Your Counselling or Holistic Health Practice Website: Your Marketing Hub
Your website plays a central role in attracting clients for your practice–it should act as the hub of your marketing. It is a place from which you can build relationships of trust with potential clients over time until they feel comfortable enough to hire you.
An oft-mentioned statistic is that it takes 5-7 contacts before a client buys a product or service from you. This is an average statistic and while some clients will hire you once they have had only one or two contacts with, it can often take 10, 15 or even more. Many of these contacts will be visits to your website.
Here’s how it works:
Potential clients arrive at your website, read a few paragraphs, click around to a few pages and read a bit more. They like what they see and so sign up for your opt-in newsletter.
They receive your e-newsletter regularly and read many of your helpful articles. Your newsletter has links leading back to your website. Your potential clients
may click on these links time and time again and each time they visit your website feel more
confident about hiring you.
It may take as little as 1 week or as much as 5 years before a client is ready to buy from you. As I have written before, marketing is not a one time event. You need to have a strategy in place that works over the long haul. Your website plays a crucial role in this strategy.
Note: For those of you in Vancouver, BC, I will be launching The Marketing Dialogues 2007 Website Series: Developing and Marketing A Client Attracting Website, a 6 month series of evening dialogues (workshops) designed to attract clients. The first dialogue, Client Attracting Websites: An Overview will be held on January 18, 2007. For more info click here.
A Tip for Your Counselling or Healing Website
A lot of healers, counsellors, holistic practitioners, and those in related professions don’t have expert guidance when setting up their website. The great thing about the web is that so many of the factors involved in having an effective website are very easy to test–and so they have been tested…a lot. It’s a shame more healers and counsellor types don’t utilize the vast amount of information that is available on this topic.
There are so many factors to take into consideration when you set up your website–the design, the layout, the copy (text), etc., that play a role in what your prospective clients will do once they reach your site that it is really useful to know about some of them at least. Here is a great little article by copywriter, Nick Usborne, that discusses research indicating that single column websites convert better than those websites using more than one column. It makes sense if you think about it. The less distractions there are, the easier it is for your website visitors to read your copy and make a decision about what they want to do.
Nick’s research supports other research that indicates that clean and simple websites make it easy for your visitors to clearly read your message. This substantially increases the odds that they will take an action as the result of visiting your site. Too many healer and counselor websites are cluttered with graphics, too much color, too many columns and ask their potential clients to do too many things.
By the way, if you have not checked out my Website Design and Promotion Blog recently and want to learn more about how to make your website work better for you, you might want to take a trip on over. Some of the information is a bit technical for most counsellors and healing arts folks, but don’t worry about it, just absorb what you can.
The Landing Page: Key to Your Website’s Success
What is a landing page? It is any page that a website visitor "lands" at when they arrive at your site. Usually, but not always this is the home page. Seth Godin reminds us again of the purpose of a landing page:
- Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s)
- Get a visitor to buy
- Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.
- Get a visitor to tell a friend
- (and the more subtle) Get a visitor to learn something, which could
even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback
The vast majority of counselling and healing professional websites that I see still don’t get this at all. Many professionals put up sites and then wonder why they don’t work for them. The reason is often related to an unclear purpose (and poorly written on untargeted copy).
If your landing page is not focusing on getting your visitor to do one or two (no more, says Seth) of these things, your website needs an overhaul.
Website Review is now Complete
Thanks to Barbara Babkirk for participating in the Website Review that Nathaniel Richman and I did over at our Website Design and Promotion Blog. You can read all the posts on the review over at our blog.
The Website Review Begins!
Thank you to everyone who entered our web site review draw.
Nathaniel and I received lots of entries and the winner is… Barbara Babkirk,
a career counsellor, from Yarmouth, Maine. Congratulation, Barbara!
We have begun the review of Barbara’s site on our blog. You can see
the first post here at our Website Design and Promotion Blog.
We invite you to follow along over the next few weeks and please
feel free to post comments or questions.
We hope you find the review educational and that it gives you some
ideas to improve the results on your own site.
The Funnel Approach to Marketing
Andy Wibbels over at Global Impact has written a brilliant post called, Scientology’s Marketing Lessons. Andy first explains the well known funnel technique of marketing, and he does a great job I might add.
In a nutshell, the funnel technique of marketing refers to the process whereby you begin by getting your clients to enter your sales system (the funnel) by giving them something of value –ideally for free or at least at low cost. This is where trust begins to develop. You then have a number of other services or products that your clients can purchase that increase in price as clients move down the funnel.
