Tag: build your hypnotherapy business

Hypnotherapy Marketing for New Hypnotherapists

Posted on by Martina McKeough

Hypnotherapy Marketing for New HypnothearpistsI felt that I had to write a blog post to cover some basic hypnotherapy marketing for new hypnotherapists following an email I just received from my contact me page. As the email was received from one of my hypnotherapy websites and not  my marketing site I assumed it was from a client and rang them up to ask them what they needed help with. The answer that they gave shocked me! It appears that they were about to finish their hypnotherapy training and wanted to know if I could tell them a clinic that they could practice in locally. Err what the hell? Yep, a person was contacting their local competition and asking if they could help sort out a room for them to use to run their therapy practice from and they wanted this information for nothing!

This call almost rendered me speechless (and that never happens). I mean what hypnotherapy courses are preparing their clients to run a business by not giving them some basic direction as to what to do? But besides that, if a person who is about to start a new career as a self-employed person is incapable of searching for some therapy rooms to practice from what are they going to be like when they try and attract new clients into their business? I can already give you the answer they are going to end up back in their old day job fast. Prompted by this call and some threads I have recently seen on some forums here are some simple marketing basics.

Learn Therapy Marketing Skills

If you don’t know anything about marketing then spend some money and learn the basics. Hypnotherapy is a hard business because you are always marketing to find new clients. Unlike hairdressing where you are likely to have a solid client base that will return again and again with hypnosis, you have hopefully resolved your client’s problem in a few sessions meaning you will need to find new clients faster.  This constant turnover of clients means that you have to be better at marketing than the average small business. No wonder most new hypnotherapists don’t last in business for very long.

To run a business you need to understand how to attract clients, how to run a website, how to use paid advertising, how to network, do accounts, how to budget and so on. If you have always worked as an employee with a salary in a job which didn’t make you think on your feet or have sales targets then you likely to underestimate the effort and skills it takes to get a business off the ground. Someone offering marketing mentoring can help you navigate this making your job just that little bit easier.

Don’t Expect Decent Information For Free

As a business my time is money. Unless I am doing pro bono work for charity expect to pay for my services. I charge for advice, my time with clients, my products and so on. Why? Because my experience is invaluable and that is what you are paying for. It means that when I am seeing a client I help them make positive change faster.  When I work with a marketing client they will see profits sooner and so on. If I need expert help in an area where I am not a specialist I get out my wallet and spend some money. I don’t worry about this expenditure because I know it will help me get more rapid results or earn more money. You should do the same.

Learn How to Fend for Yourself

Running a business means that you have to find solutions for yourself. When I used to work in the corporate world I could call the IT helpdesk and get immediate help to fix my computer or software. If I wanted to some legal advice I would head to see our corporate lawyer. When you are self-employed you simply don’t have that infrastructure around you which means you have to learn to do things for yourself or pay someone else to do them for you.

It is amazing what you can learn when you set your mind to it. I am now proficient at creating websites, recording and selling products, search engine optimisation and much more. Did someone give me that information for free? Nope, it took some hard work and dedication to acquire the skills. So remember hypnotherapy marketing for new hypnotherapists requires effort and time.

Understand Basic Accounting

A regular question I see on hypnosis boards is how much should I charge for my services?  My answer is if you don’t know what to charge then you are not ready to run a business. Being self-employed and turning a profit is all about the numbers. That means understanding some really basic details.

How much do you need to earn as a minimum per month to cover your general outgoings such as mortgage, food and bills?

What are the fixed costs in your business as a monthly number? That means rent, insurance, phone bill, travel costs, professional memberships, tax and so on.

So let’s say you need to cover outgoings of £1000 per month or £12,000 per year.

In addition, you have to cover £300 in costs related to your business meaning total outgoings of £1300 per month.

With some simple maths, you can calculate that you need a minimum of 13 client sessions per month at £100 per session to cover those fixed costs. Alternatively, you can see 26 clients at £50 per session or 6.5 clients at £200 per month and so on.

Now have a look at what your most expensive local competition is charging to at least get a vague idea of the top of the market this will allow you to assess the level you should charge.

This is just simple arithmetic yet so many hypnotherapists don’t think like a business person but pluck a number out of thin air and hope for the best. Do the maths and get the real numbers.

Get Your Website Right

Whatever you do don’t throw together a basic website and hope for the best because it won’t work. Creating a website for a business is an art and it has to be structured correctly otherwise you will have no chance of getting any business. Don’t make a website that you like the look of, make a website that converts browsers into buyers. Also, find a web designer that has experience in search engine optimisation as well as web design. If you don’t do that you will find that the expensive website that you paid a fortune for is likely to be a dud.  This is why I designed an online video course for creating and marketing hypnotherapy websites to help new hypnotherapists.

