts you, but your offer doesn't solve a sufficiently specific problem for them to buy it.

The answer to “Why isn't my dietetic business making more money?” isn't automatically “do more marketing”.

Find the gap first. Then fix the right thing.

Ready to build a new income stream in your dietetic business?

If you're serious about creating another income stream in your dietetic business, my 90 Day Sprint is designed to help you build one from scratch.

Over the 90 days, we'll work through creating a profitable digital offer and the sales system around it, including your freebie, sales page, emails and automations. We'll also build your own AI marketing assistant so it understands your business, audience, offers and professional guidelines.

The aim is to finish with a new revenue stream built, launched and ready to sell, rather than another half-finished idea sitting somewhere in your Google Drive.

Join the 90 Day Sprint here:
https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/90-day-sprint

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

Episode transcription:

 

Sarah (00:45)

 

I know how frustrating it is to look at your business and think, 'I am working so hard, so where's all the money?'. You're creating offers, you're creating content, you're answering DMs, you're doing everything you should be doing, the sales aren't coming in. Or they're coming here and there, but just not as consistently as you thought they would. And that is especially frustrating as a registered dietitian who's spent years studying, training and qualifying.

 

You started your business because you wanted the opportunity to make a really good living from the expertise that you've spent years building but maybe now, you find yourself working harder than ever and somehow earning less than you were before, maybe even making less than you did in the NHS. And that can leave you with this horrible feeling that, despite all the effort you're putting in, you're actually going backwards rather than forwards.

 

But here's what I want you to recognise: not making enough money isn't actually the problem, it's the symptom. Just like if a patient came to you and said, 'I feel rubbish', you wouldn't just treat feeling rubbish. You'd start asking questions. What's actually going on? Where's the problem? What's causing it? And that's exactly what we need to do with your business. There are actually five different stages between someone discovering you and becoming a client who buys from you and tells someone else about how amazing you are. If your business isn't making the money you want it to be, there's a good chance something is getting stuck at one of those stages and once you know where the problem is, you can actually do something about it. This is something I wish more dietitians understood about their businesses, because then, rather than looking at your business and thinking, 'Why am I not making enough money?', instead, you can ask yourself, 'Well, which stage of my customer journey am I losing people at?'. So, today I'm going to walk you through how I teach those five stages using my brand new framework that's inside the business prescription path, the way I teach dietitians in business, so that by the end of this episode, you'll have a much clearer idea of why your business isn't making the money you want it to be and what you would do differently.

 

But first of all, I want to tell you about what recently happened with one of my dietitian clients, Laura, because her story is actually a really good example of how when the sales aren't coming in, we tend to assume what the problem is. We might start changing the offer, tweaking our websites, posting more content when actually, we're just guessing. And the real problem could be something completely different.

 

So, Laura, she's a paediatric dietitian and she's spent years building her expertise and creating content around children's nutrition. She's built a really engaged large audience too. So naturally the next step seemed pretty obvious: create a digital product. And she did exactly that. She created something called 'Nourish and Thrive', a 72-page guide covering everything a parent could possibly need to know about feeding children under five.

 

But when she launched it to her audience, she only sold six copies. And out of those six sales: two were her direct competitors, one was a health visitor, one was a speech and language therapist and two were NHS dietitians who, presumably, were buying it to help with their own children. Not one of the parents in her audience bought it. Laura assumed the problem was her marketing so, she thought she needed just to post more content.

 

But she was trying to fix something without actually knowing for certain what was wrong. The marketing wasn't the problem. The problem was actually that she'd made this guide way too comprehensive. She'd built the product she wanted to make as the expert that she was rather than the simple specific solution that her audience was actually looking for. And this is a mistake that I see a lot of health professionals making.

 

We are trained to be thorough and in clinical practice, being comprehensive is a really good thing. But when you're creating something to sell online, comprehensive isn't always what people are looking for. A parent whose toddler won't eat isn't necessarily sitting down at 9 p.m. thinking, 'I need a really comprehensive guide on children's nutrition'. They're much more likely to be Googling, 'Why won't my toddler eat anything?' or 'Iron rich foods for fussy eaters under five' or 'What do I feed a child who only eats beige food?'. That is the problem they want solved and they want it solved quickly. When you're not making the kind of income that you want from an offer, finding out actually what's missing is so much more important than just guessing. Otherwise you can spend weeks or even months changing things that were never actually the problem. And that's exactly what I want you to do today. I want to help you work out which part of your customer journey isn't working so that you know what it is you actually need to fix. So, as I said earlier, there are five stages between someone first discovering you and becoming someone who buys from you and then eventually recommends you to someone else. The first stage in this loop is being found. Are the right people discovering you?

