You should too.

Legitimate, trustworthy, affordable techies
don’t solicit business this way.

So that’s your first clue to run,
don’t walk, to your nearest delete key.

When I used to open those emails, or waste the caller’s time actually talking to them with no intention of getting suckered, it was easy to find out that they wanted to charge three or four times what I paid to have this website built. Unless you need a large e-commerce site — and I know of NO therapist who will ever need that — you shouldn’t ever need to pay more than about $800 to have a site built for you.  And you could  build your own for less than $200.

Then these scammers stick it to you with a maintenance plan –and boy is that where they really count on your desire to not deal with your website, as most mental health providers don’t change content often or have features on their sites that require monthly  ”maintenance”.   Yes, some routine maintenance is a good idea, but quarterly or semi-annually is enough.  You could be paying monthly for what is really only performed that infrequently anyway.

Of course, many of these cold callers will build you a site using WordPress technology, and it’s true that there are continual, unexpected, annoying, website security problems all the time with WordPress, so that could be a reason for the frequent maintenance.  But for me, that’s a reason to stay away from WordPress! or have an on-call guru to turn to.

When it comes to “design”, buyer beware.  More often than not what designers and coders think is great and cool is actually a turn off to prospective psychotherapy clients. They do not know the needs of the mental health provider, or how the neurologically impaired therapy client’s brain may be adversely impacted by  minimal content home pages with revolving flash graphics, jarringly bright colors, or auto-play sound loops,  or by straining to read tiny fonts in light grey text on a white background.  

Many of these companies hold you hostage by being the administrator for your domain name so that when you figure out what a bad deal you got, you can’t move your site to another host without getting into a battle over securing control over your domain.  You are likely to encounter  delays and conflict getting access to  page content files in order to move your site to a different host. Oh my gosh the nightmares I’ve had with straightening that out for a colleague!  

I can’t tell you the number of licensed counselors, psychologists, and social workers I’ve had to rescue from making a big mistake in hiring a company that engages in cold call email or telemarketing — 4 this week alone!  

Save yourself the cost and hassle. NEVER ever hire anyone who cold calls you or sends you a solicitation email out of the blue. 

Need a referral for a web designer, SEO specialist, social media maven or other techie you can trust?   Ask your colleagues you’ve had good experiences with their tech helpers, check Angie’s List, or ask me for the best recommendations to fit your needs.

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A number of us have self-published, and I hear from others every week who are thinking about it.  Questions that eventually comes up are:

Do I need another website as an author?
Does my book need its own website?
Isn’t its Amazon sales page enough?

I’ve been researching this lately, for myself and a couple clients, and here’s what I’ve learned.  No, an Amazon sales page is not enough.  And if you intend to be a serious writer as an additional professional persona, yes you should have a website that showcases you as an author because it can help sales, and is better for gaining media attention — and hence, interviews about your book.

Some gurus suggest that every book title be its own domain name.  That can’t hurt. but if you fall in love with writing and find yourself publishing more than the once-in-a-lifetime book, it’s better  (and easier) to have one website with a page for each book so that fans can find your body of work all in one place.

Authors Have to Market Too

Bad news — authors still have to promote themselves and their books.  Venturing into self-publishing doesn’t relieve the coach or counselor from that chore.  But marketing for book sales  and to generate a fan base has some different needs and challenges from those involved with marketing for clients to set appointments.  

Just like with a psychotherapy private practice,  a website can — and I think should — be the center for all other marketing for your self-published books.  Think of it as a very important employee with a specific job description. Start with the purpose you want it to serve for you.

• Will it be the author’s own (your)  point of sale site? 
• Will it be to generate buzz for the newest book? 
• Will it be the media info for interviews site? 
• Will it be a fan cultivation site? 
• Will it be a broad umbrella for your creative interests site? 
• Will it be some mix of these purposes?

Once you are clear about the purpose, the content for your author website will be more obvious. 

