Running a service-based business for parents during pregnancy and postnatally involves a mix of activities—some directly contributing to revenue and others that, while essential, can eat up valuable time without a direct financial return. Understanding which tasks generate income and how to maximise their impact, as well as streamlining non-revenue-generating activities, can be a game changer for your business.

Here’s a breakdown of common activities, how they contribute to your business, and a few tips on how to enhance their effectiveness or efficiency, saving you time and moving your business forward, always.

Revenue-Generating Activities

Making Social Media Videos (Reels and TikTok)

Purpose: Attract potential clients by showcasing your expertise and personality, which can lead to bookings.

Boosting Impact: Repurpose content—Use the same video across multiple platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Record snippets of your general day to day at home or in your work and use these with ‘unrelated’ info via text or voiceover. Use trending sounds or hashtags to increase visibility when you post it. Batch create content—Set aside time once a week to film several short videos. Create one longer video and then use clips from it. Create videos from stock clips or gifs in order to reduce your time filming and enable you to create content when the kids are noisy or in a quiet corner at your day job!

Guesting on Podcasts

**Podcast purpose:**

Reach new audiences similar to your own, build authority in the field, and attract potential clients.
**Boosting Impact**: **Leverage appearances**—Promote your guest spot across your own social media and email lists. You might think that posting about it on stories or your grid is enough, it isn’t!

Most people won’t see it and therefore won’t listen. Increase the chance of your own audience seeing it, listening to it and sharing it by sending an email announcing it, posting a blog to shout about it and regularly bringing it up again on your social media and in conversations (when relevant, please!) Offer a special deal or freebie to listeners of the episode to encourage them to connect with you. Build relationships with podcast hosts for potential future collaborations or recommendations to others looking for guest. At the end of your recording, mics off, ask the host if they can think of anyone else who would be interested in your expertise for their podcast, if so, can they recommend you? Don’t ask, don’t get babes!

Going Live on Social Media

Purpose: Directly interact with your audience, answer questions, and promote services.

Boosting Impact: Plan your content ahead—Know what you’re going to talk about and have a call to action prepared. Promote your live session in advance to get more viewers. Ask someone else to join you, perhaps another business owner who has a similar audience or a friend or client that has a story that helps share what you do. It can be easier to go live, if it isn’t your usual thing, when you have someone to bounce off! Engage actively—Respond to comments and questions during the live session to build rapport. You can put a question box in your stories and then access that from your live to give you ideas of what to cover, also come prepared with some questions to answer if nobody were to ask any. Otherwise, awks.

Sending Emails to a List

**Purpose:**

Promote services, offer discounts, or share valuable content to keep your audience engaged and drive bookings. Stay in people’s minds, even if they’re out of the stage you cater to, that way they might recommend you to a friend looking for what you offer.

Boosting Impact: Segment your email list—Send targeted messages to different groups (e.g., expecting parents vs. parents of newborns) to increase how relevant and interesting each email is to those who receive it. Automate sequences—Set up email funnels that nurture leads over time without additional effort. It’s an investment in time to start with, sure. But my goodness does it pay off in future as your business grows and when you want to take holidays etc and still stay consistent.

Designing a Leaflet

Purpose: Provide a tangible marketing piece that can be distributed locally and online to attract new clients. Something to be updated in future but kind of one and done task. Creating the leaflet itself won’t make you any money, so bear that in mind when deciding if that’s a worthy task for the time. However, once it’s created you have something you can give out again and again.

Boosting Impact: Include a clear call-to-action and a special offer to encourage immediate response. Distribute strategically—Partner with local businesses that serve your target market to display your leaflet. Where do the preggos go and hang out? Any services that align with yours where you can scratch each others backs? Most people will happily give out your leaflet to their clients when you agree to do the same in return. Keep the dates and specific info off the leaflet itself to enable it to be used widely without changes- you could add a link or QR code to a page on your website that has the info on which can be updated regularly, work smart not hard!

Posting on Social Media

Purpose: Regular updates and engaging posts keep your services in front of potential clients and maintain a relationship with existing clients. Bear in mind that there are no guarantees of getting sales of in person classes and support when you post to social media and so keep your posts time efficient to make and remember that posting regularly doesn’t mean constantly! You should post at a frequency thats sustainable (and enjoyable!) for you.

Boosting Impact: Use a content calendar to plan posts ahead. Analyze engagement data to refine your strategy—focus on posting when your audience is most active and sharing the types of content that resonate most. It’s all very well spending hours writing informative posts when people really love your quick snappy reels or pics of your clients cute babies!

