The Feedback Loop Problem: Why Coaches Keep Creating Content for Other Coaches
TL;DR: The feedback loop problem is that you create a coaching content echo chamber. This happens when coaches creating content for coaches becomes the default without anyone noticing. You post something about your niche. The first likes come from other coaches. Their engagement trains the algorithm to show your content to more coaches. So you write more of what got engagement, which is content that appeals to coaches. Months pass. Your audience is growing, the numbers look healthy, and almost none of it is the people you actually help. The loop is invisible because the metrics feel like progress. Likes, comments, shares, followers. All real. All from the wrong people. Breaking it requires understanding who’s actually in your audience, what language your real clients use, and why the content that performs best in coaching communities is almost never the content that converts clients. This article walks through how the loop forms, what it costs, and how to get out of it.
A post that did really well
About a year into building my audience, I wrote a post about audience research. Good post. Specific. Practical. It got more engagement than anything I’d published in months. Saves, shares, comments. I was buzzing. Felt like something had finally clicked.
Then I looked at who was engaging.
Coaches. Marketing consultants. Other people who sell to small business owners. Without realising it, I’d joined the ranks of coaches creating content for coaches. Every single comment was from someone who did roughly what I do. Not one response from the kind of person I actually built Pain Point Pulse for.
The post performed brilliantly by every metric I was tracking. It just performed for the wrong room.
That’s the feedback loop. And the reason it’s so dangerous is that it feels exactly like success. The numbers go up. The comments are warm. Everything tells you it’s working. Except for the one metric that actually matters, which is whether anyone in your audience has ever booked a session.
What coaches creating content for coaches actually looks like
The feedback loop doesn’t announce itself. It builds gradually, one post at a time, and by the time you notice it, the pattern is months deep.
It usually starts with a post that teaches something. Maybe it’s about growing on social media, or finding your niche, or structuring an offer. The people who find this most interesting are other coaches, because they’re working on the same problems. They like it. They comment. They share it to their stories.
The algorithm notices. This post got engagement from coaches, so the platform shows your next post to more coaches. You check your analytics. Reach is up. Engagement is up. You think: more of this.
So you write more of it. More posts about the craft of coaching. More takes on niching down, pricing, content creation. Each one gets engagement from people in the same industry. Each one trains the algorithm to find more of the same audience.
Six months later, your follower count has grown. Your engagement rate looks healthy. And your actual clients, the people who need coaching in your specific area, haven’t seen a single post. They’re not in the room you’ve accidentally built.
The metrics that mislead
The loop is sustained by metrics that look like growth but measure the wrong thing. A post that gets forty likes from fellow coaches is objectively better-performing than a post that gets four likes from potential clients. By every visible metric, the coaches-reaching-coaches content wins.
But those forty likes will never become a discovery call. And those four likes might have included someone who bookmarks your post, visits your website three weeks later, and books a session. You’d never know, because the number was too small to feel like it mattered.
This is why likes don’t become clients in most coaching businesses. The correlation between visible engagement and actual revenue is weaker than almost anyone wants to admit. And the feedback loop makes it weaker still, because it actively selects for the audience least likely to buy from you.
The language shift you don’t notice
There’s a subtler thing happening inside the loop, and it compounds the problem.
When your primary audience becomes other coaches, your language starts to drift. You begin using words like “conversion,” “offer suite,” “ideal client avatar,” “pain points.” Industry language. Language that makes perfect sense to the people engaging with your content and means absolutely nothing to the people you actually want to reach.
A sleep coach caught in the feedback loop starts writing about “building authority in the sleep niche” instead of “why you keep waking up at 3am.” A divorce coach starts posting about “client acquisition for sensitive niches” instead of “how to get through the first weekend alone.”
The language gap I wrote about in The Language Gap forms partly through expertise. But it also forms through audience. When you’re writing for coaches, you write in coach-language. When you’re writing for clients, you write in human-language. The feedback loop pulls you toward the first and away from the second, and the shift happens so gradually that you never feel it changing.
