Three times a year, I run a free challenge called Nail Your Niche for qualified coaches who are struggling to find clients who can, and will, pay a professional rate for their coaching. One of the most common pieces of advice coaches receive, from other coaches, from business mentors, from every corner of the internet, is some version of “put yourself out there.” Be visible, show up authentically, let people know you exist.
It sounds like actionable advice. In practice, it produces a great deal of activity that nobody notices, because nobody knows who it’s for.
Visibility Can Be A Trap
When the instruction is “be visible” without any further definition, the natural response is to try to be visible everywhere. A LinkedIn post here, an Instagram story there, a networking event, a podcast appearance, a Facebook group comment. The logic is that more presence equals more chance of being seen, and that being seen will eventually translate into clients. The problem is that presence without precision is just noise.
What coaches doing this discover, usually after months of consistent effort, is that their activity is almost invisible to the people who matter. Not because they’re doing it wrong, exactly, but because there’s no clear signal in it. No specific person is reading a post and thinking: this is for me. No one is passing it on to someone they know because they can picture exactly who it’s relevant to. The content exists, the effort is real, and the audience it’s aimed at – everyone, roughly – isn’t responding, because “everyone” never does.
When Visibility Is Effective
Effective visibility isn’t about being everywhere, it’s about being specific. It’s about being in the right place, saying the right thing, to a specific enough group of people that some of them recognise themselves in what you’re saying. That requires knowing, before you post or attend or comment, exactly who you’re trying to reach and what you want them to think or feel or do as a result. Without that, every decision about where to show up and what to say becomes a guess, and a long series of guesses rarely adds up to anything meaningful.
This is why the question “where should I be visible?” is the wrong starting point. The right starting point is who, specifically, are you trying to be visible to, and what do you need them to understand about their own situation in order to recognise that you might be able to help. When that’s clear, visibility stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like placement. You show up where those specific people are, saying things that are specific enough to their world that they stop and pay attention.
It’s Not A Shortcut
“Putting yourself out there” persists as advice because it feels like it should work. Visibility seems like a prerequisite for being found, and it is – but only when it’s directed precisely enough to land somewhere useful. Being visible to the wrong people is functionally the same as being invisible. The coaches who build practices without it tend to have something the advice implicitly assumes you already have: a clear enough niche that their visibility is automatically targeted, because everything they do is aimed at a specific group of people with a specific problem.
That’s not a shortcut, it’s the foundation. Without it, visibility just gives you more of what you already have – effort without results.
An Opportunity
If you’ve been putting yourself out there – posting, showing up, staying visible and still not seeing it translate into clients, the issue usually isn’t effort. It’s that your visibility isn’t landing with the people who actually need what you do.
This is exactly what we focus on inside Nail Your Niche.
It’s a free, short challenge designed to help you get clear on who you’re trying to reach and what you need to say so that your visibility starts to mean something to the right people, rather than disappearing into the general noise.
We run it several times a year and there’s also a VIP option if you’d like more direct support. For £99 (inc VAT), you’ll join three small-group mentoring sessions with me, where we can look at where you’re currently showing up, who it’s reaching, and how to make that visibility far more precise and effective.
If you’d like your efforts to start landing with the right people, you can register for the next challenge by clicking here.