4 Things You Absolutely MUST Spend the Money For

Just starting out in private practice, or moving from agency work to be out on your own? Haven't had to market for clients before and don't know where to start?

There are 4 tools and services you need to function as a business owner who relies on attracting clients for one-on-one counseling, coaching, or naturopathic healthcare. They are as important to your business as electricity is to your home.

A Client Attractive Website for Your Practice

It's a well known fact now that most people who have computers do an internet search first when thinking about needing our services. In addition, many allied professional want to check us out before referring, and want to see our website. If you don't have one, it's like announcing to the world that you aren't ready for prime time.

You don't have to pay a designer thousands of dollars to have a website. They really aren't that difficult to create on template-driven webhosts. See my Web-Based Marketing Resource Packs for Counselors, Coaches, or NDs for a list of recommended, inexpensive and easy to use do it yourself web-builders.

Your Own Domain Name

Rather than having your website address be something like yahoo.com/TopekaTherapy it really is better to buy just Topeka Therapy.com. It's more memorable and clear, and looks more professional, like you are serious about your work and the success of your business.

Many webhost / website builder companies will also have domain name registration as part of your package. Some charge more than they should, but many make the whole process very easy. One that I like so much that I became an affiliate of is Webstarts.com.

An Autoresponder Vendor That Can Send Attachments

To build relationship with potential clients who are yet ready to make appointments and commit to therapy or coaching, you'll want to be able to provide them with a useful piece of self-help in exchange for collecting their email address. In the beginning before you have more than 50 names on your business email list, you could manage this manually with your personal email program.

Once your list goes beyond 50 names you really will need an account with an email broadcast vendor such as Constant Contact, MailChimp or Aweber. Short information pieces -- such as tip sheets -- or a series of short articles, these can be delivered by your personal email, but will tend to get blocked from delivery if you send to a group larger than 50.

The best solution is to pre-program an autoresponder to send your self-help tip sheet or special report on request. Constant Contact is the easiest for that, but can't yet send attachments. Aweber sends attachments but is more difficult to configure. All broadcast email services provide a sign up box you can install on your website.

Listing in Locator Directories

Once your website is live on line, with its own address, and with an autoresponder email collection box on it, it's time for the last of the 4 essential items you must spend money for -- listing your practice on a locator directory, such as Psychology Today, CoachDigg, or HealthProfs. Some are free, but the better ones charge a monthly fee to list your practice. Look for the ones that rank high in natural search results, which means more people use those directories to find practitioners.

Don't forget that all these expenses are likely to be tax deductible in the cateogry of Advertising because they are spending you need to do to let the public know you are open for business.

Do We Really Need to Tweet?

Everybody's Tweeting, it seems. Where once you were left in the dust if you didn't have a website, or a blog, now the craze is to Tweet.

Incessantly. Mindlessly. Time-consumingly.

I might be clinically anti-social, but I don't get the appeal of reading what you had for breakfast, where you walked the dog, or how much you adore /hate American Idol. Nor has it -- yet -- occurred that I've made real friends (call me old fashioned, but if I've never heard of you, you can't possibly be a friend).

Can engaging in social media really build your counseling or naturopathic practice? Should Twitter, et. al., be a central part of your marketing strategy?

They -- you know, those people who know everything -- say that engaging in the social media frenzy is absolutely necessary to having a successful business. Could that be true?

So far as I can tell, no counselor I know of, and no ND I'm in touch with, is filling their practice with clients gained from spending hours -- much less offering one tweet a day or week -- on Twitter. Or Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, or any social media site. I think this is because there is an essential ingredient missing in the instantaneous global broadcasting of one's daily trivia, personal inspirations, private wins, idiosyncratic gripes, and self-serving promotions.

The missing ingredient is actual relevant value to the recipient of others' streams of consciousness.

What Twitter especially can do for us, is be a traffic cop in helping send more readers to our newest blog post, or to a fresh offer on our websites, or to info about an upcoming event that helps shed light on or solve the problem that our ideal clients have.

Note that the strategic effort goes into the problem solving blog, website, or creation of an event.

Okay, now that I've thrown out my 2 cents, it's time to Tweet that this post exists.

New Decade, Fresh Start -- how will you use it?

I'm excited about the dawn of 2010 -- are you? There's something significant about completing the first decade of this millennium and century. Have you taken a moment in this waning week to realize the many positive changes and achievements you have accomplished in the last 10 years?

