Business Housekeeping Countdown

Got some extra time on your calendar in the second half of this month due to holiday slow down? Great!

This is the perfect time for a little business housekeeping. You know, taking care of all those little things you haven't made time for because you've been too busy marketing your practice and serving your clients, like:

• updating your website, making sure all your links and buttons work
• formalizing new service packages and policies
  
• cancelling online accounts that aren't producing
• cleaning out your data base of prospects who never buy, attend or hire
• deleting all those guru ezines you've intended to read and never have

I don't know about you, but that could keep me busy for 2-3 weeks.

Not much fun, though. So, what about balancing the housekeeping with some other business development tasks that you may not have taken time for either, such as:

• creating a vision board for achievements you want to accomplish within 5 years
• hosting a spontaneous, informal celebration lunch with colleagues to toast the 2009 successes
• shopping for a new item that contributes to business efficiency or reach
  
• seeking out a group to join in January that will be part business learning, part social, part accountability keeping
  
• finding teleclasses to take to improve marketing skills

While it's tempting to blow off work entirely over the holiday slow down, a little housekeeping and a little forward thinking can be better for giving your practice an energized start for the New Year.

So what will you tackle today, next week, and before Dec 31?

3 Things You Want Your Blog to Do

Do you think of your blog as a staff member of the marketing department of your business? It really is.

Here are three things you want that employee to do for you on a daily basis.


1. Provide useful information and tips to prospective ideal clients

If your blogs are random rambling musings, you are missing the marketing potential of doing a blog. And you're wasting your time in blogging as a marketing tactic. Instead, imagine a specific individual has asked you a question, and let your blog post provide a direct, immediately applicable solution to that question.


2. Develop rapport and likability between you and your niche market

A blog works best when it is a little online slice of your personality. Write like you speak. Be irreverent, if that's you. Exaggerate the absurd, if you do so in person. This is how your breathe your life-force energy into a flat, "impersonal" piece of writing. Being who you are AND speaking to your audience about their problems and easily applied solutions to their problems increases the sense of trustworthiness that blog readers need to become clients.


3. Establish you as a generous, helpful, knowledgeable, solution expert for your target market's problem

Blogs function best when they are endless sources of quick bits of education and help. Few people have time or patience to take courses or read books anymore, but we all need simple answers to our complex problems. As clinicians we know that real healing and lasting change is more complex than this. But the blog is not the clinician -- it's not supposed to provide enduring transformation, just enough help at the hungriest moment to make you the go-to solution expert for your target market niche.


Coaching question ---

To start thinking of your blog as a valued employee in your business's marketing department, what specific job description will it have? What measurable goals will you hold it accountable to achieving for you?

Poor Mr Sleaze -- Everybody Hates You

Sleaze is one of those things that's in the eye of the beholder. Often what it looks like is a set of tactics aimed at convincing us we need something that we can well do without, and persuading us to hurry up and get it when we can't really afford it.

In marketing a private healing arts practice, high pressure sales tactics that work in some retail advertising are generally considered sleazy, such as:

• creating false urgency that stimulates the greed factor -- i.e.: the buy now or lose tactic

• purporting a false limited availability -- i.e., the this fee good for the first 5 people today only tactic

• emotional manipulation of Maslow needs -- i.e.: the become more sexy, have money raining on you tactic

• over promised results --i.e., cousin to the above, the you too can become an Olympic star tactic

• celebrity association -- i.e., the trained by Tony Robbins, interviewed by Oprah, worked with Andrew Weil tactic

• bait and switch -- i.e., the freebies that amount to more sales pitch / less info of value tactic

Most clinicians and coaches are opposed to using sleaze to attract clients -- as well you should be. But, on the other hand, there is a psychology to marketing a service practice. Understanding that psychology and using it to your advantage is smart for business, without being sleazy.

Let's start with some reasonable assumptions about our ideal clients (regardless of who those are for you). They have a pain or a problem that is adversely impacting their daily life, they don't like that impact, their attempts to resolve it have failed, it's getting worse or spreading into other areas of life and relationships, and they want are ready to do anything to stop it.

(If your picture of your ideal client doesn't address their pain or problem in this way, it's time to go back to square one.)

These clients don't need to be convinced they have a problem. They are all too aware of it. They don't have to be persuaded to pay for the help that will end the problem. They are already willing and ready to do so.

