This week on The Whin Big Podcast, Katie speaks with Tanessa Shears, a biohacking expert who helps business owners like you find more energy for your work.
In this week’s episode, Tanessa shares her strategy for creating content for just five people, as well as her plan for getting more email sign-ups – and sales online. And Katie shares details of how you can market your business just as successfully as Tanessa by joining our free webinar – six steps to selling online.
Katie and Tanessa talk about the importance of unwinding after work and ways to find your optimum sleep rhythm. Tanessa shares resources to help you biohack your brain for better sleep and focus throughout the day. And you’ll discover something truly disgusting about your pillow that you may never, ever forget!
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Getting started in business
Tanessa is based in Vancouver, Canada. She helps entrepreneurs optimise their brains and bodies using biohacking and science. Her primary focus is helping business owners feel better rested. She runs her coaching business from home alongside parenting her 18-month-old daughter.
Tanessa’s passion is to help entrepreneurs maximise their sleep and rest for optimum energy. Having a new baby when the whole world was experiencing great turmoil and challenge has given her even more insight and experience into the importance of sleep for your well being.
“My sleep is so important because I see how much better my brain works when I’ve slept.” – Tanessa
Getting started in biohacking and wellness
Tanessa grew up with an aversion to health and fitness – actively avoiding gym classes and PE at school. Somehow, she stumbled into teaching swimming and fitness instruction. She became fascinated by what she learned as a fitness instructor that she changed her studies at college from communications into biomedical physiology.
It didn’t take long for her interest to turn to passion around health and fitness – and in 2014, she began taking clients on as a personal trainer. The more she learned, the more she taught and her clients saw better and better results. She clicked that her client base were all entrepreneurs, and by working with Tanessa, they not only got fitter but noticed significant improvements to their sleep and energy levels.
In 2017 she started working exclusively with entrepreneurs to help them optimised their brains for energy.
What is biohacking?
When Tanessa first heard the term ‘biohacking’, she thought it sounded really dangerous! She explains that the best way to think of it is as a synonym:
“Biohacking is health optimisation. It’s finding solutions that you can measure your efforts. By doing all these things for our health, we’re not only changing the outside environment but also the internal environment so we can have more longevity and health, so our brain can be at its highest performance.” – Tanessa
The similarities between biohacking and entrepreneurship
The concept of biohacking resonates with Katie. For her, the idea of tracking your efforts and matching them with your goals is remarkably similar to how she sets business goals and tracks her marketing activities against them.
Tanessa agrees – and explains why biohacking for entrepreneurs is such a great combination. Business owners frequently split test their activities, experiment with new tools and resources and look for data-driven evidence to see what’s working – and what isn’t.
The most important areas to focus on as entrepreneurs
Without any doubt, Tanessa recommends business owners pay attention to their sleep – and our internal rhythm (the Circadian Rhythm) to optimise energy and brainpower. Tanessa’s number one tip is to get consistent with your bedtime and waking times. Yes, even on the weekends. This helps you optimise hormones, heart rate and blood pressure, which has a massive impact on how alert you are throughout the day.
Tanessa goes into more detail on other ways to biohack your brain in the episode, so make sure you listen to the full interview.
How Tanessa communicates her passion with potential customers
Tanessa was drawn to FB lives and YouTube as her primary focus. She’d share ‘how-to videos and tutorials around some of the most important messages her clients needed to hear. She would then repurpose the videos into content to use elsewhere.
She’s now switched to podcasting (Becoming Limitless), and she feels it’s a much better fit for her audience because entrepreneurs love podcasts.
She also uses Instagram to post engaging content – both on her grid and in Stories. Katie and Tanessa have both noticed that a different audience engages with Stories versus grid posts.
She compliments her podcasts and Instagram posts with a weekly email that highlights her most recent podcast episode, and she has plans to turn her most engaged Instagram posts into her newsletter.
