Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

Today, we’re going to dive into a topic that I have promised to you a separate episode on because it has been mentioned so often since I launched this podcast and on my roundtable calls which are the calls that I used to hold before I had a podcast. So we’re going to just get into it today.

I'm going to give you a little bit more of the rationale behind my belief that when you are linking things in your Instagram Stories and your bio and doing it in the catalogs, in your StyleLink software for free, and you're doing it often without a strategy, you are really undercutting a lot of the financial opportunities that could be coming to you.

I want to explain to you my thoughts behind that. I believe I might be in a minority in this in terms of people who are speaking to this community. As a former stylist, who did this type of thing a lot when she was very insecure about her business, I completely understand where you're coming from.

I will certainly say I did it in different ways. I did it more like, “Oh, I made a catalog in my styling software and I'm sharing it on Instagram, or my newsletter every two seconds because I don't know what else to do and I want to get more value, and I want to show you that I know what I'm talking about.”

Please know that when I share this, it's not because I'm like above it or I never did it. But I also am very clear that the energy that was behind it and the energy that's behind it for so many of the clients that I work with and we talk through it is not very empowered. It's certainly not very strategic.

If you listen to this episode and you're saying, “Well, you know,” then that's fine. I totally get it. Everybody is welcome to run their business. I certainly am not the end-all-be-all expert on this.

I just know that I am not only working with a stylist, but I'm working with a fair number of women who are both influencers and stylists and it's a very difficult model to hold both when you're literally are an influencer and stylist, meaning you're giving styling content and you're giving links because you are contractually obligated to do that because you're an influencer.

What happens is it trains your audience. I see it from every angle. I see it from the fact that people are linking things, but it's not getting them more clients. I see it from the angle of people that it’s their actual job to link things and it's helping one part of their business, but it's not helping the other.

I'm going to explain to you some other reasons why, but I want to just dive into this episode and let you know where I come from on this, which is a very educated view both in my own experience but also just in the, I think I've worked with at least 90 stylists this year and a half alone in this business, not to mention the ones I worked with in the past.

I understand that this is an incredibly common practice and I want you to know that there's no shame in it if you're doing it. I just want you to have the chance to look at it from an objective lens and think, "Why am I doing it? Is this the best thing for my audience? Is this leading people to a place where they're going to want to do the thing that I want them to do, which is hire me for styling services?

I want to talk about first why this is so popular because again, it's not that I don't see the value or the excitement or how fun it is. I really do. First, it is just human nature, as I talked about in the social proof episode of this podcast, to want to recommend things, to want to share the things that we enjoy and care about and think are fun, I want to be a gift guide curator when I grow up.

This is like my dream in life. Please, no, I get it. The other thing about this behavior is that it provides you with immediate positive reinforcement and it creates a lot of engagement on your account because people don't feel threatened or like they're going to be sold to when you're recommending something.

That is something that makes stylists think, "Oh, but people respond to me more on a call when I do this. They don't really respond to me when I talk about my business." Part of that is the way that people are talking about their business.

If this is a go-to habit for you, you probably don't have a very strong marketing muscle in the sense that it is the only trick in your bag to get engagement, which is fine, we all have to start somewhere.

But again, there's a difference between doing this from a place of knowing why you're doing it—I'm going to give you some examples later on the podcast of when to do this—so it is strategic to be linking things and just doing it because it's too hard to create the kind of marketing messaging that would actually make a difference. Or it's uncomfortable, or you want people to like you or you don't want to be salesy, which tells me you don't know how to sell.

Because if you knew how to sell, you wouldn't feel salesy. That's actually the funny thing about selling. People want to buy, and if people are following you as a stylist, they're fully aware or they should be fully aware, hopefully, that you have a business.

If they're not, that's because you're not taking care of your business. The very honest advice here is that you were also incentivized as a stylist in this industry to link clothes as a sales-generating activity from outside sources. I want to be completely transparent about that.

There are a lot of software for stylists that are hosting calls, which is great that they're creating a community and telling stylists you should be linking every season, you should be doing that.

