Five Minute Marketing For Therapists

What can you do TODAY to get more clients? I call this strategy, "Five Minute Marketing." It's based on the concept that "It doesn't matter so much WHAT you do as THAT you do." (Think about that for a moment.)

Spend five minutes a day marketing.

• Write a letter to a referral source, or write a thank you note to a client.
• Drop a note to a client you haven't heard from in a while.
• Send a birthday card to a client.
• Write a blog post or a Twitter post.
• Spend five minutes writing part of an article.
• Spend five minutes in the front office answering the phone (especially if you have openings in the next week or two.)
• Call and introduce yourself to a therapist who works with a complimentary population.
• Schedule lunch with a therapist, or doctor, or minister who referred to you in the past, but who you haven't talked to in a while.

Just five minutes a day, every day, adds up.

Tips for More Effective Therapist Websites

I'm often asked to critique therapist websites. Here are my general criteria to make your website more effective.

1. Each therapist should have a separate page on the site.

2. Articles are a great addition to a practice website, but they need to be

• Consistent (all PDFs or all links -- ideally, use links)
• Written by a therapist -- not just compiled information. Put YOUR name on it.
• Updated regularly. (Reference a current event in the article to make it relevant.)
• Listed alphabetically, or listed by category. Or, better yet, both.
• Error-free. (No typos!!)
• Internally linked. At the bottom of each article page, it should take you back to the individual therapist's page who wrote the article.

3. Individual therapist's pages should like to a "Contact Us" page. E-mail and phone numbers should be on each therapist's page. The practice phone number should be on every page of the site.

4. The site needs to be professional -- no broken links, no ugly pages.