Blogging is such a powerful tool. Why?

• It’s free

• It can generate hundreds and even thousands of visitors to your website who can then convert to clients

• Be seen as an expert in a certain area

• Allow clients to know you a bit (your writing style, voice, personality, expertise, experience, knowledge)

• A way to diversify your income eventually once you want to do less therapy and perhaps sell a product or service outside of charging for services per hour (e.g. selling an e course, digital product, e book, workbook, etc.)

My Experience Blogging

A few of my blog posts account for over 3,000 of my monthly visits to my website. Prospective clients reach out to me consistently from out-of-state/the country for more information and referrals to other therapists since I can’t work with them due to licensing issues. Long term, this is an opportunity to create a product or service to help this population.

I also receive on average 2-3 new clients in state monthly from my blog posts.

One blog posts takes me about 3-4 hours to write. If I receive one new client a month and they work with me for 6 months bi-weekly at my full rate, I’ve made $2,040. For about 4 hours of unpaid work, I generate $2,040 a month if I get a new client every month.

Blogging has been one of my best marketing efforts long term because the post has already been written, yet I keep getting referrals monthly for good fit clients who I know I can help.

Questions To Ask Yourself

• What do I enjoy reading and learning more about?

• What am I really passionate about?

• What sort of clients and symptoms/issues do I feel most invigorated working with?

• What are my areas of expertise? 

Sample Topics For Your Therapist Blog

• Anxiety

• Ways to manage anxiety and stress

• Deep breathing skills for anxiety

• How to stop panic attacks

• Trauma

• 5 signs of childhood emotional neglect

• What is traumed informed care?

• Relationships

• How to communicate more effectively with your partner

• 7 ways to increase intimacy in your relationship

• How to find a couples therapist as a queer and gay person

• Substance Use

• How to help a family member or loved one with substance use

• Signs of substance use and misuse

Blogging Tips For Therapists In Private Practice

• Do keyword tool research

• Find what people search online for, especially locally in Washington State

• Are people looking for help with relationship issues? Trauma recovery? Substance use? Chronic illness?

• Read more:

• How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner's Guide

• Focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

• To get more organic (unpaid) traffic to your website, optimize SEO

• Optimizing SEO can include: meta tags, using relevant keywords, improving page loading speed, internal linking, and increasing number of backlinks to your post.

• Blog consistently

• At least once or twice a month

• Blog length

• Try for at least 600-1,000 words

• Have a list of topics you want to blog

• Generate a list of topics on a document so you always have ideas

• Think of a publishing schedule

• Do you want to write and publish once a month?

• With technology, you can write all your posts and then automatically set it to be published at a later date

• Link to your social media accounts 

• Link to your Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. so when you publish your blog, it’ll automatically publish on your social media

• If/when people share your posts, it reaches more people and has a larger possibility of going viral

• Outsource

• If you hate writing, hire someone else to do it for you

• Patience

• Blogging takes about 4-6 months to see results in terms of more visitors to your website due to SEO

• Long term, the real success and results come in 1-2 years

• Ask to be a guest blogger on someone else’s’ blog/website

• Find another blogger/therapist and ask them if you can write for their blog as a guest

• You’ll receive some exposure and visits from their website