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How I Made Over $500K as a Nurse Coach With an Online Audience of Less Than 5,000 People

Episode 211 • 9th April 2025 • NursePreneur Academy • Liam Caswell

e six-figure nurse preneur in: 2021

Everything changed for me in my career. I left my senior nursing role to build an online nurse-led personal brand, one that gives me the freedom to work from anywhere, leverage the skills the hospital paid me to learn and create. Both the income and impact. I always knew I was capable of. Now it's your turn.

I'm here to show you the possibilities beyond bedside and help you transition into a nurse-led business that fits your needs and life. Whether you dream of working from home, earning what you're truly worth, or making an impact on your own terms, I'm gonna guide you every step of the way together. My friends will make traditional nursing as you know it, optional.

Now, let's get down to it and let's build your profitable business.

Let's talk about how I made over $500,000 as an entrepreneur with an online audience of less than 5,000 people. Most people think that you need a massive audience to build a profitable online business. And that my friend is bs. I have built a multiple six figure nurse led business, leveraging my skills, expertise in a highly engaged audience of less than 5,000 people with no viral videos, no massive following, just strategic posting.

High value offers the right systems and processes, and here's how I did it, and I wanna show you how you can do it too. The first thing that I focused on was building authority, not just an audience where most people are chasing followers, which I tried to do at the start and failed miserably at. I really honed in and focused on building trust instead, I hyper.

Fixated on a subsection of my niche, which was graduate nurses at the time, and I positioned myself as the go-to expert. I created content that no one else was creating, and I built trust. Instead, I became that go-to expert within the graduate nursing space.

So much so that everybody would be tagging me and they'd be sending people to my page, and I'd get lots of referrals because I became the go-to. Nurse coach for graduate nurses, I made sure that I created value driven content. I literally gave everything away that I knew for free. Through my content. If you go back through all my posts, everything is there for free.

People could have gone through all of that, and many people did, and they used everything. I taught them on the podcast and on my Instagram page, and they applied and they had great success, but other people needed my help and support and their accountability, and that's where they became clients. I engaged deeply and I still do to this day.

Whilst I have automations and I have many chat and things like that running in my business, I responded to every single comment in dm. So many of us, when we start out our business, we are wearing so many different hats and you're building a, business whilst you're working in a nursing role and it can be really hard.

She think, oh my goodness, there's just one more thing to do. But through the conversations, the dms, the comments, then the voice notes back and forth with amazing humans that have now come to be like close friends in the online space. For me, I was able to build real relationships, many of whom never bought anything from me, but.

Because I connected with them and because we vibed, they would tell other people about my offerings and that snowball compounding effect came to play. So when you remember that, it's not about having thousands of followers. Having a couple of hundred of engaged people who trust you are so much more valuable than 50,000 passive followers who would never buy from you.

And this is where so many people get caught up in comparison around the difference between influencers and expertise based educators, coaches, consultant, service-based, business owners. We are not influencers. Influencers are paid directly from brands because they have a large audience. But I tell you right now.

If any of the influencers that you follow try to monetize and create something of value, they might have some traction, but their audience has not come for that. They did not come to be sold to. Even though they're covertly being sold to through brand deals, they're not there to buy from the influencer.

They're there to be influenced. So there is a difference. So you can look at somebody that has 50,000, a hundred thousand, 500,000 followers, but. If they're not monetizing it, I personally think why and they will be monetizing it through brand deals, but that also has a timestamp on it, okay? And the there comes to a point where that no longer might be viable.

So I just don't like that model. For me personally, I love it for some people, not for me. The second thing that I did was I created a high ticket, irresistible, sexy offer that solved a painful problem for my niche audience I created multiple offers, and here's the reality. Your offer will vary over time.

You'll start with one thing and it will change and it will evolve, and that's a beautiful thing. But what too many people do, and a mistake I see all the time, and I did this as well, is you create one signature high value offer that should be your go-to thing. But then you start getting people sing, but I can't.

I don't wanna pay for the offer. Can I just have this part of it? So then you go, sure. Maybe everybody else wants that. You pull it out and you make it a low ticket offer, and then three people buy it. And so I made the mistake of trying to sell low cost, high volume products alongside my high value product, and that was something that I'll talk about another day.