So, what do these clients need to hear from our marketing? They need:

• to feel that you see and understand their pain -- show that by talking about it
• to feel warmth and caring from you -- don't say you're warm and caring, demonstrate that by your language
• to feel a connection with you -- talking to them about them creates this
• to start to trust you -- talking about what in your own life gives you empathy with them shows this
• to believe there is hope for change -- provide reassurance that you will do your best to help

Is Mr Sleaze involved in any of that? I don't think so.

20 Thoughts to Juggle in Naming Your Business

Selecting a good business name is always a challenge. There are lots of considerations to keep in mind.

• What will the name mean to people who are seeking the type of services you are offering?

• Will the name have a degree of energetic resonance for these people, such that it conveys exactly what they are seeking and they recognize that the first moment they see the name?

• Is the name a clear descriptor for your service, conveying what your business actually does or is?

• Will it create conversation or confusion?

• Is it inspiring for you as well as for your clients?

• Is it short enough and powerful enough to be memorable, and easy for others to spell correctly?

• Does the name evoke a visual image and felt-emotional connection?

• Is there an inherent positive connotation to the name?

• How many ways can it be misunderstood or misspelled in a Google search?

• How much time and effort are you prepared to put into promoting / explaining your business name?

• How much competition is there for a similar name?

• Does the name convey expertise in a niche market?

• Will clients be able to spell and pronounce it when referring you to others?

• In an international marketplace (if your clients will come from across the world), can your business name possibly be a bad word or have inappropriate or detrimental associations in another language?

• Does the name suggest any particular color or color combination and will that match or clash with your branding scheme?(fascinating article on color meanings here: http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/color/a/symbolism.htm)

• Is your favorite name, or one very close to it, already registered with the appropriate business licensing authority?

• Does the name convey a serious business, or is it suggestive of an amateur hobbyist?

• Did you test several names with people likely to be in your ideal client target market?

• Did you test several names with 8-10 year olds and could they tell you what your business does?

• Can you fall in love with your business name, and wear it proudly on a sticky networking badge?

Well, you get my drift. Lots to think about.

I personally like names that hold some special meaning to the business owner, that have some special "zing" to them, while also being memorable and descriptive of the actual work being sold.

Ultimately the marketplace will tell all of us whether we've got a great magnetic business name, or one that gets us lost, forgotten, or is off-putting.

3 Reasons to Be a Go-To Guy or Gal

A go-to person is someone who is knowledgeable, resource-full, generous of spirit, and enjoys being helpful without coming across as constantly pushing their own services and products with high pressure sales tactics. It may be a natural personality characteristic, but it's also a great marketing strategy.


Reason #1: It draws more ideal prospects to your door.

Prospective clients -- people who fit our ideal client profile but may not yet be ready to seek our services -- do like to window shop. It's human nature. And everyone likes to get something for nothing, or find a bargain. People naturally seek additional information from former sources, and tend to hire providers with whom they have already created a kind of psychological bond. When we establish ourselves as knowledgeable, generous sources of helpful information is creates rapport and loyalty between you and the prospect.


Reason #2: It keeps the energetic attraction magnet working for you.

There's a metaphysical principle that what you put out comes back to you three fold -- another way to state one of the laws of attraction. Being helpful and generous with your time and information, we invite to us people who will surprise us with referrals and opportunities to take our work into realms we may not have thought of. Becoming known as the go-to person in our area of expertise is like fueling up the lighthouse beacon -- energy flows brightly from us, and unexpected rewards know where to find us.


Reason#3: It deepens your credibility, and others' trust in you.

Giving away some degree of help and information puts our priority on being of service. It furthers the know you, like, you, trust you factor that makes people feel it's safe to trust us with their secrets, fears, and vulnerabilities. In sales terms, it's a try-before-you-buy offer or test drive to determine fit, function, worth of our paid professional services. In other words, it's good business because it helps establish the credibility of our services.


Coaching question:
What area of your professional interests will you become the go-to person for?

Fear, Flow, and Focus

Are your client attraction efforts propelled by fear? How many of these fears can you relate to:

• Fear of not being visible enough to prospective clients?
• Fear of being too visible and drawing people who are wrong for your practice?
• Fear of not doing enough marketing, so you do a little of everything?
• Fear of not doing the right marketing, so you feel paralyzed or overwhelmed?
• Fear of losing traction, so you get caught up in frantically searching for more ways to promote your business?
• Fear of marketing taking over your life, so resistance comes up and prevents doing any at all?
• Fear of looking or sounding unprofessional, silly, stupid, or sleazy?

