The Growth Show with Whitney Bateson

Most of what we post online is old news within a day or two, and then it's back to the hamster wheel. So Whitney brought Nadalie Bardo back to the podcast to talk about a platform that runs on a completely different timeline. Nadalie got 1 million views on Pinterest in her first month as a blogger, organically grew her email list to 24K subscribers, and has spent eight years teaching more than 10,000 blogs, brands, and businesses how to use Pinterest. In this conversation she explains why Pinterest is a search engine and not social media, why pins can keep sending people to your site long after you publish, and what to set up before you start so those clicks actually go somewhere. She also gets into content ideas for health and wellness practitioners, the easiest way to fit Pinterest into a workflow you already have, and why AI-generated pins are a bad bet. It's a great setup for the free Pinterest masterclass Whitney and Nadalie are hosting on October 20th.

Takeaways:

• Pinterest is a search engine, not social media. Nadalie points out that you don't need to comment, follow people, or be "social" there, and pins carry a link that sends people straight to your site, with no "link in bio" or comment-to-get-it workarounds.
• Pins have a much longer shelf life. In Nadalie's experience, a pin doesn't peak until around two years after it's published, compared with the day or two an Instagram post gets. She saw this in her own business when she stopped publishing for over two years: her YouTube declined, but her Pinterest held for two years before it started to dip.
• Know where you're sending people before you start. Nadalie suggests making a quick list of what you can share (blog posts, lead magnets, a free consultation, testimonials) and checking that every link leads to a next step, like an opt-in or a booking link. As she says, clicks for the sake of clicks don't mean much.
• Repurpose what you already make. For health and wellness pros, Nadalie suggests turning newsletters into blog posts, pinning podcast episodes and YouTube videos, and repurposing short exercise videos or nutrition tips. Batch design pins in Canva with templates (1,000 x 1,500 pixels) and schedule them out.
• Skip the AI-generated pins. Nadalie notes that Pinterest is pushing back on AI-generated content, and both she and Whitney point out that real, original content is what will hold up in Pinterest, Google, and AI search over time.

Connect with Nadalie:

Website: https://yourpincoach.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourpincoach

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/yourpincoach

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@yourpincoach

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@YourPinCoach

Resources mentioned:

• Free Pinterest Masterclass with Nadalie and Whitney, Tuesday, October 20th at 1 pm ET, with a workbook and live Q&A: yourpincoach.com/pinperfect/whitney

Connect with Whitney:

Follow Whitney on Instagram @whitneybateson

Email: [email protected]

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This week we're bringing back episode five, one of the most downloaded episodes of the show, originally recorded in April 2024. Whitney walks through the software she uses to save time and make money: her scheduler, CRM, accounting and forecasting tools, Zapier, cart system, project management, Canva, and time tracking. Along the way, she shares how she decides whether a tool is worth paying for, including a simple frequency test and the eliminate, automate, delegate order for any task you're ready to stop doing. Then she comes back with a new intro and outro covering what's changed in two years. That includes the software she once said she didn't need and now pays for, and the tools that have joined the stack since, like Claude, LastPass, and Google Workspace.

• Use the frequency test before you subscribe. Whitney's rule: if she won't use a tool more than three times a year, there's no point paying for it. Look for something you already own that can do the job, or pay month to month and pause it between uses.
• Eliminate, then automate, then delegate. When a task is eating your time, first ask whether it needs to exist at all. If it does, see if software can handle it. Only then hand it to a person.
• Don't skimp on a scheduler. A booking link for discovery calls is part of your sales process. It lets people move forward with you when they're ready, without the back-and-forth.
• Get clear on your numbers before buying fancy tools. Whitney forecast in Google Sheets for years before investing in a forecasting platform. Start simple so you're learning your numbers, not learning software.
• Track your time to check your pricing. Time tracking shows whether your prices cover the hours a service really takes, overhead included. If they don't, go back to eliminate, automate, or delegate.

• Scheduling: Acuity, Calendly
• CRM and practice management: Dubsado, Practice Better
• Money: QuickBooks Online, Fathom, Google Sheets
• Automation: Zapier
• Selling digital products: ThriveCart, Payhip, Gumroad, WooCommerce
• Funnels: Deadline Funnel, Divi
• Project management: Wrike
• Design: Canva Pro
• Time tracking: Clockify
• AI: Claude, ChatGPT
• Course and membership platforms: Kajabi, Thinkific, Teachable, Circle, Practice Better
• Team tools: LastPass, Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, Airtable

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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.

• 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.

• 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

priscillazaehringer.com

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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.

• 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.

• 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

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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.

• 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.

• 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

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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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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

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Whitney has a confession: for years, her entire Kit routine has been logging in, glancing at her subscriber count, and closing the tab. The data was always there — who opens what, who clicks, where people came from — but getting at it meant exporting reports and crunching numbers, and it never made it to the top of the list. This episode is about what changed. Kit now has an MCP connector, which lets you plug your account into Claude or another AI tool and simply ask questions about your own list. Whitney covers what MCP actually means, how to set the connection up, the prompts Kit suggests, the two use cases earning their keep in her business right now, and the one feature she tried that wasn't ready for her workflow.

