The First Thirty Minutes of My Day

Coffee, laptop, and about half an hour before anything else starts.

I open two or three places where my profession talks to itself — a Facebook group, a message board, a subreddit — and I read what people are stuck on. Somebody asks a question I know the answer to. I answer it properly, the way I would answer a colleague, with no link and nothing attached. Sometimes I mention that I wrote something longer about it and leave the address.

Then I close it and get on with the day.

That is thirty to sixty minutes, most mornings, for years. It is the largest single reason there is an audience, and I scaled the nurse practitioner business through exactly this in its first year before there was a marketing budget worth the name.

People treat it as a growth tactic. It is closer to the job.

"I don't have time for that"

You have thirty minutes. What you do not have is a category for this, because it does not look like work.

It is worth being blunt about where it sits in the priority list. Producing content and marketing are the two things that generate income in a course business. This is marketing — the free version — and it produces compounding returns for a cost of one coffee's worth of attention a day.

Compare it to what the same thirty minutes usually goes on: reconfiguring something, comparing tools, adjusting a page nobody has visited. Those feel productive and return nothing.

Put it first thing, before the day gets a chance to take it. That is the only scheduling advice that has ever worked for me on this.

"My profession isn't really on social media"

Then it is somewhere else, and your job is to find where.

Communities are not a synonym for social platforms. Professions cluster in forums, message boards, subreddits, association groups, mailing lists — often in places that look dated and are enormously active. Some fields are barely on the mainstream platforms and completely alive on a board that has looked the same since 2011.

You also have the option nobody uses early enough: build your own. A group attached to your brand is a different asset entirely, because it is yours. You can post your content there, announce things there, and set the rules. People join hoping to get help free, discover there is a limit to what a thread can teach them, and a proportion of them go and buy the thing that does not have that limit.

Both kinds are worth having. Start in other people's rooms, because they already have the people.

"Isn't posting in someone else's group just spam?"

Yes — if you post what most people post. And the distinction is precise enough to state as a rule.

Never promote a product in a community you do not own. Not the course, not the membership, not a sale. It reads as extraction, it gets downvoted, moderators remove it, and the reputational cost lands on you personally in a profession where people remember names. I have watched people do it and it goes badly every time.

Do answer questions properly, and link content occasionally. I ran into this — here is how I handle it now, and I wrote it up in more detail here. That is welcome, because the help came first and the link is genuinely the longer version of the help.

The ratio matters more than the rule. If your goal on entering a room is to drop a link, everyone can tell. If your goal is to be useful and the link is occasionally the most useful thing you have, nobody minds at all.

And most of what happens is not the link anyway. Somebody reads three helpful answers with your name on them, clicks the name, finds the profile, finds the business. You did not sell anything. You just stopped being a stranger.

"I don't have a budget for any of this"

That is the point of this particular channel: it costs nothing but time.

If you have money, paid promotion accelerates it and I would use both. But a professional with no budget at all can build a real following purely by being consistently useful in the places their field gathers — I have watched people assemble audiences of thousands doing nothing else, and then sell coaching to them at serious prices.

It is slow. Genuinely slower than paying for reach, and there is no dressing that up. It is also durable in a way bought attention is not, because the people who found you this way arrived already believing you know what you are talking about.

The part that makes it work

One thing underneath all four answers.

You have to actually care about the answer you are giving. Not as a technique — the performance of caring is transparent and worse than not showing up. But you are a professional talking to people with your problems, and if you cannot summon genuine interest in a colleague's question, you may have chosen the wrong subject to build a business on.

Half an hour. Tomorrow morning, before anything else. Answer three questions and link nothing.