Self Promotion as Care: A Helpful Way to Think About Showing Up Online
You want to be the go-to in your area.
You want families to hear your name again and again, from their friends, their midwife, their childbirth educator, other birth workers. You want your calendar filling up far enough in advance that you can actually be selective and say "I don't think we're the right fit" without the quiet panic of wondering if a great fit client will fill the gap.
But right now, you're not really showing up online. This is probably because you don’t want to sound weird and salesy. Plus promoting yourself feels kind of fake and performative. It’s uncomfortable and doesn’t feel like you.
Maybe you've posted and it felt clunky. Or you can keep it up for a little while but life and clients get in the way and your ideas peter out, and now that half-abandoned Instagram grid makes you feel cringey instead of confident.
The good news is that even though it is hard, this doesn’t prove anything about you. In fact, you're honestly doing what most birth workers do: building your business through relationships and referrals and doing really good work. And for a while, that's enough. You get your first handful of clients and get through your first year or so and then…
At some point, you're ready for more. More consistency. More predictability. More options. You’ve gained some experience and are ready to talk about it. And soon, you feel like you're supposed to do marketing — and nothing about that word feels comfortable.
So let’s untangle these expectations and find an easier spot for you to start from.
Why avoiding online marketing is keeping you stuck
Staying quiet online feels safe. But it's quietly doing three things that work against the steadiness you're trying to build for your business.
It limits who can find you. When you rely entirely on word of mouth, you're only reachable by families already inside your network. Everyone else, the ones Googling at midnight, the ones asking in Facebook parenting groups, the ones who just moved to your city and don't know anyone yet, they can't find you. You end up spending all your "marketing" time and energy maintaining referral relationships, hoping past clients will recommend you to their friends, and waiting.
It creates a stop-start rhythm that feels a little desperate. Without a steady online presence, most birth workers end up talking about their work only when they… need more work. Busy, then quiet, then scrambling. And when you're scrambling, marketing feels awful. And that’s because it is stressful to talk about yourself under pressure. Every inquiry feels like an audition. No wonder you avoid it.
It keeps you out of practice. This one is less obvious, but it matters. Talking about your work — clearly, comfortably, and with confidence — is a skill. And like any skill, it gets easier the more you do it. Becoming the go-to in your area means being able to describe what you do, what makes your approach different, and why it matters, without fumbling for words or second-guessing yourself. If you're only having those conversations occasionally, it’s always going to feel hard.
When you're reliant on referrals, every gap between clients feels a little precarious, and every conversation with a family feels like you need to prove yourself all over again. Of course this kind of marketing feels hard. But maybe that's only because you've had to do it under pressure, without practice, and without a frame for it that actually fits who you are.
So let's fix that.
A few ways to think about this differently
You don't need to take off your birth worker hat and put on a marketing hat. You don't need to set up a whole second job for yourself or become someone who's "good at social media."
What follows are a few reframes to give you some different ways of looking at the same act of sharing your work. See if one of these gives you permission you need to finally talk about your work more.
Low-lift: Marketing as documentation
Here, you're not performing. You're not promoting. You're writing down what you already know.
This could be the same things you explain in a consultation, the guidance you offer at a prenatal visit, or the reassurance you give at a postpartum check-in. Birth workers are walking around full of genuinely useful, grounded knowledge… and most of them are sharing it exclusively with the families they've already booked.
What if you just wrote some of it down where strangers could find it?
You don't have to be clever or original with this info. You don't have to come up with anything new. You just have to take what's already in your head and put it somewhere online with your name on it so that it can be found. That's documentation. It's not a performance. It's a record of what you know.
More intentional: Marketing as rehearsal
What if you approached every post as an opportunity to practice? Not practice for going viral or selling to strangers so they become clients but practice for the real conversations you have with all your clients. Think about the ones where a family reaches out, a little uncertain, a little hopeful, and you want to feel clear and grounded when you respond.
