Want to jump start your online private practice by using a great domain name? I am selling www.onlineprivatepractice.com.  I secured it some time ago but my career path has moved in other directions.

Buying is easy and secure. You can make an instant Certified Offer from Network Solutions to buy it. Certified Offers allows you to remain anonymous, and Network Solutions supervises the entire transaction from presenting the offer, transferring the domain into the Buyer’s account, and payment to the Seller.

Just go to http://www.networksolutions.com enter the domain name in the search box, click “search,” then on the results page, click on “make a certified offer.”

BONUS: You get 5 months free before you need to renew!

I‘ve rearranged my schedule to make time for you.  Let me help you develop a strong web presence.  For not a lot of money, I can help you get an appealing and effective website launched, integrate it with social media (twitter and facebook), help you get promoted and listed, and otherwise assist your arrival here in the future.

I’ve got several sites under my belt with a variety of looks and purposes.  Where the Client Is (this private practice blogzine); Social Work Test Prep (exam preparation); Will Baum, LCSW (private practice).

Yours next?

I’m portfolio building, so prices are very reasonable.  Please write me with questions, to discuss, and to otherwise get started:  wheretheclientis@gmail.com.

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.)

Hoot Suite:  Lets you manage multiple social networking site accounts by jumping between tabs–no more signing in and out.  Works with facebook, twitter, etc.  There also appears to be a post scheduling feature (“Pending Tweets”), allowing you to type out tweets that Hoot Suite will post at a future time.

SocialOomph: Does tweet scheduling and much more. Especially handy, SocialOomph provides an automatic direct message greeting to people who add you on twitter.  That’s where those “Thanks for the follow” DMs come from.

Twitterfeed: Automates posting to twitter from your blog (and from others, if you like).  The “Someone’s Blogging” posts on @wherethclientis come courtesy of twitterfeed.  The newer @psychfeed is almost completely twitterfeed based, posting updates from Psychology Today, PsychCentral, New York Times Mental Health stories…and, of course, Where the Client Is.  Uses RSS feeds–the thing you get to by clicking on that orange button (right hand sidebar here).

There are many more apps where these came from.  Try ‘em out, play around, see what you think, and let us know.

Here’s a nice, shiny, new avenue to help promote your practice:  YourTango.com ProConnect.  The site is offering nine months free for new clinician sign-ups this month.  Melanie Gorman, the company’s Director of Marketing & Business Development explains:

Each relationship expert who lists on ProConnect receives a 3-6 page website that details their professional bio, contact information, services offered and more. Professionals are able to directly access potential clients and make a name for themselves within the YourTango community by posting content and answering questions from our readers.

My hope is that lots of Pros will take advantage of the free offer because for so many, marketing is a barrier to a successful practice. A smart marketing package holds so many different components and that’s the beauty of ProConnect, it’s one site that covers all of the most important bases and it’s easy for anyone to use. What better time to do something like this than when it’s free? Not to mention it will give a great depth to our list of Pros and that will allow our audience find the exact person they need to work with.

Here’s the press release regarding the free offer:

YourTango.com, the premiere women’s website for relationship advice with over 1 million readers each month, proudly announces the beta launch of its latest channel, ProConnect.

ProConnect (as the name implies) is a unique service integrated within the YourTango community designed to connect relationship and dating professionals with readers who are seeking advice. ProConnect is seeking professionals like therapists & counselors, relationship/dating/life coaches and educators, faith-based professionals, matchmakers and more to participate in ProConnect for absolutely no cost for 9-months.

Throughout January 2010, Up till Valentine’s Day, 2010, professionals who list on ProConnect will receive a 9-month membership absolutely FREE.

If you are looking for an innovative, inexpensive and quick ways to market your practice, then we want to you to join our team.