I want you to zoom out and I want you to think about why you'd be being told that. Because the truth is, the majority of stylists I talk to are not making the bulk of their revenue from links, even the ones that are on platforms that have pretty high percentages for commission.

That's because you'll always make more money with one-to-one, even with a massive audience than you will through a link that people may or may not have seen that day with probably less than 3% commission at most, and if it's under $100, why bother? It took you more time to find that item than it will generate income.

What I want to just pause here and point out is not that anybody is doing anything wrong, but that it is keeping stylists small to continue to link things and spend all of their time searching for things.

Because then what happens is you have people in your DMs asking you more and more questions like you're a catalog that you need to send more links and give them the size and tell them how it fits and what the color looks like. It's sold out here and it's sold out there. That's not your job to tell the internet.

When I heard stylists telling me that it was advised to grow their business through linking, I asked them who told them this, it is very rarely from a business coach or a business consultant, especially one that knows the industry. It is usually from the communities that come out of the software.

Again, they have every right to suggest ways for stylists to boost sales, but it is not their primary interest for you to make a lot of money just on your time alone and not on their software.

Again, this is not nefarious, this is called business. These are the types of reasons why I see stylists playing in pawns that are thinking too small for them. This is why I often say this industry is behind because unless you are a full-time influencer, which you're probably not if you're listening to this, you probably truly want to have more one-on-one clients. You want to be booked out.

You're just not spending your time if you're linking a lot and I don't mean like once a week, I mean you're doing it as your go-to marketing activity. I don't mean that you found something that a couple of your clients really liked or that you're suggesting a lot this season and you're putting up a link. That's not what we're talking about.

I'm saying it is the primary way that you are engaging with your audience day in, day out, or more times than not in a week. You're linking all of your outfits. We'll get to that in a minute.

That is what I'm talking about because then it is literally eating up other marketing activities you could be doing. Even people that have massive followings or teams that are linking for their business are not doing amazing right now. That's just the truth. A lot, a lot of influencers are struggling.

You have to remember that even influencers are getting paid by the company often on top of the commission and the links. If your thought is, “Well, other people are running businesses this way,” you don't actually have an accurate view of that model.

What's happening is when you're linking all the time, sure, you might be getting a little bit of commission, but you're also training people not to hire you because why would they hire you if you were just going to link to things?

Even if they thought to themselves, "I really like her style, I want to hire her," their thought would also be, "Well, I'll just wait till she posts more links to her outfits." This is why I think it's important to ask yourself the question when you're taking business advice, “Is this person looking at my business holistically? Are they helping me get clients? How does this behavior help me get clients? Or, is this just a quick grab at something? Do I understand what I'm grabbing for?”

Because if it's commission money and you have under 50,000 followers who are not that active, it's not going to pay your rent or your mortgage. That is why I want to talk about this because I know stylists are incentivized from different corners to do this, but I just think that that is not a business strategy.

It is a strategy for the tools and the software that stylists are using. Again, nothing wrong with that, but it's your job and honestly, my job to tell you and to protect your business and say, "Wait, how are we spending our time? Is this the best service to our clients?”

I want to talk a little bit more about what this does to your brand into your business perception or the perception other people have of your business.

When you link frequently, like you're linking every day, every other day, what it's doing is it's diluting your brand messaging. Just because you're engaging with people who are following you does not mean that you're creating meaningful relationships.

Now I'm going to use the word transaction here and I do not necessarily mean it like I have used it in the show before, but it's not a bad use of it. At least in the transactional personal styling service, the person has hired you.

But what I mean is when someone is interacting with you over something that is linked or a piece of clothing, and I don't mean like once like that you wore something and someone's like, “Oh, I love that,” or, you're like, “Oh, this is a pair of shoes that I'm giving to my clients who are walking all over Europe this summer, you should totally try them if you're walking a lot.”

That shows me that you were working. There are just links being shown every single day like, “Oh, I saw this and it was cute. I saw this and it isn't as cute.” That's what I mean. In these cases, what's happening is you are using airtime on social media and even in your newsletter, if it's not being positioned properly, to dilute your messaging.

