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Therapist 2.0 is THE place to explore all the ways you can start to monetize beyond your therapy office right now. If you’re ready to grow, we’re here as your guide! Check out this quick video to learn more about Therapist 2.0, and join us at this link!
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Here is a big list, in no particular order, of all the ways we see therapists monetizing beyond their offices, plus pros/ cons/ things to consider for each!
Coaching
Helping clients with specific but non-clinical needs. This might be life coaching, business coaching, or just about any kind of coaching you can dream up. It might be delivered 1:1 or in groups of varying sizes.
Pros:
Highly lucrative, incredibly flexible in terms of how you choose to deliver your services
Things to Consider:
Requires willingness to learn marketing and market consistently.
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Online Courses
Taking absolutely any area of expertise you have, from growing marigolds to fixing marriages, and putting it into course materials for sale. May or may not have live delivery components.
Pros:
Can grow into creating passive income. Is an excellent way to scale your beyond butt-in-chair hourly services.
Things to Consider:
You need to constantly be marketing and audience-building so you can find new buyers for your program. Online courses are most effective when you have been coaching live for a while and can put your best info in a course that you know will sell based on your track record of already selling coaching in this area.
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Consulting
Often, but not always, done with businesses (exceptions: sleep consultants, lactation consultants, etc.) Usually more directive than coaching: ie, you’re going into a business to teach their managers better communication skills based on your knowledge/ program/ etc.
Pros:
Incredibly lucrative. Businesses have big budgets for consultants. Work can be “easy” in some ways, as you can teach the same material in different businesses over and over.
Things to Consider:
Many therapists fail to realize how useful their most basic skills are to businesses, so they fail to pursue this opportunity. Therapists also need help articulating what they do and what outcomes they create in the context of business proposals, which require language that’s more concrete and outcomes-based.
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Memberships
Typically low-cost monthly fees for participants: memberships can span any number of topics.
Pros:
Serve a great many clients at once. Ongoing, relatively predictable income stream.
Things to Consider:
Memberships work on an economy of scale. Until you have a large audience built up and demand for your services, a membership is not your best option. People expect the same level of service from you for their $50 membership fee as they would in a $5k coaching program, so the labor is often not worth the return until you hit a certain number of members.
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Retreats
Pros:
Get paid to travel! Create exciting and/or intimate in-person experiences.
Things to Consider:
Retreats generally require a heavy outlay of cash from you upfront, whether you’re booking an Airbnb or guaranteeing a hotel a certain number of room nights sold. Retreats work best when you’ve already built an audience who you know will buy and has the funds to travel. Retreats are also notorious for having a million verbal confirmations (Exciting! Count me in!), then very few actual sign-ups (So sorry, bad timing! Flights too expensive! Maybe next time!). Be prepared that you may lose money or break even as you begin to offer retreats, so start small!
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Books (self-published)
Pros
No barriers to entry! You write, you publish, the end, yay! You’ll keep more revenue per book sold than you would in traditional publishing. If you get all your friends to buy your book on the same day, you can even earn the (totally meaningless) moniker of Amazon bestseller! You’ll have the joy of seeing your words in print, and the potential future business usefulness of having created your “calling card” book.
Things to Consider:
Decent self-publishing still has some associated costs, so it might take a couple grand to get your book looking how you want it. There are a million coaches now (some pricey) to help you create a rig-the-system campaign, getting everyone you know to buy your book and write you a glowing review on day one, earning that Amazon bestseller badge, and hopefully creating future sales through all those 5-star reviews. However, real publishers look at the sales numbers of your self-published books (and low numbers can work against you), so if traditional publishing is your eventual goal, you might want to start there in the first place.
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Books (traditionally published)
Pros:
You’re legit, the real deal, an author! There’s your smiling face on the table at Barnes and Noble, there’s your name creeping up the coveted bestseller list, there’s that feature in the NYT, there’s that movie company optioning your life story. Ok, ok, realistically all these things happen to maybe 1% of published authors…but the potential is there with traditional publishing. You’ll also have professionals copyediting, designing the cover, launching a marketing campaign, getting you placed on those tables at Costco, and more.
Things to Consider:
In our current world, publishers look immediately at the size of your platform. They want to know that you have built an audience excited to buy your book. Traditional publishing is a long process, from finding an agent, to selling the book, to negotiating the contract, to writing the damn thing, to rounds of edits, to (at last!) the joy of publication. And you’ll still be expected to get out there and pound the pavement to sell your books, so line up those podcasts and speaking gigs asap! And PS: Something like 95% of published authors still have day jobs, so don’t fire your therapy clients and plan your Oprah-interview outfit just yet.
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Speaking
Pros:
Create a great name for yourself, have a big impact, possibly get paid to travel and meet tons of people. Popular keynote speakers can build to speaker fees of $10k, $20, even $50k+ for appearances, so speaking can be highly lucrative!
Things to consider:
You’ll probably have to start small, perhaps speaking for free or very little, while you build up your audience and demand. Those high keynote fees are often paid by large businesses, so keep in mind that if your goal is to speak to local CPS offices, they won’t have those deep pockets. Many speakers monetize opportunities in different ways, such as selling their books, courses, retreats, etc from the stage.
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Paid Newsletters
Pros:
If you’re already writing an in-demand newsletter, this may be a way to monetize what you’re already doing. You’d create a divide between your free content (say, on social media) and your paid content (a weekly deep-dive newsletter). Your subscribers will get deeper, more intensely-focused content from you.
Things to consider:
Keep in mind–your newsletter will need to be highly valuable and serve a certain niche in a way your free content does not, or you might end up with your mom and a few kind friends as your only subscribers. Newsletters can become a bigger money-maker over time as your fame as a writer/ creator grows, especially if you provide a very clear outcome beyond simply, “Wanna pay to read more of my stuff?”
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Sponsored Newsletters
Pros:
Another great way to monetize something you might already be doing, sponsored newsletters are, in effect, selling ad space on the newsletter you already write. Instead of charging subscribers for your content, you’re charging an advertiser for the chance to get in front of your audience. These work well if you already have a big subscriber base in a targeted niche.
Things to Consider:
The amount you can charge varies by the size of your subscriber list and how many of those people actually open and read your newsletters, so you’ll need to keep your content good and your list growing over time! You’ll want to curate whom you sell spots to so as not to hammer your list with products and services they wouldn’t be interested in.
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Influencing/ Partnerships
Pros:
Fame! Fortune! Do nothing but have fun all day long! Well, ok, according to the influencers I talk to, this might be a biiiiit of a myth. However, growing a following as a MH influencer is a super-secret goal for lots of therapists. You can use your creativity like crazy and help tons of people while you do it.
Things to Consider:
You’ll never “own” your followers on social media (If Instagram folds tomorrow, your 100k followers are gone like the wind…), so to actually monetize this strategy, it’s important to offer a freebie right off the bat that grows your email list along with your following. This way, when you’re ready to sell a book or course, you’ve got thousands of people to sell to. In the meantime, you can monetize via paid partnerships across your platforms! We see you showing off those fancy free pants Lululemon sent you….😉
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Did we miss any?
How are YOU outgrowing your office?
We’d love to hear about it!
-Katie
Katie is proud to offer Therapist 2.0! This program helps therapists just like you grow and monetize beyond the office, no matter what your future goals are! Check out this video with all the basics, and sign up here!