Here’s what ProConnect will do for you:

• Establish or expand your online web presence—with countless people using search engines like Google to find information, being on the web is imperative to your success!
• Generate interest in the your activities and workshops to increase your client base
• Help improve the power of your name and brand by promoting your services to our vast community.
• Complement other directory listings you’re already paying for to boost your existing marketing efforts

Additionally, this free offer includes:

• A 6-page website designed to highlight the Pro’s practice & services
• Services to generate new client leads by:
  • Submitting articles for publication on YourTango & partner sites –reaching not just YourTango’s 1mm+ readers, but millions more through our content partnerships with sites like Yahoo, MSN, AOL and many more.
  • Answering reader’s ‘Free consultation’ questions
  • Participating in the Ask YourTango community – to establish your expertise among our readers who are looking for advice
  • Commenting on content and sharing professional opinions
  • Becoming a part of our network of Pros we look to for expert opinions and comments when requested for by larger media outlets
• Promoting events & workshops
• Selling their products available via Amazon.com
• Education, advice and tips on how to market your practice ethically on the web

No credit card or payment required; this is a 100% legitimately free offer

All the details on this exciting offer are available at:

http://www.yourtango.com/proconnect/freeoffer

http://www.yourtango.com/proconnect/sneakpeek

Receive a free ProConnect membership in 3 easy steps!

1. Click http://www.yourtango.com/proconnect/join?m=2
2. Choose “Advanced Membership”
3. Enter Coupon Code = FREEPRO

For additional questions or help, contact ProConnect customer service:

Email: pchelp@yourtango.com; Phone: 410-923-6905 or 321-459-1399

It is possible to maintain good boundaries on Facebook, if you follow four simple rules:

1) Go to Privacy Settings and review every item carefully. Facebook now provides 17 variables you can set.

2) Segment your list of friends into Personal, Family, and Business acquaintances. This way, you can post things that pertain to each group, and reduce the amount of irrelevant posts the other groups see.

3) Don’t accept a friend request unless you know the person.

4) If friends’ posts are too frequent, boring, annoying or upsetting to you in any way, you can “defriend” them, and they’ll be gone from your Facebook experience. If for some reason you want to keep them on your Friend list but can’t stomach their chatter, you can hide their posts.

The rest of the article is here.

Corey Quinn is founder of WTCI affliate MyTherapistMatch.com, a service that matches clients and therapists based upon results of a personality-traits survey. He talked to WTCI via email about why he started the company and how it does what it does.

MyTherapistMatch.com is offering one month free to WTCI readers. Sign up using coupon code 204.

What’s your background?

I was born and raised as an only child in an entrepreneurial family here in Los Angeles. After graduating college, I started up an Internet company in 1999, where we raised $6 million in seed funding. The company streamed live events on the web (webcasting) and unfortunately took a hit in the bubble burst of 2000/2001. After that, I went into financial services and eventually made my way back to school to get my MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from the Marshall School of Business at USC. Just before entering business school, I went back into the internet industry, where I’ve been ever since.

Currently, I am the founder and CEO of MyTherapistMatch.com. MyTherapistMatch.com is a website that matches individuals with therapists based on compatibility.

What made you start MyTherapistMatch.com?

When my parents decided to get a divorce, they put me in therapy. I was 12 years old. My first experiences with being in therapy were positive. My therapist Jackie and I played games, ate candy and just kind of hung out. Her low key approach to therapy worked for me, and as we became friends, I began to open up to her. She was my ally and helped me successfully deal with the range of emotions I was experiencing though the divorce.

Several years later, when I was in high school I wanted to speak with another therapist about typical “growing up” type issues. I began having sessions with Cathy, the school counselor. Cathy was amazing – I felt like she and I were able to talk and relate on a deep level. I felt like she could really understand me – more than anyone else ever could. The work that she and I did fundamentally transformed and improved my life in amazing ways. Looking back, I am so grateful for her and our therapy sessions.

That was the last time that therapy was amazing for me until recently (I am 35 years old). I had a series of mildly disappointing experiences while seeking therapy after high school. Each time, I would go to a website to find a therapist (such as an insurance website, therapist finder directory, etc.) and would find a couple of therapists that seemed to have the right experience, areas of focus, etc., call them and set up initial appointments.

My hope was that I would find another Jackie or Cathy, but what I found were therapists who were not quite what I had previously experienced. All were licensed, competent and well intentioned, but there wasn’t that connection, I didn’t feel that powerful chemistry that was the important ingredient in the transformational process.

