Creating Multiple Streams of Income for Health Professionals: Embracing Online Opportunities and Amplifying Your Impact – Jo’s interview with Kat Love

Creating multiple streams of income is one of the most important things health professionals can do to build a sustainable practice and it’s a topic Jo is very passionate about. That’s why this week we are sharing a conversation in which Jo was interviewed on this topic by Kat Love. And although this conversation was recorded 6 years ago, now more than ever health professionals want – and need – multiple streams of income. 

Special thanks to Kat for allowing us to share this interview with you today.

Kat Love is a website and private practice marketing expert. Therapists helped Kat heal from childhood sexual abuse, so now they specialise in helping therapists with their websites and marketing. You can find more about Kat at katlove.com

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• You, The Entrepreneurial Clinician

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

Transcript

Kat:

Let’s talk, creating online income streams for therapists.

Hi, I’m Kat from katlove.com and today my guest is Jo Muirhead. Jo is the founder of jomuirhead.com, where she helps health professionals build successful, sustainable, and profitable practices. A counselor herself Jo draws from her own health business building experience to help her clients grow. Today, Jo will be sharing insights with us around creating online income streams. We discuss why building income streams matter, some solid ideas for online income streams, mindset shifts that you may need in order to be awesome at both creating and marketing a service or product. Some example, stories of therapists that have built successful income streams. And one thing that you can do right now to start getting on the right track towards creating your online income stream, let’s talk.

Hi Jo. Thanks for much for joining us today.

Jo:

Good morning, Kat. Thank you for asking me to join you today.

Kat:

Thank you. So today we’re talking about how therapists might start or build online income streams. And to start off, I was wondering if you could establish what do building online in income streams really mean and why does it really matter to a therapy practice?

Jo:

<Laugh> Well why does it matter, that was a really interesting question. So from me, it matters because I quickly understood that I couldn’t do any more than seeing one-on-one clients. And that has a cap on your income. So if you’re selling your time for money or selling your therapy sessions and that’s all that you can sell, then you get to a point where there’s no more money to be made. Cause none of us work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And if you are, please stop <laugh>.

Kat:

Yes, that’s totally true.

Jo:

Yeah, so, the question really spoke into what happens if I get sick or what? And as a rehabilitation counselor, I’m working with people who get sick, injured, and ill all the time. So having another income stream that allows you to take a break or allows you to increase your wealth or <laugh> in my case, I just got bored.

Kat:

Wow. Really?

Jo:

It mattered for me cause I needed to do something more than just see clients in a clinical setting. Yeah, I know <laugh>, truthbomb. Sorry <laugh>

Kat:

Totally acceptable here. Totally acceptable.

Jo:

Yeah. So for me, multiple income streams or an online income stream creates choice. And choice for me is one of the biggest contributors to freedom, which is a really strong value for me. So that’s why they matter. We’re also in a day and age where we’re not governed or we’re not constricted by where we live. So it’s not about which vegetables we grow in which season anymore. We have the opportunity to influence millions of people across this planet and do amazing good. And if that’s an opportunity for us, then we can really take a hold of that and contribute to the world. I wanna leave the world a better place than I found it, so this is the way I can contribute to that.

Kat:

Hmm. Yeah, totally. I love that idea of like, not only creating more freedom for yourself, but also giving to more people at once. So it’s like an amplifier of what you do almost.

Jo:

Absolutely. I would never, ever have thought that I would be building well occupational therapy practices for people in Japan. Now I’ve recently spent some time in Japan, but through my online training programs, I’ve connected with a Japanese occupational therapist and they have this horrible population situation that they’re in, but occupational therapy is a booming business. So she’s one of the very few private OTs in Japan, and now I’ve got all these Japanese occupational therapists going, can you help me do this? Because we’ve got more needs than we know how to meet.

Kat:

Wow, that’s amazing.

Jo:

Yeah. <laugh>. And a friend of mine who runs a very successful Facebook marketing business, she’s now on her way to London because people can see the impact that she’s making and the impact that she has. So she’s just like, okay, I’ve got all these clients in London, so let’s take the family and visit them. That’s what online can give you. Like, it’s so much more than just being stuck in your office.

Kat:

Yeah. And that one-to-one session all the time. Yeah.

Jo:

All the time. Yeah.

