The Visibility Myth: Why You Don’t Need a Massive Following
The Visibility Myth: Why You Don’t Need a Massive Following
Let’s talk about something that comes up all the time with coaches and experts who are trying to grow their business online: this belief that you have to be everywhere and have this huge, massive following in order to be successful.
I want to bust that myth wide open.
The truth is, you don’t need to go viral or have thousands of followers to make a big impact or build a profitable coaching business. In fact, when you focus too much on the numbers, it can actually distract you from what really matters: connecting with real people.
More Followers Doesn’t Equal More Success
I see it all the time—people chasing views, chasing likes, trying to “beat the algorithm.” But if you’re a coach, an expert, or a business owner, virality isn’t the goal. Connection is.
Your visibility isn’t about being everywhere all the time. It’s about being remembered by the people who matter. And here’s a powerful truth: the most successful coaches aren’t necessarily the most followed—they’re the ones who are trusted by a few.
You don’t need tens of thousands of followers to build a thriving business. If you had eight or twelve clients right now paying for a premium service, that could completely change your life. I know because that’s how I started.
You’re Not Too Small to Be Impactful
There’s this story I love about a kid walking on the beach, throwing starfish back into the ocean. His uncle says, “What’s the point? You can’t save them all.” And the boy replies, “It mattered to this one.”
That story gives me chills every time. Because that’s exactly what it’s like when you post content and one person reaches out to say, “I needed that.” It’s easy to feel like your effort doesn’t matter when you’re not getting big engagement, but the truth is—it does matter.
I’ve done live videos where nobody showed up… and then I got a message days later from someone who caught the replay and told me how much it helped. You never know who’s watching.
Let Go of the “Perfect Coach” Image
Can we just get real about this?
The “perfect coach” we see on social media is often tall, blonde, making seven figures, driving a luxury car, working from a beach… you know the type. But if you’re comparing yourself to that and thinking you’ll never measure up, I want to stop you right there.
I don’t fit that mold either—and guess what? I’ve built a business that supports my family, lets me be present with my kids, and gave me the freedom to retire my husband. And I did that by choosing presence over perfection.
Don’t wait until your post is flawless or your video is perfectly edited. If you’re in the pursuit of excellence, you hit publish. Even if it’s not perfect.
The Coaches Who Show Up Win
When you’re consistent—when you show up, even if it’s just once a week, even if no one’s watching at first—that’s when trust is built. That’s how you grow.
Here are three habits that changed everything for me:
Post three times a week.
Share a tip, a story, or ask a question. Don’t overthink it. Just get in the habit of showing up.Comment on other people’s posts every day.
Not just to get engagement back, but to support others and get inspired. When you engage, it gets your own creative juices flowing.Start five new conversations a day.
Yes, in the DMs. This isn’t about being spammy—it’s about building real relationships. Some of my best clients came from these quiet, meaningful conversations.
Visibility Is About Being Seen—Not Performing
I want you to check in with yourself. Are you making visibility about performance, instead of presence?
Because you don’t need a viral moment to build your coaching business. What you need are consistent, impact moments—the kind that connect with the right people, over and over again.
That’s what grows trust. That’s what builds a community. And that’s what leads to clients.
So stop waiting for the perfect moment. Start showing up like the coach you already are—because someone is watching, and they need what you have.
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Chapters List:
00:00 Debunking the Visibility Myth
05:11 Building Relationships Through Engagement
10:45 The Power of Presence in Coaching
17:49 Creating Impactful Content
22:09 Strategies for Effective Client Engagement
26:31 Webinars and Nurturing Client Relationships
Full Transcript
Amanda Kaufman (00:00)
My name is Amanda Kaufman and today we are talking about a big myth which is that you need to have a huge amount of visibility in order to be successful as a coach. So we're going to be talking about why you don't necessarily need to have a massive following and a massive following on social media does not automatically mean you make more money or have more impact.
We're going to be just like digging into this for reals though. All right. So let's talk about this big myth that you need a huge following to attract clients.
You know, if social media makes you feel really, really awkward or like it's hard to do, you know, then I'm glad you're here because we can start to really unpack this. And today we're really going to be talking about how do we move past that feeling of being overwhelmed or being invisible with your social media?
