Marketing 101 for Hypnotherapists Part 7 - Improve Your Website And Get Hoards of New Clients Contacting You TODAY!

I’ve been speaking to dozens of hypnotherapists over the last couple of weeks, and working hard to help them overcome their current constraints and obstacles to achieve success in their practices.

Two of the most pressing and urgent problems in our profession are:

1. Practitioners not getting enough client enquiries and struggling to fill the diary

2. Practitioners not getting enough of the kind of clients they really enjoy working with and can really connect with to achieve the best results

Having spent so much time helping hypnotherapists with their personal action plans, I can now tell you categorically the simplest first step for 99% of you.
IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE AND GET BETTER AT ONLINE MARKETING!

I’m absolutely serious here guys, and I hope you don’t mind me being frank and honest with you. Most of your websites are a long way from achieving the quality and impact that they easily could.

Once again, I think it is symptomatic that those of us in the business of helping others so often fall short in selling ourselves and our services, and nowhere am I seeing this more clearly than in online marketing.

Let’s get something very clear here. The internet represents the ‘Gold Rush’ of our time. The statistics are absolutely frightening. Every day, a higher percentage of people are making the internet their primary research tool to find help for their problems.

This represents a fantastic opportunity for you to quickly find more ideal clients for your practice than you could ever handle. If you’ve recently found new client enquiries dwindling with no apparent explanation, then you need to look at your online efforts very closely, because:

Your competition is getting smarter and the chances are that the clients who would once have found you in the Yellow Pages book, are now busy signing up online with Toastmasters or Weight Watchers. Even your local medical practices are starting to get a lot cuter online.

A lot of you guys seem to be in denial about just how serious this problem is going to become if you don’t take action very quickly.

Here Is the Good News

There is still a huge opportunity for you online, and will be for a long time to come. It is by far the easiest way for you to quickly build your practice in the way you have always wanted to.

Online advertising is very cheap and measurable. This means that for the thousands of dollars you used to spend on ‘hit and hope’ ad campaigns in the Yellow Pages or on leaflet drops, can now be used for laser-focused online ad campaigns that reach the exact people you can help the most.

There is far less competition online, because many people are making the same mistakes as you and failing to capitalize on the opportunity. This means that your online competition is not very strong. You don’t actually need to become world class at online marketing. You just need to get 20% or 30% better than you are right now in order to fill your client diary rapidly.

There are low barriers to entry. If you wanted to build a successful retail business in your local city center, it would cost you an absolute fortune. However, building a website and successfully advertising it online is relatively cheap. Competing with the big boys is far more achievable online than it ever was offline.

Like I said, as a hypnotherapist, the internet gives you the practice building opportunity of the milenium, but you have got to act right now, or you will keep putting it off and over time it will just slip away, like sand through your fingers.
Here are the 7 fundamental steps you need to take

1. Have control of your website/s

Are you able to go into your website right now and make changes? Could you add some content or images, update your contact information or change headlines?

If the answer is no, you are putting yourself at a serious disadvantage. Unquestionably, you MUST ensure that your website is either a blog structure or a CMS (Content Management System), and that you are regularly updating it, adding new content, optimising for maximum client enquiries and generally keeping the content fresh and dynamic.

2. Have a clear goal for your website/s

What do you actually want people on your website to DO? It seems like an obvious question, but it’s one that most people never ask themselves.

I have one goal for people who land on my hypnotherapy website, and that is for them to get in touch with a question or to request a brochure. For that reason, every call to action (be it a text link, or a big shiny graphical button) recommends the site visitor to do just that.

There are many ways to bring more of the right kind of visitors to your website, all easily learned. However, if your website is not optimised for conversion (ie getting the visitor to take the next step), then simply bringing in more visitors is a waste of time.

3. Your site must look, communicate and feel FANTASTIC

Back to the metaphor of the successful retail business. How would you feel if you walked into a store and you couldn’t find anything, the store was messy and dirty, the staff appeared to be in hiding and when you could find an assistant, they were unhelpful and couldn’t answer your questions? That’s right, you wouldn’t stay in there for 5 minutes.

