Business mindset coach Faith Mariah shares her journey from miserable desk job, to full time blogger, to coaching business that brings in multiple six figures through referrals alone!
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Faith Mariah, blogger and business mindset coach, has been coaching for at least three years, and blogging for longer than that. I love chatting with Faith, because she’s a good marketer, she’s a good business mindset coach, but she also just loves the shit out of people, and I think you get that vibe when you hear her.
I love the intuitive way that she approaches her business. Love seeing how she has grown over the years and shifted in different directions from where she started.
So today on the podcast, we’re just going to dive into Faith’s story, how she got started, and how she pivoted.
Curious about getting a business coach for female entrepreneurs? Check out this post.
New Blog to Full Time Income in 10 Months
So I introduced you a little already, but can you fill it in with your details on who you really are and what you do, and then we’ll just go from there?
Sure. I’m a business mindset coach; I help people get to six figures without the drama. They need to get off what I call the “baby entrepreneur roller-coaster,” which is, “Oh my God, this is working,” “Oh my God, this is never going to work. I hate this,” “Oh my God, it’s working,” “Oh my God, this is terrible. It’s never going to work. Everybody hates me.”
I coach people through that stage of business. I’ve been through that, and I’m sure you’ve been through that too, Alison.
Yeah, for sure. So, your first blog. Why did you start that blog, and how long did it take you to get to the point where you could just do that full-time?
Well, I had a job at the University of Florida that I hated.
My twenties were this crazy vagabond experience; I was a wilderness counselor for a long time. I basically lived in a tent for years.
So, I used to take kids camping in the woods, and then I pivoted from that into a 9:00 to 5:00 job at the University of Florida in my late twenties. I went from that wilderness lifestyle to doing a 9:00 to 5:00 where it’s like, “Your ass better be at that desk 8:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday, no matter what,” and I hated it. Hated it so much, and I kept trying to get different jobs, but couldn’t find one. I couldn’t even get interviews. I’m in a small town, and I felt like there was just no opportunity.
Then, I went on a trip to Europe.
While I was there, I got sick. Since I was so congested and restless, I was just scrolling Pinterest in the night.
I kept seeing all these income reports, right, of people doing the “$10,000 a month” with their blogs. Then, I went down this whole rabbit hole. When I get an idea in my head, I obsess over it. I don’t know if you do that; I can really fixate on something. So the whole rest of the trip, I was walking around Europe, and I had this whole notes app of all the blog posts I was going to make and all of the things that I was going to teach, and all the things I was going to do.
We were in Germany for New Year’s Eve, and it was my New Year’s resolution to pursue the blog.
My partner and I broke up at that same time, and I just put all of my energy into this blog idea. Ten months later, I matched my salary at UF and quit.
When you first start blogging, there’s so many ways you can make money, and then the actual doing of it when you’re using the internet for your research is very nebulous. You sign up for Amazon, and you get your first sale with a $0.30 commission, and you’re like, “Oh my God, what did I get into?”
I know you took many courses, and you learned about all the ways to monetize and how to start a blog, but what was the way that you actually got to that full-time income in 10 months?
The way I got to the full-time income in 10 months was I found an affiliate program for an online therapy program.
I’m not a certified therapist, so it was an online therapy program that had a credible, $300 affiliate commission. They were giving me, when I started, $300 commission to get people to sign up for trials. It was crazy. So that really set me off. I was not doing the $2 Amazon affiliates. So, I had a welcome funnel that I was driving traffic to from Pinterest. The funnel was pitching these therapy trials in the beginning, and that’s how I did it.
So, you found an affiliate program that paid you a decent amount and was worth focusing on.
Yes. I always ask people, “How many people do you have in your audience?”, and if you have a small audience, you don’t want to pick a volume-based business model.
Truth Bomb:
A lot of people pick volume-based business models with no volume, and then they spend a lot of time being very upset that they’re not making any money, and it’s like, “Right. Well you picked the business model. If you’re going to sell an affiliate product where you make two bucks, that’s a business model that needs a lot of volume.”
So, the higher the price point you can sell at, the less volume you need. That’s important for people to realize when they’re deciding how they’re going to set their business up.
So, I got into business mindset coaching kind of by accident.