Have you looked at other authors’ websites?    Here are three that may be instructive in terms of what to have on your own book or publishing website:

http://www.julietmarillier.com/author.html   
http://www.tomclancy.com/   
http://www.danbrown.com/#author-section

Extrapolating from these, against the background of what I would coach a therapist to do, and for those of us who aren’t quite in the above league yet, I’d suggest an author website with these basic pages:

Homepage
     either featuring the promotion for the latest work, or a message to readers

About Page
      a warm, friendly, funny piece on why and/or how you write

Media Page
     your online press kit

Backstory Page
     bits on characters, psychodynamics, history of treatment methods or pioneers of those methods, time periods, or events, or other stuff that didn’t make it in the final book(s) but would be of interest to fans

Excerpt Page
     1000 words or so, depending on length of the book, with a button link to your point of sale  such as Amazon, PayPal, or whatever

Blog  Page
     This could be useful in various ways:

1. reveal your process, write “inside the writer’s daily life” type stuff — it helps in cultivating a fan base

2. give some of your research, as education for the reader, and to tempt them to read your book

3. discuss universal dilemmas, as relate to your book(s) and how they exist today

4. do “this date in history” posts, those are usually popular

5.  do ” identify this object” posts, with photos of stuff from by gone eras — also popular

Don’t Forget Facebook

Building a website with these components may be a more involved project than you want to tackle immediately, although it would be best in the long run.  But a faster solution is to create one or more Facebook fan pages.  I’d recommend one in the name of your book title(s) to start with.

And if you know you will be publishing more than just one book, create another Facebook fan page for yourself as an author / publisher.

Whether you use Facebook’s ads or promoted posts, you’ll still need to gain Likes for the page, and engage with the Facebook audience frequently to sustain interest in your book. This is where a social media marketing plan will be helpful.  More on that in a future No Hype Mentor post.

Happy writing!

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Content writing and its cousin, copywriting, have different rules and structures.  And most healers and helpers struggle with this type of writing.

In brief, the 4 types of content writing most useful to solorpreneurs are:

1. The motivational marketing message
2. The event or special offer promotion
3. The informational article
4. The nuts and bolts

The Motivational Marketing Message

A marketing pitch, or message, has two purposes – to make an emotional connection with the reader, and to motivate an action.

Following a specific structure, a marketing message leads potential clients through a thought process designed to come to the conclusion that they want to work with you. The sequential structure of an effective marketing message is very important. In essence, the structure is:

• Name the pain
• Empathize with the experience
• Validate  / convey you understand
• Describe the cost of continuing the pain
• Voice obstacles to making change
• Reassure  / convey you understand
• Future pace life after solution
• Call to action
• Motivating confirmation of right decision

Still need help with writing your marketing message? I am happy to consult with you or write it for you.  See details about that here.

The Promotion

Writing to encourage enrollment in an event or to get takers for a special offer is similar to a marketing message in purpose.  How extensively a promotion might follow the structure of a pitch will depend on where you place the promotion – a multiple emails campaign will obviously require more than a Facebook post.

Examples of other promotional writing would be:

• rack cards
• email marketing
• social media posts
• referral request letters
• event fliers and postcards

The main difference is in have a good title and your dates and/or costs up front in a promotion.   Titles can be quite difficult to do well – I often spend the most time on those.   Or, in the case of referral request letters, the difference from a marketing message is to establish how referring to you will help the allied professional serve your mutual clients. 

The Informational Article

This type of writing more closely resembles journalism. It describes a problem – one for which you are presumably a specialist at resolving – explores causes or examples, provides self help suggestions or resources, and because you are still marketing, ends with a call to action.

Informational articles should be written in a casual, friendly tone rather than a stiffer, impersonal academic style.  Think Wikipedia, not  Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis.  An ebook or special report would fall into this category of informational writing.

This type of writing forms the bulk of most web content. You can use it as separate web pages to help establish your professional authority, and in short versions, as blog posts.  For a number of examples of the information article, see the links on my home page at www.DeahCurryPhD.com .

If you need help writing or editing informational articles,  click here  for how I can assist you.

Nuts and Bolts Writing

What I mean by nuts and bolts is pure explanation and direction.  A website’s FAQ page is nuts and bolts writing – info that makes it easy for people to work with you.  It doesn’t empathize, make a compelling emotional connection, reassure, validate or motivate.  It just explains which bus to take and how to pay.