But I really lent in and stopped selling that low ticket offer when I realized the value of clarity and streamlining my business so that I can have more time, location, freedom, and financial freedom. So I created an offer that was validated by my niche. They took, they co-created it with me. I got on lots of calls with people to identify what it is that.

They specifically wanted, I listen to their words, I use my nursing skills to create an offer with real people. Before I launched it, I focused on transformation, taking them from A to B, from pain to pleasure, and I made sure that my process was streamlined, clear cut, and that it was not arduous. I sold it as a sexy, irresistible offer because that's.

In reality what it was, I didn't just sell them on information and told them what it included. I helped them see that they could achieve the results they were looking for through the service that I had created and my pricing reflected the depth of the impact and the value that I provided.

You don't need thousands of people and thousands of sales like you would with a low cost, high volume product. When you have the right offer at the right price, and you create an offer that just makes so much sense for your ideal client, it gets to a point where it's so good they can't say no, and that's a beautiful place to me.

The third thing that I did was I leveraged organic marketing and personal branding. I did dabble in ads for a little while and I spent probably about $10,000 on ads and I got a pretty good return. I think I signed five or six people and at the time my coach was like, this is great, but I actually hated running ads, so I, there was so much work in it and I would much rather sit and create content, and be real and authentic.

Then create ads that just. To me, just felt a little bit yuck and gross, and maybe I'll change my perspective on that as I build my business. But at this point in time, I didn't love ads, so I built. What I believe to be a magnetic personal brand. There's very few people in the Australian market that are doing what I do, and that's a testament to the work that I put in and the personal branding work that I've done.

The deep personal work that I've done to be able to show up and be authentic. Attracted great clients organically. The algorithm knew who to send my way and who to put my content in front of, so it allowed me to become an expert at content marketing and to share my expertise and provide value ahead of time for people free.

That's how you build a business. You give so much value away for free that people are like, what the hell? What is happening? And then they become your clients 'cause they want all of the other things. I leveraged storytelling and I really started to flex that muscle and learn how to speak authentically, vulnerably, and give myself permission and safety to share the ups and downs of my journey.

Which attracted and brought in people that I wanted to work with. And then I really focused in building community, so focused on conversations, not just conversions. When I first started my business, I tried out some real questionable tactics with a business coach that I paid lots of money to learn from, and that was all about conversions.

But the minute that I stopped trying to convert people and stopped trying to sell all the time and just focus on conversations. I then had a warm pipeline of people who were ready to dive in and they were in my world and they were just deciding out the finances or insert here, but they were joining or they were thinking about joining, and it just made running my business so much easier.

The fourth thing that I did was I started to learn how to sell without being salesy. And so many of us have drama about selling and I totally get that as nurses, we think I could never sell something. Like when I think of sales, I think of sleazy car salesman, overweight, sweat, running down his forehead, smells a little bit. I know it's terrible, but that's what I think when I think sales, and I'm sure you have your own version of that. And to be honest, all of us have some type of sales trauma where we've been sold something and it just was the worst experience ever. And I never want people to feel that way.

So I shifted my mindset. I did a lot of deep work on my mindset around selling, and I started to see that selling was just serving and that instead of chasing clients, I could create systems. In my business that nurtured people towards a decision that helped them come out of a state of dysregulation and pain and helped them come into a state of safety, tap into the prefrontal cortex, the decision maker, and come through a sequence that are created ahead of time, that offered value, that shared stories, that talked about, mindset shifts, mistakes, myths, polarizing opinions, and then gave them an invitation to work with me.

And so this helped me pre-qualify people that were. Ready to rock and roll and join my offers. I used a trauma-informed sales process that I've now created within the nurse per academy, and that helped me personalize the approach and the process whilst making sure that I didn't add to people's sales trauma and made sure that I was helping them make informed decisions that felt right.

It wasn't from a place of scarcity, it was from a place of centeredness and grandness so that they could know that their investment was the right decision that they will need or needed to make. And then of course I learned how to handle objections. And it's funny how we talk about objections.

Objections are just coaching questions. When people say, I'm not sure that this is for me, it's just an opportunity for us to lean in a little bit more. But so many of

we lean back and we take it as like an insult to our ego, or we get worried about it. And the reality is, if you're a coach or creator or a business owner.