Before moving forward with new hopes and plans, it's good to review:

1. In what area(s) of life did you have high satisfaction?
2. When were you most surprised, challenged, and delighted?
3. Where did you get support you didn't expect?
4. How have you integrated lessons learned, and celebrated growth?

Then, it's good to look forward with a sense of purpose and a little extra boldness:

• What do you envision for self, relationships, business, or community improvement for this new year?
• What do you need to empower your efforts in bringing such improvement into being?
• How will you engage your time, attention, inner resources, and commitment in service to your vision?

Remember, it matters little where you've been; it matters a lot where you're going.

Coaching Questions:

• How will you be using your fresh start this year?
• What would make this year absolutely perfect for you?
• If you were 10 times bolder, what risks would you take?
• Are you holding yourself as accountable as you could to make of your business, health, relationships, or life as much as you can?
• If not, what's stopping you?

The Art of the Soft Close for Business Phobic Solopreneurs

Solopreneur coaches often say that using a trial session is a way to discover if prospective clients are a good fit for us, and that it's a way for them to understand the benefits of coaching. New counselors are often tempted to provide a "free consultation" session for the same reasons.

But by itself, a trial or free consult session that has only these purposes won't necessarily turn a freebie into a paying client. What's needed is a comfortable way to "close the sale."

Yes, that's right, at some point we do actually have to ask for the business if we want it. We have to switch to the business-owner side of the brain and help the prospective client make the decision to hire.

I'm one of those who would rather not be put in that position. I'd much prefer that people would just automatically intuit, or deeply feel, or logically grok that my counseling or coaching services are so fantastic that they'd be super foolish to pass up the chance to pay me for them.

In the real world, it doesn't work like that. I've had to recognize that the REAL purpose of any trial or free consult session is to GET THE CLIENT. I've had to learn the art of the "soft close" -- that is, how to end the trial session with a comfortable way to talk about hiring me.

I have a brief outline for a soft close script I recently came across that I thought others who are reticent to be business-like in trial sessions might like to have. It's available on my wiki here.

3 Realistic Expectations for Solopreneur Success

Because few of us in the counseling, coaching or naturopathic medicine professions have been trained for being in business, we tend to have unrealistic expectations about how long it should take to consistently turn a profit.

Likewise, we can be overly idealistic about how soon marketing efforts will start bringing in clients. And the danger of this is that we adopt a shotgun approach to setting business goals and working an effective marketing plan.

Exact timelines will vary according to what degree of resources you start out with, how much time is available to work on your business, and how persistent you are at following through on a small number of daily tasks. But there are some generally realistic timeframes to keep in mind.

If you are like most solopreneurs I work with who have a small pool of resources to invest at the beginning, and are financing the launch of your business on personal credit cards or family loans, it will take longer to get a continually full client load.

The realistic expectation for the time it takes a one-person businesses to truly succeed is about 5 years.

If you are reluctant to set business goals with targets for where you want to be in 6 months, 1 year, and 3 years, it will take longer to feel and be successful. The more organized and business-like you are in your approach to running your business, the faster it will settle into a nice rhythm of keeping clients coming in.

The realistic expectation for success without a detailed business plan is from 3-7 years.

Note that detailed doesn't have to mean extensive. You don't need a 20 page business plan with charts and graphs. Start with 3 goals -- big, medium, small -- and target dates -- long range, mid range, near term -- by which you intend to achieve them.

If you are impatient or scattered in your marketing strategies, or trying to make a method work that goes against your natural personality, it will take longer to generate powerful client attraction. The more concrete, specific and consistent your marketing activities are, the faster they will pay off -- although not always in the direct ways you can measure.

The realistic expectation for highly effective marketing to be producing a steady stream of clients when you're a one-person show is from 12 months to 3 years.

These timeframes may sound like a very long time when you need clients now. There's no time like the present to get started on focused planning and follow through.

Overwhelmed? Not sure where to start? Email for a brief strategic steps chat.

What's Your Morning Marketing Routine?

