How to Get Clients Now: Building a Private Practice in Counseling

Summer Slowdown in your Therapy Practice? Send a newsletter!

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:56:00 +0000

When your telephone stops ringing, what do you do? Do you find yourself racing around trying to figure out how to get more clients? Or, do you review your past marketing skills and reevaluate your situation?

It's part of life as a therapist. Some weeks the telephone will ring often. Other times there is a drought. One great way to get your phone ringing again: Send out a newsletter.

Sending out a newsletter on a regular basis is a great opportunity to leave a lasting impression. The more people see your face and here about your work, the more comfortable they will feel with you. Also, newsletters are easy to pass along to friends and colleagues.

Sending your newsletter to past clients, current clients, and colleagues (with all of their permission, of course) can be a gentle reminder of your services offered.

While some therapists prefer print newsletters, email newsletters remove the expenses of printing and mailing. Go with your preference. You can use software or a newsletter service like ours to give your newsletter a custom look. For more on how our service works, click here . To see a sample and test out some of the many ways you can customize your email newsletter, visit our newsletter system for more information.

Networking Your Therapy Practice: Get Referrals and Build your client load

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:20:00 +0000

Learn how to get referrals and build your client load.

For only $9.99, you can get the networking e-book -- lowest-priced product we offer -- and one of the most useful. It includes specific strategies for building and maintaining a strong referral network of local professionals who are key in the lives of your ideal clients.

Visit our site for more information about get private practice referrals.

Market Therapy Practice Tip: Offer the right amount of information

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:12:00 +0000

Unlike in yellow pages or newspaper ads, there is no limit to the amount of information you can include on your web site, or even on a specific page. However, potential clients are not interested in reading a novel about you. They want to get the information necessary to choose a good therapist, and they want it quickly.

As a general rule, you should rarely offer more than four paragraphs on a single page, and you should aim for efficiency in the information you present. Using bold type, bullet lists, and other means of emphasis, you can put across a lot of information in a short span.

Efficiency in presenting information has a counter-intuitive effect -- it keeps visitors on your site longer. When information is presented well, potential clients actually take the time to read it.

For more on this, as well as 10 more tips for building a better therapy web site, visit our private practice building site at and download our FREE booklet.

Building your Practice: Get the most out of your money

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:51:00 +0000

Odds are, you were well-trained in a variety of therapeutic techniques and work with a wide variety of clients. If you were write a list of problems you have worked work with, the list would probably be quite long. This experience gives you a foundation of skills and flexibility to work from with new clients.

Many therapists make the mistake of trying to advertise every last one of those areas of experience. This is sometimes called "scatter-shot" marketing: When trying to connect with a specific target (that prospective client searching for a therapist), they advertise all at once for all of the possible issues the client may be seeking help with.

This kind of marketing is a common mistake, and does not work very well. Clients are skeptical when they see a therapist advertising a laundry list of "specialties," and will move on to someone who seems to be speaking to them more specifically.

You can hook more clients by narrowing in on a specific issue. If you genuinely have multiple specialties you enjoy working with, you are likely to find greater success -- and greater cost-effectiveness -- by marketing each specialty separately.

If you want to learn how to hook more clients and get referrals, for only $9.99 you can buy our e-book on Get more client referrals through networking.

Building Private Practice: Get Noticed....Go Green

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:48:00 +0000

Get noticed: Go green

Lots of therapists and other professionals send cards to clients and colleagues around the winter holidays. It's a great way to share good wishes at a very special time of year. Because everyone receives so many cards at that time, though, there's a chance yours may get lost in the shuffle.

To really get your clients' and colleagues' attention, send cards for other special occasions. St. Patrick's Day is a great example. How many greeting cards did you receive for St. Pat's? Probably none. But if you did, you'd be sure to open it and read it. And your memory for who sent it would probably be much better than your memory for who sent cards to you last December.