 

Think about what happens when someone has a problem they need help with - They might ask for recommendations. They go onto Google, they ask AI tools, they search on social media. That means your job at this stage is to be visible in the places that your ideal clients are. That might mean creating helpful blog posts, creating content around the questions your ideal clients are searching for and being recommended by AI tools. By the way,

 

I did a recent episode on how to get AI to recommend you. It's episode 120, so make sure to give that a listen after this. Now, just to pepper the point here, my husband and I have not long returned from a long weekend in Rome. We've never been to Italy before. We had just three days and we were aware of there being a lot we could do. So, we went to Google and then we went to ChatGPT to build an itinerary, and then to TikTok to do a bit of research. And that's exactly what your potential client is doing at this stage when they have a problem and then need a solution.

 

If you've got no reliable way of getting you or your business in front of anyone, that's what I call the 'Be found gap'. Now, the second stage is being followed. So once people have found you, are they sticking around? Are they having a nosy around your website? Are they reading your content? Are they joining your Facebook group? Are they opting in for your freebie? Joining your weekly newsletter, et cetera? Essentially,

 

are they engaging without having fully committed yet? If the answer is no, that's a 'be followed gap'. Someone with a decent sized audience who isn't making money from them has a 'be followed gap'. They're posting on social media or they have a website with lots of traffic, but they don't really know how to do marketing effectively. There's nothing that moves a visitor into an actual relationship with them.

 

I also call this the 'influencer problem' because you may have an audience who've been accidentally trained to expect everything for free. And that brings us to the next stage, the third stage, be trusted. So, this is where people move from, 'Well, I like this dietician's content,' to 'This dietitian could really help me.'. So, this is where you need to be giving people enough reasons to trust your expertise and believe that you're the person who can actually help them.

 

And this is where things like email marketing come in super handy because if you've got a freebie collecting email addresses, but nothing after it, so no welcome sequence, nothing to offer them right away, no reason to keep hearing from you, people will go cold the minute that they opt-in. And that's what I call a 'be trusted gap'. Having a simple email system set-up can make such a big difference.

 

For example, in my nutrition business, I had a free quiz called 'Fussy Eater or Problem Feeder', which actually brought in 5,382 parents onto my mailing list. But the important thing was what happened after they took the quiz. They didn't just do their quiz and get the results and then hear nothing from me. They were automatically taken through a simple email sequence.

 

After the first email that delivered their results, they started getting more emails from me with super useful information and introducing them to the next step, which was just a £9.99 portion size guide. Over 300 people bought that from an automated sequence alone which, if you know digital marketing, that's a pretty good conversion for an email sequence written once. And that's actually a really good example of what I mean by being trusted.

 

They've gone from, 'I found this dietitian and took her free quiz,' to 'I've had some value from her and I trust her enough to buy this low cost digital product'. And that's what you want your email marketing to be doing: building trust, moving people along the journey from browser to buyer, rather than just collecting email addresses. The next stage is being chosen. So, this is where you need to make it really clear what you're offering,

 

who it's for and why they should take action now. So remember the paediatric dietitian Laura we spoke about earlier. Once we realised her original 72-page guide was a bit too comprehensive, I helped Laura create something else instead. She created the 'Fussy Eater Fix'. It was an AI powered weekly meal plan generator for children under five. So instead of trying to teach parents everything about children's nutrition, it solved one very specific problem in a really practical way, helping parents work out what to actually feed their fussy eater without having to spend hours planning meals for themselves. It was £97 full price with a £37 flash sale price, so there was a clear reason to buy-now. And that's what being chosen is all about. Now look at your own business. If people trust you and clearly have the problem that you solve, but they're not actually buying: That's what I call a 'be chosen gap'. And then last but not least, the final stage is being loved. So, once someone's bought from you, are they getting such a good experience from you and amazing results that they want to buy from you again or recommend you to someone else? Because the customer journey doesn't end when someone buys once.

 

If people are buying from you just once and then disappearing, or they're never referring anyone, that is what I call a 'be loved gap'.

 

And there's one really important thing to understand about these five stages. The numbers are supposed to get smaller as people move through the journey. There might be thousands of people who discover you, hundreds who follow you, fewer who really engage with you and trust you, and fewer again who buy, and then an even smaller number who become repeat buyers and recommend you. And that's completely normal, but often a massive shock for dietitians new to business.

 

It's not about getting everyone who finds you to buy from you. It's about knowing whether there's enough of the right people moving from one stage to the next. Because if there's a big drop somewhere in one of those five stages that shouldn't be there, that's where you need to start looking.

 

You might be thinking, 'But how do I actually know if I've got a problem at one of these stages?'. Well, this is where looking at the numbers can be really useful. You're not going to guess. You're going to actually look at what's happening at each stage and see where people are dropping off more than you expect. Now, the numbers I'm going to give you aren't targets that you need to hit. They're reference points to help you work out whether something looks a bit off in your own business. So let's start with being found.

 

If you are sending people from your content to a freebie, you generally expect around 2% of the people who see that content to click through to the page to download the freebie.

 

If you're getting much less than that, it could be a sign that there's a mismatch between what you're talking about in your content and actually what you're asking people to opt-in for. They might love your content, but they're not thinking, 'Yes! I need that'. Once someone lands on the opt-in page, you generally expect around 40% of people to actually leave their name and email address. So this is also where we start to see being followed in action.