The Law of Attraction Doesn’t Work

So many people believe that if they simply think about having a successful business the law of attraction will provide them with one. Well, keep on dreaming because it actually takes time and effort to get a business off the ground. Hypnotherapy Marketing for New Hypnotherapists is initially a time-consuming task. You need to add yourself to directories, create a website, write content and blogs and a myriad of other tasks. If you don’t do this you can’t be found and you will be waiting for the phone to ring. Sorry, you just can’t sit there and hope that something will happen. Running your own business can be incredibly rewarding but in the early days, it can also be lots of hard work. Get it right and you can watch the money flow into your bank accounts but get it wrong and you will be broke, depressed and back in your old career before you know it.

Should I Practice from my Home?

There is no reason why you can’t practice from your home to keep the overheads low when you are first starting out but only if you have a really professional set up. On a forum the other day someone talked about running their business from their utility room. Hardly the professional image that you want to give a client. You need a dedicated room in your house with a desk and therapy chair and your certificates proudly framed on the wall. When you are in that room you don’t wear your slippers and comfy home wear but a smart professional outfit. If you don’t have that set up then find a therapy room and pay for it.

Next, if you do pay for a therapy room in a clinic make sure that you are the only hypnotherapist operating from the clinic. In addition, make sure that they are not making or taking your bookings for you and that you haven’t used their number in your advertising. Keep control of your biggest assets which are you and your website. Never pay the clinic a portion of what you earn. Instead, arrange a fixed fee per hour or per time slot and stick with it. Where possible try and have at least two places you practice from as if one has a problem or shuts down you have a base to work from. This is simply common sense.

Should I do Free Consultations?

I generally have a quick chat with a potential client on the phone before I book them. This is to make sure that I believe they are a suitable candidate for hypnosis and that they aren’t shall we say threatening or problematic. Where possible I keep this chat to a maximum of ten minutes after that I charge. Yet time and time again I hear of therapists arranging to meet potential clients first to have a discussion about the therapy. In one case I heard the other day a therapist had spent 3 hours unpaid with a client.  This is a great way to end up broke.

Meeting clients take time and energy where you could be doing something else. You don’t only lose the time you are talking to them but the time around the appointment where you can’t book someone in case they are is a slight overrun. So a one hour chat with a client can take nearly two hours out of your day. In addition, because someone is not committing to paying you they might simply not be bothered to turn up. Meanwhile, intelligent hypnotherapists are getting in paying clients for that time and earning money.

In my old practice area a number of therapists I knew used to run free talks in the evening to try and attract new clients into their practice. For that evening they would be earning no money. I meanwhile usually had a full practice with four or five clients paying me a nice figure for every consultation. Live and learn.

Hopefully, these pointers can help a few of you new starters to make a great living from a fantastic profession. Just remember that hypnotherapy marketing for new hypnotherapists is a skill just like any other and that it can be learned either slowly by working things out for yourself or more quickly by getting therapy marketing help. You are simply the person who chooses how quickly you want to grow and the time and commitment you put into your business.

 

 

 

Building a Hypnotherapy Practice – You Have to Speculate to Accumulate

Posted on by Martina McKeough

build a hypnotherapy practiceSo how exactly do you run your hypnotherapy business? If you are a self employed therapist I bet you do the following.  Get clients in through your door and charge them a fee per session. Out of that session fee you will pay your costs such as room hire, tax. phone bills and other miscellaneous expenses. The money you have left over is what you consider to be your wage. Once every couple of years you may pay a bit extra money to upgrade your website and that about sums it up. At no point have you thought about how you are going to get your business to grow in the future and how you are going to make that happen.

When you are building a hypnotherapy practice you can either:

1) Plod on doing the same thing year after year. Get in perhaps a greater number of clients or charge extra but ultimately have a ceiling on the amount that you can earn.

or

2) Speculate to accumulate. In other words reinvest some of those earning in your business to grow it into something much bigger than one to one therapy.

My hypnotherapy eBook talks about tips and strategies to get you to a six figure income. I know for many hypnotherapists this seems like “pie in the sky” talk yet this figure is very achievable for most therapists with the right business skills. The problem that I see in not only our industry but with therapists in general is that most have not got a clue what they need to do in order to even get a few customers in through their doors never mind to take their business to the six figure level.

Building a Hypnotherapy Business

Instead of thinking about your business on a customer by customer basis you need to think in the long term. How am I going to build a business that will earn me great money in years to come? How can I get money in through my doors in an automated way so that that I can be earning money whilst I am asleep? Frankly you need to bust through the ceiling that you have created for yourself. Working one to one with clients is great when you are starting out but you need to take your business a step further.

Think about it if you were a shareholder in a company you would want to see that company growing year on year. They need to be earning more money and giving you a great dividend. The business world understands this because their investors will sell their shares if they find that the company they decided to invest in is standing still.

