How to Build a Magnetic Business with "Slow Marketing"
An intuitive guide to overcoming digital exhaustion, protecting your energetic hygiene, and navigating the online business shakeout.
The Entrepreneur Mindset Shift: Why the Online Space Feels Exhausting
This question has come up a few times in my inner circles lately. I intentionally surround myself with other thought leaders, healers and intuitive wise women. This may describe you as well. We all seem to be living in the most insane time. Think about it. How weird is it to live in the era of AI, self-driving cars, screens-galore, email, social media, podcasting…the list goes on and on. Yet at the same time many of us are intentionally sinking into ancient rituals and rhythms. I bake sourdough bread weekly and trade a loaf of bread for a dozen eggs from a neighbor who raises chickens. Another recent conversation I had with a family member was about the new trend of people who have realized big pharma is not always the best system for maintaining health, and how oftentimes herbs, rest and movement can accomplish deeper lasting results.
In my own hometown I’m introducing the healing magic of two ancient practices to my community: yoga and reiki. Neither of these have previously existed in this county. In fact, I am quite sure I am the first preventative wellness practitioner (and initiative) we’ve ever had. To my surprise people are flocking to it. Another friend of mine who lives in California and is a thought leader and healer, begins her day by laying in the grass to ground and get in touch with nature. An age old practice that’s been around for centuries.
We are sensitive women, intuitives. We feel energy. We take great care in protecting our energetic hygiene and watching what we consume;both online and off. Yet we feel deep in our bones we are meant to lead, to share our light, to heal, to teach, to give and to serve. All of which come from an ancient place within us ; an inner knowing that’s been gnawing at us for years. We aren’t sure where it came from or why we just know it’s there.
And so we take to blogging, Substacking, podcasting - anyway to share our voice.
We start the business.
We step up and out of the mainstream and begin sharing our heart on the matters.
Here’s the hard part.
Here’s the part I hesitate to even name, yet I must name it because I see it so often.
These brave, brilliant women; who share their soul's work with the world online, are still not making a full time income from their work. They come to me when they feel jaded, exhausted and unsure of how to carry on. They know they will carry on, they just aren’t sure how to best do it for results. They are often weary and maybe even angry deep down. They’ve committed, they’ve healed, they’ve shown up and yet where are the clients they were promised when they signed up for certification at the early age of the coaching boom?
Stick with me if this is relatable. I have many thoughts on the matter.
Protecting your sacred space: The art of pondering and steeping in stillness
Here’s the thing. In order to be a thought leader, you have to think. To ponder. To sit and wonder. This comes from having space to do so. Quiet. Stillness. Moments of receiving information and then steeping in it. Like a good cup of herbal tea, the healing properties and delicious taste come only after what feels like a ridiculously luxurious amount of time of steeping, waiting, pausing.
I think that’s one reason why our kind is so intentional about spending time outside. We walk. We garden. We have pets. I would say a lot of you have timers and apps on your phone that make sure you limit your screen time each day (love that!). We have to be this way so we can fiercely protect what is now sacred - our offline time. The stillness in between calendar blocks. The spaciousness that is truly living and being human.
In a journaling session around intentional marketing with a close friend recently, I scribbled at the top of my page, something profound (that was likely channeled): “I’d rather be slow and present than rushed and fragmented everywhere.”
The energy of doing quick-hit videos, posts that last 24 hours on the virtual shelf and constantly chasing the trends and the Al Gore Rhythm is exhausting for me personally. It’s unfulfilling and shallow when I try to do it.
It’s also the energy of chasing.
You are casting your power outside of yourself and hoping it lands rather than planting your feet firmly in fertile soil and sharing your energy up and out with confidence and consciousness. That’s the difference between being fragmented and being magnetic.
We want you to magnetically attract your clients, not pray and spray with a huge fishing net; hoping for anything.
Because my dear sweet woman, you can’t work with everyone and for your own sake, you truly don’t want to.
You are potent.
You are special.
You are kind, brilliant and magic.
That energy is most definitely not best spent on the masses.
It’s not palatable for everyone.
In fact it’s not palatable for most.
Believe that. Know it in your bones. And for the sake of your own energetic magic, be incredibly selective on who you work with and how.
(I also highly recommend reading Alexandra Roxo’s substack piece here.)
True thought leadership is potent.
It is spoken with high self worth and confidence.
It is original and often polarizing.
But to get there you have to think an original thought.