It means that you're using space where people could be learning more about why you are for them, about what you believe makes you different, about what results you get for your clients, about what is possible for them when they learn more about their style.

The truth is that people that follow you, not everybody is going to see everything you put out on social media. If 60% of the time you are showing links and just random recommendations and only 40% of the time—which I don't tend to see this split, but I'm being generous—you are talking about your business or whatever, you are now ensuring that people hear way less about your business than they do about your recommendations, which have nothing to do with that person finding their personal style.

It doesn't tell me why you're the right person for them. Just statistically, if most of your content is geared to shopping picks, the likelihood that people only see 30% or 40% of their content, that they're going to ever catch the few times you put up your services is pretty low.

Even if they catch it, let's talk about memorability, people need to see things upwards of 8 to 10 times in a context that connects with them in order to hire you. I can absolutely vouch for this.

If you put out things that don't allow them to connect with you in the sense of knowing that you are a good stylist for them, that you won't judge them, that you understand them, that you understand their lifestyle, that you understand their concerns about working with the stylist, if you're not putting out that content more often than not—even if you never link anything, by the way, this is relevant to you if this is not a behavior that you use—you have to show people over and over again what you stand for. You have to have the same branding. You have to use the same colors because people are busy.

If you were then diluting your brand by showing me other people's brands, more often than not, I would forget about your brand. Because people will do that even if you're not showing other people's brands. Just the lack of consistency in your own will make them not even remember or think about you, which is what most people are experiencing.

It's not that people dislike you or are judging you. They literally don't care. It's not easy to get people to care. It takes skill and it takes time and it takes perseverance. It doesn't even require a big audience. It requires loyalty and it requires people feeling like you see them.

When you are recommending other people's brands, you are taking airtime away from your potential clients and you are taking airtime away from what they need to hear to hire you.

The other thing that it does that is so important is that it takes away the ability for people who are watching you to see your true skill as a professional. That doesn't mean you show before and after pictures. Not that I have any problem with that, but it is the thing people come to me and ask a lot like, “What if I don't believe in before and after pictures?” You don't have to do that. That's not the only way that you show social proof of your abilities on the internet. Storytelling is a big one.

Again, if you're telling a story about a client and you mention a pair of shoes and then you show it after you talk about the experience you gave that client, now that linking is in service of something. But if you're just showing me a bunch of stuff, I will forget that you ever worked with somebody.

Then the last point on this is a bit controversial, but I am going to say it because I truly don't think that people are being honest enough. I think there are so many stylists that come to me like, “What am I doing wrong? I have tried everything.”

I have been in that chair, I have been in that seat and what is so hard to often tell people is the truth, especially when it's not their fault that things are going the way they're going and maybe their fault in the sense that they didn't seek the education or they didn't invest in what they needed to get their business where they need to be because at some point that is on you if you don't have the skill and you keep going, “I don't know. I don't know.” Well, you can either choose to know or not.

You don't get to be a business owner, it's not like a privilege, it's something that you earn through your dedication. Me saying this is in service to you, sticking it out and holding on.

When you create messaging that sounds like this, you deserve to have the style that you want. You deserve to feel confident. You shouldn't be listening to what other people have to say about your style. You should be dressing for the body you have today. You should only be listening to what you like, what you want, what makes you feel good.

Then you put up links, you are undermining your own message over and over and over. Why would somebody that is truly dedicated—I'm sure you are, but I'm just giving you an outside perception as someone that looks at a lot of marketing and analyzes it—if I hear people saying that I want to hire, like, “I'm going to help you find your own style. I'm going to help you figure out your angle and you shouldn't listen to other people,” then the stylist is saying something like, “Here are all the looks that I wore this week. Here are all the outfits. Here's this thing I thought was cute. Here's that thing I thought was cute,” now the person is being encouraged to click that link because you make money. You're not saying that, but that's why you put it there. You didn't put it there just for shits and giggles.