Kat:

<Laugh>. So if a therapist wants to start exploring what online income streams might work for them, what kind of options do they have? I mean, you mentioned kind of you’re doing consultancy, I mean, what else?

Jo:

Well, number one, you need access to the internet, so please do that. So I heard a statistic yesterday and I scribbled it down over breakfast this morning. Did you know that on average app will make $9,000?

Kat:

I didn’t know that.

Jo:

Yeah. So now for your listeners or for your watches, I don’t have a source document for you. And I can’t give you the source, but it was in a marketing guru expert room and here in Australia. And he said, so on average apps will generate $9,000 worth of income over the life of that app. That’s not bad. So I think where a lot of therapists and clinicians, certainly when they come to me, they all want to create an online program. Because they think that it will be easy and they think that it’s a really easy transfer of knowledge. It’s not the easiest thing to do. So we’ve got other options. So there’s building an app. There’s online group-based stuff. There’s online training. So don’t get caught up in, are you coaching, are you consulting, are you doing therapy, just training?

Is that what you’re doing? Are you doing training? Oh, cool. You can do speaking like I’m doing now. For me, this is a speaking gig. So webinars, every second month I do a live webinar as a part of my contributing to my community. That’s a very big speaking opportunity, which has actually landed paid speaking opportunities. We can write now. People actually get paid for blogging. I’ve actually been paid to blog. I’ve got a friend who gets paid to blog where you can get paid to blog or you can write an online book, or you can write a hardcover book that gets downloaded to a Kindle. There’s affiliate marketing, which I don’t think gets anywhere near enough credit. So you can create an authority site. I had planned to do this around a coffee because I love my coffee. And then I just got busy and basically doesn’t have to have anything to do with therapy. But you can just start either advertising or creating affiliate links and start selling everybody else’s products. And YouTube, if you get a strong enough audience on YouTube, YouTube will actually pay you via advertising. You need to be one of those people that are doing jump scares and video game things <laugh>.

Kat:

Yeah. But there’s probably an audience for stuff like that. I mean, for therapy. Like kind of packaged in like a quick YouTube video. Like what kind of advice can you give? In like a YouTube format.

Jo:

Absolutely. Well, and again, you know, the World Health Organization has been telling us since 2010 that anxiety and depression are going to be the epidemic conditions that the western world has to deal with by 2020. We’re only four years away from that. And we all know that anxiety and depression continue to rise. So if somebody can get onto YouTube as a therapist or as a clinician, and go, right, this is what we’re gonna do. You’ve got two minutes. Here’s something really implementable. You’ll get picked up cause they’re overarching terms. They are so search terms, chronic pain is another one. You put a YouTube video up about pain. Oh my god, pain is everywhere. So there you go. There were seven ideas I came up with pretty quickly <laugh>.

Kat:

Yeah. That was a ton of items.

Jo:

<Laugh>.

Kat:

And I think listening to them too, I feel like some people or some therapists that are just doing the one-on-one sessions in their office and perhaps doing the marketing for their private practice they might be listening to this and wondering, how can I get there? You know, because you’re saying like all of these, like maybe some of the people watching might not even know what being an affiliate is. So I wonder if there’s something that has to happen like a shift on the mindset level. Because I know I was reading your blog <laugh> and I know that you have a lot of content about getting into the right mindset and what that can do for your practice. And so I’m wondering when it comes specifically to online income streams, is there some kind of a shift that needs to happen to really get there?

Jo:

Yeah, there was for me, it took me a long time to embrace the fact that I can help clients achieve the same type of result if they’re not in the room with me in front of me. That was the biggest mind shift for me. So there is nothing superstitiously magic that happens just because you’re in the same physical space. But we’re so used to that, that’s how we were taught, that’s how we practiced. That’s what we’ve done our 10,000 hours to become an expert and we’re so used to that physical presence of that person. So I would find it very difficult then to run a group or run an online session even through Skype. Cause there’s something less tangible about that. And that was a huge debilitating belief system for me. So I felt like my online coaching and training and mentoring packages were never going to be as valuable.

The only way I was ever gonna help anybody was if I was in the room with them, which probably says a lot more about my needs and my ego than it does about my ability to serve my clients. So that was massive. So you’ve gotta have an entrenched belief that your information and the way you can present information can actually add incredible value despite the person not being in the room with you. And once you can get over that and get over the fact that it’s new and it’s different then that will make you go forward really quickly.

