Coach Leigh Ann Dickey

Coach Leigh Ann Dickey shares her passion for design & blogging, inspires others

Name: Leigh Ann Dickey

Occupation: registered respiration therapist, self-employed, website design

Education: associates degree in health sciences-respiratory therapy, certificate in health coaching from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition, Oct. 2014

Residence: Gainesville, Georgia

By Emma Palova

EW Emma’s Writings

Lowell, MI – Leigh Ann Dickey wanted to share her story of losing 35 pounds when she joined the nutrition school. Dickey started out with a page on facebook, Instagram and a blog on WordPress two years ago using tutorials and mentors.

“I developed a nice site,” she said.

Coach Leigh Ann Dickey loves helping people.

Dickey was offering a weight loss product. But when she sustained a head injury on her bicycle, Dickey took the site down.

Since she has always liked design Dickey wanted to master WordPress. She already had a great feather in her cap; 12 years of HTML coding. Dickey completely coded her animal charity site herself from the start.

She took a WordPress class to get up to speed in 2013 & 2014. Dickey joined the Learn to Blog in 2014, but found out that she already knew a lot of the stuff from the WordPress classes.

The biggest challenge of blogging for Dickey was targeting her niche.

“I felt tossed around,” Dickey said in a Skype interview last week. “I was posting and sharing trying to target my niche. I went all over the place.”

She tried health & fitness, business coaching and design. It wasn’t until recently she found that her real passion was teaching and coaching. So, Dickey launched her Soulpreneurs this week. Soulpreneurs is a membership site on the Genesis framework.

But, before that Dickey started a WordPress support group on facebook.

“It used to be enough to have a facebook page two years ago, but now you have to create a group,” she said.

Two years ago with a budget of $150, Dickey could increase traffic to her facebook page to 3,600.

However, two years in an online business is eternity.

“That was old school,” she laughed. “Start a facebook group not a page. Find like-minded people. Join other groups inside of facebook.”

Dickey offered a lot of advice for newbie bloggers. Number one on the advice list is determining your niche.

“It all starts with ourselves knowing what we enjoy doing,” she said, “And then turn that into business. People should ask themselves what is it that they enjoy doing all day long.”

According to Dickey, the advantages of realizing what you really like to do are the following:

You best will know a lot about it.
It will be easy to develop products and services around your niche or like.
Then you have to boil it all down to specific types that is; rather than pets narrow it down to dogs and then go further, different breeds and such.

In response to what she likes about blogging, Dickey was very spontaneous.

“I enjoy the process of creating that plays into my geeky side telling the story,” she said. “I enjoy helping people.”

Blogging was a life changing experience for Dickey who had suffered a head injury.

“Blogging helped me get past something and I relate that to overcoming obstacles in business and in life. It’s just human nature to get that feedback.”

The second part of Dickey’s story with more valuable advice will appear later this week. Stay tuned and feel free to comment with your advice.