And the reason why this is so super important and why I'm talking about it is because many, many, many, many, coaches are hanging out on the sidelines. They're not getting on the field. They're not they're not playing full out. And I want you to be in a position that you can play full out. So if you're with me, show to why in the chat and let's go. So most coaches, most entrepreneurs, actually most people really believe that if you have more visibility.
that that is automatically going to lead to more followers and more views of your content and more likes. And increasingly in 2025, a lot of people get their validation from how many views one particular piece of content gets. There's so much so many marketers out there that are promising that they'll help you to get viral, for example. And if you can't spend 10 seconds on the TikTok without people talking about.
you know, here's what I do to be viral and this is how I, and you know, we're literally screaming it from our cars, which is just kind of incredible. But I think the reality is that what you're going for, if you're a coach, if you're an expert, if you're a business owner, is you're not going for virality, you're going for connection. You're going for a real relationship with people. And visibility is really more for you.
about being remembered, it's not necessarily being everywhere all at once all the time. And the most successful coaches are really known by a few. And you know, I grew up in a really small town. Let me know if you did too. But I grew up in a really, really small town where, you know, I knew everybody. Everybody knew me. There was no anonymity.
And now I live in a Metroplex that's like 11 million people. And it's so interesting, by the way, just little side note there, that it's more common in a big Metroplex not to know your neighbors, right? But in a small town that was super weird. So for me, I remember my brain kind of going through these growth stages of, wow, you what's 10,000 people? What's 50,000 people? What's 100,000 people? What's a million people?
And when you're on social media, you are joining literally millions of users, millions of other business owners. Like it's many very, very large, large countries of people that are on the platform at the same time. And that's actually an unfathomable number of people. Like it is actually really, really hard to think of. And if you take that back to your coaching business or your expert business,
you can have lot of viability with what a dozen clients. You know, for some of you, you'd be great with eight, you know, clients paying you because you're charging a lot. You know, you're doing premium services and it just doesn't take as much to to build a successful business. And yet, you know, as an industry, we're super, super fixated on like how many followers does somebody have on Instagram or
How many connections do I have on my LinkedIn or how many subscribers do I have on my email list? And those things are important. I don't want to diminish that. You you want to make progress and those key performance indicators can kind of give you an indication of whether you're growing, whether your message is resonating. And you you can start to diagnose like, where should I spend time in my business based on your particular key performance indicators? But my purpose in this live is to say that
An interim metric is not actually an indicator of success. You have to look at lots of the metrics altogether. And again, visibility for a coach is really about connection because people don't buy from people that are just wildly popular and that's the only reason they buy because they trust you. So your visibility on social media is far more about consistency.
It's about connection. It's about meeting real people where they actually are. And most real people, real consumers of social media, they're watchers. I was just talking with one of my clients who just closed another two clients, and she was saying the same thing, that her clients were mentioning her content, but never had ever even left a heart, never had ever left a comment. Now, mean, the people that leave hearts and comments, we love those too, right? Because they help.
push your visibility in the algorithm. That's amazing. You're probably helping them tremendously with your content for free. That's incredible, right? But like when it comes to the people who actually pay, very often they're what I call a voyeur. They're somebody who's watching from the side to see if you are legitimate. So the idea with visibility for you is that it's more about showing up where people actually are and keeping the conversation going.
So think for example, sharing posts that people can comment to, keeping those comments going, just even taking the time to reply to comments. A lot of people don't realize, but that engagement is so valuable for a coach because when people really engage with you back and forth, it adds to your humanity. It adds to the fact that you're a person in a community who's connecting.
direct message conversations, right? So your messenger is a beautiful place to be building relationship. And what I've found, you know, I've made a big pivot in my business in the past year or so to focus more on excellence and organic. And what I've discovered was like, wow, you know, people will have really real high quality conversations with you on DM. But the role of your content is to just like remind them that you're there.
to be a reason to follow up. And again, it adds to the trust and the credibility of you are who you say you are. And especially, think, in today's landscape, there's a lot of people who delegate their conversations in chat. now we're automating. We're seeing a lot more AI and having conversations with robots. People really do value connection with people.