Nuts and bolts are what clients look for and need AFTER they have made the decision to work with you. This information doesn’t cause readers to convert into clients, but the absence of it can make some readers change their decision.

Lack of nuts and bolts information can create the impression of a lack of clear thinking about what people need to know, or even convey a lack of professionalism or give an appearance of self-absorption.
If you are struggling with writing web content,  if it’s not fun for you, if you just don’t have the time to sit through trainings on how to do it, I’m happy to ghostwrite for you.  The range of the type of writing I’m available to do can be viewed here.

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A recent discussion among colleagues made it clear to me that there are a handful of cash-based fee for service paradigms that are argued about as if there was one RIGHT way to proceed. Usually there’s more heat than light generated by these discussions.

Since I rarely believe there is one right way for anything under the sun, let alone in business, here’s my 2 cents on the options as I see them.
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2 Dollars for Hours Models

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The Expert’s Worth model  is the straightforward, dollar per hour equals value of service model.  Usually when this model is discussed it is from a perspective that is framed as:

• the intrinsic worth of the practitioner’s expertise
• the special uniqueness of therapy being unlike other businesses
• the value of the time and cost invested in higher education
• the years of servitude while accumulating hours for licensure

Small Advantage     In this model, there is the limited advantage to offering fee adjustments such as sliding scale or discounts. It’s mostly a clinical advantage in that a lower fee helps sustain the therapeutic relationship and progress when clients have an unexpected financial set back.

Big Disadvantage     Marketing routine discounts when operating in this model can be a disadvantageous, if not risky, practice to one’s financial health. Advertising that discounts may be available encourages people to ask for them, and wonder why your rates aren’t just lower in the first place. And that will be an obstacle to rapport and trust.

There is also a disadvantage to mental / emotional well-being due to the deleterious impact on professional confidence and personal self-esteem.  If one’s sense of self worth is pegged to a certain dollar value …. well, we can expect problems at some point and we can all diagnose that issue.

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The Nobility & Needs of Poverty  model  is the second option.  This is still the basic dollar per hour idea, but the perspective is from the opposite direction. This model is based on what clients will pay for what they believe is the value to them, or within the limits they can afford.  The ideas of marketing sliding scale or other discounts off full fee belongs to this model.

Clinicians seem to adopt this model because they:

• believe therapy is something sacred
• are uncomfortable with putting a price on their own expertise
• don’t like feeling like a business owner
• can’t charge others what they would balk at paying
• feel a mission to serve the poor
• never dealt with billing and payment at their agencies
• feel mental health shouldn’t be just affordable for the rich

In this model — which many therapists adopt without thinking about options — there is an alignment with the poverty consciousness of clients as well as a sense of the nobility of the work that shouldn’t be sullied by ugly monetary commerce.

Advantage     Marketing that you offer a sliding scale may indeed attract clients. A creative practitioner I know tells his patients that he has a fee range and they are free to select their rate within that. Most select the midpoint, rather than the bottom. He doesn’t get caught up in negotiating or checking their pay slips to verify qualifying income – a distasteful prospect for many theapists.

Disadvantage    Marketing low affordable rates and sliding scale or other discounts off full fee often attracts clients that don’t stick with the work, or are more demanding in terms of expecting you to create their results by magic wand. Plus, can you sustain a practice if everyone demands your sliding scale?
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2 Business-Mindset Models

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The Strategic Loss Leader  model is dollars for expenses, thinly veiled as dollars for hours.  It would have you start your fee structure with an in-depth financial analysis of your expenses, available clinical hours per month, number of planned days off, and level of income desired per year, then factors in unplanned personal unpaid sick day and a reasonable level of unpaid client no-shows, to arrive at the necessary fee per hour.

Calculations are performed, I’m told, with a slide rule – not to be confused with a sliding scale — and some trigonomic formula involving trains leaving Chicago meeting other trains in Utah at 60 miles per hour.  I’m never sure if mileage and per diem are part of the formula, and my slide rule is serving as a door stop, so …..  

