Hi there!

Every now and then I’ll recommend a product that I think can be a great asset to your business. You see, I get approached on a weekly (if not daily) basis to promote other peoples products to you.

I don’t take this lightly. I have no intention of swamping you with material that isn’t going to build your business.

In the recent past, I have written about and taught my Exclusive Members how to create audio CDs that you can sell to your clients – to help them when you aren’t there and to create an additional income stream for you. Well, in the past it has been a rather technical and cumbersome project. Not any more. Stay tuned as more info will be coming!

Several therapists have asked me recently about blogging.

A blog is an easy way to have a web presence without the big web development price tag. In fact, many “websites” that you see on the internet are really blogs. For example, I have a blog that contains my newsletters and 6:00 a.m. musings. Our entire Exclusive Members site is also written on a blog.

Each “post” you write to a blog appears “above” the previous post. That way visitors are always looking at fresh content. You can have additional pages about your site, your location and other pages you’d like – similar to a website.

It is quite easy to set up a blog. First you find a company to “host” your blog. They will give you templates that you can modify to match your ideal color scheme and you can create the pages you want. I recommend the blogging service Typepad.

You can update your blog easily and instantly. If you can write an email, you can write “posts” to a blog. Compare this to a website where you need to hire a web professional to make programming changes in secret html-code programming language every time you want to make changes. With a blog you can make the changes yourself literally in minutes.

Search engines love blogs. Since posts to a blog are so easy to make, you will find that you are offering more content than you might on a static website. Search engines also love websites where content changes a lot – so blogs can help you get more visitors to read what you’ve written. As you continue to make “posts” the search engines will begin to take notice.

Making posts to a blog can be a great way to have your prospects and clients get to know you and your ideas better. Through your posts (again which are like emails but appear on what looks like a website) they can come to like and trust you more than they might by reading your static website.

Blogs are a great way to “post and host” your newsletter. Your newsletter content can be entered as a simple post to your blog.

If you like, you can create a dialogue with your readers – allow them to post comments to your blog entries. This is one of the aspects of blogging I enjoy the most. In fact if you want to comment on this article, please do so at here at: http://buildyourtherapypractice.com/casey/archives/36#comments

Have an upcoming class, talk or workshop? A great idea is to have a blog so participants can begin communicating with each other by introducing themselves through blog comments . I use separate blogs for my workgroups and the participants come to know more about each other through the blogs. (Note: most blogging tools have a spam feature which you can turn on to make sure spam comments don’t appear on your blog.)

Blogging has a lot of advantages.

If you want to learn more about blogging, you may want to check out Andy Wibbels’ site “Easy Bake Weblogs” at http://www.beawealthytherapist.com/recommends/howtoblog.html

Have a great week and happy practice building!

Wishing you continued success!