Diversifying Your Income as a Doula

Written by Meg Kant and the #bebobabes

Diversifying Your Income as a Doula

During our Choose You, For You week (Nov 14-18, 2022), we created a free session, facilitated by #bebobabes Bianca, Meg, Marissa, Amy and Michelle, that was all about diversifying your income and coming up with creative ways to generate doula income. This is an important skill to have, especially in the early days of your birth work business. Knowing how to generate income on a dime is vital and that will often require some creative thinking.

This session was created based on feedback from the community (that’s you!) and involved Q & A  and a massive brainstorming session.

Here’s some of the feedback we heard from our community members around what you needed from this session and why it would benefit you:

• Extra skills/tools to stand out from other birth workers
• Creating passive doula income 
• Concerns about viability of business 
• Concerns about the economy, feeling like one stream of income isn’t reliable. Multiple sources of doula income create security (multiple income sources can be especially helpful for folks with disabilities who can’t necessarily rely solely on physical forms of labor)
• To avoid burnout 
• To get safe housing 
• To be more fun 
• Travel
• Build up credit 

Income ideas as Doula

Below is a summary of some of the brilliant ideas that were generated during this session:

• Offer Equipment Rental: TENS machines, birthing pools – Buy a few and rent them out. ProTip: You will still need to offer a contract for these services!
• Writing: paid articles, blogs and vlogs, copywriting for others
• Paid speaking gigs, register on a speakers page for keynote talks or get a speaking agent
• Workshops, education, online classes – Base these from your most asked questions!
• Amazon Associates – you get paid every time someone clicks your links! #PassiveIncome
• Genius Links – same as above! This will help you make your Amazon links global. You do have to pay when folks click and it is only a percent of a cent. 
• Affiliate links (like bebo mia’s affiliate program) – You are selling products all the time anyway to your friends and family when you review your personal shopping experiences (ex. I got these awesome boots for my little on sale at Jane’s Shoes and the liners come out easily and are machine washable!’, you should at least make money from these efforts!
• Delivering nourishing meals to clients or for even less liability, do batch cooking in their kitchen with their ingredients! 
• Lactation cookies (frozen cookie dough)
• Infant feeding support
• Infant Massage
• Doula speed dating – Doulas pay while parents come for free. Have a clinic donate the space and they will get to talk about their services… it is a win, win, win and you keep the doula’s fees.
• Purchasing a franchise (example: Mommy Connections)
• Fertility doula (partnering with fertility clinics) – they rave about you, you get clients #TrustAndContinousCare
• Selling blood cord kits – You are meeting with the target market all the time! So be a rep for your local cord blood bank.
• Car seat installation – get certified and offer this as a bonus with your doula package!
• Birth Photography – Get a great camera, learn how to use it and take some awesome snaps that you can sell while you are there! You can use this as a pink spoon offer for your packages to help you stand out from the crowd
• EFT Practitioner
• Meditation Teacher
• Indoor cycling
• Personal Training – Take a pre & postnatal teachers training like this one
• Registered Massage Therapist – services that insurance covers are incredible for providing doula support because folks can claim portions or all of your package!
• Graphic design for other people’s brands – Good with Canva or Adobe? Help out other birth workers who need it!
• Curriculum building – Are you good at breaking down education into smaller bites? Were you a teacher? This is an awesome service to support folks in teaching their clients
• Arts & Crafts: quilting, knitting, cross-stitch – Make swag to sell, teach others how to do it, make gifts for clients so they will tell their friends about you! So many ways to integrate this!
• Consulting – have a skill from your life or pre-doula career? Help others with a B2C or B2B service!
• Partnerships with real estate agents or life insurance – new parents are moving to ‘get more space’… so go to the sources and create partnerships with realtors and property managers. Same for life insurance! 
• Sell RESPs – The younger the age of the child your clients buy shares, the better the price… soooo, how about getting them set up for their child’s education while you are there for care? Or use your awesome client list to springboard your new RESP biz.
• Instagram selling/TikTok UGC (user generated content) – lots of small and mid sized businesses will pay you to review products on social media! 
• Etsy – get a shop going with your homemade wares or products!
• adSense with Google – sell space on your website – you can decide what kind of ads you want. 
• Create coupon books where you sell ad space – live in a community where you know lots of folks, get a fun collaboration together where the local businesses buy ad space and offer coupons or free smaller items to get people in their front doors and you give the books to your clients!
• Digital magazine where you sell ad space
• Get a roommate – get creative with your high value items. This can also be a car share, appliance share, etc.
• Rent parts of your house for homebirths – make sure you have a contract and insurance 
• Starting a non-profit (this will require a ton of front end work, hiring a lawyer, etc.)

Pro tips:

• Consider all your experiences and skill sets and don’t be shy about venturing into other fields that aren’t necessarily or directly related to birth work
• For any new ventures, before committing to anything, be super clear on all expenses related to this income sources and how it all functions/what your responsibilities are
• Some of these suggestions will require additional training and credentials (coaching, nutritional guidance, massage therapy, etc.); remember all your skills and training and take advantage where you can
• While many ideas (Etsy, selling digital products, etc.) are presented as “passive income,” that’s rarely the case. These often require a lot of time and energy on the front end and do require maintenance along the way
• Keep your eye on the prize: remember that your main focus is birth work and that you will likely have the greatest impact here rather than doing 5-10 smaller income streams that bring in a bit of money
• Be smart and strategic

We hope that this information provides you with some creative and actionable ideas plus serves as an inspiration and motivation for how you can build some new income streams into your business. Feel free to drop in the comments below any additional income generating ideas you use and love!

Have you tried any of these options for diversifying your income? Do you have any additional ideas?  Share away in the comments, it might help someone else reading this! Check How Much Do Doulas Make?

Diversifying Your Income as a Doula

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Xoxo, the #bebobabes