The other thing you need to really understand and have a mindset shift around is if you are ready to do this and you wanna create something new, you are about to go into a whole new level of learning. People get so disappointed that they go and spend all this time and energy creating this new product to sell online. They’re exhausted by the end of the creation of the product, regardless of what it is. And they’ve invested no time, energy, resources into the marketing of it. Your product is useless if people do not know about it. And the only way people can know about it is if you tell them. It’s nobody else’s responsibility to market your stuff. So I’ll give you a really great example. I have this wonderful tool called a Book of Evidence. It is an amazing tool and I’ve had it in my office over there in boxes since 2014, selling a few copies here and there. But nobody knew about it. The webpage wasn’t even visible on my old website and nobody knew about it. But every time people got one or I’d given it as a gift, I’d get all these raving reviews about it. And now I’ve had a blog post about published in Huffington Post and I’m selling it every week. So we’ve sold 15 copies since May 29th. So what’s that? Eight days?

Kat:

Wow. Nine days. Oh yeah, I shared that. That was a great post. That was awesome.

Jo:

And it’s such an easy thing to do. And if you wanna know more about it, we’ll put that in the show notes but I just wanna give you an understanding. People didn’t know about it. So I had this wonderful tool, this beautiful resource, this thing that I know will change people’s lives.  I’ve been using it for years cause I used to run out and grab notebooks and write in them. So I was like, here you go, have it. But nobody knew about it, so, but nobody knew to buy it. So don’t do that!

Kat:

<Laugh>.

Jo:

You’ve gotta understand the easy thing is the creation of the product. Cause you’re actually just pulling out the information that you already have from your head. The more difficult thing is learning how to market that. And that’s where people fall over.

Kat:

I mean so you were saying that believing in yourself, first of all, that you can be effective in another format of transferring of knowledge or transferring of information. Information or transferring of guidance. And then also this idea of you, you may have to also learn about the marketing side of it. Cause that’s huge. That is huge if nobody knows about it.

Jo:

Yeah. And the easiest way to help yourself understand it is if your practice is full and you don’t want to have a more full practice, then deconstruct that. What did you do to get to that full practice? Because chances are you’re gonna have to learn similar steps to get your product sold.

Kat:

Yeah. It’s almost like another business. It’s almost like starting another business. It’s like this is another whole unit of business that I need to think through. You know, also like the legal stuff and the product itself and then the marketing, it’s all an entire project.

Jo:

You have to think about. It is, and if you think of it like a project and you write yourself a bit of a project plan, cause it’s not a magical thing. There is so much information on the internet seriously so much we can’t get to it all. That’s why Facebook has algorithms and it will tell us what we’re allowed to see. That’s why Google, when I do a search, it tells me what I’m allowed to see unless I’m more specific and there’s just so much information. So don’t just be more noise. You need to be smarter than that. So don’t underestimate the learning you’re about to do, but if you learn it once then, and you’ve got your system in place and you’ve got your knowledge transfer in place, you can go, okay, I created this workbook, now I’m gonna go and create an online program. And you just go, what were the steps I did over here? Oh, we just do them over there. So for people who get freaked out because they’re like, I need Aweber. I’m not an affiliate of any of these, by the way, Aweber plus Lead Pages plus Convert Kit plus this, plus that. And they freak out about all the technology. You do it once, once you’ve done it, you don’t have to do it again cause you’ve learned it. <Laugh>.

Kat:

Yeah. So also a mindset shift of investing in yourself in terms of investing in your knowledge, I mean, and being able to make that project come to life.

Jo:

Yeah, absolutely. So you’re actually developing a brand new skillset. So you are developing a skill set around marketing. And in this day and age, all of our clients and prospective clients are incredibly discerning. They’re not gonna buy your stuff just because you hold up your piece of paper. Your credentials in front of their face, <laugh>, they’re not gonna buy it, but they’re gonna buy your stuff because they know who you are. They can trust you, they get to know you and they like you. And the only way you can do that is if you’re talking to them in a way that they can understand you. So you’ve got a whole new skill set to learn here. Doing that in the room. I’m amazed at how many clinicians can do that in a room brilliantly. And then I deconstruct that conversation for them and go, so this is how you do it online. This is how you create an email sequence based on what you’ve just told me. And they’re like, oh!

