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Give a Boost to Your Therapy Business (here's how I did it...)
If You Are Interested in Boosting Your Therapy Business – Have a Read of My Story – It may work for you too....
A Bit of Background. Back in 1999 I decided to leave my job as a teacher and retrain as a massage therapist. I was always drawn to working with my hands in a healing manner and quickly immersed myself in this new world.
There were a couple of problems though! And you might be familiar with some of them.
Although I quickly learned a great massage style - I had a hard time building up the business beyond 4 or 5 clients a week. Even despite the money, it was gutting to do what you are best at - and still not see the appreciation coming in!
My practice built up, slowly but surely, over the next 5 years - but never beyond and average of 10 clients per week. Added to this, I also found that the wear and tear - the sheer physical work of massage - was taking its’ toll.
A New Discovery. As often happens in these situations - a new solution popped up. CranioSacral Therapy (CST). I found the light touch and terrific results through this healing modality to be right up my street. I retrained over the next 3 years and slowly converted my clientele to be 50% CST clients.
The people I worked with were wowed by my approach, gentleness - and powerful effects. I loved working with pregnant mums, infants and lots of folks with "quality of life" conditions such as migraine etc.
The thing was - I was still only getting a maximum of 10 clients per week. I wanted to reach up to 16-18 clients per week.
Then I got sick over the period of a year and found it hard to maintain the business. Following an operation in March 2008, I was back on the mend again and looking forward to getting back with my clients.
The trouble was that while I was sick, some of my clients migrated to other therapists AND I also had to say goodbye to some terrific loyal massage clients as I decided to leave this type of work behind me.
So - I rolled all the way back down to the bottom of the hill again, dusted myself off and decided to get stuck back in again - only smarter this time!
What I wanted from my Business. So, I regrouped and considered my position. Here is what I knew:
I was really into - and gifted - with CranioSacral Therapy
It got results - and great word of mouth over time
I wanted to deal with an average of 16 - 18 clients per week over 42 weeks of the year.
I wanted my potential clients to seek me out.
I didn’t want to employ other therapists (I had done this before and decided that the administration was not for me!)
When I got a new client - they were going to have an average of 3 sessions of one hour.
The onward referral rate was about 1 in 3 (each third successful client recommended me on to someone else).
Once someone became a client - they usually came back on a yearly basis – often with another member of their family.
I wondered would having a website help me to achieve some of my business goals? But, I had no idea where to start. While I’m fine at doing what I love and running a business to support it – a website? Where would I start? I haven’t a techie bone in my body!
Then, in March 2008 - I came across Sitebuildit. It was referred on be a friend of mine who, like myself, wasn’t interested in learning all about the technical things in websites – they wanted to get on with running a business. But, they showed me lots of case-studies and how the website was bringing in fresh clients for them every week. I was very sceptical: A) Could it really get these results for me? And B) I was sure I would get sucked into a “techie hell”.But I liked the idea that it was targeted at business owners - not techies - and seemed to make a convincing case for taking it on.
So I did it. In March, 2008 I signed up for Sitebuiltit.
What Happened Next. I went through the excellent (and sometimes tedious, frustrating, bossy – but very helpful) Action Guide - and looked at site concepts. It made a lot of sense to choose the avenue of using Sitebuildit to support my changing business.
It reminded me to focus in on my business targets (areas to support my business and to generate some extra online income):
(And most importantly) Receive 2 hot leads every week through the website.
Get Google Adsense up when traffic hits about 100 visitors per day.
Work on ebook for other therapists - possible around growing your business
Check out and use appropriate affiliate products/services.
Because, if I receive 2 hot leads per week (a hot lead is a call on the telephone that almost certainly translates into a booking), then the incremental income from the website referrals over a year would be 18000 euro per annum based on the website achieving its’ goal. Suddenly the yearly sum of 299 dollars (about 200 euro) seemed small if I would get more than that much back every week.
So that got my attention!