Becoming fluent in talking about your work doesn't happen by thinking about it. It happens by doing it repeatedly, in a low-stakes way, without the pressure of a live inquiry on the other end. Social media is actually a perfect place for this. Most of your audience isn’t watching that closely. You're largely just talking to yourself and the algorithm, and that's fine. The point isn't the audience. The point is that you get more comfortable every time you do it. Whether you write it, speak it, write the script and then speak it, it all does the same work for you: it allows you to practice promoting your work, your values, your services, and yourself.
I spent years experimenting with ways of talking about my postpartum doula work that I borrowed from someone else (mostly not postpartum doulas). Often, what I shared was too polished, too convincing, too not-me. It took a while to find language that fit, and I found it by writing a lot of things that didn't quite land. These days, when I share content online, I'm not performing. I'm just sharing my thoughts or continuing a conversation I've been having for a while. That came from practice.
Thinking proactively: Marketing as the waiting room
Your content isn't there to convince anyone of anything.
Your profile, your posts, or your blog can simply be a calm, helpful place with your name on it for the families who are already looking, already curious, already starting to wonder if they need support. They're Googling late at night. For better or worse they’re asking AI for advice. They're lurking in parenting communities. They're not ready to book yet, but they're paying attention.
Your marketing is just making sure there's a comfortable chair waiting for them when they arrive. You're not pushing anyone forward. You're just making sure they can find you, and that what they find feels like you. And when they’re ready to make a decision, they’ll remember the time they spent with your content.
Marketing as a service: Past you, doing your future clients a real favour
This is the one that changed everything for me.
Your marketing is care that travels ahead of you.
It's you, today, showing up for someone who will need you in six weeks, or three months, or maybe a year from now. That parent reading your post at 11pm, quietly wondering if they can afford a doula, trying to figure out if this is something their family actually needs — you're already there with them. Even though you're not online with them in the middle of the night, past-you left something for them to find.
And this changes the timeline completely.
When you plant something and it doesn't immediately produce results, that’s not fun. I know how discouraging it feels to watch a very clever post idea flop. But what if it was only today’s audience that didn’t need the info? The post you write this week might be the thing that helps someone trust you enough to reach out in the summer. The blog post you publish this month might sit quietly in a Google search result for two years, sending you the occasional perfect-fit client who feels like they already know you by the time they get in touch.
Viral content chases the immediate hit. Sustainable marketing that feels calm, consistent, and genuine, works more slowly and more reliably. Past-you is doing your future clients a genuine favor. And future-you will be grateful past-you showed up.
You might be thinking…
"But writing posts takes me forever."
It does at first, like anything new. But It gets faster. As a small business owner, you get to decide what's worth your time, and the more you treat online marketing as documentation or rehearsal rather than a creative performance, the less time you spend staring at a blank screen trying to be clever or get the words just right. You're just writing down what you already know. That gets easier every time.
"I don't have anything interesting or useful to say."
That's almost certainly self-doubt and comparisonitis talking, not reality. Your clients already find what you share valuable. You hear it from them almost every time you’re with them. If you're really stuck, borrow words from your website. Or something you explained to a family this week. You don't have to invent anything new. You just have to write it down somewhere it can be found.
"I still feel weird talking about myself."
Then don't. Don't talk about yourself at all.
Picture a real family. Think about something they need to hear. And write it down like you're leaving them helpful reminders or an encouraging note.
That's it. You're not the subject. They are. And the moment that clicks, it stops feeling like self-promotion and starts feeling like the work you already love doing, just extended a little further forward in time.
What becomes possible
When you let marketing be an extension of your care rather than a separate job performed by a different version of you, a few things quietly shift.
The guilt about not posting enough loses its grip. You stop waiting to feel ready. You stop needing every post to be a hit and start trusting that the steady accumulation of genuine, useful content is doing something even when you can't see it yet.
Over time, you become easier to find, easier to trust and easier to book. And it’s not because you finally cracked the algorithm but because future clients have been spending time with past-you, and they already feel like they know you before they ever reach out.
Grab the free guide to make your marketing feel lighter.
Ready to take the first step?
If this landed and you're ready to practice self promotion as an extension of your service, I made a tool to help you do that. The Calm Visibility System is a free framework that helps you map out exactly what to share so you're never staring at a blank screen wondering where to start.