Kat:

<Laugh>.

Jo:

It’s just a conversation.

Kat:

Yeah. It’s just like making friends going out for coffee. Like the same thing but you know, virtual cup of coffee, <laugh>. Exactly.

Jo:

Exactly. So I think that’s some mindset. You’re doing a much better job at summarising it than I am at presenting it. But I know for me, believing that that person didn’t need to be in the room was where I needed to start and that there wasn’t some magical thing that was happening just because we were in the room together. If you start there, then the rest will become easier.

Kat:

<Laugh>. That’s so cool.

Jo:

Easier. Easier. Not easy. Yeah. <laugh>.

Kat:

I was also reading on your website that you have had some alumni success stories and one of them really caught my attention because it sounds so interesting. It’s when you said one of your previous clients was able to take content that they already had, repurpose it and then turn that into a paid product.

Jo:

Oh yeah.

Kat:

Tell me a little bit about that. That sounds like something that maybe a lot of people watching this mail already be able to do. I mean, if you’re already blogging, or if you’ve been blogging for a year or two, I mean, like that’s content as well.

Jo:

Yes, absolutely. So I’m actually wondering which one it was cause I’ve done that a few different ways with people. So I’ve worked with two psychologists here in Australia and both of them, we reduced their multi therapist practice so that they would become key keynote speakers. And the first lady I’m thinking of, we took her blog posts. She’d written a series of 12 blog posts around the specific area. And she turned those into a workbook. But then, so that workbook was being sold, but then what that actually leveraged her to do and promoted her to be able to do is go and speak on those topics. So from this 30 years of history and experience, we got nailed it down to the 12 things that she wanted to be known for, which were a blog post she’d already written.

She turned those into a workbook, which have then become the platform for her to go and get speaking gigs. That’s pretty cool. That’s awesome. That is probably the most grand one. So one that’s not so grand is another psychologist who was so proud of her policy and procedures manual <laugh>, I’m trying to find mine, it’ll be somewhere <laugh>. So she actually spent a lot of time and energy creating this policies and procedures manual for her clinicians for herself as the director of the company and for her admin support. So what we actually did is we morphed that into a white label product. And basically she sold that. So a white label product means it’s unbranded, right? So then she sold it to other practices as the baseline for this is how you put a policy and procedure manual together. I’ve done all the thinking for you. You just need to tweak it. And then on top of that, she offered herself as a consultant to go in and help those businesses craft it to make it work for them. So that was very lucrative for her. She pre-sold that. So she was basically paid to create it. So pre-selling is huge. I’ve had a couple of people where we’ve actually developed another online income stream. This will totally blow your mind where they’re now selling their photographs. So all the images that they’ve taken for their own social media. So they just have a passion for photography anyway. They now have a completely unique online business that is all about selling their photography. That was cool and that was easy. And it’s got nothing to do with clinical work. So both of them find it incredibly fun. They don’t know each other. It was just, why don’t we do this? You spend all your spare time wanting to take photographs and manipulating your images and you’ve got the most amazing images on your social media presence. People would really like to buy those. So we tested it. That is really cool.

Kat:

Yeah. No, I think that’s really awesome too, that it’s also an opportunity to diversify what you’re spending your time doing. I mean, that’s really far – you know, being out and taking photos is like really far from being in a therapy session. Maybe it’s like your therapy, it’s cathartic for you to do it. <Laugh>,

Jo:

But for me it was just like the next natural thing and people get so overwhelmed and they think they have to have the most perfect online product that is competing with the most perfect online people who have been doing the perfect online product and training course for years when it doesn’t actually need to be that complicated. Like, it really doesn’t need to be that complicated. If you’ve got a burning desire to build a product and learn to market it and you’re invested in it, that’s awesome. But for those of you who are watching this, who wanna go, God, really, can I do something a little simpler? Where’s your policy and procedures manual? What are you doing? How do you collect your own images and what content have you already got that we can repurpose? So my favorite, if you’ve got one piece of content, you can do five things with it. So you can blog about it, you turn it into different social media tweets, you turn it into audio, you turn it into a video, and then you offer to guest blog or you offer it to someone else. So one piece of content can actually serve five different things for you.

