Ideas that help to grow your private practice
Develop a more narrow niche
You might be good at professionally helping all of your patients, whatever their needs might be. But maybe you have a calling for something niche? We’re talking about specialties like working with minorities, immigrants, refugees, neurodiverse teens, marginalized groups, and third culture children — insert your suggestion here. This doesn’t mean you should discard other patients and clients. But adding niche counseling is, paradoxically, a way to make your private practice spectrum broader. It’s also a chance to expand the practice geographically, and become in demand in other cities, states, or even countries.
A more specific niche also improves the aim of your marketing tools, like SEO or targeted social media marketing (more about it later in the article).
Work on your networking
Networking is a professional support system that keeps your private practice’s vitals in shape. There are several ways to build yours:
- Get on an insurance panel for therapists. Many countries, including the US, have volunteer insurance companies that cover mental health therapy expenses for their clients. Joining the panel of one of such companies means becoming available to its client base. There’s a downside here, however: insurance companies have limitations that you’ll be obligated to follow, e.g. keeping your rates on a certain level. If you’re fine with it, definitely explore the insurance panel avenue.
- Join online directories. This is a popular and very reliable way to fill a private practice. These sites are often the first things a person googling “mental counseling near me” sees in the results. They also have robust search and filter systems, so your profile will be easier to discover for clients with specific requests.
- Attend professional gatherings. The easiest and most productive way to do that is by getting a membership in a professional organization for mental health specialists. When you’ll be getting invitations and opportunities to participate in conferences, seminars, webinars, and other field-related events that help to make connections and get your name out there.
- Use collaborations. Very often psychotherapy is required as part of the solution to someone’s health problems. This is where the collaborative care approach comes in handy. By partnering with private practitioners from other fields, e.g. physicians, you become available for their patients who need counseling. And vice versa; you can refer your collaborative partners to your clients when needed.
- Volunteer for non-profit organizations. Not only that sharing is caring: you will also, once again, get your name out there and get acquainted with peers, wellness professionals, and other people.
Share your professional insights
Reputable mainstream media outlets often need experts for their publications, and you can offer them your commentary and professional opinions. You can even hire a PR manager to get you leads. Besides that, don’t forget about the power of blogging, which is a chance to pop up in search engine results.
Invest in targeted marketing and SEO
There’s always someone searching for mental health counseling online, so make sure they find you. Targeted marketing will push your social media posts, accounts, and ads onto their feeds and visited websites. SEO will take care of landing you — your website, your socials, your posts, and articles — in the top ten search results online.
Diversify your digitalization
Old-school handwritten planners are good, but they can’t make your life easy in the way modern software does. We’re talking about things like practice management apps for mental health professionals that take care of your bookings, schedules, bills, messaging, patient history storage, etc. And if you don’t consider yourself the most tech-savvy, don’t worry: those software solutions are extremely intuitive and user-friendly. They help you save resources on mundane tasks, leaving more time, funds, and energy for private practice increase.
Become location-flexible
With mental health counseling, clients can’t always rely on stable circumstances. Some often won’t have enough privacy to meet with you in their home or even online, and some won’t be able to travel to the location of your office. But you can make it work with short-term therapy space rentals: in different locations for different clients. It’s a great way to diversify your customer base, thus growing your private practice.
Short-term rentals for mental health counselors can be easily found and booked flexibly and even per hour on Wellerz. Our platform lists professional spaces of the highest quality, with no contractual obligations on your part. Whichever location you choose, we have an office on demand for your flexible private therapy practice