So just remember that, like be a person, be a human being, you know, stay connected. The other thing that's a really valuable thing is stories. So I super rejected, you know, and neglected stories for a long time because when I publish a story, I don't get hundreds and hundreds of people looking at it because I don't have hundreds of thousands of followers. But I noticed that when I started getting really consistent with stories, the same 20 or so people.
would see my stories and very often there was a core group of people who would reply to my stories, engage with me, and I was like, my gosh, like this is another channel of building relationships I didn't even realize. And I had put so much pressure, and here's where I want to relieve a little bit of your pressure. I put so much pressure on having really polished posts. And I have posted.
So many times I really should do the math. It's like in the many thousands I've made many thousands of posts and most coaches are stuck on their first 20 posts their first 10 posts Maybe even your first post because you're putting so much pressure on Like it has to be really polished and it has to go viral and it has to get a lot of views and I have to get a lot of positive feedback for what I'm doing because if I don't get that then I'm not gonna be I'm not gonna pursue it and
I think like if there was something that was a little broken in my brain that has helped me, and I think you can break this in your own brain, is I actually really don't care about the number of views or the number of people who see me live. Like I genuinely don't care. And if you've been here with me live, know, live video doesn't get the same kind of reach that other kinds of content do in today's environment. You know, people are looking for a little more polish.
We're working on our YouTube channel all the time to get it better and better. By the way, you can check that out at it's called the Amanda Kaufman show. But I think like
because the algorithms change and because of all that, you would think that we just like stop. And I've considered it and I still consider it. But the thing is, is that the live video is a piece of value that I like to leave in my free community, Clients Over Chaos. So it's like one of the many benefits of being in my free community is every single week you get a unfiltered, real talk kind of a conversation and a chance to come and join me on live chat.
to talk about these different topics. So I just want to do a little mindset check in. Like, are you hiding behind that perfectionism? You know, this idea. I think of perfectionism, there's two types. OK, there's maladaptive perfectionism, which is where you are procrastinating. You are engaging in negative self-talk. You are, you know, I call it like weaponizing your progress, like you're you're you're taking.
what would be something that like if a friend did the same thing, you would be like, good for you, friend. Awesome for doing that, friend. You would would you would like cheer them on. Right. But for you, when you're in maladaptive perfectionism, you're like, it's not good enough. This is not up to our standards. And because of that, you don't publish it. You don't put it out there. You're endlessly working on the thing, but you never let it see the light of day and certainly never let somebody else see it. Right. So that's that's hiding behind.
perfectionism. There's another kind of perfectionism and that to me is super important. It's the pursuit of excellence and the big difference between knowing if you're maladaptive or whether you are in the pursuit of excellence is if you're in the pursuit of excellence, you hit publish. You hit publish, right? And you let other people see your work and you let the feedback loop happen and you use that feedback loop to perfect what you're doing.
So, you know, like perfection in the sense of excellence pursuit is really about doing things after it publishes. Maladaptive perfectionism is what a lot when people say like you're a perfectionist, they usually are talking about the maladaptive type. And I just I want you to pursue like real excellence. Like I want you to pursue the kind of excellence that requires the risk of being seen, the risk of doing it wrong, the risk of using the wrong words, the risk of not
not nailing it and not getting it right. The second thing that I want to check on with you today on the mindset around this is are you making visibility mean performance instead of presence? And I'm like, woof. You know, as I was thinking about these mindsets, I'm like putting together my notes for today's live. I was like.
This huge, know, I think a lot of people are posting for the sake of posting. They're not thinking about the overall story that they're architecting. They're posting for the sake of posting and they're not thinking about the overall strategy of the relationship. And if I sound like a fricking robot for saying the strategy of the relationship, come at me, brah, because here's the thing. I've been married for 15 years, okay? So I'm just so curious, like I'm gonna look this up.
