Marketing Your Hypnosis Site

[Jon Rhodes]

This is the holy grail of hypnosis knowledge - how to get a busy and thriving hypnosis web site. It is also the perfect time of year to knuckle down and promote your online venture. January is by far the busiest time of the year for online hypnosis. Before setting off on an online venture, most of us are unaware of exactly how much hard work is required in order to create a successful hypnosis site. The answer is a lot!

I have written a fairly long (around 2300 words) article about how to market your hypnosis web site. It deals with some offline solutions as to how to create interest in your site, and concentrated on online methods to help create that 'buzz' around your site.

In this article I discuss many methods of how to gain links towards you site, in order to increase both direct traffic and search engine positioning. One of the leading methods I discuss is hypnosis article .submission. By submitting an article about hypnosis, you can add a link to your site in the 'resource box'. This can help you gain visitors when they click on the link, and it can also help improve your search engine positioning. Further still, a well written article can be picked up and displayed on many other sites, giving you many more links. Good articles can also help establish you as an expert in your field, helping you gain much needed credibility.

All the methods I discuss are free, which is a good price in these economically challenging times!

Many hypnotherapists seem to struggle to attract visitors to their sites, even though they have a pretty good package set up. This is a shame, as success in the online world can lead to great rewards, both financially and spiritually.

If you are interested in helping the image of your site, then you may wish to try and win a hypnosis award. This will help your visitors see what a well run and professional organisation you have! Seriously though, credibility seems to be the backbone of any successful internet venture, as online customers are still a little skeptical about web businesses.

Do you have any other tips to share that have helped you with your online endeavors? Do you agree with all the points outlined in the article? Have I missed out something obvious? Let's have a mutually beneficial discussion!

[Nathan Thomas]

Good move creating that article directory, i hope it will grow into something big!
Nathan
http://keystothemind.blogspot.com

[Jon Rhodes]

Thanks Nathan, so do I! We have been link building to it quite a bit, so it should offer decent page rank pretty soon. Its an opportunity for free targeted promotion, a place to learn, and a place to get free material for your blog or site. All good really!

[Jon Rhodes]

I see you have posted 3 articles Nathan. Hope you get plenty of long term traffic as a result! Yes, at any time, but particularly now, free advertising and marketing is a definite plus. Social network sites can also help increase links and traffic, but I am dubious as to whether they are worth the time investment for the quality of visitors they attract. What are you thoughts on this?

[Jon Rhodes]

I am of course referring to general social network sites like Digg, not niche sites like HypnoThoughts!

[James Hazlerig]

Thanks for posting this article, Jon.

I have a few comments and questions. Please don't take them as negative or critical--I'm just trying to explore the subject. Overall, I think your article was great.

First question--maybe this should be a thread--do you have any figures or even anecdotal evidence about the money that people have made from affiliate programs? Let me explain my curiosity. Suppose I have an affiliate link to Cal Banyan's training program on my site. (Actually, I do.) Now suppose someone curious about learning hypnosis clicks on that link, reads all about Banyan's program, and decides it sounds great. Now, I don't know about you, but if I'm in that situation, I save Banyan's URL so I can go back to re-read and compare before I commit to spending that much money. Maybe most people aren't like that--maybe they read about it the first time and instantly commit. All I know is that if shoppers are anything like me, the affiliates are not making much money. But please tell me if there are figures to disprove my dubiousness.

Second, I've considered putting Google adwords on my site. What concerns me is that when a potential client is looking at my site, I really don't want them seeing ads for the other hypnotists in my area or other hypnosis recordings they could be buying instead of mine. Even though I might make a few cents from Google if they go that direction, that's not worth encouraging them to leave my site. Again, I'm not an expert, so I'm open to other interpretations of this.

Third--and I'm sorry to pick nits, but I used to work as a writer-editor--the phrase is "cold, cruel, and UNforgiving." However, as an editor, I would discourage you from overusing that phrase, as it's become a cliche.

