[JOE SANOK]
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 641.

Well, I am Joe Sanok, your host and we are entering one of my favorite months of the year, December. I love December. My birthday is this month. We have our Polish Wigilia dinner, Christmas Eve, the kids get to open presents and just the end of year break to reflect on how things have gone and with the new year is going to bring us. I just love December so much. So if you are finding it gloomy or sad as you enter these chillier months, just know that the spirit of Joe is with you in being excited and hopefully that just raises you up just a little bit because this is a month that’s kind of capstoning our year. It’s a time to reflect on what we’ve done, where we’re headed. Probably ate a little too much food at Thanksgiving and maybe we’re going to end up making a new year’s resolution we’re going to give up on, but hey, it’s December.

So welcome. I’m so glad that you are here with me. If you are new to the show thanks so much for joining. You’ve got 641 episodes other than this to tear through. So you’ve got a lot of listening content if you want to build your game in the private practice world. If you’ve been here a while, thank you so much for hanging out. We’ve had so many long-term listeners. Just recently I was on someone’s podcast and she was talking about how she had listened to the podcast for so long. It’s just, it never gets old it to have people will say that they’ve appreciated the work and the interviews that I’ve done because you’re standing here in your home office in Northern Michigan or when I was on the road and you don’t always get to meet every single person that’s listening. That would take a while.

Today I am so excited about the topic that we are covering. I have Michael Buzinski, who is CEO of Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing, who is a lifelong entrepreneur, digital marketing thought leader and author. Dubbed a quote visionary marketer by the American Marketing Association, Michael’s sole mission is to help entrepreneurs avoid the time drain and frustration of managing profitable digital marketing campaigns. Buzz, as most people call him has simplified digital marketing success with The Rule of 26, his new book and is on a mission to double the website revenue of service-based businesses across America. Buzz. Welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[MICHAEL BUZINSKI]
Thank you, Joe and happy holiday season.
[JOE]
I know, I love December. It just, oh man, I just am like, here we go. So super exciting. You know, what I love about your book is how specialized it is for my exact audience. I mean, I talk to a lot of marketing people and then it’s like to be, how do you teach marketing to service-based professionals? Because it’s such a unique thing that counselors therapists and psychologists go through where they’re so trained, they’ve got PhDs, galore and they are super clinical, but then it’s like, well how do I get out of just giving myself a job and doing all that? So I can’t wait to dive in today. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to this point with the book and just a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey before we dive into your book.
[MICHAEL]
Okay. Well, my entrepreneurial journeys started way back when I was, I lived on a farm when I was a little kid, but we won’t go that at far back. We’ll go after I was in the air force for 10 years. I flew a jet called AWACS for that amount of time and did my service and I got out and I actually started a recording studio to help other musicians, I was a failed musician. My first dream was to become a rockstar and so I opened up a studio —
[JOE]
Me too.
[MICHAEL]
Really, there you go. So I wanted to make sure, I had a horrible experience as a musician in recording studios. So I started Buzz Biz Media back in 2005 when I got out the service to help other working musicians avoid that process. But about a year into that, I realized that surviving of starving musicians was a horrible business plan. So it pivoted into a media production studio for small businesses who don’t have any money either, but it was my passion. I feel that the small business sector is the backbone of our economy. SMBs create two thirds of all new jobs in the United States and it is the answer to the ever shrinking middle class. It’s where the middle class jobs come from, is from these small businesses.

So over the years though, my marketing prowess, that started back when I was a teenager, working for big companies kind of came through in conversations and whatnot, and it grew into a creative agency. About three years ago, I split the creative agency into two companies and now I have the Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing, which specifically works on the website marketing for service-based businesses exclusively. From that came this book, due to COVID when all of a sudden people couldn’t afford to get the insight of what they needed to do for their business to get revenue from their website. So I needed to find this way to convey this for little to no money and in a very short amount of time without people having to learn what digital marketing is. So I found this formula that really just answers the marketing strategy questions for website and creating that predictable revenue for it.
[JOE]
Walk us through kind of how the average therapist or counselor tends to approach how they think about their website, how they think about marketing, like what’s the typical way people do it? Then maybe we can talk about the potential kind of through their website.
[MICHAEL]
Sure. So practitioners are notorious for working in their business. I mean really, they went to school to become the master at their craft and in all medical. It kind of spans across all medical practices then that we get into becoming a practitioner and very rarely do we spend a lot of time on the business side, let alone the marketing. So I always feel that when I’m talking to practitioners, they’re thinking of their website as an afterthought. It is just this thing that has to happen because everybody says it needs to happen.