Speaking of going green, the environmental undertones of that slogan are not lost on us. We'll be talking more about reducing the environmental impact of a therapy practice in the months to come. If you have ideas to share that could help other therapists in this important endeavor, we'd love to share them! Drop us an email and your environmental tips could make it into our newsletter.

Visit our Therapy Marketing site for more tips and tools on building a private practice.

Posting your Resume: Should you do it?

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:18:00 +0000

It depends on what you're aiming for. If your site is designed to attract potential employers, then yes – make it available to them. A resume is also useful for communicating with other professionals (for example, if you offer consultation services.)

If you simply are wanting to let site visitors know that you have lots of professional experience, usually a paragraph or two of narrative on an "About Me" page is more effective.

Getting Started in Private Practice: It's like a Bike Ride

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:03:00 +0000

Imagine yourself at the top of a tall mountain with a beautiful view. The sky is clear, the wind blowing at your face. Nature surrounds you on all sides. Now imagine yourself on a mountain bike going down the steep, rocky, and narrow trails. Most people doing this ride for the first time are terrified of getting hurt or falling off the mountain, or anxious about the unknown length of the ride.

What happens for people who get afraid on this ride? Some freeze up and do nothing. Making no movement, they never build any forward momentum. Others walk the bike down, in fear of falling or getting hurt, and take a very long time to get down the mountain.

Then there are those who take the risk, hop on the bike, and carefully start to pedal. As they work their way down the mountain, they learn how to guide the bike, and quickly build their confidence. The learning isn’t as scary as they expected, and they enjoy a great view while working their way toward where they want to be. This is exactly what happens for therapists preparing to start their practice. What type of entrepreneur are you?

If you are ready to hop on your bike and carefully start to pedal down the private practice building journey, we are here to help. Click here to start your low cost website.

Banner blindness: On the web, simple is good

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:48:00 +0000

Several studies have shown that when people visit a web site in search of specific information, they look only in those places on the page where they assume that information will be. Typically, this means they look for specific keywords in the body text (this is why it's a good idea to highlight key words or phrases), and for specific links.

Banner ads are usually blocked out. As is everything else the brain deems less likely to hold relevant information. There's even a term for this pattern of visual information gathering on the web: "Banner blindness."

For this reason, we encourage you to think carefully before adding banners – or any other visual distractions – to your site. They are unlikely to be read, and may just make it harder for visitors to find what they're looking for.

If you are a psychotherapist looking to build a website, Therapy Marketing Associates provides web sites for only $99.00 per year. Take a test drive for one week and try out our low cost web site.

Keeping cash-pay clients in tough economic times

jestes@estestherapy.com (Jennine Estes - Marriage and Family Therapy) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:40:00 +0000

Recent, dramatic increases in the costs of gas and groceries have left many private practitioners with fewer clients who can afford to pay directly for services. Of course, it can help to offer payment options, such as reducing frequency of services, working on a sliding fee scale, or offering a payment plan. But in difficult economic times, how can you keep the flow of new cash-pay clients strong? Here are three things we have seen work:

- Change your strategy. This is less about what you change to, and more about being willing to try something different. If your old marketing strategies are starting to fall flat, then doing more of the same is not likely to work much better. Do you have a web site? Are you advertising on Google AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter? Are you marketing toward a specific group?

- Work your niche. If you focus your efforts on serving a specific population and then market directly to that population, you can increase your incoming clients while actually saving marketing money.

- Think about accepting insurance – or at least some insurance. Yes, we hate excessive paperwork as much as you do. But many insurance plans will pay a portion of your fees (clients just pay their co-pay) without requiring massive amounts of administrative time. Talk with other therapists to see which plans they would recommend accepting, and which they would not. (As a cautionary note, we suggest you avoid joining panels that charge you a fee to join.)

If you would like to learn how to build your therapy practice by referrals, click here to visit our ebook on networking for only $9.99.

Welcome!

ben@therapymarketing.net (Ben Caldwell, PsyD) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:51:00 +0000

This is the blog for Therapy Marketing Associates.