4 Things to Keep in Mind about Multiple Income Streams

Lots of business coaches advise leveraging your time and developing multiple streams of income. Time leveraging generally means working with groups, whether that be via teleconferences or live seminars. Multiple streams of income for service providers may mean developing a product line, or adding a new service, which may mean getting another credential.

Generating lots of different ways to make money sounds like a good idea -- until you realize each one can become a new business start up. How many businesses can you handle having at one time, especially as a solopreneur?

Keeping focused on your central business purpose can be a challenge when you start adding additional ways to monetize what you know and do. But allowing yourself to scatter your energies can be deadly, resulting in no one "stream" becoming more than a trickle.

If your vision as a counselor, coach, or ND is to be a one-person show, here are four things I've learned the hard way that may help you become successful more quickly than I did.

1. Define your ideal client niche with great precision -- know what their problems are, what motivates them to seek help, where they turn when they do, and what they are willing to spend money for (the outcome they want).

2. As a coach, you naturally deliver one-on-one services. That's Stream #1. In what other ways will you deliver the same information and help? Local workshops? Teleclasses? E-books? Ezines? Sticking to one themed (signature) message throughout all these different delivery methods will keep things manageable.

3. Set out to become a topic expert in your signature field. Do one thing everyday that furthers your visibility in your topic. Select the things that either will create income or that promote name recognition, subject authority, professional credibility, personal rapport, and client attraction interest.

4. If you feel the impulse to spend time and money that doesn't fall into the profit or promotion categories, get some coaching on working SMARTer, and look at core beliefs and other self-sabotaging factors in your self-employment habits.

Projecting Expertise

Last week I spoke to two groups of naturopathic medical students about marketing their practices after graduation. As expected, there was some resistance to the concept of marketing themselves as an expert when just out of school. This is a normal and appropriate concern.

And it's not just my ND clients who have trouble with this claim. My counselor clients also feel inhibited about calling themselves a specialist. Naturopathic doctors and psychotherapists alike are trained to be generalists, and marketing as a specialist rubs uncomfortably against that.

Plus, let's face it, a lot of us in the healing arts are recovering from poor self-esteem and low confidence. It stretches our own belief in ourselves to say out loud that we have expertise in anything. If I could give us all a pill for that, the magic med would erase all the early life programming we've experienced that damaged our self-concept as relates to the joyful quality we naturally have in childhood when we KNOW we can do anything.

But I digress. One way around this marketing need to project expertise, while still staying in integrity with the truth, is a very simple language shift. In the examples here, do you spot the difference?

• I'm an expert anxiety counselor. Or, My expertise is in eliminating anxiety and depression.
  
• I specialize in helping women with anxiety gain confidence and freedom from debilitating worry.

In the first example, the claim implies a high level of experience, extra rigorous training, or something beyond the average accumulation of education and years in business. (It also is rather egocentric, and just begs to be proven with statistics or some other quantifiable method).

The second example defines a narrow scope of interest and merely says this is where I put most of my attention -- it's what I like doing best. The focus remains on the client type, their problem, and the result they want, rather than staking a claim about myself. It directly states that my role is facilitation of the client's work.

The second example is much different in that it doesn't claim to know everything about anything. It simply states what is true from day one after graduation -- I'm a helper.

If you are graduating this spring as an ND or a therapist and you can't say you're a helper -- well, why did you choose this profession?