Having to combat such fears makes it all the more difficult to produce an effective, compelling, client attracting marketing message. A confident mindset with a good amount of belief in yourself is absolutely essential to the success of any self-promotion strategy.

I highly recommend having some strong techniques for feeling the fear and promoting your business anyway. That should include confident self-talk, an accountability partner, and a step by step system to persistently follow.

Many of us by nature or training value being in a "flow" state of mind, where we've heard that high creativity exists. There's nothing wrong with that when we need to generate new ideas or produce a specific product. How that often plays out for marketing a private practice, though, can look like this:

• dabbling at many marketing actions, mastering and following through on few
• interacting with your business as if it were a hobby
• scattering your energies with disconnected approaches to spreading the word about your services
• starting the business day waiting for inspiration, energy, or motivation to strike
• flitting from one strategy to the next without giving each enough time to produce results
• constantly reinventing the wheel, or being terminally "unique" in promoting your practice
  

Approaching marketing with this kind of scatteredness is exhausting and expensive for us, and confusing for potential clients. Worse, it sends a subtle message that we don't quite know what we're doing if we aren't consistent with how we market to prospective clients.

I recommend making the best use of the flow state when needing to brainstorm, when wanting to immerse yourself in a creative process, and in visualizing success everyday.

If I could make just one point about client attraction it would be that FOCUS is the big secret. What focus looks like is:

• making the health of your business a priority on your schedule everyday
  
• a well defined understanding of your ideal client
• an emotionally compelling marketing message
  
• a limited number of effective ways to fill your pipeline, get referrals, present yourself and get hired
  
• a small set of easy, fun, productive action steps taken every day
  

Focus includes defining, detailing, planning, following through, evaluating, and adjusting. It often sounds like a lot of work, but getting systematic about it makes it very easy, efficient, and really produces client attraction results.

I recommend setting aside time everyday to tend your business in a focused way with clear, measurable action steps that lead to achievable goals.

Why Does Promoting Your Business Feel Sleezy?

Look at me, I'm great, I'm so educated, I have tons of tools, I can do this for you, I can do that -- me, me, me. That's the idea that many coaches and counselors have about what marketing is.

Or -- YOU can be sexier, thinner, more confident, happier, make more money than Ever before, just one hour a week is all it takes and all your troubles will be gone, hurry hurry don't delay, this offer expires today, this chance won't come again, if you want the life you've already dreamed of, act now. Ugh, can you feel the slime rolling down your arms just reading that?

No wonder it feels sleezy to promote yourself and your solo practice.

Leaving aside the comforting fact that neither of those two approaches to late night guru fitness systems and ginzu knife promotions work for professionals in the healing and optimal performance arts, the deeper issue is that they touch us where we are raw -- in our self esteem, belief in our abilities to do our work well, or our lack of ease with feeling in the spotlight.

I want to pass along to you one of the most valuable things that was ever said to me when I was voicing the feeling of being not as good as the next therapist:

• Your clients chose you because they intuitively knew that you were the best helper for them, and it's an insult to them to not have the same belief in yourself that they do. They are trusting you, and you must return their trust by trusting yourself.
  

If you struggle with feeling not good enough -- whether it's an underlying personality pattern or a misplaced acknowledgment of being new in practice -- it is vital to the health of your business that you work on believing in and trusting your abilities.

When you believe in your abilities you won't need to put yourself in the forefront of your marketing message. When you deeply trust yourself to provide the help that your clients seek, you'll focus your marketing message on them, not on yourself.

If you already believe in and trust yourself, it can become easy and comfortable to promote your business without feeling like it's sleezy because you can approach it from the sense of being in service to your clients and their goals.

Isn't that the core of why we wanted to be a counselor, coach or ND in the first place?

Multiple Streams -- of income or hassle?

There's a lot of excitement in some quarters about the old idea of having multiple streams of income. What that means is that you have additional ways to make money aside from your one-on-one client appointments.

There are two common ways to do this for the novice solopreneur:

• developing and selling products -- books, self-help tools, diagnostic kits, dispensary items
  
• developing and selling live group services -- group therapy / coaching, workshops, signature talks, teleclasses, etc
  

The more experienced business owner may also venture into:

• affiliate programs -- where you get a percentage for referring clients to others
• creating online membership programs
• train the provider programs

What's important to realize is that establishing multiple streams of income when you are your only employee means that you are running more than one business. It can become a multiple nightmare -- assuming you even had time to sleep -- in keeping up with your bookkeeping, different tax structures, various regulations, not to mention different marketing campaigns and business plans for each income stream.