Following up on yesterday's blog, I am wondering today what others do in their morning marketing routines. (No, I don't mean like jogging to the Starbucks -- although if you do that wearing a tee shirt with your business logo on it, that might count. LOL)

Like Dolly Parton, I tumbled outa bed and stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition....and then I turn on the computer and get to work. In an hour or less I have done all the following:

1. glance at the news headlines on my start page -- reassure myself that the world is still out there
2. check email for urgent notes from clients and friends / family, and skim through AlterNet.org e-news
   
3. scan through / respond to new posts on forums for counselors and coaches, get ideas for blogging
   
4. scan through Twitter, get more ideas for blogging, and respond to any Tweets from followers
5. scan through Facebook and do some keeping in touch with colleagues
6. blog or deal with the urgent emails
7. check appointments for the day and my other projects task list

Since starting that routine I've generated 6 new clients. Of course, I have all the foundations in place -- like my websites -- and often on my project list is the designing, marketing or giving of a signature talk or the writing and sending of a email campaign. Those activities I do in the second hour of the workday, or later in the afternoon, depending on my client appointment schedule.

The systematic approach really works. What's yours?

SP* Seeks Confidence for Self Promotion

SP = solopreneur. That's you if you're self-employed in a one-person business, as many of my counselor, coach, and naturopathic doctor colleagues are. And having the confidence to promote yourself is about the biggest problem I'm hearing about these days.

Isn't it curious, this lack of confidence? What happened between the moment we make the decision to pursue all that training, believing that we could do it, and the moment that we graduate and start in with the anxiety of, am I good enough? How does that initial confidence evaporate?

One very likely cause is that we stopped believing our own "can-do" inner voice. We gave away little pieces of our confidence power when someone else had a different idea, or challenged our view, or required evidence we didn't yet know of.

In becoming educated, we learned how much we didn't know. And perhaps that scared us. Then we got out in the world, opened a practice, and realized, holy cow, no one ever taught us how to get clients.

Fear, doubt, need, recognition of our lack of knowledge -- all these erode belief in the self, and a confident can-do attitude.

Here's a hint: if you think you lack confidence for promoting yourself (meaning your skills, your knowledge and training), then don't promote yourself.

What do you / can you have confidence in? That you have a desire to help? That you know more than your clients? That you can interpret or reframe their suffering or problem in a way that will help them?

Promote that.

To paraphrase the famous movie line, If you build on that, they will come.

Starting a Business During Scary Economic Times

Eighteen years ago I started my psychotherapy practice during version one of Bush-onomics. Now I’m shifting into coaching and client attraction mentoring during the tail end (should that be tail spin??) of Bush-onomics version two. My mom always said I like doing things the hard way.

My point is, though, that it can be done. While the fear-based conventional wisdom will be that you should conserve your resources and take whatever steady paycheck you can get, my soul just doesn’t go along with that. My guess is that yours doesn’t, either.

How to Survive Now to Thrive as Quickly as Possible

It comes down to knowing very clearly and specifically who your ideal client is, and what they are most distressed about right now that they will gladly pay you to help them do, eliminate, or solve. What motivates your target client type during fearful economic times?

The days of marketing yourself as a generalist are over. When people are counting every penny and are fearful of letting go of a buck, they seek the expert they believe they can afford. Keyword there is expert. If you aren’t distinguishing yourself in your marketplace as at least a specialist – if not an expert – you aren’t using the energy of the times to build your business.

And make no mistake – coaching is a business. If you are running yours like a hobby, start filling out those applications for unemployment compensation. Unless you win the lottery or are already independently wealthy, no business will survive these economic times if the business owner is simply dabbling.

So, what motivates your target client type during fearful economic times? You must discover that, name it and its consequences, and focus on that in your marketing.

3 Ways to Discover Your Clients’ Motivators

1. Ask everyone you know what they are scared of right now. Make a list of the words they use (this is market research).

2. Model your ideal client on yourself – what freaks you out about your own financial situation? You’re already a specialist in understanding this type of client (assuming you are self-aware).

3. Spend a week paying attention to how your general competitors are marketing to the ideal client you share in common (this is marketing intelligence). Make a list of the emotionally compelling points they make.

Craft Your Message to Fit Your Clients’ Psyche

People make hiring and purchasing decisions based on emotional perception of want, and either logical or fantasy expectations of the results. Know what your clients’ ultimate wants are (such as: to feel safe, to save money, to end conflict in relationship, etc) and highlight those in your marketing message. Present yourself in a way that is unique from your colleagues so that you will stand out in the prospective clients’ view as if in a spotlight.

These strategies will help your start up business survive through these scary times.