February 2012

20 Reasons for Writing a Blog to Connect with Counselling Clients and Increase your Online Visibility

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All writing takes courage. Writing for your therapy practice in the form of a regular blog may seem like a leap to you if you have not written much more than your papers at University, but your fears can be channelled into productive and honest efforts to produce valuable content for your counselling clients.

Remember, the idea is to connect with your therapy practice clients on a real and personal level. This is something you do every day. Only with a blog, it’s a written resource and can be read at any time. A blog can be in the form of a journal, or be directly targeted for building your business. A blog filled with useful content develops your online visibility and authority in both the search engines and within your client community.

Here then, in no particular order, are 20 reasons why writing a blog consistently helps you to connect with your counselling clients and increase your online visibility:

#1. You create awareness in your community

Your blog can be dedicated to your client community - the people who benefit most from your expertise. By writing blog posts that help people with problems that you have the unique solution for, you’ll create awareness about your services. The ways that you can help people will become known. This holds immense value for your therapy practice.

#2. You establish authority in your field

Establishing yourself as an expert in your particular counselling and therapeutic field is one of the foundational benefits of blogging. Blogs are wonderful tools for validating your expertise. Posting regularly to your blog on topics of special interest to your client community will help you to expand your online visibility.

#3. Your blog resource will be shared

The more helpful and useful the content that resides in your blog, the more your audience are inclined to share it. Social media buttons linking to social networks are easy to incorporate into your website pages and blog. Once your community are regularly sharing the useful tips and insights you provide, your blog may become very popular.

#4. You’ll earn favour with search engines

The structure of blogs is designed for ranking high in the search engines. Add to this a steady flow of useful content, and you have a winning formula that will automatically improve your search engine rankings. Applying optimisation techniques including keywords and key phrases, relevant images and video  in your posts further earns you search engine love.

#5. More people will hear about your services

Once you have established a regular routine for your writing and posting of helpful and useful content, you can encourage interaction with your client community by asking questions and inviting comments. Initiating dialogue with your blog readers can lead to active engagement with your blog and a wider community hearing about your services.

Sydney psychologists marketing a practice#6. Like-minded people will find you

People with similar interests to yours within the counselling and therapy community will also be attracted to your blog. As members of your client community begin to share your ideas, insights and tips across the web, like-minded people distribute these conversations via informal networks that your blog can benefit from in terms of inbound linking.

#7.  You’ll help people grow

Your blogging about topics related to counselling and therapy in context of your therapy practice will help people expand in knowledge and understanding of the world we live in, of ourselves, and the relationships we have with people. The joy of knowing you are helping people grow is a core reason on its own to write your blog.

#8.  Your knowledge will increase

Since blogging successfully calls for frequent posting and providing fresh content on a regular basis, the process provides the perfect way for you to stay in touch with counselling and therapy industry practices. Your knowledge will be continually enhanced by the discipline of seeking out new and useful content to share.

#9. You can stay in touch with trends

Every time you post to your blog, you’ll be drawn to current trends and newsworthy items in the blogosphere. Keeping your blog on trend will not only give your clients good content but will help you to stay in touch with what is happening in the world. Linking to trending topics can help you gain more attention.

#10. Your therapy practice income will increase

While blogging certainly isn’t about making money, the potential for generating income for your therapy practice is increased. Some revenue can be earned from your blog by implementing a few income generating activities, yet the greatest value is in the new clients and referrals you gain for your therapy practice.

#11. You’ll have more fun and be more creative

Growing a blog and building your resources is a fun and creative experience. Your area of expertise is also the area of your greatest passion and commitment. You can tap into this feeling whenever you write and deliver sound advice and stories that warm the hearts of your blog visitors.

#12. Your therapy practice will grow

Encouraging stronger relationships between your blog visitors and clients within your community can be easily achieved by providing forums like enabled comment strings for each blog post. You can engage with your clients and respond to their needs in new ways. This can lead to tremendous growth for your therapy practice.

