Uncover The Six Essential Steps For Having A Thriving Online Private-Pay Practice – Steps 4-6

GoodTherapy | Online Private-Pay Clients

Part 2 of 2 by Alexandra Whitehead, CEO, The Practice Activator

As a quick recap of Part One, if you want the freedom and control that comes from having a profitable online practice, comprised in part of private-pay clients, then these are the six essential steps you need to take:

  1. Know what your desired future is, even if it seems unrealistic right now
  2. Know why you want that desired future
  3. Uncover a profitable and viable niche
  4. Know and share your story (why do you work inside this niche?)
  5. Create an irresistible offer for your ideal clients
  6. Get the right eyeballs on your irresistible offer via a traffic source 

We covered the first three steps in Part One of this article here, and now we’ll dive into steps 4 through 6. 

Start by Sharing Your Story with Clients

Step 4: Share your story with your potential clients and help them make a choice

If you don’t tell your potential clients your story – that is, why you work in your specific niche and why you want to help them solve their problem, you’re missing one key ingredient that’s essential to the buying process for private-pay clients. 

Potential clients need to Know, Like, and Trust you in order to say yes to working with you. To solve this issue, and to foster the Know, Like, and Trust factors at super speed, you need to, first of all – know your story – and then share it with your potential clients.

  • Your story could be personal – maybe you or a close friend or family member dealt with the problem you now help your clients with.  
  • It could be you had an interest in this specific problem area from an early age because of something you saw – in real life, on TV, etc. 
  • You might have discovered your interest area in your early career days, and from that moment forward you’ve dedicated yourself to helping others with this problem.

Create Your Story Using These Tips

As you create your story to share with your audience, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

  • Do express yourself emotionally. Tell people how it felt to go through your situation, and allow them to connect with you. For example “When I hit rock bottom I felt awful, deflated, it was horrible…but then I had a breakthrough…”. Even if you think you’ve shared some emotions, I encourage you to try harder! It takes a while to naturally write in this way when you’re used to writing academically.
  • Don’t make the story all about you. At some point in your story, you need to focus on your potential client and make them the hero of the story.  For example, you might talk about “how you now do this for others”.
  • Do foster hope. Be sure to show your potential clients that the result you got is possible for them too.
  • Do write in first-person. Remember, the point of sharing your story is to foster the Know, Like, and Trust factors and to connect emotionally with your potential clients. Writing in 3rd person doesn’t do this anywhere near as well as writing in 1st person does.
  • Do consider video. You might be aware of adult learning principles. Writing out your story and using that as a script to record a video – if you can do so naturally, in a way that connects with the viewer – will take care of potential clients who prefer video to text. Video also helps people to get to know you even more before booking their initial appointment. If you’re brave, you can place both a video and the written blurb on your website. Remember, it’s not about you – it’s about helping potential clients to choose you if you’re the right therapist for them. 

Create an Irresistible Offer!

Step 5: Create an irresistible offer for your ideal clients

There are around nine different factors that go into creating an irresistible offer. In this article, I’m going to focus on the one factor that most therapists overlook. This particular factor prevents clients from hitting the book button! I call this factor “The Objection Buster”.

To have an “IRRESISTIBLE” offer you need to overcome your potential client’s resistance to saying yes to working with you. 

As the business owner, it’s your job to uncover all of the objections people have and to come up with the antidote to these objections. People need your help to move through their objections – so that they have the opportunity to work with you and get the result they want. 

People have generic objections like “I don’t have time”, and “I don’t have the money”. For many people (not all of course), generic objections can be thought of as limiting beliefs. 

Think about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy! Find a way to gently challenge these limiting beliefs. For example, if money is an objection – and if you have anything priced over $97 it will be – you could say “For less than a cup of coffee a day, you can reduce your anxiety and feel more confident in the teacher-parent interview setting”. You’ll see here, that this objection buster is tailored to the niche. 

Clients will also have specific objections that are related to your niche. For example, if your niche falls within the social anxiety category, an objection to working with you might be the uncertainty associated with the initial session. Potential clients don’t know what to expect, which fills them up with dread, and they decide it’s better to not book in at all! 

It’s very easy to solve this type of objection. In this scenario, you could do a 5-minute explainer video outlining exactly what happens after they click that book button. Put that on your website and watch your conversion rates increase!

To get you started with overcoming objections, you can ask your current clients if they hesitated at all when they booked in for the first time. Write down all of the objections they give you, so you can begin to come up with the antidotes. 

Where Should You Share Your Irresistible Offer?

Step 6: Get the right eyeballs on your irresistible offer via a traffic source

Woohoo! You’re at the final step of the six-step process. 

  • You now know what you’re aiming for with your business, and what the ripple effect will be once you’ve got this system up and running. That might be more holidays, taking Fridays off, or simply having greater control over your business and who you serve. 
  • You’re investigating a viable niche.
  • You’re connecting emotionally with your potential clients and fostering the know, like, and trust factors that are required in order for them to say yes to working with you.
  • You’re developing your irresistible offer and helping people to overcome limiting beliefs that are keeping them stationary.

Now it’s time to put your irresistible offer in front of the right people and ask for the sale. 

I use the word ‘sale’ specifically because you’re the CEO of your business and you’re selling your services to the people who will benefit most from engaging with you.

It’s your job to help your potential clients make a choice. There are two choices:

  • Yes! I want to work with you to solve my problem
  • No! I don’t want to work with you to solve my problem

If you don’t ask for the sale e.g. “click that book button, and I’ll see you very soon” or, “can I get you scheduled?”, “would you like to work together to solve this problem?”, you run the risk of keeping a potential client on the fence. And this serves no one.

To ask for the sale, you need to commit to a traffic source from which you can communicate and present your irresistible offer. 

Here are some common traffic choices:

  • Networking events (yes, even for online clients)
  • SEO (this is a long term play, however, and it’s not recommended if you need clients asap)
  • Facebook and Instagram Ads
  • Organic social media (if you have a large following and high rates of engagement with your audience) 
  • Tiktok
  • Google Ads
  • LinkedIn posting and DMs
  • YouTube Video and/or YouTube Advertising

Here’s the formula for choosing your main traffic source:

[Where my ideal clients are] + [What traffic source I enjoy] = Traffic Source #1

It’s best to get really great at one traffic source. When you’re earning $100,000+ you can then invest your time/money into learning and becoming great at your secondary traffic source. 

Once you’ve chosen your traffic source, it’s time to start putting your irresistible offer out there! Think about how people can contact you. If you’re running ads or doing organic social media, you are likely testing traffic going right to a website sales page, a booking page, or a contact me page. If you’re at a networking event, you likely have a business card with the link for that specific sales page on it (not a generic home page). 

Six Essential Steps to Create a Thriving Online Private-Pay Practice

In summary, these are the six essential steps needed to have a thriving online private-pay practice:

  • Know what your desired future is, even if it seems unrealistic right now
  • Know why you want that desired future
  • Uncover a profitable and viable niche
  • Know and share your story and deeply connect with your audience
  • Create an irresistible offer for your ideal clients
  • Get the right eyeballs on your irresistible offer via a traffic source and ask for the sale!

Following this proven process, brings you much closer to filling up your online practice with great-fitting clients, on autopilot. 

For FREE resources – just for Good Therapy Practitioners – including the fast way to uncovering your true desires and getting what you want in business and life + the 3-step framework for getting your first online private-pay clients, click here.

 

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