However, some of these same activities can be more simply started as marketing strategies for your one initial service.

What's your plan for transitioning multiple marketing strategies into multiple streams of income?

Ezine, Blog, or Social Media? Wrong Question

For non-writers, all this talk of having a website, then doing an ezine, and writing a blog, and sending bursts of info out on social media can feel overwhelming and confusing.

Anyone out there feeling that? Yep, thought so.

The question is not which one should you do, but why and when will you want to do one or more of these forms of writing.

From my perspective as a web-presence marketing mentor-coach, I always say that a website is your home-base. It anchors all the rest of your marketing. This is the most important more or less permanent piece of writing you'll have to do.

The purpose of your website is to tell your potential clients what they are waiting to hear in order for them to know you are the right provider for them.

Blogs seem to work better these days than ezines for getting people interested in you and your services, and getting a little taste of what it would be like to work with you. So when you are starting out and needing to generate enough clients to fill your practice, a blog is a good addition to a website.

Ezines seem to work best to keep in touch with current and former clients, generating repeat business, providing targeted help on topics your clients have expressed an interest in, and reminding people you haven't seen for a while that you are still in business. This is a different purpose than a blog, so the writing should be different as well.

Social media work best to spark interest in something specific in the moment. They can be good for sending the curious and the prospective client to your blog or website for more extensive information, or to make an appointment. But for solopreneurs in the healing arts, they don't really directly generate a lot of new clients.

So, website, ezine, blog, and social media -- which will you work on today?

Essentials of Your Marketing Message

One reason marketing is so overwhelming for solopreneurs just starting out in business is that not only do we need to know WHAT to do and HOW to do it, we also have to know what to SAY and how to say it.

What you say is your message.

You message needs to be crystal clear on 5 main points:

• who you're talking to (your ideal client)
• who you're not talking to (the prospects you intend to screen out)
• the experience they have that they don't want (their pain or problem)
  
• the outcome they want that they are willing to pay you to get (their need, goal, desire)
  
• your claim regarding what you can help them get (benefits and value of hiring you)

This may sound like a lot to think about. Ironically, sometimes the best way to crystalize all this is by thinking of your tagline, or one breath introduction.

A trick I learned years ago when I was a journalist writing headlines is useful here -- you don't have to say everything in detail. Readers naturally fill in the blanks. Less can be much better than more.

For example, look at the tagline for this blog: Getting More Clients to Your Door with Grace and Ease for Solopreneurs in the Healing Arts. It tells my ideal client -- solopreneurs in the healing arts -- and by specifying that it implies who I intend to screen out -- retail businesses with employees, executive coaches, etc. It suggests the problem -- you need more clients -- which also is your outcome goal and desire -- actually getting more clients. Finally it makes the claim that I provide easy solutions that will feel and be graceful to implement.

How you relay your message is key.

There's an old adage in the retail business that the 3 most important factors of success are location, location, location. For professionals like coaches and counselors, and even the solo-practice ND, who market primarily on the internet, the 3 most important factors of marketing success are emotion, connection, and delivery.

The most important lesson from this post is: describe, don't explain.

Describe your client. Describe what they want. Describe the problems they have in getting it. Describe how that impacts their life. Describe what they want instead.

Describe using emotional words. Name the pain. Actually say: you're feeling this (it implies: and I know it). Why? Because that begins to create an emotional bond. It begins to feel to them like they are connected to you. Feeling connected naturally leads to calling for appointments.

Delivery is about style. Be yourself in writing your message. Speak with the warmest, most authentic and empathetic aspects of your personality. Don't explain that you are warm and caring. BE warm in caring in your delivery.

There ya go -- the quick Friday lesson in the essentials of your marketing message. Work on that this weekend, and let me know what you come up with, eh?

Client Appointments Slowed to a Trickle? Try One of 4 Ideas

Are you like my friend* Julie, whose business as a life coach has taken a nose dive in recent months?

Maybe you're in the same boat with my colleague Arty, whose counseling clients are getting fewer and farther between?

Or, is your situation more like my client Dr. Genefer, who is considering closing down her naturopathic medicine practice and working as a natural supplements sales rep?

