Starting an Online Coaching Business in 2026? What I'd Do Differently, the Costly Funnel Mistakes I'd Avoid & How I'd Build a Lean Multi Six Figure Coaching Business with a Small Audience Today [Ep99]

And the big thing is not going down the rabbit hole of building out a freebie funnel.

That's like my main number one point, right? Number one point is not focusing on the freebie funnel.

I know, I know that every single coach out there, every guru out there, every online marketer is like, You have to have a free PDF, you know, freebie.

You have a lead magnet and then you get those people to download your lead magnet and then you nurture them and send them like a 500 email email sequence that they're going to eat, you know, eat up and they're going to get all of this free content from you forever.

Right.

And then they're finally going to be at a point, you know, after months and months and months of you pouring into them, they're going to be at the point where they're going to pay you for a teeny tiny offer, right? Then you create your teeny tiny little offer and yay, your little offer.

And then you start creating a really complicated funnel to build this and you build this funnel ecosystem.

And The bottom line is I see new coaches now who are massively overcomplicating their business.

And I feel bad because it's really daunting.

Like you feel like you have to do all of these things, but the fact is you don't.

I have wasted so much time, so much money with lead magnets and funnels that went absolutely nowhere.

For those of you who've been listening to my podcast for a minute and You know that one of my, I had a very successful freebie and by success, I mean, I had like a really low cost per lead and people were just like opting in like hotcakes and more people were coming on my list.

And Amy Porterfield in her email like course, she had like a course on how to build your email list.

I don't know if she still runs that, but yeah.

Well, it was like a DIY course, I think, that she had.

And she was like, I was one of her success stories.

Masha did this and my freebie was so successful.

But behind the scenes, I just want you to know that yeah, it's looked like it was so successful, but the fact is I attracted thousands and thousands and thousands of garbage leads.

So I had like this freebie that was converting in the sense that people were opting in.

I then started running ads.

Like at first I did it all organically.

I then started running ads.

I hustled for that freebie.

I gave everyone and their mother my tip sheet, right? Like It was, you know, a PDF download and it was, everyone loved it.

And I thought, wow, this is so great.