Summer School Lesson 5: Directory sites

Hello and welcome to the Business of Psychology Summer School edition.

Over the six weeks of the English school holidays, we are doing things a little bit differently around here. If you're looking to start up an independent practice in September, then this is the place to be as each week I'm dropping in with a quick lesson and tasks that can be completed in 30 minutes or less from your sun lounger.

By the end of the six weeks, you will feel ready to step into your practice in September, confident that you can find clients and have a safe and viable business foundation.

Each week, the lessons will go out on this podcast feed, but if you want the weekly tasks, workbooks, private community, and a live session with me at the end of the summer to hold you accountable and make sure nothing stands in your way, you will need to sign up here: PBS Summer School

I would love to see you in the community.

Full show notes of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links & References:

PBS Summer School Sign Up

PBS Start and Grow

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@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

Week 5: Directory Sites

For lesson five of our summer school, we are thinking about directory sites. It's a good idea to be on a directory site or two if you're in independent practice. They can be a good source of referrals, but on top of that, they give you a home on the internet that you can direct people to before you get your own website up and running. They show up in search engines and they can give you a real boost of credibility.

There are a myriad of directory sites to choose from, and the good news is that most of them offer a free trial, so you can test which ones work for you.

What I do, and what I'm going to talk through today, is I create a perfect profile, which I save in a Google Doc, and then I just copy and paste it into different platforms that I want to try out.

At a minimum, I'd recommend trying out Psychology Today, Counseling Directory, and Find My Psychologist, but it's worth doing a search for a 'psychologist or therapist near me' and seeing what directory sites are dominating the search results near you, because it is different postcode to postcode, and you really want to make sure you're on those sites that are coming top for your area. For example, where I am, if I type in ‘psychologist in Tunbridge Wells’, the first results are from Harley Therapy, Psychology Today and Counseling Directory. So if I was starting out, those would be places that I'd really want to consider.

There are some basic principles for a good directory site profile, that if you follow, you're going to be streets ahead of most people out there, because most profiles on directory sites are really awful. I'm going to talk you through some top tips, and then if you're in summer school, you will be able to use my template, which I've put underneath this lesson, in order to craft your directory site profile.

Write as though you're speaking to a potential client

If this is difficult and it doesn't come naturally to you, it's actually worth recording your side of a conversation with a new client and looking at the phrases that you use and what you say and how you explain who you are and what you do when you're really in front of somebody. For me, I can do this as a bit of an imagination exercise. As I'm writing, I just imagine that I'm speaking to a real person that's come to me and is asking ‘how can you help me with X, Y, or Z?’ But I know that that doesn't come naturally for everybody, so sometimes it's about recording those real life interactions, because if you've been a therapist for a while, you're good at this, it's just sometimes difficult to get it out on paper.

Specialise

You can't speak to everybody in your profile, you're just going to blend into the background. So make sure that you pick a particular client group to speak to. This is something we talk about a lot in Start and Grow; deciding on that specialism and who your ideal client is, is really important. But for now just pick your favourite type of client, the people that you've worked with most successfully in the past and go with that.

A few lines about your approach

When it comes to talking about your approach, say a few confident lines about this, let them know about your experience and literally how you will help them, but don't go into reams and reams about how your unique approach to therapy is X, Y, or Z. People can't make sense of that if they've got no prior experience of therapy, it's likely that every single word you use will just come across as jargon to them, even though it isn’t to us. I would know what you mean, but we're thinking about the ideal client, and if they haven't had therapy before, things like 'safe space' even, just sound like rubbish to them. So try and steer clear of that sort of thing and just talk about ‘my 25 years of experience in therapy, experience in the NHS working in this area to help you overcome the problems that you're facing with X, Y, and Z. I offer...,’ and then maybe something like, talking therapies like CBT and trauma focused therapies like EMDR. That would be enough. You really don't need to overwhelm people with more, which is probably most often more written for our peers than it is for the ideal client. So steer clear of that and just a few confident lines.

Don't list every piece of training

Give your core qualification and then maybe one or two other things which really say something about the way that you work. For example, if you are EMDR accredited, that's probably worth mentioning. But if you did a two day course in CFT, that's probably not worth mentioning, but if you've done the CFT Diploma, maybe that is. Keep it to core qualification plus maybe one or two other things if they're really important to the way that you work.

Have an easy booking system

Have an easy booking system and make sure it's really explicit. If the person needs to send an email to book with you, tell them to do that. If they need to phone, tell them to do that. Give one way of doing it. If you've set up something like Calendly or Acuity or you're using the WriteUpp booking system that we talked about in the tools lesson, then tell them about that and tell them exactly how to do it.

Tell them exactly what will happen next

If you offer a free consultation, tell them that's what's going to happen and then afterwards you will follow up with your recommendations. However you do it, just make it really clear what needs to happen next and what will happen immediately afterwards.

Make your fees really clear

None of this kind of sliding scale, none of this inquire and then I'll tell you the fee. No. People get really anxious about fees, understandably. Put yourself in their shoes. When I've been inquiring about therapy, the thing that is on my mind is can I afford this and what am I going to pay over the next three months, six months, 12 months, however long I think I'm going to need therapy for. And it's terrifying. People do not want to have a conversation, get to the end of it and have to tell you that they can't afford you. Horrible for everybody. Don't put anybody through it. Make your fees really explicit.

Use a professional headshot

If you don't have one, put that on your list of things to get sorted, because people need to feel that they have a sense of who you are and what your presence is like and the photo really communicates that, and it's very difficult to get right on your own. You need to make sure that there are no weird shadows over your face, and that you just look how you really look. So making sure that you've got a really good quality image will really help. There's lots of evidence that people do use those to make decisions about who they contact. So make sure you've got the best image you can possibly get. I really recommend going to local networking events and finding a local photographer to do that for you. It's not that expensive and it can make a really big difference to your profile success.

So overall, the key here is to write your profile for an overwhelmed potential client, not for your peers. We talk about this loads in Psychology Business School and especially in the Start and Grow programme, and we spend a lot of time giving each other feedback on profiles because even I struggled to do this. After years and years of helping other people with their own, I still struggle to get mine right because it's very difficult to see your profile through the eyes of a potential client when you've got all your own stuff in your own head going on about it. So sharing what you've got for feedback is my biggest piece of advice. And don't worry if you need to tweak it a few times to get it right, because we all do.

If you're in summer school, then there's a template below this lesson that you can use to create a great profile. And remember, it doesn't ha...