Dr. Susan Giurleo is a psychologist and private practice consultant–the Biz-Savvy Therapist.  She talked to WTCI via email about what she does and how she does it.

What’s your background? What do you do now?

I am trained as a PhD counseling psychologist and focused my research around education and career development. Over time my interests shifted a bit to helping children with developmental issues such as ADHD, autism spectrum and learning disorders. I was a school psychologist for awhile, worked in a group practice and then got tired of working for others and went out on my own. The whole idea of starting a business was overwhelming and scary to me. I had no business background and neither did anyone in my immediate family. But I was motivated to learn because I wanted to create my ideal practice, utilizing evidence-based approaches to help kids and families in distress.

I spent a lot of time learning how business and health care work. Once I got the business fundamentals down, I started to learn how to market my practice. I quickly realized that marketing involves psychology at its core. The best marketing speaks to people’s needs in a way that allows them to understand products and services and make purchasing decisions.

Learning how to market my practice was fun and rewarding. And led me to where I am today.

Now, in addition to my private practice, I write my blog BizSavvyTherapist.com and provide business coaching and consultation to mental health professionals in private practice. My focus is on the marketing of small practices because I feel that is where people can do the work they love and make a very good living at the same time.

All of the business skills I talk about and teach are ethical and promote good mental health. I teach a strategy called “content marketing” (some call it ‘information marketing’). This approach combines valuable psychoeducation to the public,while at the same time promoting a practice and mental health services. Content marketing allows a practitioner to position herself as an expert or the “go to” person in her community for a specific treatment issue or condition. Based on solid, ethical content clients start to self-identify a fit between their needs and a specific practice or provider. At the same time referral sources such as physicians, lawyers and other professionals come to see the provider as a reliable source of information and quality care for their clients.

The BizSavvyTherapist allows me to combine my passions of promoting mental health, education and entrepreneurship. I feel that the more clinicians I can empower to have strong practices, the more people we can help and serve. It feels like a win-win–more clients, more healing and more income for providers.

How do you go about working with clients using content marketing?

My coaching process has evolved over the past few months.

Initially I ask my coaching clients lots of questions about their reasons for becoming a therapist,why they want to build a practice, what their ideal practice looks like and who they want to help.

To build an authentic practice each one of us needs to know our “why.”  Why do what you do? Who do you help others? What drives your decision to work for yourself?

The truth is, it’s not easy to be a small business owner. Yet, so many therapists start their graduate training with this goal in mind, but graduate with no idea how to go about the process of making money in a helping profession. So, we need to get at the heart of our motivations to be in the business of helping.

Once there is clarity on the why, we then explore how that translates into a profitable business. From my client’s core passions and interests we develop a focus, or a specialty from which they can build an authentic, rewarding business. We generate a business plan that incorporates a balance between their business and the lifestyle they desire. I call this “career/life balance.”

Once this base business plan is in place, I can teach and advise how to do the “nuts and bolts” work of building a website/blog, provide services that clients want and will pay for, and multiple income streams and marketing.

Ultimately, the goal is for therapists to have a solid business that helps people with specific needs and generates a good profit.

In this way, helping professionals can do the work they love and get paid well. It’s not hard to do once people are very clear on their motivations and goals.

What are the basic marketing lessons that apply to therapists?

The cornerstone of any success business requires that we offer something specific that solves a problem or addresses a pain point for people. By default, therapists are trained to help people in pain, but we are rarely specific enough about this.

Human beings naturally categorize things, ideas and people. We are hard wired to sort out “what’s in it for me?” Therefore, we pay close attention to the details of a business or service offering. We are willing to invest our resources (time, money, energy) into something that looks like a good fit for our needs.

This means that therapists need to become more specialized and demonstrate an expertise in one treatment area. People don’t work with generalists. They want providers that can meet their specific needs.

Without a focused specialization, all marketing efforts are wasted. No one can successfully market “therapy.” First of all, how do you define that well enough so people see that they need it? And, let’s face it, no one will trust someone who says “I can help you with any problem you may have.” Would you trust a physician who says they can treat any ailment from cancer to schizophrenia? Of course not. So the first basic marketing lesson is to develop a specialty.

After deciding on a focus for your practice, the next step is to develop a marketing “home” where all of your marketing activity comes together. I always suggest this be a website built on a blog platform (WordPress is my preference). Having a robust web presence allows people to access your information 24/7 and eliminates any need for brochures since the website has all the information people will need.

