Continuing my discussion of Building Your Hypnosis Business from the Hypnosis Technique Exchange.
In another list, a member says he’s a newly certified hypnotherapist with a burning desire to build his practice. However, like so many other folks who take a certification course, he needs guidance on kickstarting his business.
Here we go again. I posted this before in the forum with the original post but after I posted it and got the ol’ "your message is in moderation" note as both moderators tell me they evidently missed it in the pending messages list before the expiration set and unfortunately as I used the yahoogroups webmail thing, I don’t have a copy of the original long post. I won’t repeat every thing I said before as I don’t have time right now to go into more details and so will repost highlights which should get you started.
I’ve seen a number "established" and "successful" hypnotists who will criticize anyone who "can’t make 100K" or more from their hypnosis practice as being lazy or stupid or incompetent, many of whom offer professional training programs that don’t give any business advice to their own students. One well known fellow used to frequently post bits that anyone who wasn’t making their sole living from doing hypnosis isn’t qualified to discuss hypnosis (patent nonsense as there are a number of folks who do indeed make their sole living from hypnosis or are also dumber than sticks in the mud and others who have healthy professions who use hypnosis as a supplement to their other work who know more than many folks who have been floundering in the business for years).
It is quality, not quantity that matters . . . but for those who wish to make their living at this stuff, there is a conundrum. A lot of folks go into training programs believing the programs will supply them with everything they need to do the business of hypnosis . . . but the programs pretty much give a basic background in hypnotic method but nothing on promotion or business. This is in part what the class action suit agains the Hypnosis Motivation Institute was about as the advertising for the courses plainly stated folks would be making a certain figure income once they graduated but most either failed at their business or worse (the courses themselves did not prepare the students for the business of hypnosis). Of course, this is also true of many professions . . . most small businesses fail. So, get yourself some small business books and read through them. As for the business of hypnosis . . . Jerry Kein has a couple DVDs out on marketing ideas or turning "free talks" into money making opportunities. Jerry’s material is usually very useful and his videos have one of the best signal to noise ratios in the hypnosis community. His webpages at http://www.omnihypnosis.com are worth bookmarking. Katherine Zimmerman has a nice book on The Business of Hypnotherapy: Establishing and Maintaning a Successful Practice which has a lot of the material "professional courses" should have but invariably don’t. It’s a worthwhile handbook you will find helpful. Wendi Friesen has a couple small pamphlets worth peeking at "Marketing Your Hypnosis Business" and "Marketing in the Media" – although I found much of her advice to be unhelpful for my own area, others may find some tips worth noting. Bryan Knight has an ebook "Marketing Action Plan for Success in Private Practice" which has a couple points of interest as well. Of course, you will find a good solid "small business marketing for dummies" type book to be much more useful than most of the "marketing plans" presented by many hypnotists. If available in your area, look into a "practice builders" type program (one that offers actual pointers and tips and not the general pontifications or self-promotional bits).
While your question was specific to marketing and growing one’s business, I would strongly suggest that in addition to some marketing courses and the like, you continue your own professional development. Read, read, read. Practice, practice, practice. Learn from anyone and everyone and practice what you learn. Also . . . learn the basic concepts behind the ideas of changework and through experience develope your own tricks of the trade.
I would strongly suggest that you join a local community of hypnotists and if an appropriate one is not available, create one. A practice group or support group is an excellent way to become part of the local community and to create connections or relationships among hypnotists. I started a Taipei practice group long ago http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HypnoTaipeiExperimentalWorkshop and it has allowed me to meet and learn from some excellent hypnotists. While I tend to organize my group and run the workshops, I have found that I have learned from both beginners and experienced folks alike (actually, my group is unusual in that the majority of my students tend to be certified trainers in their own right). I modeled my own initial group on a Tokyo group that was established in the expatriate community to study NLP but there are as many ways to get a group together as there are folks interested in hypnosis. As the original poster of the query is in Singapore, I am certain there are plenty of folks who have gone through a training course who would love to get together and discuss shop, learn and practice new techniques, as well as share marketing techniques that have proven useful and discuss those that have shown to be less than reliable. The advantage of a group with regular meetings (my group meets roughly evey month but the Tokyo group met biweekly for a number of months before it was abandoned as most of the membership seems to have left the country). Likewise, I began the HypnoAsia yahoogroup years ago as a way to meet others in the area interested in hypnosis. I have long since merged that group with my larger Hypnosis Technique Exchange as most of the folks in Asia interested in corresponding in English belong to that larger much more active group and those interested in specific topics related to the business of hypnosis in Asia tend to be active in the local Chinese language groups.