#13. Your blog can help you understand your market

Blogging is all about give and take. Traditional advertising and publishing is waning because new inbound marketing tactics offer your clients and readers ways to give you input and insights into their needs like never before. As you introduce significant topics, your readers may sometimes challenge you to take a fresh look at it through the responses you receive.

#14.  Identifying your ideal client becomes easier

As you become a seasoned blogger, with more and more insights into your market and client community’s problems, you will be able to easily identify the main groups who respond well to your solutions. This makes it easier over time to find the perfect and specialised niche for your services.

#15.  You can share valuable content quickly

Syndication of content – material that is reused and integrated through other services across the web – is very efficient in the online environment. Initially, the syndication of content online was manual. Now, however, potentially every aspect of content syndication can be automated and content quickly shared.

#16. You’ll become a better writer

Writing and note-taking – whether in text processors or by voice recording and transcription – are essential to your therapy practice. By developing your blog, writing on a regular basis, and responding to the community feedback you receive, the process of writing and expressing your thoughts and opinions becomes easier every day.

#17.  You’ll develop a rapport with your clients

The more you write, the more you realise that it doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect to get your point across or connect with your clients. The more you let people see the real and authentic you, the easier it is for people to relate to you. Perfection can block our creativity. Your readers won’t care if you’re perfect when you’re solving their problems.

#18.  Blogging develops great discipline

To be absolutely clear, blogging does require devotion, discipline and commitment. And each of these qualities – if you embrace them – will help you grow your therapy practice confidently and get the most from your life. By extending your daily or weekly activities to patiently include your blog writing, fresh new opportunities, profits and life habits come to light.

#19.  You’ll save on promotions and advertising

Another thing to remember as you get started with your blogging is that most blogs are free or cost very little to maintain. WordPress is free. Hosting your blog in your own domain can be done for as little as $100 a year. Instead of expensive advertising and promotions to get new clients, inbound marketing tactics like blogging will save you money.

#20.  Getting your blog up and running is easy

A blog is a very simple platform for communicating ideas. In An Introduction to WordPress for Therapists [Video] Clinton Power guides you step by step through the powerful yet easy to use features of WordPress. The dashboard is simple to understand and offers great flexibility for creating an inspiring and lively blog.

Related blog posts (linked to in text):

10 Steps for Overcoming your Fears of Writing

Improving your Australia Counselling Profile with SEO

The Essential pages of your Therapy or Counselling Website

An Introduction to WordPress for Therapists [Video]

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marketing a Sydney and Australian therapy private practice

4 Ways to Attract New Clients to Your Therapy Practice Using Images for SEO

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Images have a very attractive quality, especially when added meaningfully to your counselling website and therapy blog content. Using pictures and visual elements on your web page is a powerful way to grab attention and build interest into your content creation strategy.

Images can also deliver useful data and facts to your audience, giving your future clients every reason to establish trust in your services.

Taking a little time to search, select, place and properly tag your images to be easily accessed by the search engines provides your readers with a better read and enhances your on-page search engine optimisation (SEO).

1.   Select relevant and impactful images

Choosing the right images to match your counselling website content and blog posts can be critical in whether your blog post gets read. These days, people browsing online tend not to read a whole page of content but to seek out the most useful facts and read only what is fascinating and holds value for them.

Deliver your message with emphasis

By using images to break up long articles and web content, you are much more likely to keep the attention of your visitors. Selecting relevant images and placing visual elements in the correct context is also a good way to create continuity within your articles and website content.  

 “A picture is worth a thousand words” – there’s a reason this cliché has stood the test of time. Photos, pictures, infographics and other visual representations of ideas and facts convey a message with far more impact, especially when you want to emphasise a strong point. Keeping images relevant to the theme of your content is essential for a fluid reading experience.

Make your content more memorable

Placing your images next to your key ideas and using graphical data to really hone in on the core takeaways within your content definitely make the read more memorable. Being human, we find it easier to memorise information when we have an anchor to aid the memory. A visual snapshot is easier to pin to our memory boards because it is more natural than the written word.