The Website Goes Live. My website went live as craniosacral-therapy-healing.com in late March, 2008. The Look and Feel was basic. My writing style was intended to be friendly, approachable - yet professional. The content talked about different conditions, clients and how I approached their conditions. I learned a lot from the writing guide provided by Sitebuildit.
I had not seen this style used before by my competition - most just used online brochures. We found that the website did an excellent job of “preselling” (which sure beats explaining what CST is, time and time again, one to one, over the phone).
By late April of 2008- we had completed 30 web pages. Traffic was up to an average of 7 visitors per day –
- AND WE GOT OUR FIRST HOT LEAD - AND BOOKING!
A word on this – Sitebuildit showed me in it’s local service business guide how to optimise Google to recognise us as a “Cork, Ireland” site - and we sprinkled the pages with keywords "CranioSacral Therapy", "Cork" "Munster" "Ireland".
Our goal was to firstly get people looking for CranioSacral Therapy locally - and then get to people with conditions such as Tinnitus - who just wanted relief but would stumble across our site. We knew it would take a while to get up the Google charts for words such as Migraine relief - but that was for later.
Moving Up the Charts. At the beginning of May 2008 - we were no. 5 in Google.ie search for "CranioSacral Therapy Cork". Yippee we had arrived! I couldn't believe how fast this had happened. By the end of May, we were number 2! Whatever Sitebuildit was doing - it was working.
By early July 2008 we had:
Stayed with the same Look and feel.
Added lots of photos (always a good idea to put lot’s of visuals on your website)
Built up to 50 pages
Hit an average of 14 visitors per day
And - started to receive one hot lead every 2 weeks. The nice thing about these leads is that they are already sold! They are phoning up to book a CranioSacral therapy session – the website has sold them on what the therapy is and how it works.
The Present (November, 2009). Rolling forward to the present - these are tough times. People are careful how they spend their money. Many of my peers have experienced a drop-off in bookings.
However...
For the past year, I’ve been receiving 2-4 hot leads per week!!! Based on an average traffic of 45 visitors per day!
Quite amazing (at least to me)!
We are beginning to get concerned how we might handle 6 new clients per week should this continue!
In summary - the main monetization goal - 2 hot leads per week was reached inside 5 months based on traffic of 17 people per day.
Also - 4 Sitebuild it packages were sold to friends of mine who were impressed with the results (that was a nice bonus).
And Into The Future. Looking forward - I am so thrilled that I am finally on the path to fulfilling my natural talents with a needful and appreciative client base. It is great to feel the pep in my step!
We are really looking forward to keeping up the momentum and building up to the next phase with ads, affiliates and ebook - but always keeping an eye on the "knitting" - hot leads, new clients for my practice every week.
Finally - one of the things that really attracted me to sitebuildit was the user forum - what a resource! It is peopled by folks just like you and me who have made all the mistakes along the way, and are really happy to help others avoid them. This human “voice” really works for me. What a nice mixture of genius, humanity and commitment!
So thanks for sticking with my story. As you look around my site, you will notice that I rarely endorse any products. I am very careful where I attach me reputation. However, if you are a therapist and want to REALLY grow your business – then I wholeheartedly recommend Sitebuildit as a great place to start.
When you're ready to find out more - do just do as I did - click on Sitebuildit - or take the Video Tour - and make up your own mind. I know I'm glad I did!
Carina Collins, CST-T, Cork, Ireland.
P.S. And, even if you decide not to buy, there are all sorts of freebies available which will help you to have a good critical look at your current business and how a website might improve your income. The publications that I found particularily helpful were:
The Action Guide - Which gave me a good overview on how to build a Website to boost my business.
The Local Business Guide - Which spoke directly to me as a local business provider (you don't just have to be a therapist).
Make Your Content Presell - All about how to write for a website. It was a lot easier than I through once I worked through it.
Make Your Knowledge Sell - When you are an expert in something, how do your put this expertise across online - and get paid for it?