How the loop forms
The feedback loop has a clear anatomy. Understanding each stage makes it easier to spot.
Stage one: the helpful post
You share something genuinely useful about your coaching practice. How you structure sessions. A model you use with clients. An insight about your niche. It’s good content. It comes from real experience. The problem isn’t the content. The problem is who it’s useful to.
Stage two: coach engagement
Other coaches see it. They’re doing similar work. They find it interesting, because it’s about their industry. They engage. Comments like “This is so helpful!” and “Needed to hear this today.” Warm. Encouraging. Absolutely not from someone who needs your coaching.
Stage three: algorithmic reinforcement
The platform’s algorithm doesn’t know the difference between a fellow coach and a potential client. It sees engagement and serves your content to more of the same type of person. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. They all do this. The algorithm is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. It’s just optimising for the wrong outcome.
Stage four: content adaptation
You, consciously or not, start creating more of what worked. The posts that got engagement were about the business of coaching. So you write more about the business of coaching. Your content calendar fills up with takes on niching, posting schedules, pricing, client attraction. All of it aimed, implicitly, at coaches.
Stage five: audience lock-in
Your audience is now predominantly coaches and industry peers. Your content is calibrated for them. The algorithm is trained on them. A post aimed at actual clients, written in their language, about their problems, now underperforms by comparison, because the audience the platform shows it to doesn’t relate.
So you stop writing those posts. And the loop closes.
Why it’s so hard to see from the inside
The feedback loop is invisible for a specific reason: it looks and feels like doing well.
Your engagement goes up. Your follower count grows. People tag you in posts and share your content. You might even get podcast invitations or collaboration requests. All of it from coaches, but it doesn’t feel wrong. It feels like your content is finally landing.
I think this is the cruellest part. The loop doesn’t just waste your time. It gives you false confidence that you’re on the right track. You’re building an audience. You’re getting noticed. The only problem is that you’re building the wrong audience and getting noticed by the wrong people.
The pattern is almost identical to what happens when the wrong audience finds you. In that case, a piece of content reaches far beyond your niche and attracts people who’ll never buy. The feedback loop is the slow-motion version. Same outcome, different speed.
There’s also an emotional component that makes the loop sticky. Coaching can be isolating work. When other coaches engage with your content, it feels like community. Like being seen. Like belonging. Those feelings are real and they matter. But they’re not client acquisition. And mistaking one for the other is how the loop sustains itself.
The comparison trap runs deep here too. You see another coach with strong engagement and you think they’ve figured it out. What you don’t know is whether their engagement is coming from potential clients or from the same feedback loop you’re in. The metrics look identical from the outside. A post with fifty comments looks like success regardless of who’s commenting. So coaches watch each other, mimic each other’s approaches, and collectively reinforce a pattern where the entire coaching community is essentially performing for itself.
The real cost
I’ve spoken to coaches who spent two years growing an audience of twelve hundred people, almost entirely other coaches. Two years of consistent posting, genuine effort, real thought going into every piece of content. Zero clients from any of it.
The time cost is obvious. The financial cost, if you’ve been running ads to this audience, can run into thousands. But the thing that does the most damage is the story it writes in your head.
“I’ve been showing up consistently for two years and I have nothing to show for it.”
That sentence comes up in almost every conversation I have with coaches about content. And every time, the same thing is true: they’d been coaches creating content for coaches without realising it. They weren’t failing. They were succeeding at the wrong thing. Their content was working exactly as designed. It was just designed for the wrong audience, and the feedback loop made sure they never questioned who was actually in the room.
This is the same compounding loss I described in the Guessing Tax. Wasted time is the first cost. Eroded confidence is the second. Lost momentum is the third. And eventually, the conclusion that content marketing simply doesn’t work for you, which is the most expensive cost of all because it makes you stop trying.