Explain processes in simple steps

Given time and with little effort, you can create your own images. For example, if an article is to explain something like How to Use Facebook Ads to Fill your Therapy Groups and Workshops in 5 Easy Steps, you can use screen capture software to create an image that you can then insert into a program like Adobe Acrobat or Nitro PDF Professional that allows you to add arrows and highlight parts of the captured image to explain exactly how to carry out a necessary action to achieve a goal.

Experiment with different sources

You can also use your own photos if you have a digital camera and a penchant for photography. Given a decent eye and a digital camera, you can shoot and edit your own photos for use on the web using an image editor. You can also use hand drawn images and upload them using a scanner. Computer graphics programs can also be very useful for making illustrations that are unique to your website and relevant to your content. You can also gather facts and figures about your therapy market and transform them into graphic illustrations that present the information in ways that are easy to recognise and remember.

2.   Place and upload images appropriately

The most logical and effective placement for an image is naturally right at the beginning of your written website copy or counselling blog post, preferably near the title. This is the first place your visitors will look and is one of the most useful placements to help in memorising your content.

How many images to use

Following that, additional images are useful for sectioning the content, along with headlines and other textual techniques for keeping a reader engaged. It’s best to place images right near the content that it is related to and to avoid using too many irrelevant images that could clutter up the text. Placing images at intervals of between six to ten paragraphs is comfortable on the eye – some articles and blog posts may need more images if it’s explaining a process but in general, it’s best only to use images to make reading easier, not harder.

Choosing your image uploader

Uploading images to your WordPress blog, you have a couple of choices. You may prefer to use an image uploader plug-in like ‘SEO friendly images’  or  use the standard WordPress images uploader.  It’s all a matter of how you prefer to add SEO elements to the images you upload.

Using image filenames for SEO

Something to remember is to name your image files in a way that enhances your SEO. Photographers rarely realise the usefulness of image file names stored and linked to website content.

A few examples of image file names that have not been optimised are:

  • DSC0000015875422.jpg
  • PictureA.jpg
  • 20110215-BP-1-C.jpg
  • FFF319B-ALT-91.jpg

For archive use, the above may seem useful. However, this type of naming is useless for images uploaded to the web. The search engine spiders crawling would have absolutely no clue about the content of pictures named in this way.

In contrast, the following image file names can easily be read by the search engines:

  • Melbourne-Psychology-Practice.jpg
  • Trauma-Abuse-Counselling.jpg
  • Counsellor-profile-face-australia-counselling.jpg
  • Adelaide-Counselling-Office.jpg

Size really does matter

There is little that is more frustrating than arriving at a website and waiting an extraordinary length of time for a page to load. Large image files can slow down page loading times dramatically. It is definitely true that image file size does matter and in terms of web page loading times, the smaller the better. There are some good file optimiser plug-ins available – like ‘WP.Smush.it’ – that enable you to reduce large files significantly without losing image quality. It is worth taking time to reduce file sizes before uploading to your website and blog. Your Google rankings are adjusted for site speed. And your visitors will thank you for it if your site loads quickly and easily.

3.   Use ALT tags to optimise your images

ALT tags are tags associated with web page graphics that display alternate text as visitors hover over the graphic with a mouse. These image ALT tags also make visual elements in graphics files more accessible to search engines and the visually impaired.

Search engine love

ALT tags offer a little extra strength to your website and blog SEO. To make them really useful, ALT tags must convey what the graphic is for or about and contain relevant and descriptive keywords.

Remember it is unwise to do any keyword stuffing as Google has already adjusted the algorithm for web page rankings to counter this bad practice. The purpose of the ALT tag is to describe the image as accurately as possible so it can be recognised by text-based search engines.