In this model  – when managed by a true business mind instead of one who mastered [cough] geometry by playing pool (you know, for all the practice with angles) — discounts would be strategically planned loss leaders used as a lever for increasing client numbers during predictable downturns.  The cost of those discounts are factored into the initial and yearly reviewed financial analysis.  Marketing might resemble using Groupon, buy 5 get the 6^th half off, and other consumer-like incentives.

Advantages     Your accountant will probably love you. You’ll know what you make down to the penny every month, if not every week. You’ll know when to increase your hours or offer incentives to attract new clients to compensate for summer and winter slow downs.

Disadvantage     All that math, all the time – need I say more? If this isn’t a root cause of OCD, I don’t know what is. LOL

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The Entrepreneurial Experiment Mindset releases the business owner from the limits of dollars for hours thinking. This model reconstructs the traditional one client or one couple or one family per service hour model.

Instead, using multiple streams of income approach, your time is leveraged by working more with ongoing groups, recurring subscription services, and products that monetize your knowledge, in addition to a small, exclusive set of long term full fee individuals.

Advantage      Marketing is more clear cut in a number of ways because your services have more clear definition, such as pre-paid time-bound packages, open-ended boutique care (retainers), and monetized information products.  Pricing for services and products can be fluid, changing as you receive data on what is producing the most return for the least opportunity cost.  When you achieve a well balanced mix of offerings, you’ll have maximum fun with minimum burnout.

Disadvantage      Admittedly the entrepreneurial model isn’t for everyone. Most therapists will need to enlist the help of various technology gurus to keep the practice  / business humming along.  It’s difficult if not impossible to use a hybrid mix of collecting insurance payments while also operating from the entrepreneurial mindset — too many restrictions are imposed by insurance companies.   And  it requires out of the box thinking that makes most malpractice attorneys and professional associations frown.

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If the Entrpreneurial Experiment Mindset model sounds like something you’d like to explore, contact me.  I’d love to hear your ideas, and lend my 2 cents, if that would be helpful.

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So I thought I’d share what I’ve learned and now tell my clients about dipping our toes into this Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn especially as a necessary part of a well rounded marketing plan.

Choose one platform to focus your efforts on until you feel proficient

Scattering yourself over every social media platform you can find without a strategy for quality is counterproductive – even with cool tools like Hootsuite, that allows you to pre-write and schedule your posts for multiple accounts at once. Quality beats quantity.

Engage / be responsive to your followers

You may get likes for your quotes and photos, you might give a lot of likes and share others posts, but the way to engage is to ask a question in a reply to others’ posts, or carefully give an opinion, state an agreement, or give a compliment.  It’s unnecessary to “sell” your practice – if your online identity is set up as a business name or tagline, you are automatically but subtly selling your practice with every post you make.

 Be yourself – tactfully

People talk about having a plan or strategy, which makes us think there’s some formula for social media. There’s not.  You’ll hear  that you should be engaged and helpful 80% of the time, and promote yourself 20%.  But the truth is that all engaged helpfulness is self-promotional.   The best strategy is to tactfully be yourself. Keep in mind that you are there for business purposes, but that potential clients will be attracted by your authenticity, by seeing you as a human being with a sense of humor, personal interests, and the ability to connect.

Don’t post when tired or frustrated — and no venting

Of course, It’s part of being “real” that we all are sometimes ticked off, exhausted, or irritated at something or somebody.  Save it for online groups or your personal – versus business – pages. You don’t want a potential client’s first impression of you to be made from the post where you’ve trash-talked some politician or corporate conglomerate.

Keep it short & simple

Twitter has the right idea – posts of 140 characters are about all people really want. Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn don’t restrict post lengths, so you’ll have to exercise some restraint. Those platforms are not the place to put blog-length posts. Instead write a “teaser” and give a link to your blog.

Re-read and correct

Before hitting the POST or SUBMIT or SEND button, take the time to proofread for spelling and grammar. Nothing degrades a professional presence more than typos and language mistakes.

Need more help with your marketing methods?  Whether it’s content writing help, a website, strategy consultation, techie training, or coaching to break through your anxiety about self-promotion, I’d like to help. I have services to fit any budget.  Check out the details here  on how to choose what you need.

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