There's no question that the recession is impacting the bottom line of the solopreneur in the healing arts. But before you start cleaning houses, flip burgers, or throw in the towel altogether, ask yourself if you have tried enough creative, alternative ways to generate income in the field you love.

If not, here are 4 low cost, quick to start, in your field ideas to consider. BTW, these aren't as much for generating quick cash as for consistently keeping your pipeline full.

1. Start a Group

• Pick a dire need that your clients are desperate to end, improve, or achieve
• Make sure the target market is viable enough to be willing to pay for group membership
• Be direct and grounded in how you market the group
• Do it in person, by phone, connected to a networking organization, or sponsored by a company

2. Write a Self Help E-book

• Focus on a specific, definable problem with easy to describe steps to end, improve, or overcome
• Limit profesional jargon, maximize step by step instruction, and keep length to 15-50 pages
  
• Include pictures or clip art, and worksheets
• Include a plug for your regular services at the end
• Be assertive and persistent in how you market the e-book, whether as a free tool, or for a small fee**

3. Produce One or More Downloadable Self Help Audios

• Use a free conference call service on the internet if your computer isn't capable of recording
• Script out what you will say and rehearse it with a friend before recording
• Be clear in your diction, simple in your words, and slow-ish in your speaking
• Invite several friends or clients to participate in the recording with their questions
  
• End with a call to action for buying your e-book, or making an appointment for regular services
• Capture the wav file and save to your computer, then load onto to your website
• Market via social media

4. Develop a Creative Payment System

• Borrow and adapt from concierge or boutique practices
• Offer bonuses or discounts if clients will pay for a package in advance
• Seek out private contracts with small business owners to serve their employees
• At the least, get a shopping cart or PayPal buttons on your website and start taking credit cards
  

*Of course these aren't the real names of my friend, colleague.

**Check with your state -- in some places electronic products like ebooks and audio downloads are now taxable when sold.

Ugh -- Does Marketing Have to Be So Manipulative?

This morning I read a squeeze page* for a copywriting workshop. The longer it got, the more nauseated I felt.

No question this guy is a brilliant copywriter. He knows all the psychological hooks into the subconscious mind that create the urgent, even desperate, desire to buy whatever can be sold. To borrow a phrase I heard on a tv show, he could sell you the clothes you're already wearing.

Counselors, coaches and naturopathic doctors who try to emulate these types of sales letters for their websites will likely turn off more clients than they attract. It's the type of marketing we all hate, feel slimed by, that makes us want to run away screaming from the computer straight into the shower. UGH!

But, what can we learn that we can ethically use? Here are a few tips I'm translating from his tactics:

• Individuals in your target niche will be at various stages of readiness for your services. It's wise to have different methods for speaking to each level of readiness, and keep providing more and more useful help until they have decided to hire you to help them.

• More than touting your unique selling points -- a concept from the 1940s! -- is needed. We have to match a specific USP with our ideal clients' level of perception of pain or problem and their timeline of readiness to hire.

• Your website home page will work best if it follows the AIDA format: grab attention, connect with self interest, speak to your prospective clients' emotionally compelling desire, and use a motivating call to action.

• Tone, tempo and pattern in your content is important. Use them to create a sense of safety, rapport, trust, and confidence that you are the right person to help them resolve their pain or problem.

This stuff really isn't as hard as it appears, but it is a skillset that isn't as developed as it needs to be for most solopreneur counselors, coaches, and NDs.

I'd be happy to help you learn to use the marketing tricks that work AND are ethical for our professions.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

*A squeeze page is often a very long, one page website that pushes a single product or high ticket conference in a way that manufactures need, installs a sense of fear of losing out if you don't buy now, like it would be a bad decision to resist and affect your life or your business for years down the road. Usually the cost involved is not given until the bottom of the page, sometimes not even until you press the shopping cart button.

10 Reasons Counselors, Coaches & NDs Need Good Web Presence

Marketing online is perfect for introverts and those solopreneurs who suffer insecurity, low confidence, shoestring budgets, and greater than normal risk aversion when it comes to self and/or business promotion. But more than this, web marketing is a business success necessity in the 21st century.