We're live. So I'm to look this up right now. How long do people typically stay married in the United States? I'm just curious, right? So I know a couple of statistics that scared the bejeepers out of me. Number one, more than 50 % of marriages nowadays are ending in divorce. But did you know that if it was a second marriage, that statistic goes up to like 75%. It's wild. So it wasn't my
Like I wasn't the second, Chris is my first marriage, but I'm his second. So I was like, my gosh, know, statistically, if I just leave all of this alone, we're doomed, you know, like that's terrible. So let's see. The average length of a marriage is approximately 8.2 years. Okay, cool, cool, cool. So we're working on year 15, so we're not quite double, but.
I would say we are a good distance from from the average. And so I would have to tell you something. I've been strategic about it. I've been strategic about our relationship. We've had date nights. We're strategic about the conversations that we have with each other. There are certain things we just do not say to each other. Like there is quite a lot of strategy and intent.
that goes into the relationship. Now that doesn't mean I took it off from like all spontaneity. I mean, nobody wants that. But I would say that what makes our relationship perhaps different than the average is that we are strategic. And one of those things that we're really strategic about is presence. And I've taken that exact same principle into my business. And in my business, it's about presence. It's not about it's not about being the perfect, perfectest, perfect, perfect.
And for the first few years of my business, I wanna let you know, I was really worried about not being good enough for you. I was so worried about it. I was worried that because I didn't have seven figures under my belt, that I was going to be a disappointment to you because the perfect coach makes seven figures a year. The perfect coach looks like a Barbie doll. The perfect coach is a bro, right? Like there's all of these.
ideals that we get fed over and over and over again about what is perfect and that obsession with like my dissatisfaction with the fact that I didn't fit any of those paradigms was a huge obstacle that I had to overcome and what I realized was that presence mattered one heck of a lot like presence mattered way lots more than my perfection in that presence.
And I saw the same thing when I hosted my live events here in Fort Worth. I was like, I was not rocking high heels that whole time. was making people dance. I was doing everything wrong and it was great. So because I think that it's really important to be real. And part of being real is allowing for the fact you have flaws and that you're not perfect.
Just because you have flaws, though, and just because you're not perfect, and just because you don't have, like, the world's biggest social following, because, like, here's the ideal coach, right? The ideal coach is probably tall and blonde or is a bro and also probably tall and blonde. And the ideal coach makes seven figures a year. And the ideal coach drives around in a Lamborghini, lives in a mansion, never actually works. The ideal coach is probably...
flirting with like 300 to 500,000 Instagram followers. The perfect coach has a New York Times bestseller. The perfect coach, you know what I'm saying? Like there's just, there's all these things that can feel so far out of reach. And when you compare it to where you stand, you know, and you feel kind of small, it's like, whew. Now I'm not saying don't go for the New York Times bestselling book. You know, one of the things I'm really proud of this year in the Amanda Kaufman show is I've been interviewing a lot of book coaches. I think people should write books, right?
I'm not saying that you shouldn't look after your health. I'm not saying that it's bad that you're blonde if you are. But what I am saying is that if you're using those ideals and those standards to to prevent you from being centered and present, that lack of presence is going to be far more detrimental than you having a big nose or you being overweight or you having too many children or being too old or too young or whatever the thing is that you feel.
doesn't match some kind of a perfectionistic ideal. My big reminder for you today is that you're not too small to be impactful. You're not too small to be impactful. And I am reminded of this story about this kid who's like walking down the beach with their, I think it was their uncle or something like that.
He's walking down the beach and he picks up the beach had been filled with starfish. There were just all these starfish, thousands of them, as far as the eye could see. And the boy bends down and picks up a starfish, throws it back into the ocean. And he keeps walking along, just picking up one starfish at a time, throwing it out into the ocean. His uncle goes, what are you doing? Like, what's the point? Because there's thousands of them. There's no way that we can put all of these starfish back into the ocean.
And the boy says, it mattered to this one. And he kept, he just threw another one. I get goosebumps with that story. I love that story. You know, I've been doing a live video every single week for years, right? Years. And it is a rare thing for me to miss miss. It is more common for me to do more. And I share that with you because I've had lives where like nobody showed up. No one was there.