What you're saying is, “I'm telling you one thing and then I am showing you to be impulsive about your style. I'm showing you that if I make some money here, it's okay for all the things I said about listening to yourself to go out the window.”

Again, I know you don't mean that. I know that you're doing it because it's fun, because it's what gets your audience to engage with you in that context, but you're building a business, and you’re building a business that requires an incredible amount.

I just want to make sure we're all clear on this, all of this is in service, not of making anybody feel bad for linking, but of grounding us in the reality of why we're all here, which is to help people step more fully into themselves, to show up in the world in a way that they feel they're most self-expressed so they can do whatever it is that they feel they are here to do better for other people. That is why I do this job.

I do this job so you guys can do that job for other people. Just full stop. While there's nothing wrong with links, it doesn't help any of us get there. I get it. It's easier to put up cool stuff that you like on the internet than it is to talk about that. That's why it's taken me so long to put this episode out because I know this is the popular thing to do.

But I also know that you want to make a lot of money and I want you to make a lot of money because when you make a lot of money, it shows that you helped a lot of people. When you help a lot of people, they get to live bigger lives.

Linking is keeping everybody from that in a way that is not strategic. If it's just for the sake of it, if it's just blind, it's blind consumerism. Even if that sweater is adorable and we all want it and it is cool, are you giving people a context to think about that purchase through a lens?

It's not a problem to ever give people links—I'm going to tell you the ways to do that in a moment—but even when you do that, your first priority is to your values as a stylist and your bottom line of what you're here for for your clients, not your financial bottom line.

I believe that when you stick with your values and you stand for something, the money follows. It's certainly going to follow a lot faster and a lot heavier than a couple of links. I'll tell you that right now, I promise. Because I have worked with influencers my whole career and I know how hard of a job that is.

They're actually really good marketers. This is not about influencers because they're doing what they say they're supposed to do. We all know what they're here for. The question is, what are you here for? What are we here for as a group?

I'm here to mobilize stylists to make people's lives better, including their own. It just doesn't make anybody better or more thoughtful. What it does do—I'm going to be so, so, so candid about this—one of the reasons why I really feel like the way you do this is so critical is because so many stylists say like, "Oh, no one's taking me and my business seriously." But the truth is you're not taking your business seriously.

If you are out here promoting everybody else's business and it's not your business to do that as in you're an influencer. The ways that you do this, and the ways that you use links should be helping your business grow. I'm going to tell you the three most effective methods that are going to do that and help you stay in integrity as a stylist.

The first one is to build your email list. I want you to use links as gated content and encourage sign-ups. Within the context of that newsletter, you now have more control over how you present those links.

You can give some context like, "Hey, these are the things that my clients are loving. These are the things I'm loving." Also, you always need to do a check-in with yourself, blah, blah, blah.

Now, is everybody an adult here? Should everybody be doing that otherwise? Uh-huh. And when you say that and when you do that, you demonstrate your values in a way that makes me trust you.

The really important part here is people need to trust stylists so much more than stylists realize in order to let them into their world. It is a vulnerable act that we do not acknowledge enough.

I'm not saying you would be out here being serious all the time in your content or super deep, but I am saying your actions and your words need to match. If you use links to build your email list, you are absolutely growing your business.

Now if you have people in a more captive audience than on stories where they're just tap and tap and tap, you can really showcase your abilities as a stylist because you can put links in better contexts. Like, “I like this with these types of colors.” You can show me, not just tell me that this could be good for me because XYZ.

The next way that you could use links to really, really help showcase your expertise is how to really work on positioning yourself in your niche even more deeply. I've used this one a few times throughout this episode, but one of the things you can do is use links to demonstrate your specialized knowledge about a group of people.

I'm going to just give you a random one. Say you are somebody who works with a lot of women who are like 40 plus in menopause. I was just talking to my group today in the profit accelerator. They were talking about how one of the biggest sales triggers they see—because we go over sales triggers like the first week—is menopause.

It's so important for you to recognize that when people tell you these things about their lives, you need to be using it in your marketing. Say you know that, that a lot of the people in your audience are dealing with menopause.