Visually impaired visitors

 A visitor to your counselling blog or therapy practice website who is visually impaired may be able to understand your page content through a browser with a screen reader that reads aloud the ALT tags and text on the page. If the ALT tags are not used, the person would have no idea of the visual content on the page.

A simple plug-in for ALT tags

Filling in ALT tags can be a little time-consuming and this is why some people don’t use them.  The ‘SEO Friendly Images’ plug-in for your WordPress counselling blog is an easy way to get the job done more quickly and to satisfy both the search engines and your visually impaired visitors.

4.   Keep it easy on the eye

Using images that are relevant and impactful are a great way to attract new clients to your counselling blog or therapy website and thereby to your services. The key idea is to find and use images that make your therapy website content and counselling blog posts easier to read. You can use a variety of images to accomplish your goals.

Make your images clickable

Images can be hyperlinked to other web pages on your blog or your Facebook profile to keep your visitors engaged with all the useful content you have to offer.

Sourcing and attribution

If you do not have a ready source of your own images or will be writing about different topics from time to time that require different types of images, you can source many of the images you need through Google’s images search. You can use the Advanced function to specify images with ‘Right to Use’ to avoid copyright infringements. You can also create custom images to link to your social media accounts.

Images in our mobile world

Sometimes images don’t render as well on mobile technology as they do on a computer. One way to make sure a visitor can view images better on a mobile device is by providing a link from the smaller, optimised image to the larger image hosted elsewhere. This way a visitor can zoom in to get more detail.

Using images is a very useful way to attract clients to your therapy website or counselling blog and for redirecting visitors around your website, blog and social networking platforms. To make the most of images is both excellent for SEO and for alerting your clients to useful content you have published to the web. Paying attention to the images you use can take a little extra time but the results will speak volumes.

Do you use images on your blog and website? If so, what have you found works for you? Enter your comments below.

Related blog posts:

How to Use Facebook Ads to Fill your Therapy Groups and Workshops in 5 Easy Steps

Healthcare Websites: 55 Things you can do with Wordpress

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How to Use Facebook Ads to Fill Your Therapy Groups and Workshops in 5 Easy Steps

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Facebook is now a social media platform of epic proportions. With over 800 million members at the time of writing this post, it is not to be ignored in your therapy marketing efforts. And yet I see so many therapists who struggle to fill their therapy groups and public workshops who are not utilising this powerful form of advertising.

Often I hear therapists say "it's not the right timing" or "money is tight for people at the moment" and many other excuses, but I don't buy any of these reasons why your therapy group is not full.

I've had great success filling my 10-week therapy groups that I run 2-3 times a year for the last couple of years and get enough inquiries to fill 8-10 spaces for each group. My co-facilitator and I make a very tidy profit after an advertising budget of about $250-300 per group. I primarily use Facebook advertising to fill these groups, along with a small Google Adwords campaign.

In this post I will take you step-by-step through the process of setting up a Facebook advertising campaign that will help you fill your therapy group or workshop. The good news is Facebook ads are easy to set up, create and manage and you will be getting inquiries about your group or workshop in no time at all.

Before you create your ads, define your niche market

Facebook is the most targeted advertising that is available in the world today. In my research of using Facebook ads for the last couple of years, I've found that the most effective ads are those that are specifically targeted to a niche market; a specific population and/or a specific problem. 

Ads that are general don't do as well as those that are specific. For example, I ran some ads a while back that were about general counselling for anyone within the Sydney region. These ads got very few click-throughs and did not do well in converting website visitors into paying therapy clients.

Start by thinking about a very specific population you can target and the types of interests they have. For example, if you run a relationship singles group, you may want to target single woman over 40, or if you run a cancer support group, you could target women over 30 who have an interest in cancer mentioned on their profile.

Step 1: Create a landing page

When someone clicks on your Facebook ad, you want them to go to a landing page. A landing page is a specific page on your therapy website that is designed so that the visitor is compelled to take one action, such as enter their email address or phone number, sign up for your newsletter or download your free report.

