These days, every business needs an online presence and a mental health private practice is, at the most basic, a type of business. Gone are the days where word of mouth was good enough to create an ever flowing stream of clientele. Nowadays, potential clients will check out your reviews, your competitors, and your website. If you have a blog that provides valuable insight into your services and tips for the reader’s mental health and wellbeing, then that person will remember.
However, you may be thinking that you want to write your own blog. You have the knowledge, you are a good writer, and you want to ensure that your content uses your voice. While these are all good things, there are other aspects to consider as well. Since you may not know why a therapist should hire a writer, let’s look at some of the reasons that it can be beneficial.
Knowledge and Skill
As a therapist, you hold a lot of valuable knowledge about mental health that could offer value to readers and potential clients. You may be wondering, “What can a writer offer that I can’t?”
Well, sure most writers do not have the mental health knowledge that writing for a therapist’s blog requires. However, there are writers that specialize in mental health available (like me!). These writers have extensive knowledge of mental health topics. Sometimes, they focus in one certain topics within the category of mental health like anxiety or addiction. You can still edit and review the content before it is published on your site, but these writers should be able to offer the type of experience you desire.
Furthermore, as a therapist, you are used to talking about mental health, but it may have been a while since you wrote about it. All a mental health writer does is write about these types of things. They know the ins and outs and strategic nuances that can make the writing clear, interesting, and valuable.
A lot of writers also have experience with SEO. This means that they know how to write valuable content that will show up on Google when your potential clients look up related topics. This can be very valuable for getting in front of clientele and showing them that you know about the topics they are struggling with.
Time
There are only so many hours in a day, week, month, year, and lifetime and you probably already spend a lot of them working. Do you really want to spend some of your free time just so you can have the clients to work even more? Probably not… but these things still have to get done.
A writer can save you enough time so that you can focus on helping people. It can take a few hours just to write a single article for you blog or a newsletter to your clients. While that may not seem like much, the most effective blogs, newsletters, and websites are updated regularly. This ensures that there is always a reason to come check out your site.
If you are seeing clients most of the day, 5 days a week. Then you add in marketing and updating your blog, then you may find that your personal time is getting condensed. After going home, making dinner and working our, you only have a couple hours before you have to go to sleep to get up and do it again. You should know as good as anybody that this type of lifestyle is not great for mental health and wellbeing. Plus, if you have the time for yourself, you can probably help your clients more effectively as well.
Voice and Style
A good writer can convey the message that you want your readers and potential clients to see. This means that the writer will adapt to your brand voice, which could be sympathetic, professional, fun, or many other things.
A good writer should also know how to get the information across in a succinct way. Instead of rambling about mindfulness techniques for 7 pages, they can provide your readers with concise information that is valuable to their mental health. In turn, you gain credibly and respect by providing readers with free, but useful, information.
You may think that the only way to keep the articles in your own voice is to write them yourself. This is not true. However, a lot of therapists will go through and edit a writer’s work to better match their ideals or tone and others even write an occasional article to go along with the writer’s blog posts. Even with this, the benefits to hiring the writer still remain.
Cost-Effective
While it may seem expensive to hire a writer, if you think about the amount of time you will save and the amount of potential clients that you will reach, you will find that it will end up making you money in the long run. Plus, with a freelance writer, you can only pay for the work that you want. This could be 2 to 4 blog posts a month, or could be more if you have other advertising avenues. Either way, you are paying for what you get and not a penny more. Then, you can spend more time seeing the clients that actually pay your money.
Every hour that you spend on your own marketing efforts is your hourly rate subtracted from your income. This means that you can pay a writer just slightly less than that per hour you would spend writing the content and copy and you will still come out with a higher net income. Plus, you may save a little time, which may be worth even more to you.
Conclusion for Why a Therapist Should Hire A Writer
A lot of mental health professionals go into their private practice thinking they can do it all themselves. While this may work for a while, you may find that the marketing and writing efforts are not worth your time and money. A therapist who hires a good writer often finds that they have more time, more clients (and therefore more money), and less stress about inbound clientele.