You have to think.
To think you must pause.
Sit.
Receive.
Steep.
Ponder.
That’s also the fertile ground for creativity, receptiveness, downloads and listening to your intuition.
Taking walks, sitting idly, laying in the ground - these are no longer cute self care recommendations my friend; they are vital requirements for your work. Your work requires strong energy and strong, clear energy requires these protocols.
Think about rest differently.
It’s not weakness, it’s not luxury.
It’s essential.
Mandatory.
Vital.
A non-negotiable part of each and every work day.
Schedule your calendar accordingly if you are wise.
Be the Shift from Digital Noise to Healing Magic
First of all let's talk a bit more about these feelings of guilt or shame that come with the juxtaposition of wanting to share your voice.
You share posts about the importance of getting offline and going for a walk, and in the next post you tell people to join your newsletter and read your substack. It’s natural to feel pulled in two directions and even icky in this situation. Who wouldn’t? At first glance it does seem like we are being hypocritical. But let’s dive deeper.
My Instagram currently consists of nothing but yoga science, reiki benefits and tips to reset your nervous system. I don’t scroll often but when I do, I feel a sense of urgency to go outside, hit the yoga mat or talk more about how and why people should give reiki a try. My feed (for the most part) inspires me. It doesn't suck me in, because it’s very redundant. It actually just feeds my own work. However, sometimes when we share content from someone else that supports the point we ourselves are trying to make, it can add credibility to those watching/listening/reading.
By quickly sharing a few one-sentence reminders about going for a walk, taking deep breaths and mindful moving, my audience might have the same thought. “Oh yeah, I probably should go take a little walk.” This may not look like an immediate laying down of the phone and walking outside, but it does seep into the subconscious and give them a subtle reminder. Then who knows what their next scroll is - an ad to buy ANOTHER reusable water bottle. But at least they had that tiny bit of positivity. That 2 second reminder that they are human and not robots. In a sea of negative news, celebrity drama, overexcited meteorologists and angry politicians, be that one spark of light.
But that’s just sharing other people’s content to your story. Let’s go deeper. Let’s talk about that beautiful newsletter/substack/blog you put out. Maybe it’s a podcast or a long-form talk you do on YouTube monthly (I have a client who does this and it’s pure gold! She shares the astro-energetic forecast each month and it is 200% spot on.) Any of these forms of content creation are what I call Slow Marketing. I’m not going to talk about the marketing side in this post, but I am going to talk about slow.
Think about how people have to consume these things.
Slower.
Slowly.
Slow.
They have to slow down, stop scrolling and pay attention for longer than 30 seconds. It’s good for their brains, actually.
I never just half-hazardly scroll Substack or throw on a Podcast (I’m sure many people do, but that’s beside the point.) The only time I check Substack is on slow mornings when I have a cup of tea, a nice nature scene paired with jazz music on Youtube in the background and usually my kitten is curled up next to me. I take my time when I read Substack. It’s long-form content that is thoughtful, not hurried. You can tell the energy is different. The authors take their time with what they need to say and most of it is human-written, not quick AI sales pitches.
My sweet kitten reading Kindle with me.
The same for podcasts. When do you put on a podcast? When you have some leisure time, right? Long drives, long walks, cleaning the house…not usually when you have five minutes between getting off work and cooking dinner. You listen when you’re more relaxed, more present.
So what if we took away those forms of content? What if your voice didn’t exist in these places? In my mind, that leaves a very sad void.
I only keep up with about three main podcasts and a handful of substacks, and yet those few are nourishing to me. They are like a drink of water for my soul. I visit them when I feel thirsty. They inspire me, perk me up and give me something thoughtful to chew on. It’s a very lovely and unusual thing in a world of slapstick-y TikToks, 10-second videos and oh don’t even get me started on the world news (most of us HSP’s unsubscribe altogether and happily so).
You may feel like you are “just another voice on the internet” but you are a soothing balm to those who need to hear something different. Your magic is needed. Share your truth in slow, intentional present ways - both in the delivery and in how people must receive it.
One more example here. My sweet friend Lauren has a very engaged YouTube community where she shares sewing videos and patterns. She has shared with me that what she does feels meaningful because it in fact encourages people to be offline, using their hands, making things for the real world. I thought that was a great point as well, though I know it doesn’t always apply to all of us. Or does it? If you pull the thread enough it probably does apply to your work too. Because how we are influenced online, affects who we are and how we show up in the world offline.