Andy’s uses the funnel analogy to compare the Church of Scientology and The Catholic Church pointing out that the former has a very effective funnel system and the latter does not.
Marketing can be applied to many aspects of life once you understand the fundamental concepts. Andy’s analogy is just one great example.
You can read Andy’s post here and I highly recommend that you do.
Update: After reading this post, a subscriber to my newsletter wrote to ask me if I was a member of Scientology. I am not involved in Scientology in any way. I made referrence to Andy Wibbels’ post simply because I thought it was a fascinating example of how marketing works.
Writing and Speaking for Shy Self Promoters
Nick Osborne writes about how challenging it is for professionals to promote themselves. One solution he suggests is article writing. SInce I am a big fan of writing as a means to market your private practice, I definitely agree with him.
However, I also think public speaking is a key way to market your private practice successfully. Both writing articles and speaking are the methods I have used most successfully to attract clients quickly.
Both put you in front of a lot of people at one time and both set you up as an expert in your field. They can be time consuming, but very rewarding methods of marketing your practice.
Both require a strategy if you want them to attract clients successfully though. So if you use either of these methods, make sure you know how to implement them effectively as a marketing tool and that you have a plan of action.
Nick provides some useful tips on writing articles. You might want to check it out. You can also read about article writing by clicking on the following links:
The Rewards of Writing a Newsletter When Marketing your Private Practice
Marketing your Private Practice Through Thought Leadership
Writing Articles to Market your Private Practice on the Internet
The Rewards of Writing a Newsletter as a Method of Marketing Your Practice
I have been writing a newsletter for about a year and half and it has been one of the most rewarding methods I use to market my practice. Not only is it exciting to watch the number of my subscribers increase every day, the feedback I receive on my newsletters keeps me motivated to keep writing. Most importantly are the clients that I get from my newsletters. I am convinced that my newsletter (and increasingly my blog) is one of the most important things that I do in my marketing.
I heard the late Guru Coach, Thomas Leonard, once say that one’s success is in the size of one’s list. That about sums it up. The more people who know about you, your services and products, the more business you will have.
Recently, for various reasons, I decided to retire my old list of newsletter subscribers and ask them to sign up for my new list. At the same time I announced this I released my new free report, "67 Surefire Ways to Attract Clients". It was wonderful and validating to watch the number of people re-subscribe to my newsletter. It was also great to read on the wonderful feedback on the report.
If you haven’t yet started a newsletter I hope you get on it soon! Because if you don’t you are missing out on a lot of business.
If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter and received my, 22-page, free report, "67 Surefire Ways to Attract Clients" you can subscribe at here. It will only take you a couple of minutes.
If you want to read past issues of my newsletter, Enlightened Marketing, you can get them here.
Both the newsletter and the report will be of great benefit to you in marketing your practice.
Marketing via Article Writing Pays off
Increasingly over the last few years I have been focusing a lot of my marketing on writing strategies (i.e newsletter, blog and articles) and it’s really paying off. More and more people are contacting me about my services because they have found me on the net, often by reading one of my articles which are increasingly posted on several websites including many article directories.
The other interesting thing that is happening is people are contacting me asking to use my articles in their publications or asking me to write columns for them. Recently the Holistic Business Journal posted one of my articles in their journal and I accepted an offer to write a monthly column for The Meta Arts Magazine a few weeks ago.
Marketing is largely about getting as many people to know about your services as possible and marketing through writing is an extremely effective way of doing this. It is a great example of what marketing guru, Seth Godin, calls viral marketing: your ideas spread like a virus.
Finally, one added bonus of writing for the Internet is that my search engine rankings are improving because of the increasing number of links leading back to my site. This is bringing more traffic to my website.
While it takes some time before you start seeing results of this method of marketing, it is very effective.
For more information on article marketing check out the following links: Writing Articles to Market Your Practice on The Internet and Marketing Your Practice Through Thought Leadership.
Marketing Your Practice Through “Thought Leadership”
A while ago I posted an entry on marketing your practice by writing articles and submitting them to article directories. I have been increasingly submitting articles to directories that I have written and it is amazing how quickly they are picked up and posted on other websites.
As explained in my previous post, marketing your practice through article distribution increases backlinks to your site which is critical for your website’s search engine rankings.
Christopher Knight from ezinearticles.com has a very interesting article on "Thought Leadership" that explains very well the value of writing articles and submitting them to directories.
If you are a writer, and even if you’re not, I suggest you think about this very effective way to increase your exposure for your private practice.
