subject: Marketing For Psychologists: The New Wave Of Practice Promotion [print this page] Being a psychologist, there might be a pretty decent odds that you gained very little about how to market your private practice in school. Nearly all tools offered not much help whenever it comes down to business development and marketing. This can be a huge fact why quite a few psychologists clamber to be successful in private practice. It is not that their clinical skills are inferior; it's their marketing skills which can utilize considerable improvement.
If you are intent on building a 6 figure cash-based psychology practice, it's imperative that you learn how to market your practice. In particular, I highly recommend that you put most of your focus on the internet, as there are likely hundreds if not thousands of people searching for your services online every single month.
It has been quite challenging to profitably promote a private practice. You had to count on referral marketing, pricey display ads, and various traditional strategies that are often shateringly gradual and quite expensive to carry out. I am not saying that perfecting internet marketing is simple. It is a broad world with many information that require to be understood in order to become successful.
The intention is quite simple though--you want to own as much valuable real estate on Google for the main keywords your target market is typing in to find your exact services. You do this through a series of strategies including:
1. building a highly professional website that positions you as a trusted expert
2. doing on page search engine optimization--setting up the tags and content of your site with the keywords your audience is using to find you
3. carrying out off page search engine optimization--this is especially significant if you practice in a more competitve neighborhood, which often implies a large city. If you are in LA, New York, Denver, Miami, Seattle, or other large cities, you will likely need to look at some extra steps to get ranked high on Google. Off page SEO is a process that involves link building, which means getting as many high quality sites as possible to link back to yours for the main keyword phrases you are competing for. That may sound advanced, but this can be pretty simple. In either case, you will probably choose to outsource this to gurus who know what they have to do.
4. Make sure you site has a lot of great content
5. Use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to build a very large local following.
6. Use Google Adwords to generate qualified traffic to your site--this is by far my favorite paid advertising strategy.
7. Use online video distribution to own more Google real estate and get your message out to a lot more people through video sharing sites and podcasting directories.
These are the areas that I recommend focusing on as a psychologist looking for the most powerful marketing strategies in 2010 and beyond.
