The Growth Show with Whitney Bateson

If you've ever been told you can't run Facebook or Instagram ads because you work in health, this episode is going to change how you think about that. Priscilla Zaehringer — who writes the ads, builds the graphics, and submits the campaigns for Whitney's done-for-you funnel clients — takes over the show to explain the one Meta policy that trips up practitioners most: personal attributes. The rule isn't that you can't talk about menopause or GLP-1s or anxiety. It's that a cold ad can't behave like it already knows something private about a stranger. Priscilla walks through two ads running right now for clients, shows the "easy" version she rejected in each case and why, and then gets into the part most people skip — that she can write compliant hooks because by the time she reaches the ad, she's been inside that practitioner's business for weeks. Takeaways: Recognition, not identification. Priscilla's framing for the whole episode: you want the right person to recognize herself in your ad, without the ad assigning her a condition, a diagnosis, or a medication. "A guide to nutrition during menopause" is about a topic; "Struggling with weight gain in menopause?" is about a person. Ban lists of forbidden words miss the point. Priscilla doesn't like the "words you can't use in Meta ads" lists that circulate, because the word isn't the problem - the context is. The same term is fine describing a topic and a problem when it's aimed at the reader. Move the question from what she has to what she's dealing with. Instead of naming the condition, Priscilla asks what situation the person is in, what she's trying to figure out, and what question the practitioner hears over and over. That's where "the plate that works on a low appetite" came from, in place of a line naming a medication and a side effect. Friction can do the work a callout would have done. "Add food, don't take away" stops the right reader because it contradicts what she's been told for decades — no diagnosis, no scale number, no doctor's orders, and she still recognizes herself. The hook is the last five percent. Priscilla writes the ad last - after the half-hour onboarding intake, the client's old blog posts and guest appearances, the lead magnet, and the emails. By then she isn't hunting for a line, because the line is already sitting in that pile and she just has to dig for it. Which is also why she doesn't think a list of approved phrases would help anyone. Resources Mentioned Whitney's free live training, The List Building System That Brings in Clients While You're Off Social Media — Monday Sept 21 at 12pm ET / 9am PT, repeated Wednesday Sept 23 at 1pm ET / 10am PT: whitneybateson.com/training Connect with Priscilla: priscillazaehringer.com Connect with Whitney: Follow Whitney on Instagram @whitneybateson Subscribe & Review: If you’re enjoying the podcast, don’t forget to follow and leave a review! Your support helps others discover the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This one is a replay of Whitney's most recent free Open Coaching Call, and the questions were good enough that it earned its own episode. Nearly everyone who registered said the same thing when asked what they're working on — they want more visibility — so that's where most of the hour goes. Whitney is candid that her own social media does very little for her business, and walks through what she'd do instead: go into audiences other people have already built, reach out to local providers with an actual phone call rather than a brochure, run simple $5/day ads so you stay in front of people without posting, and use local SEO to catch the people who are already searching for a provider. Along the way she takes live questions on lead magnet automations and email platforms, the funnel pitfalls nobody talks about, whether a five-module course should be broken up and sold in pieces, how to move from ChatGPT to Claude without losing your context, and how to keep going when the motivation just isn't there. Takeaways: The most common funnel mistake is building it and then never driving traffic to it. A lead magnet linked in one spot on your website will not find people on its own. Whitney says the biggest pitfall she sees is treating the build as the finish line rather than the start. Borrowed audiences are the fastest route to visibility. Colleagues, bundles, a local doctor's office with a patient newsletter — these are people who have already built trust with your ideal client. Reaching out takes more research than writing a post, but the return per hour is far higher. With referral outreach, do all of it, and don't stop after one try. Whitney recommends email, mail and a phone call together, and reminds listeners that a non-response isn't a rejection: "silence doesn't mean no." Following up is doing the other practitioner a favor, not bothering them. $5/day ads keep you present on Facebook and Instagram without posting. Whitney frames this as the version of social media that runs whether you show up or not, and notes it doesn't replace networking and referrals... it just takes the manual posting off your plate. Local SEO usually pays back faster than broad SEO, because someone searching "dietitian near me" is close to booking, not fact-finding. That holds even for virtual practices - you can signal the states you're licensed in with a page for each service area. Content that's all tips and education trains people to collect advice. If nothing you publish speaks to someone who is getting ready to hire, they never get ready. Balance the educational content with posts and emails about what working with you is actually like. Resources Mentioned Free training: The List Building System That Brings in Clients While You're Off Social Media — Monday, September 21 at 12pm ET and Wednesday, September 23 at 1pm ET — whitneybateson.com/training Connect with Whitney: Follow Whitney on Instagram @whitneybateson Subscribe & Review: If you’re enjoying the podcast, don’t forget to follow and leave a review! Your support helps others discover the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you've been pouring your energy into email, SEO, and social while the phone stays quiet, this episode is the nudge to go work the channel that pays off fastest. Whitney revisits referral networking as a follow-up to her conversation with Alex Raymond in Ep. 111, and gets practical about the part most practitioners stall on: figuring out who to contact and what to actually say. She shares the AI prompt she'd use to assemble a list of 20 local practices in minutes, plus a cold email and a voicemail script that lead with how you support the other provider's patients rather than what you want from them. She's also honest about why this one gets skipped — a Canva tab feels a lot safer than a phone call to a doctor's office — and why the discomfort is the point. The whole system runs from a spreadsheet and five outreaches a week, no CRM required. Takeaways: A referral is borrowed trust, and that's why it's faster. Whitney's framing is that the trust a patient has in their current provider transfers to you when that provider says your name. Someone who found you through a blog post has to build that trust from scratch, which takes weeks or months. Use AI for the list-building, not