You are first and foremost to coach. And when you have an objection come your way, it's your client saying, I'm interested, but I'm just not really sure. This is not clear. Help me clarify. So that allowed me to leverage my nursing skills, my active listening, my non-verbal communication skills and techniques to be able to calmly and coolly empathetically coach people to the right decision, not the right decision for me, the right decision for them.

So that allowed me to focus on the transformation, not just transactional sales conversations. So what that allowed me to do was to sign high value clients that I love serving. I will do anything for them. And it also allowed me to deliver a high impact service where I have high profits within my business.

We're talking like 50, 60% profits in my business. And then the final thing is that I built systems that allowed me to scale my income without scaling my workloads. The biggest game changer, or the thing that most people are sleeping on when I get a little sneak peek into their business as an entrepreneur is they're not using automation and they're not leveraging technology and ai.

And I get it. As nurses, we never use technology in the system. We struggle to do those frigging workplace audits, and I totally get it. But the reality is automation, AI systems and processes where you can leverage so much time back in your business and it's worth investing the time ahead of time so that you can then have the freedom that you crave.

So I streamlined all aspects of my business. I created systems around content creation, podcasting. I streamlined my onboarding from my clients. So now when somebody joins, it just all fires off and I don't have to do a thing. They get their invoice, they get an email sequence, they get invited to our community.

It all just happens and it's beautiful. I remember a day when that was not the case, and honestly, my business was pretty tough to run. But times have changed and technology is incredible. I use email marketing. Content repurposing and automation tools to work smarter in my business, not harder. So when people say to me, Liam, how do you do it?

How do I build a part-time nursing role? Like how do I work in the system and build a business? It's because from day one, we leverage technology and I actually have quite a few entrepreneurs that are tech phobic, and it's been really awesome to see how amazing they've done because they're learning.

And they're growing and they're starting to bust their own beliefs about their ability to succeed with technology, and they're starting to do really cool things, and they're starting to see the benefit of that in their businesses. So when you leverage technology and build systems that can scale, that means that you can generate income and revenue when you're not working.

That is the ultimate nurse flex, is that your business is working for you behind the scenes whilst you're out at dinner, you're watching the Netflix with your partner, you're with your family. You're not working Christmas day, you're having Christmas dinner, and your systems, people are still signing up for them.

People are going through your world. Your business is always working for you when you leverage the power of technology, which means that your ability to earn six figures, multiple six figures, maybe even seven figures, is totally achievable, but only if you leverage automation and technology. So the bottom line is that you don't need a huge audience.

You need a strategy, my friends. So if you're waiting until you have 10,000 followers to start making money, you're making a huge mistake. You can and you must, and you should start today. You should have started yesterday. So here's what I want you to focus on.

As a recap. Position yourself as an authority in your niche. Solve a high stakes problem with a premium irresistible offer that people can't say no to. You wanna build an engaged community of people that trust you and love you and just show you with love all the time, but send you beautiful messages and they feel like they are just your buddies, your peers.

You're gonna master organic social media marketing and high converting sales processes in a trauma-informed way that makes selling easy and simple. We move from selling to serving, which equals clients, and then we set up systems and automations in your business to create predictable revenue streams and income.

So there's no fight or flight within your business. It's all just happening like clockwork whilst you go out, live your life, go to the beach, read your book, go to the coffee shop, you name it, you can do it. What's your businesses working behind the scenes?

So if you are a nurse preneur that is looking to turn your skills into a thriving online business or a service-based business, this is exactly how you do it without a huge audience. If I've been able to do it with an audience of less than 5,000 people, I made my first $100,000 in business with much less than 5,000 followers.

You can too.

A pay rise bedside nursing could never provide freedom from hospital politics and the flexibility to work on your own terms without the shift work. You my friend, are one step closer to creating your bedside escape plan. I want to hear your insights, takeaways, and questions. Connect with me over on Instagram at Nurse Preneur Academy or email me at hello@liamcastle.com.

If you're the type of nurse that's ready to explore your options for building a Northside business. Leave us a review, screenshot it, and send it to my email or my Instagram, and I'll send you my bedside to business roadmap, my step-by-step process to building a six figure nurse-led business as a thank you.

Until next week, keep dreaming big, take in bold action and betting on yourself because this is the year you make nursing optional.

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211. How I Made Over $500K as a Nurse Coach With an Online Audience of Less Than 5,000 People