There’s a financial dimension too, and it’s worth naming. If you’ve been running paid ads during the loop, you’ve been paying to reach other coaches. Facebook and Instagram ad targeting optimises based on your existing audience profile. If your organic audience is mostly coaches, your paid audience will skew the same way. I spoke to one coach who’d spent over two thousand pounds on Instagram ads across eighteen months. When she audited her followers, fewer than 15% matched the profile of someone who’d actually hire her. The rest were industry peers. The ad spend didn’t just reach the wrong people. It trained the algorithm to find more of them.
How to know if you’re in one
Before you can break the loop, you need to know it’s there. Here are five honest checks.
Look at your last twenty comments. Not the number. The names. How many are from potential clients in your niche versus coaches, VAs, social media managers, and other service providers? If more than half are industry peers, the loop is active.
Check your DMs. When was the last time a message came from someone describing a problem you help with, in their own words, not using coaching language? If you can’t remember, that’s data.
Audit your content topics. Look at your last month of posts. How many are about the experience of being a coach versus the experience of being someone who needs a coach? Posts about niching down, pricing, content creation, and building an online business are for coaches. Posts about sleepless nights, anxiety before a presentation, or not recognising yourself in the mirror are for clients.
Track discovery call sources. If you ask “how did you find me?” and the answer is never “I saw your post on Instagram,” your content isn’t reaching clients. It might be reaching plenty of people. Just not the ones who book calls. The referral sources tell you more than any analytics dashboard. If clients come through word of mouth or Google but never through your content, the content is serving a different audience to the one you’re selling to.
Test the language. Write one post using only the vocabulary your clients would use, the words from anonymous online forums, not the words from your coaching certification. See who responds. If the engagement drops but the enquiries don’t, you’ve been in a loop.
How to break it
Breaking the feedback loop isn’t complicated. But it does require deliberately choosing to create content that won’t perform as well by the metrics you’re used to watching.
Start from client language, not coach language
Every post should begin from a sentence your client would actually say. Not “how to find your ideal client.” That’s a coach’s problem. Something like “I keep posting and nobody responds and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” That’s a person’s problem.
The Weekend Audience Research Sprint is the fastest way to build a bank of these sentences. Two days of focused research gives you months of content starting points, all in language that actual clients recognise as their own experience.
Write about their problems, not your methods
Your method for transformation is interesting to other coaches. It’s invisible to clients. They don’t care about your methodology. They care about whether you understand what they’re going through.
“The three pillars of resilience coaching” is a coaches-reaching-coaches post. “Why everything feels harder than it should” is a clients-reaching-clients post. Both come from the same expertise. Only one reaches the people who need it.
Accept the engagement dip
When you pivot from coach-facing content to client-facing content, your engagement will drop. This is normal. It’s the loop unwinding. The coaches who were engaging with your previous content won’t relate to posts about your clients’ lived experience. That’s the point.
The dip is temporary, but it’s real, and it’s where most people lose their nerve and go back to posting what “works.” It helps to know it’s coming. Think of it this way: the engagement you’re losing was never going to become revenue. The engagement you’re building might be smaller, but it’s from people who could actually hire you. Five genuine responses from potential clients are worth more than fifty from fellow coaches. The maths only looks bad if you’re measuring the wrong column.
Talk about specific situations, not general wisdom
“Boundaries matter” is a coaching platitude that coaches share with other coaches. “My sister asked me to babysit again and I said yes even though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t” is a specific situation that a real person posted in a Reddit thread about people-pleasing.
The first version performs in coaching communities. The second version makes someone stop scrolling and think: how does this person know my life?
Specificity is the way out of the loop. General wisdom circulates among professionals. Specific situations connect with real people. A career coach who posts “How I helped a client negotiate a 30% raise” will attract other career coaches interested in the methodology. A career coach who posts “She’d been putting off asking for three years because the last time she brought up money, her manager changed the subject and she felt sick about it for a week” will attract the person sitting at their desk right now with the same knot in their stomach.
Use the invisible audience test
Before you publish anything, ask yourself: would the invisible audience find this? The people who need you most but will never comment, never share, never engage visibly. They’re lurking, reading, deciding whether to trust you based on whether your content sounds like someone who actually understands their life.