Kat:

Write that down. Right? And that’s also your marketing right there as well. Like, you don’t have to make it into this big complicated marketing thing. If you have some content and you’re able to repurpose it for different marketing purposes, you could also turn it into, did you say a webinar as well? You could turn it into a workshop or there’s so many possibilities.

Jo:

There are. And I think that’s where people get really overwhelmed. Oh, so your idea doesn’t need to be complicated because the complication is gonna come in the next step, which is feeling overwhelmed about where do I go next? So I think we get started from ground zero and wanna be at a hundred percent without realising that you’ve got 99 more phases to go through and that’s okay. And you’re not supposed to know this stuff yet. You went to college or university to become the discipline that you are. You didn’t go there to become an online marketing guru. Right? It’s okay not to know this stuff, but we have so many opportunities, let’s take advantage of them.

Kat:

Totally. So how can therapists take advantage of those opportunities? Like to put it more succinctly, what’s one thing that therapists can do right now to start getting on the right track towards an online income stream?

Jo:

Oh, one thing. Okay. So the easiest way to do this is I want you to think of the five things that you have to teach every single client that comes through your door. Well, another way to say that is, what are the five things you wish every person knew before they turned up in your clinic or into your practice? Okay, so you got those five things down. So now you’ve got five modules for a training program. Oh, you’ve now got five modules for a workbook. You’ve now got five modules for a video series. You’ve now got five modules for a webinar. That’s useful content just because it’s easy for you and it feels like common sense for you. That’s because you’re the person who’s invested five years in learning how to do this.

And you’ve spent 150 grand getting there. Don’t devalue that. People need to know about therapy or any clinical intervention. We gotta demystify it. That is the biggest bridge we need to fill. The gap that we need to fill. The bridge we need to build. So do that with an online service. That’s not a big risk. You’re not, you know, doing EMDR via Skype or anything. You are just informing people and helping them make a better decision about how to choose you as the therapist they wanna work with. So that would be my one thing. I’m gonna give you two things. because I like to overachieve <laugh>.

Kat:

Oh good.

Jo:

And that is, you can’t expect yourself to just learn how to do the online marketing thing. So there’s only so much free stuff. Well there’s only so much leverage. Nobody has built a successful online business from all the free stuff you are going to have to invest in getting your website looked at your SEO looked at. You’re gonna have to invest in how to write good copy. Cause writing good copy does not equal academic papers. So you need to be prepared that there’ll be a time investment, but there’ll also need to be some financial investment. But if you’re not committed to either of those things, then don’t back tthe project. Keep it simple. You don’t have to do this just because everyone is telling you you should, it doesn’t mean you have to.

Kat:

<Laugh>.

Yeah, no, I think you definitely need to invest to grow and that does mean financial investment and time investment and energy investment. So you have to really be enthusiastic in order to make that investment happen.

Jo:

Oh, absolutely. You do. And just remember what you were like when you were just about to graduate from college and university and all the energy that was going into learning how to do that. You were actually going back to some of that space again. That space of everything is wonderful and awesome and terrifying all at the same time. And I think we need to acknowledge that and, and help each other understand that it, you’re supposed to feel like this. You don’t have it all together right now. This is brand new for you and that’s okay.

Kat:

<Affirmative>, that’s really comforting actually and validating because if you are in that space, you know, that’s good to hear that you’re not just the only crazy one <laugh>.

Jo:

No. And you don’t have to spend four years like I’ve done trying to work out the best way to deliver online content. Don’t do that. You don’t need to do that. There are people out there who can help you do that. So you just can navigate it. I couldn’t tell you how much money I spent on that. So there is no need <laugh> to do that!

Kat:

Thank you so much for coming. I learned so much. I’m sure our viewers learned so much. So thank you.

Jo:

My pleasure. And feel free to get in touch with me. You can find me on LinkedIn, on Facebook. I do have a website, jomuirhead.com. I do have a YouTube channel, but it’s not as nice as Kat’s though <laugh>. I do have something called Google Plus, but I don’t know how to use it. And I’m also on Twitter <laugh>, so come find me, <laugh>.

Kat:

Yes, I’ll include all of your links.

Jo:

<Laugh>. Beautiful. Thank you Kat, this is great. I wish you every success. Have a great day.

Kat:

You too. Bye!

Jo, shared some absolutely awesome tips with us today. To get notes and links from today’s session, you can do so at cat love.com/session four. Thank you so much for watching. Bye.