 

Because someone giving you their email address is a much stronger signal than simply following you on Instagram. If you're getting nowhere near that 40%, it's worth looking at whether the page is making the problem you're freebie solves clear enough. Are they looking at it and thinking, 'Well, that's exactly what I need help with!' or are they thinking, 'Well, that sounds nice,' but then they click away. Then we move on to being trusted. And this is why your email numbers become really useful.

 

So as a rough reference, you might expect email open rates to be somewhere between 20% to 40%, depending on where your subscribers have come from. And I'd be looking at around 5% to 7% of those people actually clicking through. So it's important to remember that every email should have something to click, so people learn that an email from you is always worth opening. Then we get to the being chosen part, the sales part.

 

For a newer or smaller email list, something around 1% to 3% of that list, buying an offer can actually be a fairly realistic starting point. And if you're thinking, 'Only 1 to 3%! That sounds terrible...' It really isn't. Not everyone on your list is ready to buy right now. Some people will need to hear from you for months before they're ready. We're not going into buyer psychology today, but you need to know that you have two types of buyer on your list. The buy-now impulse buyers, and the buy-later consideration buyers. And the other thing that's important to remember is that buying behavior has slowed down considerably over the last couple of years. And so there's more buy-later buyers than ever before. And then finally, being loved. So this one's slightly different because there really isn't a useful benchmark for how many people should come back and buy again or refer someone else. That's something to track in your own business over time.

 

I really recommend you start looking at your business through those five stages. So rather than thinking, 'I'm not making enough money', you can start asking yourself, 'Well, what are the numbers actually telling me?'. And just to be clear, these aren't targets that you need to hit. These are reference points based on published industry data, coupled with what I've seen across my businesses and working with lots of clients in their businesses over the years. So don't look at them and think, 'Oh God, I'm well below that so my business must be failing'. Just use them simply to ask yourself, 'Does this number give me a clue about where I need to look next?'.

 

The other important thing to understand is that these five stages build on each other. A lot of dietitians make the mistake of jumping straight into the sale. They create their offer, they put it on their website and they hope people will buy. But people need to get to know you. They need to see that you understand their problem. They need to trust that you know what you're talking about. And then most of them will need an easy first step. I like to think of these stages as a journey.

 

First, your lead magnet helps them build that first bit of trust. Then your low cost offer gives them a really easy way to experience what it's like to work with you without a big commitment. That's for those buy-now buyers. And then once they've had that good experience and had a quick win from that low cost offer, they're much more likely to consider your bigger offer sooner. There's another important reason for building it this way too. Your low cost offer can help fund your marketing. The money that

 

comes in from those smaller sales can be used to bring in more of the right people into your business or run things like ads. And then your main offer is where you make all of the profits. In my own business, I tracked 120 of my premium clients over six years and 32% of my highest-paying clients had bought something low cost from me first. My VIP clients, the ones paying upwards of a thousand pounds a month, typically bought two or three lower cost products before they ever considered working with me at that level. So they moved through these stages. They didn't go from stranger to a thousand pound a month client overnight. And that's important if you're sitting here thinking, 'But I don't have a big audience'. You know what? You don't necessarily need one. You just need enough of the right people entering at the beginning of the journey and then you need to know how to move them through it.

 

And actually, you know what? Low cost digital products are a really big part of that journey. They can bring new people into your world, they can build trust, they can generate revenue, and they can help those buyers move towards your bigger offers. Let's quickly recap. There's five stages between someone discovering you and becoming a client who buys from you and tells someone else all about you. Be found, be followed, be trusted, be chosen, be loved.

 

And if your business isn't making the money you want it to be, go and work out which one is out of range in your business using the numbers I've given you. Now, if you're serious about making more money from your dietetic business in 2027, and you're willing to actually do the work now to make that happen, let me tell you about my 90 Day Sprint. I'm taking a small group of dietitians through a 90 day sprint period starting this week, and we are going to build a new income stream from scratch.

 

So if you've been thinking about joining, this is your last chance. The goal is really simple: by Christmas, you'll have a new revenue stream built, launched, and ready to sell. I'm going to take you through my 'Easy Yes' framework to help you create a highly profitable digital offer that people actually want to buy. And I'm not just going to help you create the product and leave you to figure out the rest, over the 90 days, we'll build the entire funnel for it including the freebie, the sales page, the emails, the automations, so you finish with a full sales system.

 

One of the things that makes this much faster is AI. We actually start by building your own AI marketing assistant, essentially a custom AI team member that understands your business, your audience, your offers, your professional guidelines, because there's a big difference between opening a random AI chat and asking it to write something for you and having a properly built assistant that already understands who you are and how your business works.

 

So, if you want a solid new revenue stream by Christmas and you want your business to be making more consistent income in 2027, now is the time to join the sprint. The first training and implementation tool drops today and the first of our live calls is next week so do not wait around. Head to the show notes of this episode to join while you still can. Bye for now.