The website becomes the place where you provide information about your specialty, articles that are informational and helpful to clients (and potential clients). You can list services, products, free newsletters, etc. Once these basics are in place you then branch out into social media using Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic back to your site. It really can be quite elegant and efficient once you get a good basic online structure set up.

And the third marketing tip: show yourself online. Put a picture of yourself on your webpage, get rid of those pictures of sunsets, beaches and drops of water (they don’t mean anything to people). When you engage in social media, always have a picture of yourself associated with the account (whether it be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or another networking site). Therapists are essentially marketing themselves. We don’t have a product. If you won’t show your face online, people will not trust you. Our culture increasingly expects to see faces of others online. The internet is the new community center. I know many therapists are uncomfortable with the concept,but we can’t change cultural shifts. If you want to engage in a marketing plan, be ready to show yourself. Nobody will every visit with an anonymous therapist.

Are there marketing ideas that don’t fit for this profession?

The one things many marketers recommend that therapists can’t use is testimonials.

Ethically, we can’t ask clients to give us feedback that we then share with others.
Sometimes business minded clients will offer a testimonial, but I recommend a policy of not using them because our ethics codes are clear that testimonials can be a place of misused power differential. That really is the only area where we need to adjust our marketing efforts.

However, I also want to say that I hear a lot of talk in professional circles about how therapists should not use social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) but that is incorrect advice. There are many ways we can use these platforms ethically and safely to promote mental health and to market our practices. As long as the information shared is factual and never references real client stories or situations, social media is a powerful tool. There is a lot of debate about this, but many of the people engaged in these discussions don’t seem to really understand the flexibility in these platforms. It is absolutely possible to have an ethical social media presence. I recommend therapists learn how to use Facebook and Twitter with their “professional” hat on, rather than approach it as they would as a private person.

I talk about ways to use social media on my blog.

Any final words of wisdom for people building a private practice…?

Start with one thing. Take one action. That could be meeting with a professional colleague for lunch or coffee, writing an article for a local publication (online or off line), heading over to WordPress.org and starting a blog. The process of building and marketing a practice can seem overwhelming, but when we break it down into steps and stick with it, a lot of progress can be made in a short period of time.

I wish every one the best in their practice building efforts!

Find Susan Giurleo, PhD on the web at BizSavvyTherapist.com, ChildDevelopmentPartners.com, and on twitter: @susangiurleo.

Marketing may be the most hated word in private practice. Most of my clients tell me that they can’t stand marketing their practices. For them, any marketing is synonymous with push marketing — shameless advertising, overpromising, promoting, or seducing — the direct opposite of the healing relationships they are trying to build. They don’t want any part of it.

But you can leverage your marketing efforts (leverage = learning to do a lot with a little) by applying two steps:

1) Find the need in the market
2) Stay within your comfort zone.

The “here’s how” is on her site.

Much of the popular wisdom about how to succeed as an independent professional seems to center around saying yes…

Here are six examples of situations where you may want to consider saying no:

1. New clients who don’t fit into your niche.

2. Networking with people who have no connection to your niche.

3. Clients who take more effort to pursue than their business is worth.

4. People and organizations who ask for your time but do nothing for you.

5. Ads, promotional schemes, and exhibit space that don’t fit your budget.

6. Flavor-of-the-month marketing approaches.

Details/explanation at Get Clients Now.

David P. Diana (interviewed in WTCI here) has just released a new book,

Preface

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
— Viktor E. Frankl (1984)

A career in mental health is rewarding and challenging, inspiring and at times discouraging, open and yet surprisingly restrictive. These dichotomies define the core of a life spent in service of the psychological and emotional well-being of others.

Since I began my mental health career in 1994 I’ve heard much talk about the sacrifices one makes when choosing the life of a behavioral health care provider. It is a noble endeavor indeed! However, this book is not about burdens and sacrifice. It’s about innovation, opportunity, and abundance. It is also about change and about breaking free in a profession where few see how this can possibly be done.

This book honors the caretaker in you while giving equal importance to your own well-being. A career in the behavioral sciences offers a vast reservoir of opportunity, more so than at any other time in our profession’s history. But those opportunities are sometimes diffi cult to see and hear. This book is about those untapped opportunities.

The history of our profession reveals a discipline that, since its inception, has challenged the status quo in pursuit of truth and understanding. Innovation, curiosity, a sense of wonder and growth were all bedrock principles.

But what are we to make of the mental health profession today? Are we living those bedrock principles? Are they available to us?