And then I get a message later from somebody who caught the replay. You know, they were in my group. They got the replay. They watched the replay. They sent me a private message and they go, my God, I needed to hear that today. Thank you so much for doing that video today. And I was just like, what? I didn't even think anybody noticed. Right. Like I was, I was just, you know, I thought that that was just a dud topic. And, you know, that's happened many times. So I just want to share with you, like that has happened so many times.
So I think a lot of my colleagues, they don't want to throw the starfish. They're like, if I can't get the entire beach clean of all starfish, then I'm not even going to start. That is black and white thinking. That is not having the level of impact that you can have meeting yourself exactly where you are right now. And just remember, you're early. You're early in your process. Wherever you are, I'm early. I'm early in my process. My mentors have been doing this for over 20 years. And I've got eight.
Right? I've got eight years that I've been doing this. I mean, being online and talking with people and coaching them and supporting them. Like you're just early. So stop having so much judgment for where you stand. Right? Stop having so much judgment for where you stand. OK. I want to give you some visibility habits that have just changed my life. Literally, when I say changed my life, I don't mean that I became this viral Kardashian sensation. I mean...
I built a business to multiple six figures while raising a young family and retiring my husband that we could depend on this business. That is life changing. That is life changing. I used to in my old career, I was expected to get on an airplane and travel in full regalia, know, like the full, you know, corporate outfit kind of thing, rockin' the high heels. And it was really fabulous. It was so fabulous in my 20s. It really, really was.
and even into the very beginning of my 30s. But I'm a family lady. Like I wanted the flexibility to be able to go to a doctor's appointment or go to a dentist appointment and not have to think about like orchestrating it super in advance so that my boss wasn't pissed off. Like my life has changed. It is fundamentally changed. So let me just talk about three things, three ideas.
The first thing is if you're not posting at all right now, I want you to commit to posting three times a week. Three times a week. You pick the day, you pick the time. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what time of day. There's no optimal here. The real optimal is where we're activating you deciding to have visibility. Share a tip, share a story, or just ask a question, right? Like it doesn't have to be this big engineered, super polished anything.
The second thing is I want you to go comment on other people's content every day. I mean, comment, like stop being such a voyeur. Let yourself go actually participate with people's content because, know, I think this helps for a couple of reasons. Number one, it jogs your creation juices, like just like, what can I say to this? What should I say to this? How can I add to this?
Right. I love that. And that will help you build more of your original content. So that's thing number one. I think there's also a bit of a law of reciprocity here. You you tend to attract the things that you put out into the world. So I'm a big fan of like supporting other people's content, hearting it, liking it, commenting on it as a matter of your process, because you're normalizing for yourself that that's what people do on social media. And when people start doing it for you, you will you'll expect it. Right.
The third thing that really helps with your visibility is just start a conversation every day. So I enrolled in a program last year where my mentor challenged me to open five conversations every day. And that makes a huge difference, a huge difference, because I don't know if you knew this, but when you engage with somebody in DM, then the algorithm is more likely to serve their content to you. So if you open conversations with people in DM,
they're more likely to notice your content the next time it comes across. I don't know for sure if that's like a real algorithmic thing or whether that's just kind of a proximity bias. know, like because somebody just talked to you recently, then the next time they see you post, then they're more likely to want to see it. They engage with it, then the algorithm is more likely to show it up.
It's not about blowing up your social feeds. It's not about blowing up all your friends' inboxes. It's really just about showing up with a level of consistency. And that consistency is what gives you credibility, which allows you to continue to grow your business and grow your relationships and network and keep the flywheel going. So if this landed for you and you're ready to just stop feeling like you always have to perform,
and you wanna start connecting, I want you to know that the Clients Over Chaos community is open and we are always welcoming people into it. If you DM me the word DWM, which stands for Do What Matters, I will make sure to send you the link to come and join us inside of the group. And that's where you're gonna get, yes, the replays from all of our weekly live trainings, but you're also gonna get our daily spark.
So if you're looking for motivation, like to stay focused on your business, particularly every single day, you want to be in that group because every single day I'm sharing with you a short five minute audio that's meant to get you going, get you motivated towards your business. And it is awesome. I've gotten tremendous feedback from that. Now remember, you don't need a viral moment. You need consistent impact moments with the right people.
start showing up like the coach that you actually are, right? Like I'm in the same outfits and in the same regalia that I would be if I was joining you for a coaching call today. And that's exactly what I'm gonna do with my clients today. Just start showing up like the coach that you really already are because the right clients are already watching you. And with that.