• MCP is a common language between your software and your AI tool. It stands for Model Context Protocol, and it lets a platform like Kit hand your AI tool a reliable set of instructions for reading subscribers, reading emails, and pulling activity data. Whitney compares it loosely to Zapier connecting two tools, with the difference that an MCP isn't a paid layer.
• Good analysis depends entirely on good data going in. Whitney's caveat throughout: if your tagging and attribution are sloppy, the AI has nothing meaningful to work with. Her example is giving a talk at a conference — build a separate landing page, automation, and tag for that specific event, even if you offer the same resource elsewhere, so you can actually trace who came from it and whether any of them became clients.
• The strongest use case is analysis, not drafting. Whitney tried Kit's suggested workflow for importing an external draft into a broadcast and it came in as code she couldn't edit in the native block builder. She still makes small tweaks to every email inside Kit, so that broke her workflow.
• Whitney's first real use case: profiling subscribers coming in from ads. She has Claude look at what new subscribers are clicking and opening, pushes that into Airtable, and uses it to identify specific people worth reaching out to directly. That kind of data crunching used to take repeated manual passes.
• Her second: using past emails as source material for new content. She had Claude pull the emails from an existing sequence on a topic and reference them while writing new marketing content, so the new work carries her actual philosophy, themes, and voice rather than starting from scratch. You can also surface which subject lines performed best and repurpose emails that landed months ago.

• Kit (formerly ConvertKit) — the MCP connector lives in the left sidebar under Automation, on a paid plan
• Claude — the AI tool Whitney uses for these connections
• EmailOctopus — a simpler, lower-cost starter email platform a colleague introduced her to
• Airtable — where she pushes subscriber activity data for further analysis
• Zapier — referenced as a loose analogy for connecting two tools

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If you've ever written a genuinely helpful email and then cringed while tacking your offer onto the bottom, this one is for you. Whitney picks up a thread from her conversation with Orly Wachter about why selling feels so uncomfortable in the health and helping professions, and takes it somewhere practical. She walks through a two-step framework for writing emails that sell without the ick: first generating nine content angles directly from one of your services, then matching one of those angles to a simple email format. She also gets into why the bridge into your call to action so often feels like whiplash, how the benefits-versus-features distinction trips people up, and how often you actually need to be inviting people to work with you. She closes with a challenge to write one of these emails and send it this week, even if you haven't emailed your list in months.

• Start with the service, not the topic. Whitney's framework works backward from one specific offer, so every email idea you generate already has a straight line to the thing you're selling. That's what keeps the call to action from feeling shoehorned in.
• Run three buckets, three ideas each. The outcomes people get from the service, the things clients love about how it's delivered, and the reasons people hesitate to move forward. That's nine angles from a single offer, and you can refill the well anytime you run dry.
• Keep benefits and features separate, and lead with benefits. Whitney notes that most practitioners find features far easier to talk about than the transformation, which is exactly why the first bucket takes the most deliberate effort.
• Match your angle to one of five email formats. A myth or misconception, a news or research tie-in, a case study, a tip or how-to, or a story about how you learned something. Then keep it to a few skimmable paragraphs carrying one core idea.
• Talk about your services every few emails, not every email. Whitney calls this the non-negotiable. The call to action can rotate between booking a call, a sales page, a resource, or a simple reply, but the invitation has to be there regularly.

Ep. 132 — What You're Getting Wrong About Selling with Orly Wachter MSc, RD - https://whitneybateson.com/ep-132-what-youre-getting-wrong-about-selling-with-orly-wachter-msc-rd/

The challenge: write one of these emails, send it, and forward it to [email protected]

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Everyone is being told to put AI in their practice, and almost nobody is talking about where it helps versus where it makes things worse. So Whitney brought on Meredith Eaton and Jennifer Crawford, co-CEOs of Move Forward Virtual Assistants, who bought the company in 2022 and grew it from fewer than 40 clients to over 100. They have been inside the day-to-day operations of mental health practices since 2018, so this is not speculation. It's what they have watched land in real practices. This conversation is from their perspective in mental health, but it applies just as much to dietitians, functional medicine practitioners, and nurses. They cover a decision rule for when to use a tool versus a person, the admin work AI is genuinely good at, the moment where handing a call to a bot costs you a client and costs someone their one attempt at getting help, and why competing with the AI therapy apps on price and speed is the wrong move entirely.

• Change the question. Jennifer's reframe is that instead of asking "Can AI do this?" we should be asking "Should AI be doing this?" Those get very different answers.
• Use a decision rule you can apply on the fly. Jennifer's version: if the value comes from efficiency, technology is the right tool. If the value comes from your humanity, expertise, judgment, or the relationship, a person leads.
• Start with the low-risk wins. Meredith points to meeting notes, call summaries with a human spot-checking them, spreadsheet formulas, and first drafts. Build the editing step into the system so AI's voice doesn't slowly become yours.
• Keep a healthy skepticism about client data. Jennifer's open question about AI notetakers is where that information actually goes, and whether protected health information is secure. She isn't claiming to have the answer. She's saying the question deserves asking before you adopt.
• Stop competing with AI platforms on price and availability. Meredith's advice is to go the other direction and be loud about the human part, because connection is the product and venture capital can't buy it.

• Website: https://moveforwardvirtualassistants.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moveforwardvas
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoveForwardVAs
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@moveforwardvas
• LinkedIn (Jennifer): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenrunsbusiness/
• LinkedIn (Meredith): https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-eaton/
• LinkedIn (company): https://www.linkedin.com/company/move-forward-virtual-assistants/

TheraBrain waitlist: https://moveforwardvirtualassistants.com/thera-brain

Follow Whitney on Instagram @whitneybateson

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