Advertisements for Myself: Online Marketing for Mental Health Professionals

Early on, I spent a lot – A LOT! – of time reading blogs and books about how to start a private practice. There’s so much you don’t learn in a counseling program about business. For a while, after I figured out (kinda) what I was doing, I used to offer a free hands-on training for grad students and new counselors around creating a “first draft” of their private practice website.

I’m no longer as interested in offering this kind of assistance via trainings or one-on-one, though I’m always interested in seeing what supervisees are creating. Here’s a crappy Power Point, full of examples and information – but free of narration, and free of cost!!!

 

 

 

Details:

Are you looking to learn more about how to increase your caseload – and to improve the kinds of referrals you receive?

Are you interested in not spending hundreds of dollars having an expert build and maintain a website for you?

Would you like the ins and outs of online marketing explained to you in a jargon-free way you can actually understand?

 

An education in counseling or social work rarely prepares graduates for the realities of starting a business. This results in too many private practitioners having to figure out how to attract clients all on our own, or paying a lot of money to a consultant to do that for us.

As trained caretakers, we tend to be especially squeamish around selling ourselves to strangers, which makes it pretty hard to tell the whole internet that we’re great at what we do.

 

Via discussion and brief expressive arts and somatic exercises, this workshop will provide a safe space in which you will be encouraged to explore your unique strengths as a counselor, assist you with writing effective copy for your ideal clientele, and teach you proven tactics for constructing an online presence that’s as awesome as you are. As we move throughout these topics, we’ll also be practicing constructing an attractive (free) website, including setting up domain name and URL, selecting themes, creating pages and subpages, and integrating the text you construct during this time into your new site. *No coding skills needed, and please note, this is not an overview of search engine optimization – for a great workshop on SEO, contact Portland Therapy Center’s Jeff Guenther.

 

Participants will achieve the following learning objectives:

• Explore the internal barriers caretakers in the helping professions face at the prospect of selling themselves.
• Learn simple and effective components of human-centered design as it pertains to website construction.
• Gain hands-on experience in building a website that will resonate with the lay public – bring your laptop!