the outreach. The prompt below assembles practice names, specialties, addresses, phone numbers, and websites into a table you can export. Whitney is explicit about telling the tool not to invent an email address, because it will happily guess one. Lead with their patients, not your services. The single biggest fix in the outreach is opening with how you support the people they already treat, and inviting them to a short call with a scheduling link right in the message. A brochure isn't outreach. Mailing a flyer or dropping off business cards doesn't put you in a provider's mind when they're sitting with a patient who needs you. A face-to-face conversation on Zoom does. Silence isn't a no, and five a week is enough. Reach out to five new practices weekly, then circle back to the previous week's five. Track it in a spreadsheet and only count it as a no when someone actually tells you no. Resources Mentioned Ep. 111 — The Networking System That Fills Your Practice With Aligned Referrals (Alex Raymond): https://whitneybateson.com/ep-111-the-networking-system-that-fills-your-practice-with-aligned-referrals-with-alex-raymond-rd-ld-ceds-c/ Free Open Coaching Call — Thursday, September 10 at 12 pm ET / 9 am PT: whitneybateson.com/coach Connect with Whitney: Follow Whitney on Instagram @whitneybateson Subscribe & Review: If you’re enjoying the podcast, don’t forget to follow and leave a review! Your support helps others discover the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How you write is how people decide who you are. Whitney has watched this play out twice now: first with dietitians, therapists, and doctors whose clinical training left them writing website copy like a textbook, and now with practitioners handing that same copy to AI and getting back something confident, punchy, and completely unlike them. The missing step in both cases is the same one a copywriter would have insisted on before writing a single line - defining the brand voice first. In this episode Whitney lays out a four-part brand voice summary, where to pull the raw material for it (old blog posts, podcast transcripts, your sent folder, a couple of voice memos), and how to hand it to AI so it organizes your voice instead of polishing it away. She also makes the case for the bucket most people skip: the list of things you refuse to say. Takeaways: Skip generic tone words. "Friendly" and "professional" describe every practitioner in your niche. Whitney's test is whether someone could still identify the writing as yours with your name covered up, which pushes you toward combinations like warm but blunt, or nerdy but approachable. Your "do not" list is as useful as your "do" list. Naming the jargon, the sales language, and the framing you refuse to use, fear-based marketing, hustle culture, make-a-million-dollars talk, is what keeps AI-assisted copy from drifting into the tone Whitney describes as cocky and sales-bro. You already have the raw material. Blog posts and website copy written before AI, transcripts from podcasts you have guested on, and your own sent email are all richer sources than staring at a blank page trying to describe yourself. Ask AI to sort, not to summarize. Whitney's instruction is to have it drop your raw content into the four buckets and give you plenty to react to, rather than collating and polishing — because polishing is exactly where your voice gets removed. Asking it to flag contradictions between your blog tone and your email tone is more useful than a frequency list of words. Read the finished summary out loud, and treat AI's version as a draft rather than a verdict. Resources mentioned Open Coaching Call: Thursday, September 10, 12:00pm ET / 9:00am PT, free on Zoom: whitneybateson.com/coach Wispr: voice-to-text transcription - https://wisprflow.ai/ Connect with Whitney Follow Whitney on Instagram @whitneybateson If you're enjoying the podcast, don't forget to follow and leave a review! Your support helps others discover the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here's the strange part about most of these websites: they're ranking. They're getting traffic. It's just traffic that was never going to turn into a client — recipes, lists of foods to eat or avoid with a condition, and the general questions people ask while they're still working out what's wrong with them. Whitney has brought on a colleague, Matt, to work with her on SEO (he'll be on the podcast at some point), and over the last few weeks the two of them audited five practice websites and kept running into the same four things. In this episode she walks through all of them: why so much of the SEO advice out there was written for blogs that make their money from ads and affiliate links rather than from selling services, what to go after instead, the local SEO opportunity hardly anyone is taking advantage of even if they've never seen a patient in person, the technical and accessibility issues that creep into every site over time, and the Google Search Console problem showing up on nearly every audit. Takeaways: Traffic and clients are two different goals, and most SEO advice is aimed at the first one. Ad revenue and affiliate income need enormous traffic to work, and Whitney notes they can take a year or two before generating real income. If what you're selling is your time and your expertise, you need far less traffic — it just has to be the right people. Write for people who are closer to a decision. Recipes and lists of foods for a condition attract researchers. Searches like "what to expect when working with a dietitian" or symptoms of the specific condition you treat attract people who are close to booking. If you only have time for one blog post a month, Whitney says make it that one. A smaller keyword can outperform a bigger one. Whitney points out that even 200 searches a month for a well-aligned phrase is worth going after, because those searchers are the ones who click through, join your list, and book a call. Local SEO doesn't require a physical office. If you're licensed or credentialed in specific states, or take insurance in certain places, you can create location-specific service pages — a page for nutrition services in a particular metro area, or for an entire state — to signal to Google exactly where you serve. Whitney notes this needs to be backed by keyword data, since some states are better optimized statewide and others city by city. Sites degrade over time, and that's normal. New code conflicts, oversized images, heading structure, and missing image alt text all pile up after launch. Whitney recommends running your site through pagespeed.web.dev and checking Search Console for pages marked as not indexed — not everything needs fixing, the goal is just to move the score up. Resources Mentioned PageSpeed Insights — free site performance and accessibility scoring Google Search Console — for checking which pages are and aren't indexed Google Business Profile — for practices with a physical location Mediavine — ad platform referenced as an example of the volume-based blog model Doctolib — European provider booking platform Whitney used in Berlin Connect with Whitney: Follow Whitney on Instagram @whitneybateson Subscribe & Review: If you’re enjoying the podcast, don’t forget to fo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.