For marketing, there are a number of commercial products out there specific to the hypnosis community. However, while some of these may prove useful, I would again strongly suggest you also look into some Small Business primer type books.
As to the internet, there are a couple yahoogroups that you might wish to check into. HypnoMasterMind http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HypnoMasterMind (begun by Wendi Friesen, who has done a lot giving folks advice for promoting their work) has a very rich archive of useful posts related to building a hypnosis business (the earlier posts tend to be where many of the basic techniques are discussed but you will find occassional gems even today). You may also wish to join the Marketing-Hypnosis http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketing-hypnosis list (one of Cal Banyan’s lists) which has a few nice pieces, also more gold in the earlier archives when it was running under full steam.
You should definately check out the Hypnosis Marketing blog posts by Craig Eubanks, some of which used to be regularly posted Hypnosis Technique Exchange list as well as to his blog (you can find a link to the blog via my blog https://briandavidphillips.net/ in the Hypnoblogs section if you can’t find the posts in the list archives. Unfortunately, Craig seems to have stopped posting new entries but the archived pieces are very worthwhile.
You may consider starting a blog of your own as well. However, make certain it is informative and has information that folks will keep coming back for and/or is written in a style that goes beyond self-promotional press release. My own interests are pretty eclectic and so my own blog has a number of different categories – allowing folks who wish to bookmark a certain feed to do so without reading other category posts (however, most of my readers just go to the front page and navigate from there). Do be wary of starting a blog that is only self-promotional. While a self-promotional newsletter is worthwhile, such material doesn’t work as well for a blog as the only visitors who will reliably return are those who are aleady in your customer base. You want your blog to have information that folks will continue to return for. You don’t need to give away all your tricks or the trade, but you should have engaging content that is renewed and offers value so readers will come back. You may also wish to have CDs or ebooks or other products available. However, keep in mind that any such material must be original. Don’t just copy someone else’s script and record it to sell. You need to write your own material. Keep in mind also that there are hundreds of recordings out there on general topics. Find your niche and style. I have a list of hypnoblogs maintained by others on my blog in the righthand blogroll. I used to post everything I knew about but eventually removed the folks who don’t update and the ones who basically use their blogs only for self-promotion without any content or for other reasons. I decided I would be happy to promote folks with content or values I agree with but wouldn’t waste my space promoting folks who I don’t wish to. So now it’s just a list of content providers or folks whose pieces I enjoy.
Personally, I would suggest you research your wouldbe market and find something you offer that goes beyond others in the same market. Developing an expertise or a niche is another excellent way to go. As the number of "trainers" in Asia has skyrocketed lately (for instance, there are more NGH certified trainers than in most countries outside of the US and Canada and the number seems to be continuine to rise) so that market is becoming very overcrowded unless you have a specialty, niche, or advanced subjects that others don’t approach. A number of folks here have begun abandoning the market here as overcrowded and very over saturated with some very poor trainers or folks who use questionable business practices (false advertising, misleading claims, spam or junk mail, and the like are very common of late and spoil the image of all hypnotists). The community building process also allows you to find folks who have expertise in areas you may not be as comfortable with or unequiped to handle so you can refer folks to them or they can refer to you. A simple example from my experience is that my Chinese is not really proficient enough to run sessions with so I refer folks to a few very good hypnotists I know here who I met via my workshop efforts and a number of folks will refer "foreigners" who don’t speak Chinese to me as I run my sessions in English. There are a couple folks to whom I refer most of the "medical" work (I won’t do any medical related work without a physician’s referral) that comes my way and one psychologist to whom I would refer any psychiatric work that goes beyond my own scope of practice. Community building and being part of a community is very very important, regardless of your marketing or specialty needs.