You may be surprised at these facts:
1. More than 90% of households with computers in the US use the internet to find health care providers

2. The top search in Google is for health and medical related services, products, and information

3. More than 75% of the 78 million Boomer generation research for their needs and buy online

4. 73% of people aged 45+ say that shopping online is a favorite activity

5. Traditional advertising is declining in credibility and increasingly ignored among internet users -- consumers want to be in control of when and how they learn about something they are in the market to spend money on

6. Word of mouth marketing can be more quickly successful in the era of social media than old school referral systems

7. Social networking increased a whopping 774 % from 2006 to 2007 -- yup, that's seven hundred seventy four percent

8. People who buy from email links spend 138% more than those who don't

9. In 2006, e-books (which are gaining favor among internet users) generated $20 million in sales

10. Web marketing is cheap, flexible, easily correctable, low risk, with potentially high return on investment

In short, marketing is no longer about persuading the unknown masses to have interest in your product or service, convincing them that they need it, and relentlessly pushing them to buy it right now.

It's about being where your specific clients are already looking for what they already want, and becoming a familiar and trusted entity to them by providing enough immediate help to engage their natural desire to want even more and be willing to pay you for it.

Raise Your Hand if You Don't Have a Marketing Plan

Yep, that's what I thought. Most counselors, coaches, and solo-NDs don't.

When I ask my clients what their marketing plan is, I often hear answers like this: I'm looking into graphic designers, thinking about branding and planning to get a website soon. Or, I was thinking about taking brochures to doctor's offices. Or, I don't know, what do you think.

Well, what I think is that the idea of writing out a plan is intimidating to a lot of self-employed sole proprietors. We aren't really sure what's supposed to be in a plan, don't know the right way to make a plan, or the process is just too overwhelming.

The idea of a marketing plan triggers distaste for self-promotion, fear of being too visible in the public eye, insecurities about being on our own as business people, and sets off those feelings of being a fraud. Besides, if we'd wanted to do all these businessy things, we wouldn't have gone into the healing arts, right?

Some rugged individualists resist planning because we think it will pin us down, fence us in, inhibit our range of movement. Usually, these are the types who jump from one idea to another, without building a solid foundation or a clear, coherent, compelling message. (I've been guilty of that, so I can talk. LOL)

There are many benefits to having a marketing plan. It prevents going into panic when clients drop off and new intakes have dried up. It ensures you are connecting with the right prospective clients in ways they are likely to respond to. It keeps you from spending money foolishly on unnecessary advertising ploys pushed by unscrupulous hucksters.

So let me ask you this -- how healthy is your business right now? Is it thriving the way you want? Do you have a waiting list of clients, clamoring to get an appointment this month? Can you confidently project what your client load will be a year from now? No?

In other words, how's it working for ya to take the haphazard approach to marketing? I'd bet it's maybe giving you sporadic returns on investment, but not paving the road to sustainable success.

Starting to feel the need to get your marketing plan together? I'm here to help.

Are You Making These 7 Marketing Mistakes Right Now?

1. Waiting until your client load has dropped by 25-50% before you take action?

2. Depending solely on referral sources / insurance panels, or word of mouth to fill your practice?

3. Using cancelled appointment times for everything except marketing?

4. Thinking a website or traditional networking is all the marketing you need to do?

5. Not revising your website to be high touch and client-centered?

6. Not thinking NOW from a prospective client's point of view about the problems they'll be facing come October through January?

7. Wanting to believe you can succeed by doing less than building a systematic marketing system and tending to it on a daily basis?

If you're making any of these mistakes, what are you going to do about it?

What 3 things can you do differently to turn your practice around?

Making the commitment to your business -- as if it were a child whose life you were responsible for, rather than a game to be played when it kills time -- is essential for all solopreneurs in the healing arts who want a thriving practice. What commitments are you holding yourself accountable for today?

Magical Thinking in Marketing

In counseling, we often deal with clients who have what we call magical thinking -- the tendency to base decisions and life on irrational ideas and cognitive distortions of reality.

Interestingly, as self-employed business owners, many clinically competent counselors, coaches, and naturopathic doctors engage in magical thinking when it comes to marketing. I thought it might be instructive to see this laid out in comparison to several of the types of cognitive distortions we more easily identify in our clinical patients.

All or Nothing Thinking -- Have you convinced yourself that all you need to do is have a website that lists the benefits of your services and your contact info, or put an ad in a newspaper or phone book, or a profile on a locator service, or get one time advice, and when that doesn't bring in enough clients to fill your practice, you do nothing else?