The material presented here will teach you how to combine your understanding of human behavior with innovative business ideas, thereby giving you the best of both worlds: fi nancial success and the ability to do what you love.

Learn from the disciplines of sales, marketing, and business development, and you will bring about new levels of success no matter what your interests or what role you choose to play in the field.

The new rules in today ’ s economy are important not only for big business but for professionals in all walks of life including behavioral health care.

In a dynamic world, we know all too well that change is a constant. The question is never about deciding whether to change. The question is about what kind of change is needed.

I am taking you on a journey into new opportunity within the profession. It’s a story about you. It ’ s a story about the possibilities available to you.

And it is well worth the effort.

Purchase Marketing for the Mental Health Professional at the WTCI Bookstore.  Find David P. Diana online at davidpdiana.com.

1. Relying on email and website traffic alone to promote your business.

2. Counting on your reputation and personal charisma to convince people to do business with you.

3. Promoting your own free workshops or teleclasses instead of guest speaking for others.

4. Spending unbudgeted amounts on promotional opportunities.

5. Maintaining multiple websites, ezines, blogs, or social networking identities with different themes.

Details on her site.

Getting Listed in Local Business Search Results duration: 15:15

There are over half a billion searches for local businesses (including therapists) in Google each month. In this webinar, you will learn the essential skill of listing your therapy practice website on the Google Local Business Center so that you can be found. We also teach you how to list your website in the Yahoo and Bing Local Business Centers, as well as show you a tool for easily verifying your listings in the local business centers.

Submit My Practice Website to the Search Engines duration: 6:03

Learn the important skill of submitting your therapy practice website to Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Best Practices for Emailing Prospective Clients duration: 7:17

Every day, prospective clients are emailing therapists for a potential initial session. Do you know what the best practices for responding to these emails are? Learn how to effectively respond to emails from prospective clients so that you increase the probability that they become a client.

Also, posted previously, and full of very useful tips:

Search Engine Optimization for Therapists duration: 42:43

In this webinar, you will learn how the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization for your therapy practice website. Topics include: How Search Engines work, how to do keyword research, which keywords to use on your website, where should the keywords go, linking, social media and much more.

The upshot:  Just having a website isn’t necessarily going to bring you clients.  There are ways to build a site and ways to promote it so it gets seen.  (If all of this is Greek to you (and you don’t speak Greek), you can always try WTCI Web for inexpensive/effective/friendly help.)

12:00-1:00PM EST – Dr. Susan Giurleo, Biz Savvy Therapist
Topic: “First Steps to Building Your Innovative, Powerful, Profitable Practice”

1:30PM-2:30PM EST – DeeAnna Merz Nagel, OnlineTherapyInstitute.com
Topic: “Text-based Therapy: An Introduction to Email and Chat”

3:00-4:00PM EST – SCHEDULE CHANGE Brian Whetten, Selling By Giving
Topic: “The One Challenge You Have to Address if You Want to Build a
Six Figure Practice from a Place of Love and Service”

4:30-5:00PM EST – BONUS CALL with Laura Dessauer, Business Success for Therapists
Topic: “Want to Know the Top 5 Mistakes Therapists Make in Building Their Practice?”

Marina London, LCSW writes about social media at iWebU and helps people with it at emphasisweb.com.  She talked to

What’s your background? What do you do now?

I started off my career somewhat conventionally. BA in psychology from Yale University, MS in Social Work form Columbia University, psychiatric social worker at New York Hospital, private practice and then a 15 year career as an Employee Assistance Program executive. Started of as Clinical Director for a national EAP ended up as a VP of Operations for another one.

I was an early technology adopter from the get go and was in charge of IT at many of the EAPs I worked for being that rare bird – a clinician who understood computers. Since 2005 I have been the Web Editor for the Employee Assistance Professionals Association. Since 2008 I have been training clinicians on how to understand and use social media to grow their private practices. I have presented at numerous local, national and international conferences on this topic. My next major gig is an all day workshop at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in March 2010.

I write an award winning blog http://iwebu.blogspot.com and my Twitter is twitter.com/iwebu. I continue to maintain a rather peculiar skill set (for a social worker) which includes HTML coding, web site design and content writing, as well as other assorted geekery.

What do you see as the most important steps non-tech-savvy clinicians can take to help build their practices?

Step one is to do a ruthless inventory of your skills and your available time, as this will inform your level of involvement. If you don’t have the requisite skills, hire someone to teach you or do it for you. For example, if you only have 15 minutes a week to devote to social media, and find writing to be an excruciating process, don’t blog.