Hot take: You don't have to use social media to build your business
When discussing this topic with another entrepreneur friend, she began telling me how “over” social media she is. She said she dislikes posting her content on Instagram all the time, but knows she has to (at least that’s what she currently believes.) She asked me what my thoughts were as a business coach, to which I thoughtfully replied,
Well, you don’t have to market your business on social media.
Most often when I share this perspective with clients they quickly dismiss it as if I’m speaking gibberish nonsense like an old wizard naming a riddle. It’s as if the modern brain can’t even take this idea seriously because it feels so ridiculous at first.
Yet I can say with 100% certainty that most every single client I’ve had (over 150 since 2018) have found their success outside of Instagram. (I’m going to use Instagram here instead of “social media” because I have found that when people say “social media” they are in fact talking about “Instagram” for the most part these days. I discuss this more in my journal, Social Media Energetics.)
There seems to be a disillusionment in the Collective conscience that Instagram is vital for growing an online business. However I would very much caution against this.
📝My best advice is to stop and ask yourself a couple of questions first:
How many clients have you booked fully and completely as a result of them finding and following you on Instagram?
Do you enjoy creating content for Instagram? Does it feel deeply fulfilling for you?
How are people finding you now?
If you do indeed enjoy Instagram and find great fulfilling results from it, please continue to do so! I would never instruct someone to stop doing what’s aligned and working for them. In fact I can point you to a good friend of mine who is a fantastic expert on the matter. We speak often and I love hearing her point of view, though it is very different from mine.
What I tend to see in clients is that they don’t book clients and customers from Instagram, even after years of consistently posting high quality content. They loathe creating content for it and feel discouraged and dissatisfied with how quickly their posts become chum food for the algorithm before disappearing to the bottom of the ocean forever. They usually tell me most people find them elsewhere and YET they still feel some kind of need to be on Instagram.
It’s truly a collective insanity if you ask me.
I don’t get it.
I myself was lost in this madness for many years. (Again, see the journal I wrote as a result.)
But the truth is, there are A MILLION other ways to market your business - whether you’re an online-based business or a brick and mortar, location-based business. Don’t limit yourself to one way of being. One way of marketing.
Marketing your work should feel fulfilling, joyful and rewarding. My marketing efforts feel synonymous with service and my calling to help others in the specific way that I do. It feels just as good to share content as it does to work with a client.
You deserve that too.
Slow marketing is advocating for slow living.
Surviving the Great Shakeout:
An Intuitive Leader's Guide to the Shifting Waves of Industry
We are ahead of the mass curve; intuiting the next move; don't doubt it, trust it. It's coming. We are preparing the boat before the flood when most can't see any signs of rain in the foreseeable future.
If you are in the coaching industry, you are a pioneer. If you are in the online coaching industry, you are even more so a pioneer.
Life Coaching was loosely founded in the 1980s, with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) founded a decade later, in 1995. Still, life coaching didn’t gain popularity until the 2000’s when Oprah had a life coach on her show. This led to corporations adopting life coaching into their leadership and team culture. But get this - what really gave life coaching it’s modern popularity and launched it into mainstream culture was non other than Covid in 2019-2023. During that time the number of coaches grew by 54%, according to ICF.
A better marker of that time period changing the online industry can be shown by Zoom’s growth. Personally, I used Zoom in 2017 and 2018 when I started by coaching career. No one new the platform, it was high-tech and new to everyone I introduced it to. Amazingly, two years later it was as common of a household name as “Kleenex” our grandmother’s were on Zoom already! According to Tech HQ, “during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom experienced an unprecedented period of hypergrowth, expanding by 2,900% in daily meeting participants and quadrupling its annual revenue within a single year.” That’s insane growth, and it speaks directly to what we saw happening in the coaching industry.
Between the two metrics shared above you can see that this “coaching boom” is still very new - with many coaches being launched into the industry between 2019 and 2023. The post-pandemic coaching boom is still incredibly fresh, making this a wild, early frontier for our industry. We are still in the middle of a massive macroeconomic transition. In the last five years we’ve swung drastically from one extreme to the other - moving every single life experience possible to an online platform, and then getting sick of it and swinging the pendulum back hard in the other direction, working more toward offline-based work.