Keep your landing page simple and uncluttered with a strong headline and interesting copy. Also have a very clear call to action. You can see an example of a landing page I created recently for a therapy training institute above.

Ads that direct the person to your home page or general pages of your website have been shown not to be as effective as having them land on a dedicated page with your one call to action, so try to create a landing page to increase your conversions.

If you're running a group or workshop, I recommend you have a sign-up box where the visitor can enter their contact details, and you're notified when they submit them. You can then follow up with them providing more information about the course or workshop.

Step 2: Create your campaign

You need to have a Facebook account to be able to  create Facebook ads. This is because you will access and manage all your ads through your account settings.

Go to www.Facebook.com/ads to create your first ad.

Step 3: Design your ad

The first task is to specify where you will send the people who click on your ad. 

You will have the option to send someone to one of your business pages, but for the purpose of this ad, you will want to choose external URL, which will be the URL of your landing page (or home page if you aren't using a landing page).

After you have entered the URL of your landing page, you then need to write a compelling headline. Try to choose something that will really grab the attention of the reader. Facebook advertising is a form of 'interruption advertising', so you need to grab the attention of the Facebook user, who is not on Facebook with the intention to read your advert.

You can then upload an image. This is very important because the image is a powerful way to convey a message to the Facebook user. Make sure you have purchased the image or have permission to use it for commercial purposes. I use Fotolia.com, but there are hundreds of stock image repositories on the Internet, so Google stock photos to find them.

Next, write your copy. The word limit is small, so again, you need to be compelling, direct and captivating. There's no room for fluff- just get straight to the point and be clear. 

Step 4: Set your targeting

This is where you can really unlock the power of Facebook ads. You can target your ads to only show on the profiles of people according to the following elements:

  • country
  • city
  • number of kilometres from the city
  • age range
  • gender
  • precise interests
  • all connections or connected to a page, event or app
  • interested in male or female
  • marital status
  • education level: high school, university, post-graduate
  • language
  • workplaces

You can easily have your ad potentially show on the pages of all people in your geographic area, or drill down your ad to appear on any of the elements above with as much specificity as you desire. 

You will also notice that as you change the targeting elements, the number in the right-hand column representing the potential reach of people who can view your ad will change. So you have a real-time representation of how many people are within your reach.

Step 5: Set your campaign, scheduling and pricing

In the final step, you need to choose this ad to appear under a current campaign (if you have already created one) or create a new campaign. A campaign is an umbrella under which you can have many different ads. However, you can have global settings for a campaign, such as your daily budget.

If you want to set your campaign at $4 a day and create 5-10 ads, these ads will show continuously until you have reached your daily budget. 

It can be helpful to have different campaigns if you are wanting different daily budgets. So while you may want to spend $4 a day for your therapy group, perhaps you are selling a therapy eBook on communication, and only want to spend $3 a day for that, then you need to create those ads under a different campaign. Make sense?

You can then easily set a schedule for your ads or have them run indefinitely.

You will then have the choice to pay for impressions  (CPM) or pay for  clicks (CPC). I recommend you pay for clicks, so you only pay each time someone clicks on your ad and goes through to your landing page.

Facebook will suggest a maximum bid per click. You can accept this, decrease it or increase it. The higher the bid, the more pages your ad will appear on.

Complete the process by clicking place order or you can preview advert.

Create multiple ads and track your statistics

Now you've created your first ad, Facebook will notify you when it is approved and is running. You now need to create multiple versions of your ads to test which one is the most effective. 

Facebook makes this easy to do. Once you are in the adverts area where there is a summary of your ad, click on the ad you just created and click create similar. You can then quickly make different versions of your ads and change the image, headlines and copy. I recommend you create 5-10 ads to test the best ones.

Facebook has wonderful metrics where you can easily see which ad is receiving the most clicks and getting the most reach. You can then delete the ads that are under-performing and continue to tweak the ones that work.

Would you consider Facebook advertising for your next therapy group or workshop? Share your thoughts or questions below.

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