The second step is probably still to have a well designed and well written website. It does not have to be big or full of bells and whistles but it should state clearly:

· Your credentials
· Your areas of specialization
· What is unique about you as a practitioner
· Your publications and presentations if applicable (articles you have authored, speaking engagements)
· How to contact you
· How to find you (e.g. directions to your office)

The third step is to get involved in social media. This can be overwhelming because there are literally dozens upon dozens of social media “channels”, from Ning to Facebook, from LinkedIn to Twitter, from blogging to less known ones like BlogTalkRadio. The important thing to remember is that there are three levels of involvement in social media, from observer, to commentator, to content producer. So let’s say you are a good writer and have something to say and you are thinking about blogging. Step one: read blogs. Step two: read and write comments on other people’s blogs. Step three: write your own blog.

What are the most common tech missteps you see?

On the web site side of things, I still see a lot of poorly written, unprofessional looking sites with bad photography. Clinicians should hire professional photographers – especially for that all important head shot, retain a copywriter if they can’t write web copy, and hire a designer to ensure a professional look. It’s not that expensive and it’s worth it.

On the social media side, I see a lot of clinicians who jump to step three as stated above and then call me in a panic. For example, they launch a Twitter account, tweet once and then have no clue what to do next. Using social media to build a practice is completely different than doing it purely for social purposes. So before setting up a Twitter account, it is important for professionals to follow other clinicians on Twitter, direct message them and articulate a set of goals for the tweets, for example “I want to become recognized as an expert on EMDR for adolescents.” The tweets should be focused around that goal, and you should follow people on Twitter in a purposeful manner. Who can help you further that aim?

If you’ve done all of the above, how will you know it’s working?

Well with respect to the website you may not. Sure you can do (or have someone do for you) some Search Engine Optimization stuff and some Google Analytics to see how many people visit your site. Reality – as one of my favorite new media experts has said – “Having a website is like having a billboard in the desert.”  In other words, unless you actively drive people to your site using other forms of social media, that’s not how you are going to build your practice. You need a website because pretty soon the phone book is going to be totally obsolete and plus, having a website gives you gravitas.

With respect to social media, you have better indicators. How many followers do you have on Twitter? How many people subscribe to your blog? But it is not just about the numbers. It can be about quality. Any day I would prefer to have 10 serious and well connected new followers on Twitter rather than 100 people who absent mindedly clicked “follow.” Clinicians need to remember – you are not Ashton Kutcher trying to hit 1 million followers on Twitter. You are trying to get relevant colleagues to refer to you, new clients for your practice, a booking to speak in front of the local PTA, etc.

Forget about complex analytics, a simple question to new clients, “How did you hear about my practice?” will tell you a lot.

Any other words of wisdom you’d like to add…?

If clinicians are serious about using new media to promote their practice, they might be interested in a concept that I developed called the “Social Media Marketing Triangle.”

I had the idea after I heard my contractor talking about the “kitchen work triangle” as he attempted to remodel my “vintage” kitchen into something more 21st century. He kept harping about the need to have an invisible “work triangle” created by the arrangement of the sink, the stove and the refrigerator. It seems that the placement of these three elements in relation to each other is intrinsically connected to designing an efficient kitchen.

It got me thinking – maybe the key to promoting a professional practice on the web is an invisible “triangle” that you create on the Internet by cross referring between at least three web platforms.

Take, for example, your website, your Facebook page and your Twitter account. What if the strategic placement of any three social media elements in relation to one another is fundamentally connected to successfully marketing your practice on the Internet? So, your website refers to your blog, your blog refers to Twitter, your Twitter account refers back to your website.

In any event, a website and two other social media outlets is about the max that most people can handle and do a good job with. Though I professionally use and lecture about many social media channels, I personally only use two to promote my work.

For more information on how you can use social media and other technologies to grow your practice, read my weekly “web secret” at http://iwebu.blogspot.com. For daily secrets on all matters web for the non-geeky clinician, follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/IWEBU.

Four Switches to Make to Get a Cash Based Practice

Deah Curry, PhD

Switch #1 ~ Speak Marketing

Most health care practitioners speak clinician-ese. This doesn’t connect with people who are seeking help, and may in fact be intimidating to them, creating a counterproductive barrier that actually drives them away. To attract a cash paying clientele you must learn to speak the language of marketing.