You said you have an interest in "training" . . . as your market is overflowing with basic trainers just as mine is overcrowded (I have the language factor to deal with as well), you will want to make certain you have skills the market needs. In Asia right now, there is a serious overcrowding of trainers in certain markets – this is in part due to overzealousness by certain organizations but it is also a simple factor of market pressures. So, make certain you have quality and uniqueness to offer. There are hundreds of folks who set themselves up as "trainers" who do not have even basic skills. Of course, the general public doesn’t know this when they sign up for a course but we all pay the price for it. Eventually, most of the really crappy folks will leave the market but not before having poisoned the well for everyone else. Even if most trainers were indeed good at what they do (unfortunately, I don’t believe that), there would still be a need to set yourself apart in terms of quality and type. For my market, there are just already so many people who offer "basic" courses in Chinese that there really isn’t any point in me offerring the same sort of courses in English (I do offer Chinese interpretation during my courses but I teach in English). So, instead of going for the basic market, I offer courses that are either intended to teach advanced skills to experienced hypnotists or specialty courses on topics that are not offerred as fully by others intended for experienced or beginning hypnotists. I also offer short workshops for the general public on topics of special interest. So, instead of competing in an overcrowded general market, I opt for specialty and advanced niches. Of course, if you offer advanced or specialty classes you really need to know the material and have the skills. If you opt to do basic courses to beginners you need to keep all of your promotional material above board (that means no outright lies or misleading statements – for instance, a number of folks in Taiwan will call the certifications they give with their courses "licenses that allow one to legally practice hypnosis in the United States" which implies that the "certifications" are legal "licenses" and that such licenses are required to do hypnosis in the US, of which neither statement is true). Keep everything aboveboard and straightforward and make sure you provide enough practice so your students get the skills in a supervised setting (do NOT lecture for hours and hours and assume folks will practice on their own, the place for supervised practice is the classroom . . . if they can get the material they need from a lecture then give ’em a book and they can take it home to read, listening to some guy lecture is not what folks take a practical course for, they are there for the skills and to get the skills you need Introduction-Demonstration-Debriefing-Practice-Debriefing).
In addition to this list and to other specialty interest lists, join the major general email lists related to hypnosis. The Hypnosis Technique Exchange http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HypnosisTechniqueExchange and hypnosis-hypnotherapy http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hypnosis-hypnotherapy are large lists with robust and informative archives. There are also a number of smaller specialty lists, albeit a number of the lists out there are fronts for self-promotion or have fallen into disrepair and become spam traps. However, if you look at the earlier archives, you will often find legitimate discussion that took place prior to the group owner abandoning moderation. While many of these non-marketing lists will discuss technique or other issues rather than ideas for growing your business, you will still find a number of folks who are willing to provide tips and the like. Some groups of this type start off strong but then lose steam after time. A group is only as good as it’s archives and it’s current members so if folks don’t post regularly, groups often lose their current usefulness to members. Some groups that serve as self-promotional venues for a particular trainer’s wares also eventually lose steam so a balance has to be reached.
I hope this has been helpful.
All the best,
Brian
Practical Approaches to Metaphysical Hypnosis – Feb. 6-10, 2006
Romance and Sensuality Hypnosis – Feb. 13-17, 2006
See "training" at http://www.briandavidphillips.com for details!
Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH [phillips@nccu.edu.tw]Certified Hypnotherapist
President, Society of Experiential Trance
Associate Professor, NCCU, Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.briandavidphillips.com