I’ve always been into psychology and mindset, and I have a background in sociology, but like you said, I just love being helpful. So, when I quit my job and went full-time, a lot of people that I knew from different blogging communities were asking me questions: “How are you making money on the internet?”, and, “How did you do that?”, and, “You got to quit your job. What’s going on?” So I started putting everybody that I was talking to about business in a Facebook group and it just kind of grew.
I had the group for years, but never planned on monetizing it. I would just go in there and do these lives where I would answer people’s questions on live video, and as time went on, I found that I loved talking to entrepreneurs more than I loved talking to people with mental health issues. Eventually I pivoted, and now it’s my full-time business. I could have never seen it unfold that way.
It had never occurred to me to make it a business, and I was like, “Oh, people would pay me for coaching for this. What?” It was crazy.
So are you still working on the mental health blog?
No; I just sold it.
It was dying a slow, painful death. I went head on into the coaching; I’m obsessed with this business I have, coaching and helping entrepreneurs, and I just never felt like doing the blog. I kept telling myself I was going to update it and I wanted to keep it, but I wasn’t doing anything with it. The page views were just going down and down and down. It was making less and less and less, because I was getting less and less page views, and I was like, “I have to sell this. I can’t keep doing this.”
So yeah, I finally sold it and the sale went through, I think a couple weeks ago.
Awesome. Very cool. Yeah, I sold mine, same reason. Wasn’t inspired by it at all, and people always ask like, “Why sell if it’s making passive income still?”, and it’s such an energy suck to have more than one business.
Also, and I don’t know about you, but my site was a mess. We had like a hundred funnels and ConvertKit and leave pages and stuff in WordPress and stuff, like I had a hundred courses.
Selling it was great, because we ended up migrating everything to Kajabi, and my business feels so clean for the first time ever. Even my bookkeeper was like, “Oh my God,” because we had like random affiliate checks coming in and random teachable checks and money, and stuff from all over the place all the time. So it feels so much more clean now, which is, yeah. It feels so good to do that.
Business Mindset Coaching: Making Six Figures With Just Referrals
So now, you’re focused 100% on coaching and a lot of mindset and transformation work there.
What’s your process for getting clients now or staying visible? Do you blog to get coaching clients? I’m sure that business and how you market is totally different from how you were getting the affiliate marketing sales for the other blog.
This is my new hot marketing take that I’ve been talking about a lot: I think you can really do six figures as a coach with referrals.
I don’t do anything to get clients. We don’t have any content ranking. I don’t run ads. My Instagram is very, like sometimes I’m doing it, sometimes I’m not. It’s definitely not, I don’t think, making me tons of money or anything. So I have a business based, it’s entirely pretty much on referrals, really, and I do collaborations and networking, right? So it’s referrals from clients, but also networking with people like you and other people that we’re friends with, and being on people’s podcast, and being invited to speak at things.
I think becoming known in your space is a really underutilized marketing strategy. You know, I’ve got a little bit of a reputation, at least around the groups that we’re in, right, the circle that we associate with. I’m known for what I do now, and we did multiple six figures last year doing that. I don’t have time to have any content anywhere. I’ll get to it eventually.
So, how do you expand?
There’s so many different ways to expand your sphere of influence. For me, ads were almost like a lazy shortcut. A really expensive, lazy shortcut that was really inconsistent, but now this year, my whole philosophy is, “I’m just saying yes to pretty much everything.” I want to be in all the free bundles, any paid bundle, like, “You want me on a podcast? Oh yeah, sure.” “Want me to do a training to your group? Oh yeah, sure.” Like just saying yes to everything. When I was smaller, I totally underutilized that.
I think that’s a good lesson for people, and I think the way that I ran ads in the past was very much what people would say not to do. Like people are always, “Don’t run ads into your consistent $50,000 months,” but then I have these clients who have crazy success with their ads. So I get FOMO and I want to start throwing money at things, but the reason why it’s helpful to have that much money coming in before you run ads is because they don’t always work right away.
Yes. My brand just doesn’t work like mathematically. So with ads I’m like, “Boring. No, thanks.” I just can’t even, I’ve so many times thought about it and I’ll start doing ads, and I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t care about this,” and then I immediately abandon it.