Instead of continuing to shop around to find the “right” therapist, I would decide to stay with a good, but not great (for me) therapist – more out of convenience than anything else. I was not in the mood to interview a large number of therapists to find the right one. I was ready to begin the therapeutic process – to start the work. I would come to find that the outcome of these therapy sessions was positive but it was not the transformational experience I was hoping for.

At the end of one not so satisfying therapy session, I thought to myself – “there has got to be a better way to find a ‘good’ therapist.” Good meaning one that I can really feel connected to and trust at a deep level.

I spent some time thinking about different ways to solve this puzzle, and it hit me – take an eHarmony style compatibility approach and apply it to the finding a therapist process. While the client/therapist relationship is not romantic in nature, the requirement for interpersonal trust and rapport does apply. This was the genesis for MyTherapistMatch.com

What do you do now?

As the founder and CEO of MyTherapistMatch.com, I spend much of my time improving the visibility of the MyTherapistMatch.com site to individuals who are actively seeking a therapist. Finding the right therapist is the most important decision in therapy, and by using MyTherapistMatch.com, individuals looking for a therapist can dramatically reduce the amount of time and improve the probability of finding a compatible therapist. In our first month (we launched in November 2009), we had two times the number of people complete our compatibility survey than we had therapists on our site. We are growing in January and look forward to a great 2010.

How’d you come up with the criteria? Why, for instance, “preferred orientation in time”?

My co-founder and I created the matching survey and algorithm. We base the matching criteria found in our survey and algorithm on our understanding of interpersonal rapport. Dr. Robert Dee McDonald, co-founder of MyTherapistMatch.com, is a therapist who has taught interpersonal communication skills in 18 countries to thousands of students. He has been in private practice for over 35 years, has taught psychology as the University of San Francisco, and is a co-author of the best selling NLP book of all time: The New Technology of Achievement.

We know that in general, people like people who are like them. The same is true for therapists and clients. In the therapeutic realm, the client must feel a great deal of trust in the therapist for real change to happen. Without this trust, clients will not open themselves up to the therapist, making the effort futile, extending the therapeutic process for the client, running up the cost of doing therapy and more. The premise of MyTherapistMatch.com is that we help people find the right therapist by getting connected with a therapist who moves through the world in a similar way to the client, thereby increasing the probability of natural rapport and trust.

In the case of “preferred orientation in time,” which is just one of the 23 criteria with which we match therapists and clients, people tend to “live” in either the present, future or past. We match therapists and clients who prefer one of the three orientations similiarly. Contrarily, if we were to match up a client who prefers to be future oriented with a therapist who prefers to be past oriented, there will most likely be a subtle disconnect. Providing support for the preferred orientation in time concept, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, former president of the APA and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, has recently presented his findings, called Time Perspectives. Please see the following video clip (duration 2:23): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTphlvB0xs.

Is there evidence that this kind of compatibility helps in a therapeutic relationship?

There is no hard evidence to support our ideas about this particular kind of compatibility. But we do know from clinical evidence that therapists report that when there is deep rapport, there is a higher probability of therapeutic movement. Carl Rogers, PhD., founder of Person Centered Counseling, said that compatibility is absolutely necessary to create a climate for therapeutic change. In addition, Bruce Wampold, from the University of Wisconsin, reported in 2001 that the therapeutic alliance, i.e., rapport, is a key factor in psychotherapy.

In addition, much of the criteria with which we match people are based on the works of well known psychologists, such as Carl Rogers, PhD, Virginia Satir, PhD, Fritz Perls, MD and Milton Erickson, MD.

Has My Therapist Match been working–are clients and therapists matching up and doing good work so far…?

I am grateful to say that MTM is working. We are only in our 3rd month, so the feedback is just starting to come in. The feedback that we have received so far from therapists on our site has been generally positive. In addition, the feedback we collect from our therapist members gets fed back into our matching algorithm, allowing us to better understand the core drivers of a good match for clients and therapists. In that way, our algorithm learns and improves over time.

Corey Quinn’s company is MyTherapistMatch.com. Find more information at the company’s blog, The Compatible Therapist.

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.