Oy, I'm afraid I've come off like an ogre in this post. I'm really not critical all the time, I swear. :-) I think you're doing a great thing hosting the article site, and I really appreciate you taking the time to post here about it. I plan to submit a few articles there myself.

Just trying to be helpful,

James

[Jon Rhodes]

James you big bully haha!

I have no actual figures or proof about affiliate programmes, but I have experience of them. I started running a free hypnosis site about 2 years ago. To fund it I put up Google Adwords, and sold affiliate recordings. I get pretty decent traffic on this site, and was making several hundred dollars a month selling hypnosis downloads as an affiliate, and another few hundred dollars with the adverts. It wasn't a fortune, but it was a good addition to my income. It gave me the incentive to work harder and learn how to market a web site, since I knew that the more visitors I attracted, the more money I earned (generally!).

The downloads I was selling, I think, were about $12 each. You are probably right in what you are saying, if I was selling a $200 course, then most people would probably take their time and think about it, possibly book marking and buying later. Many affiliate programmes do take this into account, and will still credit you with a sale in the future, sometimes up to a year after your visitors have first clicked on the ad by tracking the 'cookies'. However with smaller purchases customers are more likely to impulse buy, especially if both yours and your affiliates site are professional, safe looking, and easy to use.

You may lose some sales, like a shop may. Someone can visit your physical shop and you can spend an hour telling a customer about an exciting new product, only for them to go home, and buy it from another store at a later date. It doesn't mean that they are making little money. You win some and you lose some. What I would say though is that if you have a really good compelling site where people keep returning, the incident of this will be minimised, since the visitors will keep visiting you directly, and the affiliate site through you. If you have a really good site, then it will be yours that they will be book marking, and not the site that is simply selling products.

Again I have no proof, but I would say that you are very unlikely to lose any customers to Google adwords being on your site. First of all very few hypnotherpists use these for a one to one therapeutic practice. Nearly all the ads that will be on your site will be adverts for things like hypnosis downloads, books, online courses etc.

No two sites are the same James. You could be right that adverts affect your sales, but you will never know until you try. You may for example lose one $12 sale, but gain $50 dollars. Or you may lose 10 $12 sales and gain only $30. If you try Google adverts for a month, you should be able to roughly gauge if they are worth putting on. Personally I would be reluctant to put them on a site where I was selling online products, but would be confident of putting them on a site where I was promoting my 'live' services. Then again, you don't know for sure how your visitors will react until you test it.

As for the 'cold, cruel, and forgiving', it was a deliberate tactic I used to distract your mind into focusing on this 'mistake' so that I could bombard you with covert suggestions to write articles for my new site MWAHAHAHA!!

Hope this clears up a few things for ya James!

[Eric G. Schneider]

This is a very important topic and actually a complex one...thanks for getting it out there Nathan!

[Jon Rhodes]

Ahem - Jon! I have had some success with netscape (propeller) and Digg in driving traffic to my site. I could usually drive 100-200 visitors in a day with a few hours work. In my analytics I indeed had a good surge of traffic, but most of them were staying on for less than 30 seconds. They must have been clicking on, quickly reading my article, then clicking off to go and find another article elseware. Sales and ad clicks barely changed. This was in my early web master days.

I now feel that those few hours I spent networking - building friends, voting and commenting for them, and letting them know about my latest content - are better spent actually creating more good content, and marketing in different ways - BUT that's just my experience of it! Some may have had a different experience of general social networks?

It's all about driving quality traffic to your site, not quantity. For instance I know that anyone on HypnoThoughts who checks out my profile and visits one of my hypnosis web sites are going to be fairly good visitors - they are likely to have a big interest in hypnosis for a start! The only problem here is that the majority of users here are selling their products and services, rather than buying them - buy hey I like it here, and hypnotherapists do buy products sometimes!

I agree that "its the website's ability to appeal to the potential client- and also keep them interested- that converts to sales." That's why I personally now try to spend less time yaking, and more time trying to create valuable content!!