Marketing is like housekeeping. It's never finished. There's always something more that can be learned and done. It has to be part of your daily business-keeping routine.

Magnifying and Minimizing -- Are you magnifying the expense of getting your marketing foundation in place and minimizing the long term payoff in doing so? Are you over-relying on scattered piecemeal activities and under-utilizing a structured marketing plan?

Solopreneurs in the healing arts tend to sabotage themselves with a pay-as-you-go mentality, rather than having a mindset of investing in what creates life energy for their business and for the future. Many marketing tasks cost little more than time and self-discipline. The secret is in knowing where and when to put your resources for easiest maximum benefit.

Shoulding on Yourself -- Do you tell yourself you should be networking, seeking referral sources, blogging, speaking, etc, when that goes against your innate personality and skills? Do shoulds form the basis of your marketing expectations: for example, you should be getting clients because your website presents your credentials and the benefits of your work?

Assumptions and pre-judgment really get in the way of successful practice building, especially when you don't evaluate their validity or get input from experienced advisers. Marketing is a heuristic game. It requires you to be self-observing, self-evaluating, and self-correcting without getting stuck in shoulds.

Jumping to Conclusions -- Do you construct your own roadblocks by assuming what your colleagues will think of you if you market this way versus that? Have you concluded that niche marketing will limit your client base without actually trying it?

Personal insecurities and an unconsciously defensive attempt to escape them are at the root of this form of magical thinking in business.

A client attraction coaching program on the best marketing activities for your personality, along with work on your confidence level, can alleviate these destructive forms of magical thinking.

Do You Have to Sell Yourself to Succeed?

A lot of advice for coaches, counselors, and naturopathic doctors revolves around collecting lots of business cards, telling everyone you know you're in practice, and asking for their referrals.

Once you've done that, this extroverted approach says, you have to follow up with everyone and tell them again.

Pardon me, but UGH!

For those with a more introverted personality who might rather eat worms than promote themselves in such outgoing ways, I'd like to offer another set of activities that work especially well for us.

1. Develop a client-centered website with lots of helpful tips for the problems your niche market struggles with. Make sure the site is 80% about them, and only 20% about you. Have a way for people to pre-pay for an appointment or package on your website.

2. Develop a signature presentation topic, in multiple lengths and formats that offers a solution to your niche market's biggest, most desperate problem, and demonstrate your skills as part of the presentation. Approach potential allied professionals and networking/ professional groups who are your niche or who worked with those who are, and offer to be the speaker at one of their meetings.

3. Find an online forum where your niche market turns to when they seek help, and become an active helper. Become their go-to person on your specialty topic.

4. Start a meetup group, host a coaching tele-group, or offer your services to meet a need in an already formed group.

5. Blog daily, or nearly, on topics and powerful questions you'd ask ideal clients in person.

6. Learn to interact with your niche using Facebook and Twitter.

7. Write an emotionally compelling marketing message about your client, not about you, and not about explaining coaching.

8. Don't give away free services, but do give well timed and well placed perspective shifting questions freely -- these are the best intro to your work and the most intriguing taste of your value, while also providing something of immediate value to prospective clients. It leaves people wanting more, and feeling just fine with paying you.

4 Things to Keep in Mind about Multiple Income Streams

Lots of business coaches advise leveraging your time and developing multiple streams of income. Time leveraging generally means working with groups, whether that be via teleconferences or live seminars. Multiple streams of income for service providers may mean developing a product line, or adding a new service, which may mean getting another credential.

Generating lots of different ways to make money sounds like a good idea -- until you realize each one can become a new business start up. How many businesses can you handle having at one time, especially as a solopreneur?

Keeping focused on your central business purpose can be a challenge when you start adding additional ways to monetize what you know and do. But allowing yourself to scatter your energies can be deadly, resulting in no one "stream" becoming more than a trickle.

If your vision as a counselor, coach, or ND is to be a one-person show, here are four things I've learned the hard way that may help you become successful more quickly than I did.

1. Define your ideal client niche with great precision -- know what their problems are, what motivates them to seek help, where they turn when they do, and what they are willing to spend money for (the outcome they want).

2. As a coach, you naturally deliver one-on-one services. That's Stream #1. In what other ways will you deliver the same information and help? Local workshops? Teleclasses? E-books? Ezines? Sticking to one themed (signature) message throughout all these different delivery methods will keep things manageable.