What if you come across these really amazing cute stylish pajamas that keep you super cool? This is the thing I remember a while ago, but I like this fabric that helps wick away sweat and doesn't make it gross or whatever. If you share that link on your Instagram Stories and you're like, “You know what, all my clients are dealing with this,” now you're solving a problem specific to a niche.

You link that all day long. Now I see what you stand for and that you help those people through your linking. Another one is if you work with a lot of plus-sized clients, and there are some stylists who just work with plus-sized clients, and you find a sports bra that is so amazing and actually supported without totally compressing you and making you feel bad and gross, and it's just not cute, because sometimes plus-size sports bras or bras in general, they don't really work hard to make those as pretty as they could be. I don't understand why.

You find one and you're like, “Oh my gosh, this is great,” share it and talk about the absolute horror show of trying to find a beautiful bra or a great sports bra for plus-size women.

Show me that you understand the industry and you understand your niche and their pain point and then provide the link. I am here for that all day long, do you guys see the difference between like, “Oh, this is cute. This is cute,” and taking an opportunity to link something and make it thoughtful for the people that are watching, not just another impulse that these people don't really need in their life because quite frankly, that's how they got their style problems to begin with.

When you do this, now I'm like, “Oh, my gosh, she's a stylist and she's recommending something and she's really for this group.” Then the other thing that I'll just add is that sometimes we just like things and that can be a way for your audience to connect with you. I want you to think of this as the icing on the cake rather than the main focus.

One of the things I do in my programs and my one-to-one is I give stylists a rough percentage because it's so, so helpful to have that idea of like, “Okay, am I linking more times than not?”

If 10% of your content is links—again, I prefer you to do it in a way that showcases your expertise, that builds your email list, whatever—but if it's just like, “I went to Paris and I found this thing and it's so amazing,” great.

I want to be specific about something here. I'm specifically talking about clothing links. I'm specifically talking about the thing that you were paid to go find people. If you want to link things that are industry-adjacent, I highly recommend that clothing care things.

If you want to do every season-specific things that are seasonal once in a while—again I still think that's smarter behind an email link because then you can grow your list and people want things they can't have so you might as well grow it strategically—but then okay, that's fine because if you're only doing 10% of your content linking, either to help me understand you or to show me as a way of relating to you, there are other ways.

But if that's one of the ways you want to do it, then 10% is not going to be enough for me to think that's your whole brand, even if I don't see your content that much. You might just want to turn the percentages on their head and make it the thing you do the least.

Again, the icing on the cake rather than the whole cake. Just make sure that whatever you're linking is in service to your values, is in service to your brand strategy, and is helping me understand you and where you stand as a stylist better.

I hope this conversation was helpful. I hope that honesty puts us all on a level playing field because there is so much possible for every single one of you. There are so many people that need you and want to hear that you see them and that you understand their struggle as human beings trying to find their style in the world.

What we miss so often, because we're so close to it, because maybe we didn't become a stylist because we struggled—maybe we did, it just depends, we all come at this from different angles—is that you don't often realize how important this is to people in their own head and what they have made it mean about themselves, that their style isn't where it could be.

I'm not saying we need to dwell on the problem, but we are supposed to give these people who want to work with us or are watching our content something to live into. Links don't let people live into something. They give them another thing to fill a void, and filling voids is what got us to bad closets.

You have to make a choice in your business. Are you going to do the slightly harder, but way more financially, emotionally, and psychologically beneficial thing, which is to grow your business and learn how to actually market it properly as a service provider who people need to know and trust and understand their philosophy on this thing before they let you into their life? Or are you going to keep linking things? Because it's cute.

Again, if that's the business you want, there is a place for that business and you can build that business, but what I hear more often than not and who this episode is for the stylist who wants one-to-one clients, who wants those deeper relationships with them and they're wondering, “Why isn't my marketing working?” because there is nothing more defeating than feeling like you were showing up and doing the thing and it's not clicking.

None of you need to stay in that place. Now you know how to get out of that place. Go build your email list, go tell people what you stand for. I'll talk to you next week.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.