Therapist Business Centre: Building, Marketing and Managing Your Practice

Being Involved in Developing Your Practice

This section of CounsellingResource.com is intended mainly for private practitioners who want to be personally involved in the development of their practice as a growing business. If you’d like to learn about internet marketing, discover some tools you can use to evaluate competitors, explore the technology you can use to build a web site, see what you can do about overcoming RSI from too much time spent at the keyboard, and more, then you’ve come to the right place!

Basic Marketing, Internet Marketing and More

An initial section includes brief introductions covering a few of the basics of private practice marketing.

A second section covers some of the central aspects of marketing your private practice specifically via the internet, from the perspective of keywords, content, and related ideas.

A third describes listing your site in internet directories.

Market Intelligence Tools

Part of the job of successfully marketing your private practice is understanding something about the competitive landscape you’re operating within. This section describes some of the market intelligence tools you may find useful for evaluating the competitive landscape specifically on the internet.

Options for Building Your Private Practice Website

Whether you want to practice online or simply market your private mental health practice via the internet, there are several options for getting your site up and running. The first part of this article explores some of the background questions you may want to ask yourself, while Part 2 describes some of the options in detail.

Practitioner Tools, Reviews, and Security

Whether for working online with clients, for strategic marketing using the internet, or just for helping our practices to run more smoothly, technology plays in increasingly significant role in the daily lives of many mental health practitioners. Our reviews evaluate a few of the software and hardware tools that can make your life easier.

An additional section provides some basic information about electronic security in your mental health practice, including software options for protecting communications with clients and, for UK practitioners, brief notes on the Data Protection Act. We also cover the basics of backup strategies and offer a case study in backup strategy.

Considering Entering Private Counselling Practice?

Most of this section of CounsellingResource.com is aimed at the practitioner already in private practice, or looking to build up a larger practice for which they are responsible. But some practitioners will just be considering the move into working privately and will be wondering whether they are ready for taking that plunge. In my view, the main differences between private and organizational counselling practice have very little to do with actual counselling ability and everything to do with the environment outside the counselling hour.

Get Help With Your Private Practice Marketing

Have you read through some of this business section of CounsellingResource.com, but still find yourself a bit swamped by all the possibilities? Or is your practice marketing effort already cooking with oil, and you just need a hand fine-tuning some aspect of it? Maybe we can help…

We also run a small RSS service for configuring automatic news headlines on your site.

Free Downloads

This section includes some small software tools — one for recording client contact hours and one for gathering client feedback. Both are available as free downloads.

Forthcoming Guide to Effective Private Practice Marketing

One of the projects I’ve been working on in my abundant spare time (!) is a more comprehensive guide to marketing written specifically with the interests of the private practitioner in mind. Be sure to grab our newsfeed covering Site News if you’d like to be informed as soon as it’s available!