| |
|
Remember
the investment of time, money and energy into your practice
is an investment you make in yourself for life.
Therapist Identity – how do you describe yourself,
how do you help, what does the client get?
Maintaining Vitality as a Therapist – how do you stay fresh and knowledgeable?
Maintain a High Standard of Service and Quality
Knowing the Business of Psychotherapy
Knowing the art of Psychotherapy
Develop your vision of what is needed.
Develop a marketing mindset; bring out that inner "mad men"
Stand out from the crowd
Place yourself in a learning environment, i.e. supervision, workshops, training programs.
Learn to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing and waiting. The energy you put out today may pay off in 6 months.
Maintain honesty and integrity in all your business practices.
Create a marketing plan that utilizes many resources: researchers concluded a message must penetrate the mind of a prospect a total of 9 times before that message is absorbed. The bad news is that for every 3 times you expose your prospect to your marketing message, it gets missed or ignored 2 of those 3 times. So you've got to get the message out 27 times to make the 9 marketing exposures.
Create a support system
|
|
|
|
|
Web
Presence:
In this day and age having a web presence is pretty important if you want to attract clients. Your potential client or referral source has an opportunity to start knowing you the minute they land on your website. All the more reason to make sure your site shows you in your best light.
Let me give a quick explanation:
Website: Is a collection of related pages of text, graphics, and
images, videos that rents space on the Internet. It can be as many
pages as you'd like. You can create web sites with places like therapysites.com
which charges $59 a month which comes to $708 a year and if you
want to move your site you lose your template since therapysites
owns it. You can have an independent web designer create the site,
which you wil own and can always move and change. You can download
free designs from places like nodethirtythree.com
which requests you give them credit on your site for use of
their free designs or create sites with http://www.wordpress.org
or other type programs, be careful that these sites still need to
be worked with so they look professional.
You can hire web designers that can charge anywhere from $500 -
$10,000 for your website. I have great designers that charge anywhere
from $500 - $1000, depending upon the amount of prep work you do.
Once the site is complete it usually costs around $100 a year for
web hosting.
Web Hosting:(wikipedia)
A web hosting service is like a landlord. You rent the space from
them to place your website on. Many sites offer extras beyond space,
they offer optimization, web design and advertising. The first thing
to look for is load time. Have you ever gone to website and it takes
forever to load, it sometimes has to do with how the pages are designed
and it can have to do with load time. I also look for how often
the server is down. Which means your web site would be down on the
internet. I have been using Blue Host, they offer unlimited pages,
The cost is about $100 per year and I have to say except for the
rare incident my site has not been down. They are upgrading their
systems often and improving quality
|
|
Here you can go to Blue Host and sign up. They will know the referral
came from my site and that helps me earn rewards, so I appreciate
it.
Blog pages: are generally
a page that holds an online diary. You can put one your website
or start one with any blog site, most search engines offer blogs.
Social Media sites, Directories:
these are all places where you can usually join for free and post
information about yourself online. I would use these sites to help
you improve your ranking with the search engines. Recently Facebook
and othe sites have become more business friendly. I am also following
many people on LinkedIn struggle with how to use Facebook and Twitter.
Search Engines: google,
yahoo, msn, bing, etc. these are the major search engines out there.
Having a web site is not enough you must have that site found by
people searching. The goal is to be on the first page of a search.
So for me, if you google Santa Monica psychotherapist my link is
on the first page below the paid for ads. You can pay for placement
or you can do what is called an organic search.. I spend very little
money on advertising my site and my placement is an organic one.
Search engine optimization:
This is a collection of tasks designed to create a good placement
(ranking) with the search engines. Like I said you can pay, any
of the search engines offer means of paid sponsorship (pay per click,
sponsored ads, advertising). Or you can create an organic
optimization without paid advertising on the search engines.
Newsletters
- are a great way to get your information out online. You will need
to start to collect email addresses and it helps if you have a website
with a sign up box, like I have here that offers something in return
for siging up. I have been using Constant Contact for sometime,
its easy and has been reliable. If you sign up through my link here,
than I receive credits and rewards, which I always appreciate.
|
|