Many holistic practitioners graduate from their trainings, and imagine building build a successful business overnight. It just doesn’t happen that way. One of the most important factors in building a client base is to become considered an expert — the Go-To Person for solving particular problems.
If you’re like most Holistic practitioners, you would rather focus on working with your clients than building your expertise in the places on the web where those clients might find you! The truth is, though, that all of us need to focus some of our attention on getting more people to find us on the internet, and to being the experts they’re looking for, once they get there.
Most practitioners know that their web site is an important factor in being found. In fact, if you don’t have one yet, “getting yours up” is probably on your list of things to do, as soon as you have time. Let’s take look at some of the other choices for building expertise as a Holistic Practitioner.
Article Marketing
Article Marketing can work well for Holistic Practitioners because so many of us like to write. In fact, lots of us prefer writing to talking with a group of people!
Article Marketing is fairly simple: Write an informative article — especially one your Ideal Clients will love — and submit it to an online article directory. EzineArticles is one of the best-known.
The keywords you’re trying to rank for are important. Rather than trying to get on page one of the organic search engine returns with keywords like “back pain,” look for phrases that describe what you do in more detail. Include your location. The best keywords are the ones with a small to medium local search volume, and have little competition.
Video Marketing
The numbers are staggering—more video is being uploaded every day than you could watch in a year! And people love video – they’re choosing video over text by huge margins when they’re looking for solutions to their problems.
That means that video marketing is another great traffic source for your Holistic Practice website. You can easily create a content videos that address simple issues your Ideal Clients have, and put it on YouTube, on your website, Facebook, Twitter and many distribution sites.
Consistency is really important. You probably won’t get a flood of traffic by uploading one video. But if you establish yourself as a well-known expert — especially in your local area — through video marketing, you can easily build yourself a name, a great deal of traffic and a lot of legitimate backlinks.
Social Media
Social media like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest and many others are great places for Holistic Practitioners to become known — and the wonderful thing is the wide variety of ways in which you can become a presence on these sites.
Social Media falls into two categories: Sites that generate traffic to your site — Digg is this kind of site, and sites that help you get repeat visits from people who are already interested in what you’re writing. Facebook business pages and Twitter are in this category.
The main idea behind social media is to become a part of the conversations your Ideal Clients are having. If you’re a Feldenkrais® practitioner, for example, your goal is to become well known enough to the people you’re looking for, that your name means something. On Facebook, this is best done on your own business page, and by commenting on other business pages. Your personal profile isn’t the best place to talk about your business — 5,000 friends who like you but don’t want your services don’t help you build your business or your expertise!
The key to making social media work for you is to give lots of content relevant to your Ideal Client, in places where your Ideal Client “hangs out.”
The best advice I can give you is to pick ONE avenue to build your expertise, and develop it thoroughly. Then add another. If you start with one that you can manage, you can quickly begin to see results, and won’t be overwhelmed.