Chatting to Other Business Owners with a Similar Audience

Purpose: Establish potential partnerships or referrals that can bring in more clients. Maybe it’s someone to team up with for a Hypnobirthing and Yoga retreat, or maybe a pregnancy supper club? Maybe its for podcast guesting, blogging opportunities, people to shout about you, people to give out leaflets etc. Collaboration is much better than competition!

Boosting Impact: Formalise partnerships—Consider co-hosting events or creating joint offers to boost the value and variety as well as share the load when it comes to organising and promoting. Follow up regularly to maintain and nurture the relationship, arrange to meet up, go live with each other on social media, post in each others client groups, send emails about each others things to your email lists. Attending meet ups and events for people in similar industries that are aligned with you will keep collaboration opportunities fresh.

Non-Revenue-Generating Activities

Creating the Graphics and Setting Up the Admin for a Lead Magnet

Purpose: Necessary for building your email list, MASSIVELY recommended even, but not directly income-generating until it converts. Getting this task done will enable you to promote the freebie and therefore collect people’s very valuable data so get it done sooner than later and don’t overthink it but don’t assume once it’s up and running that it’s going to get people to find you on it’s own. You’ll have to shout about it a lot!

Increasing Productivity: Use templates for graphics and landing pages to save time. Outsource tasks like design or tech setup if it’s not your strength, our very own Becci is a whizz with this sort of stuff and can be booked for one off set up of this sort of shit. Automate as much of the process as possible, from delivery of the lead magnet to follow-up emails. If you don’t have an email marketing platform yet, you’re missing the opportunity to grow your business in a big way! Get one, get some automations in place and watch people think you’re ‘on it’ when you’ve got your feet up!

Writing a Blog

**Purpose of a blog:**

Useful for SEO and providing valuable information, but often slow to produce direct revenue. People may well find you via google when looking for that specific topic or perhaps they’ll be drawn to your website from promoting the blog on your social media. But unless you’re promoting something from that or your content is MIND BLOWING, it’s unlikely to get you sold out classes in your local area or a diary full of doula clients is it?

Increasing Productivity: Batch write blog posts to save time. Consider repurposing content from webinars or live sessions into blog posts, nowadays there are so many ways to access the transcipts of things and then reuse them, don’t miss that trick. Optimise for SEO from the start to maximise long-term traffic. Do this by considering what it is that people who are looking for your service might google, and include those terms in your content where it makes sense. For example, a hypnobirthing teacher in Glasgow may want to focus on ‘hypnobirthing class Glasgow’ and include those things as much as possible.

Making Edits to Website

Purpose: Ensures that your site is up-to-date and functioning well, which is important but not directly revenue-generating. Often massively overthought when nobody is actually… visiting… your website at the moment. No offense…

Increasing Productivity: Schedule regular but infrequent updates—perhaps quarterly—to avoid constant tinkering. Delegate tasks like technical edits to a web developer. Prioritise updates that directly impact user experience and conversion rates.

Contacting Companies for Product Samples for Goodie Bags

Purpose: Adds value to your service, but does not directly generate revenue.

Increasing Productivity: Create a template email to save time when reaching out and send to all the brands at once using the BCC function . Use partnerships—Consider teaming up with businesses that offer complementary services to share the load, you could offer a small ticket item for free such as a downlaodable template or money off voucher and they could offer a sample or voucher for you.

By focusing your energy on activities that directly drive revenue (bring all the preggos flocking to book your services) and finding ways to streamline or delegate non-revenue-generating tasks, you can make the most of your time and grow your parent and baby business more effectively.

Prioritizing the right tasks and making strategic improvements will help you achieve a full diary of clients and a thriving business with less stress and more success. Some of the activities that don’t immediately get you bookings but would really benefit you long term such as setting up a lead magnet and email automations, should be scheduled into your working time in order to spend the majority of your time on things that bring people to you and a smaller amount of time, consistently pushing your business forward long term with streamlined processes and shit that saves you doing admin when you should be doing what you love!

If you want some help setting up these processes with training, tech walkthroughs and modules on running a parent and baby business your way, join Riot Birth Network via one of our 3 pathways.

Whether you've run your own business before or you're just starting out, we can teach you how to set up your birth business as part of our Hypnobirthing Instructor and Doula training courses, choose which one suits you and get more details here.
If you're trained as a hypnobirthing instructor but just not vibing with your original brand, come on over to our network and get all the benefits of being independent with none of the cons. With resources for you to tailor to suit you and your clients needs and up to date learning on birth and business topics. Learn more here.
If your business is aimed at parents and babies but you don't quite fit into the above categories, we've still got loads to suit you. All our business masterclasses are suitable for parent and baby business owners of all sorts and can be accessed in the members area and live with the rest of the network for a monthly fee of £15. Join here.

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