I see many therapists as companies who are stagnating. They have great potential but then they have no idea of where to go next. They carry on doing the same old stuff year after year and their income stalls. Well I can tell you I didn’t start my own business to earn a boring old basic income. I took the risk of leaving a well paid job so that I could not only be my own boss but so that I could demonstrate how I could build a great business myself. I see myself as an entrepreneur and not as someone who is earning just enough to stay afloat.

Reinvesting in your Business

Building a hypnotherapy practice and creating a business that is next level means you need to reinvest. That means that some of that money you are earning has to be spent on other ventures that will bring you more money in the long term. It means reinvesting in your skills. If you don’t know how to build a greater income then you need to learn from somebody else. Investing in marketing advice and mentoring could mean the difference between surviving and thriving. Oh and you need to invest in better websites, equipment, automated software and so on. Now you don’t obviously have to do all of this at once but I believe that a percentage of your income needs to be set aside for you to do this.

I know that ever since I started by business I have used part of my “salary” to create new avenues of income. Once I built those products I began to sell them to others and that extra money is now steadily adding additional income into my monthly account without me even thinking about it. That means that as well as earning income from my clients I am earning from other sources as well. Now there is no ceiling to what I can earn. You can do the same with the right help.

If you need help building a hypnotherapy practice then how about getting some assistance? I work with all kinds of therapists and small business owners with my marketing and mentoring sessions. I believe that the  cost of my business coaching will almost be immediately offset by the extra customers you will get into your business. Remember it only takes one client paying for a number of sessions to pay for my marketing sessions for six months and I personally guarantee that you will be getting in many more than that providing you follow my advice. Give me a call today on 020 8351 2744 and see how you can change the income potential for your business.

 

 

How Much Time Do You Spend On Your Hypnosis Marketing?

Posted on by Martina McKeough

Hypnosis marketingHow many hours a week do you actually spend attracting new clients in to your business? One hour a week, five or ten? I know that there are a considerable number of therapists out there who do a very small amount each week and I can tell you that it is not going to be enough to get you the business that you deserve. A networking session and an hour or so writing a blog or handing out some leaflets now and again will be lucky to get you anywhere. Hypnosis marketing actually needs consistent daily work especially in your start up days to get you regular clients calling you for appointments.

So lets say that you have just qualified as a hypnotherapist and you are lucky to see a client a day in the initial stages. This means that you have a significant amount of time during the day which you have left hanging around doing nothing. That means that you have eight to ten hours to fill working on your hypnosis marketing. Now to some people that might sound excessive but frankly this career is now your full time job. It means that you need to spend at least as much time on it as you would have in your old profession if not far more because now you are not automatically going to get a wage at the end of each month.

Think about the average entrepreneur and how they work on their businesses in the early days. Many of these people will be up working at 7am in the morning and finishing late into the night. They will have sacrificed their social lives to get their business up and running and earning them great money. Now think of what the average hypnotherapist does when they finish their courses. They might get a website up and running and attend a few small networking gatherings but in many cases I do not see the same drive in our profession as I do in many others.

Now of course if you don’t need to earn money then it really does not matter. You can frankly sit in bed all morning, drink coffee with your friends and go to the gym. But if you actually have to earn a living from this profession then you had better start to get fired up about marketing and getting cash flowing in to your business or you may as well go back to the day job.

Building a Hypnotherapy Business Takes Time

In order to build a great business you need to be working on your marketing tasks daily. If you don’t understand what marketing you need to do then you need to get some business and coaching advice and fast. You need that knowledge because otherwise you will end up banging your head against a brick wall and getting nowhere.

At my marketing classes for hypnotherapists I make it clear that the information that I give them is just their starting point. One blog is not enough, writing one advert is insufficient. You need to be constantly producing new material, updating websites, blogs, profiles. press releases to get found. I can guarantee you that even after I explain this to my students there will always be someone a week or two later who had selective hearing and comes back to and says they have done it all and the phone is not ringing.

I can tell you now that there is never a point when you have finished all the marketing that you can do. At this moment in time I have a list of about thirty tasks that I need to accomplish on my latest round of marketing. As I progress down this list I will find that there are more and more elements which will be added to it making it a never ending project. I have never sat down for one moment and thought that’s it I have done enough!

Earn More Money You are a Business!

You see I am at the point now where I am busy just about every day. I can see up to eight clients a day on some days and frankly that is pushing me right to the limits. Now for some people they will be satisfied with this but I most certainly am not. You see if I continued like this there would be a ceiling on my earnings. I can’t fit any more clients in to each day which means that the only way I could make more money would be charging them more or seeing people in groups.