I'm going to make sure we get this replay posted inside the Clients Over Chaos community. If you love this, let me know in the chat. If there's other topics, then make sure that you ask it. I just noticed we got a question from a community member that I wanna share with you. She asked, do you need to post on what your coaching practice is? I think it's a good idea to represent who you are. So if you're somebody who's an expert in money, then the way that you...
create content is you talk about money. If you're an expert in relationships, you talk about relationships. If you're an expert in health, you talk about health. I think it is best to have your profile really optimized for what you want people to know you for. So for example, you could put in your link in bio details about who you are and what you do, right?
I think it's a good idea and a good practice to have a link at least to your website that talks more about what it is that you do. Because when people find your content interesting, they tend to go visit your profile. When they visit your profile, then they're gonna see all of those additional details. I'm not a big fan of the hard sell on social media. I don't think that that's a good way to build rapport with people if you're very pitch-sloppy. But if you keep what you do a secret,
That doesn't work either. what I find and I'm working right now, we've got a beta of the coaching gold mine, which is now available on our website. If you go to the coachesplaza.com or you check out my link in bio, you can go to our website anytime. And that course is really all about how do you choose the right message? How do you decide what to put out there and how do you test what's working?
and how do you double down on that as well as helping you to choose what is the right problem of appropriate magnitude to apply your coaching towards. Because so many people are rushing to go and get clients and build really complicated marketing machines. And it turns out that they're not even talking about something that people pay for. So that's like a lot of wasted effort. And it's where a lot of people have gone because marketers are great marketers and marketers love to sell their marketing. So there's kind of this
the thing in the industry where people are super obsessed with the tactics and the technology of marketing. But the thing that actually works when it comes to building an expert business is solving a problem people care about with your expertise. So that's what you're showcasing on your social media. That's what you're putting on your website. That's how you're getting people to know you.
In terms of like the broader strategy, I think that having like moments where people can join you for live webinars, where people can join you, like this is a live stream. So I'm just like talking to you real time, right? So people can ask questions, they can kind of share what's going on and like that's so super cool. However, most people don't have a more formalized way of showcasing their genius. So for me, what I really, really love,
is I love hosting webinars and I host those webinars on a rhythm, on a cadence, at least once a month. I have a showcase of my knowledge and of solving a particular problem with that knowledge, then logical invitation forward. And when you've got people in kind of a more intentional space, like a webinar,
then when you make the invitation to sit down and have a consult or you make the invitation to sell something or you make that invitation forward into the sale, it's not icky, right? It's like, well, that's logical because I just finished solving the problems to an extent and a degree. And now I understand there's next steps that I can follow. those are gated, those are paid, but the willingness to participate is way higher. So kind of think of it kind of like your social media is meeting people.
and it's talking to people, it's engaging with people, and it's nurturing people forward. But then you need more than that. You need to have your email list, you need to have your webinar structure, and have your programs kind of sing together to build something that's profitable over the long term.
Yes. So Deborah just asked, is there somewhere I can go to learn how to produce and post webinars? Yes, that is part of our Experts Network program. So our Experts Network program is our more advanced coaching program. And in there, we have a library of different courses that are available to you. And one of those is the Classy Masterclass Mastery Class, which is my prescriptive step-by-step.
What are the emails to send? What are the slides to include? What is the structure? All of that. And so if you have a desire to upgrade to the experts network or you want to talk to me about whether that would be a good thing or not, just head to pickamandasbrain.com and you can book a coffee with me. All I ask is you buy me a cup of coffee for my time. But you can book a coffee with me and we can talk about whether that would be something worth exploring in a deeper way or not. It is an investment.
But it also gives you like a year of access and you get a huge a huge library of things telling you prescriptively Exactly what to do when it comes to those webinars super duper. Okay guys. Well, we've made it to the end of our live stream for this week I'm super excited that you joined me. Thank you so much for being here
Take care everybody. Bye bye.