“I’m trying to look at my IG carousel posts as a mini masterclass. I could take the content and create a 30-minute podcast, a one hour webinar or an email. It has to be save-worthy. That’s the metric I’m focusing on right now.” – Tanessa
How Tanessa builds a sales strategy into marketing
Tanessa keeps direct selling posts to her Stories and tends to use a softer approach to sales elsewhere. For example – she’ll share a masterclass on stress in business, offering lots of free content, but will add in a sentence at the end, offering people a chance to jump on a judgement-free clarity call if stress is affecting your business.
She does this between 10 and 15 times per week across all her platforms – figuring that different audiences will access her content and resonate with her offers in different ways.
“I want people to come to me not just for the value my content offers, but I want them to know what I do. My goal is for people to fall in love with me right away and figure out if they want to work with me real quick.” – Tanessa
A refreshing way to think about content creation
Working with a business coach has helped Tanessa get clarity on messaging and marketing across the board. Making offers as regularly as 10-15 times a week may feel like a lot, but her coach reminded her that individuals would only see the offers 2 or 3 times because of the nature of how they consume her content – and where.
She embedded the notion that five people are consuming Tanessa’s content at any given time – and they’re all ready to work with her. Every time Tanessa creates content, she thinks about these five people, and it gets her so excited to make the content.
“You know that feeling when you engage with someone’s content, and you get excited about the idea of buying from them? I like to think five people at all times are right there. What do these five people need right now?” – Katie
A strategy for capturing email addresses
The most successful place for gaining new subscribers is by guesting on other people’s podcasts. She chooses podcasts with audiences that complement her work, illustrated perfectly by her guesting on the Whin Big podcast.
As Tanessa explained – our audience of business owners and entrepreneurs will be interested in biohacking to help with their business goals and ambition. And Tanessa’s audience of entrepreneurs and business owners will be interested in what Katie has to offer around marketing for small businesses. The beauty, for Tanessa, is that the audiences and topics complement each other perfectly – without any hint of competition.
Tanessa’s email funnel
Most people subscribe to Tanessa’s email list from her lead magnet, a PDF that talks about biohacking and raising your energy. On downloading, she has a ten email sequence which is all about adding value, and the final three emails focus on introducing herself and pitching some of her services.
From here, they move into her evergreen email sequence of a weekly email. Katie’s delighted to hear this as it’s the exact process she teaches in the All-In-Whin marketing course.
Tanessa’s most popular (and disgusting) podcast episode
Tanessa loves that some of her most successful podcast episodes are on topics she had no idea people would be interested in. To date, the most successful episode of Becoming Limitless was called ‘How to bio-hack your pillow’.
The focus of this episode was around something truly disgusting – you’ll have to tune in to today’s episode to find out the big secret…. Tanessa’s call to action on this episode was for people to DM her on Instagram so she could tell listeners what pillows she bought to replace her old ones. It’s helped her make deeper connections with her audience and has been the most downloaded episode to date.
Tanessa’s favourite bio-hack to reduce stress
Tanessa dives into the importance of unwinding before bed in more detail in the episode, so don’t miss it! She talks about why the activities you choose to relax is more important than the setting (you can still stress out in a bubble bath!).
She also shares her favourite app: Brain. FM, which she describes as a remote control for the brain. It helps your brain unwind or ramp up to focus mode when you need to get into flow for work.
Want to market your business the same way Tanessa does – for free?
You can learn the exact same process Tanessa uses to market her business online by joining in Katie’s FREE training webinar – the six steps you need to sell online.
Keep the conversation going with Tanessa
Follow Tanessa on Instagram
Tanessa Shears website
Subscribe to Tanessa’s YouTube channel
Resources from this episode of The Whin Big Podcast
Tanessa’s free guide: 12 Ways to Biohack Your Energy
Becoming Limitless Podcast
Podcast episode: Biohack your pillow (you won’t believe this!)
Brain FM podcast episode Biohack your brainwaves for super focus
Brain FM: Take the Chronoquiz: Dr Michael Breus