Yeah, but you’re on the right track, especially if you’re getting referrals. That’s the whole thing: expanding your sphere of influence. If you add more organic, sure. Yes, blogging. Yes, growing your social media. At the end of the day, though – whatever works.
Like it all works. Whatever works for you.
My strategy has been, meet a lot of people. Meet other people that are in my space, and be known for what I do.
The other thing that I’ve spent a lot of time and money on is becoming a really good business mindset coach and becoming very good at what I do.
I think that that’s really overlooked; people get a little cash-grabby. Everybody’s like, “$10,000 months!!” and “You can just sell products.”
But I want to be the best at what I do. I want to be known for being someone that gets results, and having a track record that gets results. If you can get results for people, they will send you business. I don’t need to pay for leads. People bring all their friends to my free events, because they know it’s going to be awesome. You know, I’m going to really over-deliver and really try to help them.
So, that’s another strategy too: over-deliver for the people that are paying you and make sure that your clients are getting results. And, you know, I believe a lot in woo woo stuff. So I believe in the law of reciprocation: “Of course if I help people, I will have business. Of course the business will grow.”
Business Mindset and Woo Woo for Entrepreneurs
You’ve always been strong in mindset. So I’m curious about your own mindset journey. How has the way that you’ve approached your mindset changed or deepened over the last four years?
Well, I feel like I’ve always been on this journey to manage my brain.
I’m someone that struggles with a lot of mental health issues. I talk about that publicly. I think I’m going to be medicated for mental health for the rest of my life. My brain is just not a brain that you can live with without medication. I always say my brain is like a toxic dumpster fire, and because of that, I have had to become really good at managing thoughts, understanding thoughts and how they interact with feelings. I think that’s why I’m so good at coaching people through the mindset, because I honestly had to get good at it to be able to survive in the kind of brain that I was given. So, you know, that’s the truth of it.
I think people are best at teaching the things they had to learn.
Yeah. I’ve been brutally learning that for my entire life. You know, I’ve been through it with all of the depression and anxiety and all of that kinds of stuff. From like the time I was a little kid – I remember being depressed and suicidal at like six.
So I’ve always had to just figure it out. I was going to have to figure it out if I was going to have a good life. There was just no other option for me. So I spent all this time doing that for myself, and then became really interested in sharing what I was learning with other people, and I got better and better at it.
It’s interesting too, because I still think I teach the exact same stuff. My mental health podcast is actually still live. If you go listen to that, it’s the same stuff that I teach. It’s just marketed different.
I teach a lot more business strategy and I’m always like, I know a lot about business strategy. I’m a huge marketing nerd, but that’s not what most beginner entrepreneurs need. They think they need some really complex, crazy strategy.
But they don’t. They just need to clean up the drama in their brain so they can get through this beginning part.
The first couple years can be tough as a new entrepreneur. When you’re in belief, all of the strategies work, and when you’re in low belief, none of the strategies work.
So do you have moments in your business or life where you get intense anxiety or freak out moments? Do you have kind of a process or resourcing that you take yourself through?
Yeah, I do. I’ll tell you one of the things I do that’s pretty woo that I think really helps. So every once in a while I have an “I don’t know what the f*** I’m doing” attack.
It’s like, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t do this.” I have a huge vision; I want to help a lot of people and help millions of people and have this huge impact, and every once in a while, the weight of my own vision crushes down on me. It’s like I have this calling that I’m never going to be able to rise up to. Lots of self-doubt – “How do you think you’re going to do this?”, and, “Who do you think you are?”
When that happens, I go on these walks, I call them “miracle walks.”
I just go outside, and I think about what a miracle it is that:
- I have a heartbeat
- there’s trees
- I have a dog
- there’s a sky
- I have money in my bank account
- there’s electricity
- I have a house to live in
- there’s other people
And I think about everyone I love. I just get in the energy of like, “Life is good and it’s always going to be good for me no matter what,” and then I come back and regroup. So, miracle walk.
I love that. That reminds me of an affirmation that I really, really love that I just found two days ago: Any time you’re just struggling or you’re starting to focus on the problems, you just ask yourself, ‘Why am I so abundant?'”