I’ve seen it with my own clients. A few years back we were focusing every business model around online-only marketing. Now I’d say it seems like we’re doing more IRL marketing with a side dish of online to support it. We’re still uncovering this new hybrid-mix of IRL+Zoom business modeling that again, is very new.
So all in all the online coaching industry is still very new. In reality it started around 2010 or so, when social media and blogging entered the game - it all swirls together. In fact, I started my first blog at that time and later received my life coaching certification as a way to monetize my blog. Check out this timeline I created below.
Think about it. Blog monetization - the precursors to what we do now with websites and online service sales - didn’t even exist until around 2010! Our entire industry is less than 20 years old! That is an insanely new industry. In fact, if you wait for the coaching boom (2019-2023), you could say the mainstream form of the coaching industry is actually less than a decade old! That’s infant-status for a career-based industry! Did you realize you were a pioneer? That’s amazing.
I had a long conversation with Google’s new AI integration (I’m over here studying how that affects your business visibility too, but that’s a different article for another day). I asked Google to draw universal parallels among any industry that is still in its pioneering stages. Here’s what it came up with:
Universal Trends in "Industry Pioneering"
When we study the birth of railroads, automobiles, the early internet, or online coaching, every single pioneering industry follows the exact same 4-step macroeconomic lifecycle:
Step 1: The Gold Rush (Years 1–10)
A new technology or cultural shift opens up an unmapped frontier. Regulations are non-existent, margins are incredibly high, and early adopters make massive amounts of money simply by being first. Amateurs and visionaries run side-by-side.
Step 2: The Bubble & Backlash (Years 10–15)
The public catches on. The market becomes heavily oversaturated with low-quality copycats, bad actors, and get-rich-quick opportunists. The general public grows deeply skeptical, the media runs expose stories, and customers demand consumer protection.
Step 3: The Great Shakeout (Years 15–20)
This is the stage the online coaching industry is navigating right now. The market tightens. Smarter, more cynical consumers refuse to buy from unproven players. The "tourists" who entered the industry just to make a quick buck realize it’s no longer easy, and they wash out.
Step 4: Institutional Maturity (Years 20+)
The industry stabilizes into a respected economic pillar. Universal standards, credentials, and transparent pricing become mandatory. The wild margins of the Gold Rush disappear, replaced by predictable, sustainable, long-term B2B and B2C revenue.
The Ultimate Takeaway for You
Every major industry undergoes a "cleansing fire" around its 15-to-20-year mark. The shakeout does not kill the vehicle; it just removes the bad drivers.
Maybe you’re reading this and you’re like, “Okay, Haley, but I’m not a coach, I just sell my (insert services or products here) online.” The same applies to you. The online commerce industry is virtually parallel to this. It’s all the same timeline. It’s brand new as far as industry’s go and we are all figuring it out together. Give yourself grace and patience as we navigate the shifting waves of change
Alignment and Macro-Timing: Success Strategies for Feminine Pioneers
I have one more thought on all of this. I just finished reading Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. In his book, Gladwell studies what makes people successful in all different areas of success - farming, hockey, founding the internet, etc. The results are very surprising. Perhaps my biggest takeaway is how timing affects everything. I’m not talking about the time of day you push “post” on social media. I’m talking about macro-timing on a worldwide scale, which can also be akin to energetics and divine timing, depending on what you’re into.
Gladwell makes the case that if Bill Gates would have been born slightly earlier or slightly later he would have completely missed the exact period of time that the internet would take off and he wouldn’t have been in the exact position he was in that allowed him to heavily contribute to the shaping and sharing of it.
He also shares how important opportunity and community is. How we are raised, when we are born and the “10,000 hour rule” all come into play when it comes to achieving success. It’s not completely random, like we think, but it’s also not an individual’s hard work alone that makes it happen. That’s an Americanized fallacy.
What I’m trying to say is this. We are feminine pioneers on the early waves of a new era. Whether it’s online business, coaching, returning to the divine feminine as our primary way of being in the workplace, healing with natural remedies or something else – all of these things are newly emerging and re-emerging in a brand new era of AI and Aquarius. We have to rise up together, letting Spirit guide us and use us at “exactly the right time as this.”
✨ A Soulful Invitation...
If your bones are nodding along to this, and you are ready to step out of the frantic social media chase and into sustainable, magnetic success, I’m opening up something special. I’m gathering a small, sacred circle of pioneers for the Beta (and half-priced!) round of The Sparkling Business Academy. [Click here to join the waitlist and claim your space.]