Ok so lets say I charge more or see groups there would still be a ceiling on my income. That is the last thing that any business owner should not be aiming for. Year on year your business should be growing and that means that you have to think of new innovative ways to push your income levels higher. How about selling real and virtual products for example. Creating passive income streams to bring you in money whilst you are asleep. Or perhaps hiring associates or affiliates to sell your products.

You see hypnosis marketing never ends. There is never a point where you have done enough and there is never a point where you should have run out of ideas. If you feel that you are stuck and have no idea how to get those initial clients or how to take your business to a level where you earn additional income then you are a prime candidate for my marketing and mentoring sessions. Over a period of six months to a year I work with you to build great foundations for your business so that once you have a great base level of income you can start to take things to another level. Yes you will have to work hard but the rewards are potentially unlimited when you really commit to running a business instead of thinking as a vocational career choice.

Build Your Hypnotherapy Practice on a Shoestring- The Best Things in Life Are Free!

Posted on by Martina McKeough

Hypnotherapy Marketing ExpertWhilst in some areas you have to speculate to accumulate I believe that when it comes to Hypnotherapy Marketing some of the best ways of getting clients cost absolutely nothing. Now I know that this is of huge importance for many therapists especially those who are starting out because they simply don’t have the money to throw around on large marketing campaigns. I like my students to keep their hands in their pockets where possible as throwing money at something does not actually mean that you are going to get a return.

I know that many therapists simply believe that this isn’t true but some of my best financial returns have cost me very little. For example how many of you have spent hundreds if not over a thousand pounds/dollars on a website created by a developer? My guess is that most therapists believe they are not capable of getting something up on line so they pay someone to do it for them. Well the news is that in 2015 you don’t need any huge web development knowledge to get a website up and running. In fact with many of the online website creators you could get a very basic website up and ready online within an hour. Even better many of these websites will cost you less than a couple of cups of coffee. You simply need to buy a domain name and you are good to go.

Now I can hear many of you thinking that surely it must be difficult to get something up online but the reality is that with the internet anything is possible if you apply yourself. For example this website that you are looking at this blog on was created by me on the WordPress platform. This admittedly took me longer than an hour but I have built plenty of other websites on other platforms which consist of drag and drop templates. All you have to do is add the copy and suddenly you have a website that looks sleek and polished for peanuts. You can also change the elements in the website within minutes so if you want to add a new page or change wording on a page it can be done instantly. Those of you with developer websites know that getting someone else to do these things for you will cost you $$$$$!

Don’t know where to start even when you see a simple web design template? Simple, head on over to YouTube there are plenty of people online showing you exactly how to construct a website on just about every platform you can think of. Many of these are step by step guides which means that you can do a little at a time and build your confidence. When you build your own website on a platform such as WordPress it has other advantages. You are now in control of every aspect of the site and that means that if you want it to have additional features you can add them for no cost. Most WordPress plugins cost you nothing at all. It also means that you don’t have to turn to a developer every time you need to make a little change. Getting to grips with the basics is really important and can save you thousands over your career. If you want a little extra help then I offer advice on what elements a website needs to have in order to be a success.

Save Money on Your Hypnosis Marketing

Creating your own website is just the start of setting up your business on a shoestring budget. In fact you can get your business of the ground for virtually nothing. For example a great way to get clients is through networking. I have never spent a penny on conventional networking groups in fact most of my contacts I met online. I show people in my classes how Social Media can increase your business without you ever meeting the person who is referring people to you.

I save money on my hypnotherapy marketing by not leafleting, not paying for directories or listings on local websites. If a salesperson rings me on the phone they are ignored because I simply do not need their services. I don’t advertise on gym videos, on doctors cards, in local magazines or papers. In fact I am cheap and you can be as well. The only thing I do spend money on is improving my marketing skills whether that is online courses or books to improve my profits and revenue or on paid online advertising in only a few key areas. This is the complete opposite of what I used to do. When I started out I threw money at all kinds of possible advertising schemes and I can tell you that almost none of them worked.

So Why Pay for Me?

People may ask why then should I pay for your business advise if you are telling me that the best things are free? Well firstly my job is to save you money in the long term. My six monthly marketing and mentoring sessions cost the same as one extra client. I can guarantee you that if you follow my marketing and mentoring advice you will make that money back ten times over in those first six months providing you follow my advice.

Secondly I have years of knowledge in business development and I run a successful hypnotherapy company which has tried all these techniques and tips so that you don’t have to. Not only do I see private clients I also:

  • Sell online programs and audios
  • Work with large corporate clients to improve client well being
  • Offer training programs for therapists
  • Sell eBooks
  • Work regularly with the media including companies such as the BBC and the UK Press.

In just a few short years I have gone from nothing to a thriving business and you can as well. For more details about my Hypnotherapy Marketing and Mentoring programs or even my eBooks simply send me an email or give me a call and let me tell you how I can transform your business for the price of one client.