There's a common belief amongst practitioners that the only way to make more money is to work more hours. However, you can scale your business beyond solely 1:1 client visits. While many practitioners believe that the only, or right, way to increase income is to see more clients, this business model represents only one way to run a practice. In fact, it’s often the only way most professionals are taught. However, by increasing your channels of passive income you can make a big difference in your revenue stream without taking time out of your day-to-day. But what actually is passive income? Does it really require zero effort? Why is it so important? How do you create more passive income? Read on to learn how to earn more money and scale your business without seeing more clients.
Passive income is an additional revenue stream that doesn't require your constant attention or effort. However, it still requires time to set up and tweak if needed! Although you have to invest some energy up front, once systems are in place, you can reap the benefits.Learn more about how you can include more passive methods into your business, like automations, and move away from an hour-per-hour fee structure below.
Passive income continues to generate money for your practice without continuous effort. For example, if you’re a nutritionist, you may want to create an e-Book with meal plans and recipes for purchase on your website or provide nutritional guidance through a paid online experience. Although you've curated your e-book, you'll still have to spend time marketing it to your audience! However, promotion can include ideas such as paid media or even creating some buzz around it and giving your first one away in a giveaway! If you already have a large clientele, promotion can start with them by sharing it in your monthly newsletter.
Recurring income, on the other hand, is more stable and predictable. It refers to money your practice can expect to take in on an ongoing basis. For health and wellness practitioners, the most common source of recurring income is through monthly, fee-based client programs or packages that span over the course of a year or several months.
As you focus on scaling your business, finding a way to earn passive or additional income is a great way to buffer against slow revenue periods. You’ve probably heard about the concept of a balanced portfolio of stocks or financial assets; if you lose from one, chances are the losses are offset by gains from another asset. You can look at your business in the same way, as a portfolio of services and offerings that you can balance. If one of your income streams slows down or stops, you can rest easy knowing that you still have money coming in from other channels. That’s especially important for health and wellness practitioners, particularly the ones just starting out, who rely on 1:1 visits as their main source of income.
Also, as we’ve just learned, there are forces beyond our control that could very well shut things down for a while. And it’s comforting to know that there’s more than one way to bring in more income should anything happen to that main source.
Another major benefit to venturing out into other income generators is that you’re able to cast out a wider net to reach more people through different avenues. More awareness could mean more clients coming your way.
Yet probably the most important benefit to earning passive income is growing your business without spending every hour of every day seeing clients. Less stress for you means less of a chance you’ll experience the burnout that comes with jamming too many clients in. Win-win.
Keep in mind that it works differently for different industries. Here are some of our top ideas for generating more money for health and wellness practitioners.
Have a knack for creating beautifully designed templates and meal plans? Sell them online. If you already invested the time creating it for yourself, take the opportunity to sell it to others who could benefit from your creation. There are many ways to set up an online store or sell your products in a digital marketplace. If you don’t want to make your own website just yet, a great place to sell your work to other practitioners is RD2RD, created by Registered Dietitian Megan Boitano to help dietitians sell their resources to other professionals. There is likely a market for your wonderful nutrition talk slide decks or pre-made intake forms.
What if you could earn passive income from being an advocate for brands you love? A brand ambassador doesn’t have to be a celebrity or mega-influencer, they just have to be good at sharing the love through their social channels.
Reach out to brands that are well-connected to yours, audience-wise, to see if they would be interested in a promotional partnership. Worried you don’t have 100K followers to offer? You shouldn’t be. Even smaller, niche audiences are incredibly appealing to companies and they’ll likely still be interested in some kind of partnership.
Have a blog or a podcast or interested in creating one? Some bloggers make full-time income through their websites. Not only can you sell your services through your posts or podcasts, you can also charge other businesses a fee to advertise with you. Connect with brands that align with your values and you’ll be set.
You can also explore affiliate marketing. You team up with a like-minded brand and promote their wellness product or service on your website, then earn a commission for doing so. Affiliate programs are usually free to join so you won’t have to worry about high start-up costs.
You can also earn passive income by selling online courses! Practice Better’s programs feature lets you market your programs online so you can share your expertise with more clients, more often. You’ll also have the convenience of choice between Fixed-date or Evergreen programs.
With Fixed-date, you establish a start and end date for your program and everyone who signs up starts (and receives their modules) at the same time. Evergreen on the other hand, are programs that are available anytime. This option is best for clients who want to run through them on their own time.
The best part? You can schedule the programs whenever you want: before appointments, during appointments, or regardless if there’s an appointment at all. Not ready to completely automate? No problem. With Practice Better, you’ll have the ability to incorporate 1:1 or group sessions, if you still want to incorporate client visits into your practice.
You can actually earn recurring monthly commissions for every referral who signs up for a paid plan on Practice Better. You’ll earn 10% for each referral subscription. Payouts end after 12 months or upon cancellation of monthly subscription, whichever comes first.
Absolutely. And it couldn’t be easier. Here are a few ways Practice Better can help build and automate your packages to get that income flowing.
With packages in Practice Better, you can bundle multiple services and sessions together to create packages for your clients. For example, you can include program access and individual sessions as part of the same package, so your clients can register and pay for everything at once.
Have an existing online dispensary? You can connect it to your Practice Better account. This allows you to automate your supplement sales process, along with your billing and payments as well.
You’ll also have the ability to create automated scheduling, so you can focus more on helping enrich your clients’ lives. Not only does it make life easier for you, it makes life easier for your clients, ensuring that their appointment is always in their schedule.
To keep your schedule up-to-date with all of your upcoming sessions, recurring appointments, reminders and personal events, you also have the capability to sync your Practice Better Calendar with your Google Calendar so you won’t miss a thing. Bonus: The syncing feature also prevents clients from booking sessions that conflict with other events in your Google Calendar. How’s that for efficiency?
People live online these days. That’s why promoting your practice on social media is an incredibly important tool to use at your passive income-making disposal. Not only are they free advertising services, you can use the platforms to link directly to the products or services you're offering (also making it super easy for new clients to get to you).
With Custom Bookings in Practice Better, you can customize your services, packages and programs, plus you can create unique links directly to them. The perfect call-to-action to take potential clients from your social media ads to your offerings
As you can see, there’s no shortage of ways to bump up your revenue stream with passive income opportunities. Whatever you choose, Practice Better can help make it even easier to get some time back and generate more income while you’re at it.
This post was originally published on August 3, 2022, and has been refreshed for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Practice Better is the complete practice management platform for nutritionists, dietitians, and wellness professionals. Streamline your practice and begin your free trial today.