• Talk directly to an ideal client type. Use second person tense.
• Talk about them, not about you.
• Save all information about your credentials for your About Me website page.
• Talk about their negative experience of their problem, using phrasing they would use.
• Talk about the outcome they want from you, using phrasing they would use.
• Talk about these things in the emotional language of a 5-7 year old.
• Use direct, concrete, specific descriptions of what their suffering does and/or prevents.
• Use direct, concrete, specific descriptions of the results they are desperate for, and will pay for.

Switch #2 ~ Niche Yourself

Niche marketing is NOT the same as limiting the scope of your practice. It will not prevent people outside your niche from wanting to work with you. This is one of the most difficult concepts for clinicians to understand, and one of the most crucial mindset switches you must make. Niche marketing is only about putting a bright spotlight on you. It is not about how you practice or who you accept as a client.

Niche marketing positions you as a specialist or expert. Marketing psychology shows that people naturally make the intuitive leap from understanding that you excel at a particular problem, to assuming that you must also be good at other problems. To establish your niche you must:

• Focus on one ideal client type in clear, concrete, specific language.
• Decide what problem they have, and describe it in clear, concrete, specific language.
• Make that “problem” what you most enjoy helping solve, heal, or change.
• Be confident about the outcome you can help people achieve, in clear, concrete, specific language.
• Exude trust and rapport in all marketing efforts.
• Resist watering down your niche with too many variations and options.
• Be focused and consistent in marketing to your niche in multiple venues.
• Plan multiple ways to market to your niche (see reverse for some ideas).
• Continually refine your language to make it even more specific and emotion-connecting.
• Give your marketing efforts enough time to bear fruit – usually 6-12 months.

Switch #3 ~ Be Persistent

Marketing is an ongoing endeavor. It is a necessary part of running a successful business. Just like bookkeeping, marketing needs to be done on a continual basis. Having a marketing plan helps you be focused and consistent in your efforts, rather than hit and miss. Working your plan ensures that your efforts are timely in connecting with the felt-need of your ideal clients, and also guarantees that you don’t miss advertising deadlines. When you don’t have a plan, or aren’t continually working your plan, it’s difficult to establish a steady stream of cash-paying clients. Persistence in niche marketing might include:

• Contracting to run advertising for 6-12 months in monthly publications.
• Running advertising for 9-16 weeks in weekly publications.
• Having a signature talk and presenting it where your ideal clients go for information.
• Having a website with a well maintained blog.
• Producing a patient education ezine on a monthly or quarterly basis.
• Networking with potential referral sources, such as doctors and other allied professionals.
• Getting hard copies of your ezine on display in others’ offices.
• Teaching a community education workshop on a regular basis.
• Keeping track of what type of marketing works well for you and do more of that.
• Keeping track of how your competition does their marketing and learn from that.
• Keeping track of what type of marketing does not feel natural or energizing for you, and stop that.
• Making appointments with yourself to work on your marketing plan, and keeping them.
• Using half a day a week for marketing when you have all the clients you want.
• Using 2 hours a day for marketing until you have all the clients you want.

Switch #4 ~ Invest in a Sticky Website

A sticky website not only makes visitors want to stay and read more, but return time and again because there is so much of value, or because there is new information posted on a frequent (meaning, weekly) basis. Research shows that when a website isn’t sticky, visitors click away within 3-10 seconds. You have only that long to connect, establish rapport, and stimulate the desire to know more.

Research also shows that 98 million adults use the internet to search for health care services each year. NAMI reports that mental health sites are one of the top 5 searched for sites. That’s good and bad news – good because it makes the relatively inexpensive venture of having a website a good investment, but bad in that your competition likely has one too. There’s more pressure than ever to make your website really do its job for you in terms of attracting potential clients and converting them to appointment-makers.

Website Do’s

• Speak marketing (see Switch #1).

• Speak to your niche (see Switch #2).

• Engage visitors with something interactive (leaving blog comments, ezine sign up, take a quiz, etc).

• Give away free tips in exchange for getting their email address (creates a pool of prospects).

• Repeatedly insert a call to action (a suggestion to call for an appointment).

Website Don’ts

• Link to others’ websites – it encourages people to wander off and not call for appointment.

• Extol your own virtues except on your bio page – exception: do say I can help.

• Write in the third person as if you are writing a book report in high school — it’s cold and impersonal.

• Use professional jargon – it’s confusing, meaningless, distancing, and intimidating.

Find Deah Curry online at thenohypementor.com and on the No Hype Marketing Mentor Blog.