3. Set out to become a topic expert in your signature field. Do one thing everyday that furthers your visibility in your topic. Select the things that either will create income or that promote name recognition, subject authority, professional credibility, personal rapport, and client attraction interest.

4. If you feel the impulse to spend time and money that doesn't fall into the profit or promotion categories, get some coaching on working SMARTer, and look at core beliefs and other self-sabotaging factors in your self-employment habits.

7 Shoestring Budget Marketing Musts

Lots of my clients allocate a miniscule amount of their business budget to marketing. Cautious about taking financial risks, and invested in getting trackable results, they tend to have a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) marketing mentality.

It's psychologically understandable to want your business to pay for itself. It may even be an absolute necessity for now. However, it is assuredly an unwise long term practice that won't lead to sustainable success.

So I have these suggestions for smart initial spending on a shoestring to get the most value from your marketing dollars.

1. Remember that nearly all marketing expenses are very likely tax deductible, even for sole proprietor businesses. Spending on marketing is like putting money in a savings account -- the pay off grows over time, and you collect nicely on your year end income tax return.

2. Spend all you can on building an attractive, sticky, interactive, user-friendly website with a compelling marketing message.

3. Invest in help for crafting the best marketing message that makes the deepest emotional connection with your ideal client if writing isn't fun and easy for you. (remember that writing for marketing purposes is different from all other writing)

4. Use an inexpensive online printer like www.VistaPrint.com for your business cards. Don't bother with ordering brochures at first. Print fliers, tipsheets, even brochures from your own printer on an as needed basis, unless you need more than 30 or so at one time.

5. Take advantage of all the low cost online locator services, and free social media and blogsites to connect with potential clients.

6. Pay for online credit card processing capability -- such as PayPal, as one of several examples -- to make it easy for clients to buy your services and products.

7. Develop a marketing plan that gives you a clear path for growth within the limits of sensible, reinvestment in your business spending.

5 Marketing Lessons from Getting My Deck Rebuilt

1. Over-protective preparation may be a waste of time, but will make you feel more in control of the chaos.

• They told me to cover all my electronics, so I bought huge plastic bags and encased everything, then I sealed all the windows with plastic sheeting to keep construction dust out. Probably a bit over the top, eh? LOL

• In marketing, solopreneurs often think that more is better -- it's not. Do only what is needed for the purpose you are aiming at. But you won't be sorry if you take the time to hone your marketing message and develop your marketing plan to it's highest potential effectiveness.
  

2. Making big noise is okay -- do it early in the day, in small bursts, then take an early lunch, and quit at 3 pm.

• Workers are hammering and drilling and sawing and banging on the walls at 7 am. Oy! That's practically like the middle of the night for me. But they are efficient, the sounds have variety, it doesn't last long, and they are done early.

• Marketing is effective when it makes some big noise to get your prospective clients' attention. It's even more effective when it makes the right kind of noise, using various approaches, in limited doses, then respects the clients' ability to make their own choices.
  

3. Take frequent breaks -- work a little, get coffee, work in a different area, confer with colleagues, work some more, rest, etc

• Frequent breaks allow for proper pacing of the job, while conserving personal energy. Corrective consultation, new directions, a little social interaction, all make the work go faster and be more pleasant.

• Self-promotion becomes over-bearing when endless. Clients hate the constant sales pitch, and you don't get useful feedback and input from colleagues. Better to pace yourself, evaluate results, make changes, and come at it again.
  

4. Be careful about promising a timeline or a specific result.

• I think it's a genetic pre-requisite to be in the building trades to never guarantee how long things will take or exactly what it will look like when it's done. Ever try getting a firm answer from a contractor? Forget it.

• A coach might argue there is an accountability issue here, but there is a good lesson too in not setting up expectations that can't be met. Novice self-employed marketers in the healing arts will do well to perfect how to be accountable without inflating unrealistic expectations with their marketing message.
  

5. Ultimately, it won't be as awful as you imagined -- the disruption won't be as bad or as unrelenting as you may have expected.

• Being used to an exceptionally quiet work environment, I imagined needing alternative office space for the 3 weeks or more this construction may take. I fled the premises yesterday with my laptop and cell phone. Today, with my desktop computer unbagged, I've barely noticed the work outside my office door.

• Marketing is an unfamiliar activity for many self-employed business owners. You might imagine all sorts of hassles, challenges, and results that never manifest. Putting yourself in the experience of it is the only way to know for certain how to work around the frustrations.