The average web visitor won’t stay on a low quality website for more than 5 seconds.

I’m not suggesting here that you need to spend a fortune on fancy graphics or gimmicks, in fact quite the opposite – simple is often better online but professional is a must.

4. Make sure people can find you

Again, if you were a retail store, it wouldn’t matter how wonderful the store was, if you were located in an obscure back street that no one could find, you would never sell a thing.

Clearly you need to get your website perfect in terms of its potential to convert visitors into client enquiries as a first priority, but then the big question is:

How are those people actually going to find you?

There are dozens and dozens of ways that you can get visitors to your website. Think about the ways that you find different websites when you are searching online. Some of the most successful approaches are:

• SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation). This means getting your website optimised for maximum search engine success.
• PPC (or Pay-Per-Click advertising). This involves getting your ad seen next to the main search engine results.
• Advertising your services on other people’s websites
• Posting in blogs and forums
• Writing expert articles on third party websites
• Online press releases
• Etc etc

Any combination of the above can propel your practice to higher levels of success. Pay-per-click advertising for instance can, by itself, create a successful business in no time at all.

6. Make your website the perfect meeting point between you and your potential clients

I’d like you to imagine two circles. One represents you (your experience, training, beliefs etc). The second circle represents your potential client (their problems, goals, values etc).

Now imagine the point at which these two circles overlap – the meeting point between everything that your client wants and needs to improve their life, and everything that you bring to the table that can help them get there.

Your website and your marketing should be a clear representation of that meeting point or ’sweet spot’ where the two circles overlap. I strongly suggest you enlist the help of a friend or fellow professional to go through your website with the mindset of being your client. Are you clearly answering all of their potential questions? If not, it’s time to get to work and start making improvements.

When you engage with your potential clients in this professional yet intimate way, you will create incredibly powerful rapport with them, and your results will improve dramatically.

7. Establish trust with your potential clients

Think about businesses that you trust, and websites that you feel secure in buying from.

What is it that makes you trust those people? Two of the most important things are honesty and openness. I am amazed by how many hypnotherapy websites I have visited recently which do not have a photo of the hypnotherapist clearly displayed.

This is a big mistake! Your visitors are looking for help and a powerful connection. The easiest way you can achieve this is by speaking to them as yourself, and in a way that clearly articulates that you understand where they are at and that you are able to help them.

Another thing that will help you greatly is powerful testimonials. I know that for some practitioners, using client testimonials is an ethical challenge, however there are many other ways you can achieve the same result. Something I find to be extremely powerful, yet nobody ever teaches it, is to secure testimonials from fellow practitioners, even from your original training instructors.
The way forward

Ultimately, you are in a position to address these 7 steps right now, and if you get this right, you will rapidly increase your enquiries and will see more and more of the type of clients and issues that you passionately enjoy working with. This means that your revenues will explode, you will get a lot more enjoyment from what you are doing, and your professional energy levels will be sky high.

All of this means that you could soon be running the hypnotherapy practice that you always dreamed of, helping literally hundreds of clients to make powerful changes and overcome their problems. You will then be able to use your website in other ways, and build countless opportunities in the future such as selling physical products and CDs, doing more group and corporate work – the possibilities are endless.

If all of this just feels too difficult or overwhelming, then please just take my word for it – it needn’t be. One step at a time is fine. An object in motion is on its way towards its target. You just need to get moving.

One other thing. I have never had problems with online success. I have always been more successful than others in my local vicinity, and some of my hypnotherapy and life coaching websites have been amongst the busiest in the world.

However, I am far from being a technical person. Quite the opposite! The reason I am telling you this is that I don’t want you to use the excuse of not being ‘technical’; none of that stuff really matters. At the end of the day, you can do what I always do – ask your 12 year old nephew to help you.

Here’s to your future success, and please don’t let the Online Gold Rush pass you and your practice by!

Ed Lester
The Hypnotherapy Report


Ed Lester