Those people will never contribute to your engagement metrics. But they’re the ones who bookmark your page, come back three weeks later, and book a discovery call. They’re the audience you actually need, and they’ll never find you if every post you write is aimed at the room full of coaches.
The deeper pattern
The feedback loop is really a symptom of something bigger. Coaches, especially early in their business, spend most of their time in coaching communities. Facebook groups, masterminds, course communities, industry podcasts. Their professional world is almost entirely populated by other coaches.
So when they sit down to create content, the audience in their head is the audience in their life. Other coaches. The content reflects that, the algorithm reinforces it, and the cycle of coaches creating content for coaches is born without anyone choosing it.
I wrote about this wider pattern in Premature Growth. Growing your audience before understanding it means every piece of growth effort pulls in the wrong direction. The feedback loop is the content-specific version of the same mistake: building visibility before building understanding.
The fix, in both cases, starts with research. Knowing who your actual audience is, what they say when you’re not in the room, and what language they use to describe the problem you solve. Once you have that, the loop can’t form, because your content is built from client data, not coach intuition.
Pain Point Pulse does this systematically. It pulls language from online sources where your actual audience talks honestly about their problems, and gives you the vocabulary your content should start from. Not coaching language. Client language. The words that make someone stop scrolling because they feel seen, not because they agree with your take on posting schedules.
But the tool isn’t the point. The point is the shift in attention. From your peers to your clients. From what performs to what actually connects with the people you want to help. From the room you’ve accidentally built to the one you actually need.
Frequently asked questions
Is some coach-to-coach content okay? Yes. Collaboration posts, industry commentary, and sharing your expertise with peers all have a place. The problem isn’t any single coach-facing post. It’s when coach-facing content becomes the dominant pattern and the algorithm locks it in. A good ratio is roughly one industry post for every four client-facing posts. Enough to maintain your professional network. Not enough to train the algorithm that coaches are your audience.
How long does it take to break out of a feedback loop? Most coaches see a shift within four to eight weeks of consistently posting client-language content. The engagement dip usually lasts two to three weeks. The algorithm needs time to recalibrate who it shows your content to. During that period, your metrics will look worse than before. That’s the loop releasing, not your content failing. The coaches who push through the dip consistently report that the new engagement, while smaller in volume, converts at a much higher rate. Stay with it.
What if all my engagement comes from coaches right now? That’s normal and fixable. It means your content has been optimised for the wrong audience, not that you’re incapable of reaching the right one. The audience you’ve built took months to accumulate through consistent posting. The new audience will take time too, but every post aimed at actual clients is a step in the right direction. Start with research. Spend a weekend in the audience research sprint and build a bank of client-language sentences. Then write five posts using only that language. See what shifts.
Can I lose my coaching network by stopping coach-facing content? Your genuine professional relationships won’t disappear because you stopped posting about how to grow on Instagram. The connections that only existed because of coach-facing content were never going to become referral sources anyway. Real professional relationships survive a content pivot. Surface-level engagement from strangers in the same industry doesn’t, and that’s fine. If anything, your real peers will respect the shift. They’re probably dealing with the same loop themselves.
How do I know if my content is reaching real potential clients? Track actions, not engagement. Website visits from social media. DMs asking about your services in non-coaching language. Discovery call bookings that reference a specific post. Email list growth from people who describe themselves as having the problem you solve, not the business you run. These signals are quieter than likes and comments, but they’re the ones that matter.
I don’t think most coaches end up in the feedback loop because they’re doing anything wrong. They’re doing something natural. Creating content, checking what works, doing more of it. Following the numbers. The platforms reward it. The marketing advice reinforces it. Post more, post consistently, watch the analytics. Nobody tells you to check who’s actually watching.
The problem is that “what works” and “what brings clients” are two different questions, and the metrics only answer the first one.
The loop breaks the moment you start answering the second.
Pat Kelman. Come and look at this.
Photo by Breno Cardoso on Pexels