I love to be in the energy of “Wow;” I like to be in the feeling of awe. That’s my favorite, and it’s the easiest for me to access.
So I think it’s important to have a positive emotion up your sleeve that’s an easy access all the time. I can always get in the energy of, “Whoa. I’m on planet earth in my body,” and I’ll just start thinking about how crazy life is, and I can really get myself in the energy of, “Wow, this is all so miraculous and so amazing.” That’s a really easy positive emotion for me to access. I can’t always access joy. I can’t always access certain positive emotions all the time, but it’s like this one is easy for me.
Then, too, it’s important to realize we create our own experiences.
So I always say, “You don’t control what happens to you, but you control what you think about it.”
So, learning where my leverage points are. Being aware of when I am spiraling, and realizing, “Oh, these are just a bunch of shitty thoughts that are in my brain.” I’m always like, “Human brain doing human brain things,” you know. It’s not a big deal, but I’m just aware:
“Oh, my brain is just offering me some really painful thoughts, and that’s okay. It’s not a problem. It’s just human brain doing human brain things,” and I’ll kind of let them be there for a little bit, and then eventually I’ll be like, “Okay, well I would like to think something different that’s a little less painful.”
“Thank you. Thank you for the lesson. I’m ready to move on.”
That’s such a perfect example of resourcing. I’m in this new coaching certification that’s trauma-informed, and that’s one of the first things you learn, is tapping into a resource that inspires an emotion.
Something for me that is similar is a feeling of, “Ah.” It’s not necessarily joy or gratitude. I have a cat that we actually almost lost recently. I used to get really annoyed with him, because he’s aggressively affectionate; he will not leave me alone to where I’m getting really irritated when he’s in my lap and I’m trying to talk to clients. But now, since we almost lost him, I have this new newfound sense of gratitude for him. Every single morning when I do my mindset routine, he’s in my lap. I just appreciate how much he loves me. I can feel it in my body whenever I’m sitting there, instead of being like, “God damn it, I wish his claws were not in my chest right now,” I’m like, “Wow.” I can just feel how much he loves me.
So that, because I’m always on my couch, I tie that feeling physically to the blanket. So now I have this great tool. It’s not a miracle walk, but it’s something really similar where when I need to recenter, I just get into the feeling of like, “Oh, this being loves me so much.”
You can totally make a system for accessing positive emotions when you need to.
If there’s someone you really love a lot or an experience you’ve had, if you just sit there and you think about that, love is usually always accessible. That feeling of awe is always accessible.
A lot of the stuff in the manifesting community never resonated with me because I was like, “I can’t be high vibe all the time. That’s just not going to work.”
Like not going to happen for me in my human experience, I don’t think. I tried, you know what I mean? I tried and I tried, but it’s like that’s just not my experience being in this human body.
Yeah; all that’s just the start. I’m launching a new program, and the whole focus of it is that mindset is a really good start, and it’s also not enough. Just saying affirmations and trying to be high vibe is helpful sometimes, but it’s not enough. Love law of attraction, but it’s just not the whole story. So, yeah. Love that. Thank you for sharing your miracle walk resource with us.
So as a business mindset coach, what do you focus on now? Like if you want to share a free offer, what are you doing now?
I have a free event coming up called Bosses Make Sales, and it’s going to be all about creating a product and having the right business mindset to be able to sell it.
I think a lot of women feel weird about money and about accepting money and they struggle with how to price. We’re going to talk about all that. That’s a free three-day live event.
Awesome. Love it. Well, cool. You guys can go follow Faith. Is your website the best place to go or Instagram or your group?
The best place is just go to FaithMariah.com. My best stuff is on the podcast. If you’re really struggling with business mindset, I have some really good resources on the podcast. I also have this really nice, little free Facebook group that I still go in and coach in for free a little bit. That’s a nice spot too. If you’re looking for some business, I call it like a “business support group.” You need a business support group, I got you.
About Faith Mariah
I’m Faith Mariah and I have been making a fulltime income from my mental health blog for the last three years. Last year I realized there was an epidemic of women starting blogs and failing. There were plenty of people teaching Pinterest strategies and preaching avatar exercises, but there wasn’t anyone talking about developing a business mindset. Learn more at FaithMariah.com.