They don’t realize the potential for the revenue that can come directly from that entity and that there are a lot of people looking for what they, for answers of what they offer. So 68% of all people who are looking for a service start with a search engine inquiry. So if you are not working your website in a way that is visible to the search engines and or you are advertising outwardly to people with those tendencies, then you are never being seen by 68% of the people looking for your services. That’s where The Rule of 26 come ins.
[JOE]
That’s such a huge stat to know that 68% of people start with a search engine query. I mean that’s, if someone said, “Hey, if you do this one thing, your business will grow by 68%,” why wouldn’t you do it? So take us through, if people, so that’s how most therapists are doing it. What are some tactics or things from The Rule of 26 that you can share with us that will help us flip that to make our listeners just hyper successful?
[MICHAEL]
Sure. I think that actually we should break down The Rule of 26 first because The Rule of 26 tells you what you want to do and then the tactics behind it. So The Rule of 26 creates three objectives. So we want to take your website and we want to increase the unique visitors that are coming to your website by 26%. Then we want to turn around and we want to increase the conversion rate of those visitors by 26%. If we increase the average value per client by 26%, then we have a compound result of 100% more revenue coming from the website.

The great thing about that is once you’re done with it, and you’re like, “Hey, we’ve done this and we’ve actually measured a hundred percent more business coming from our website, we get to just do it again,” that’s how simple it is. So once you’ve done it a second time, you literally have quadrupled the amount of revenue coming from your website and becomes this predictable stream of revenue for your practice so that you can then grow it to the exact size and feel that you want because you can actually shape the type of clients you’re getting from your website once you start dialing in The Rule of 26.
[JOE]
Okay, I feel like I have an expert here that I just selfishly want to be like, okay, help me with Practice of the Practice. So forget all of you that are listening. I’m just going to get a free consulting. I want to obviously grow a hundred percent. That sounds awesome. So take me through with, so Practice of the Practice is service-based in that we offer consulting, we have membership communities, we have all these things. Take me through each of those three things that you just said that we want to grow by 26% and how would I do that or what question questions would you need to ask me to help me understand practically how we would do that in each of those three phases?
[MICHAEL]
Sure. So the first objective is increasing traffic because without traffic, you have nothing. First we have to figure out, are you tracking unique traffic? Because a lot of times people don’t even have their Google analytics plugged in. So the most simple of things to do is make sure that your analytics are plugged into your Google analytics, are plugged into your website and that you’re getting clean data back. So we need to filter the bots that are crawling for the search engine’s sake, because we want them there, but we don’t want to report them and then we want to make sure that we are identifying what a conversion looks like.

So is a conversion a phone call? Is a conversion a schedule an appointment? Is a conversion “contact us for more information?” If it could be all of those, every practice is going to be a little bit different. Whatever you consider a profitable step towards becoming a patient at your practice should be considered conversion. Once we’ve done that, then we look at ways to push more traffic because if you have say a thousand people come into your website and you don’t feel like you’re getting revenue, you have enough traffic. Believe me. We just need to get five to 6% of those thousand people getting through your website to your practice. So then we leapfrog over to the conversion rate.

But if you say I only have a hundred to 200 folks in there, that means you’re probably only seeing six to maybe 10 people actually inquiring. And out of those 10, there’s only going to be percentage of those that are actually qualified to work with you. So we want to get, we want to increase that traffic. That is the great question as far as like, where do you want to go from there? But the first thing that I always go is the long game, which is your search engine optimization. Remember 68% of all people looking for your services are going to start with a search query. So start with your search engine optimization so that you can be seen on that search query when they type in the keywords relevant to your practice.
[JOE]
So take us through some of the strategies with SEO that people should be doing, say on a regular basis. So you have a typical practice, what are maybe things that monthly you would recommend people do? What are things that, you know here’s one time do a big swoop through your website to clean things up. What are some of those maybe habits that people should do around specifically SEO to get that new traffic in?
[MICHAEL]
That’s a great question, Joe. There’s a lot of things you can do on a regular basis and then there’s things that you can do on a periodic basis. So the first thing you want to do is make sure that your website is hosted by a good host. You want to make sure that it is loading fast. This second thing you want to do is make sure that all of your photographs and graphics on your website are optimized so that they load fast. The third thing you want to make sure is that all of your headers and your sub-headers, or what they call yes, headers, I’m sorry, H1s and H2s and stuff like that, we don’t get too technical today.

Although those are using the keywords most specific to what you offer, not necessarily your name, unless you are a well known name and people are searching your name more often than they’re searching for the solutions that you provide, but usually it’s the solutions or the symptoms that you’re providing that you want to put in those headers and then mention a few time in each of the chunks of content that you have on your website. You want to say your keywords about every 200 words and you don’t want a web page that has less than 300 words on it. And you want to focus each of those pages on each of those keywords. You can have related keyword so that you can mention either the symptoms or the treatment multiple times, more times than every 200 words but you don’t want to try to have everything be optimized, say 10 key words on one page.

So once you’ve done that, then it’s a matter of continually adding content. This is why a lot of practitioners will turn to a SEO agency or an SEO expert to get all of that done because there’s a lot of research and all those things. But if you look at the long-term effects of SEO, you’ll realize that the amount of return on investment over the long haul is immeasurable.
[JOE]
So what do you think about authoritative posts that are like 5,000 words that try to answer every question about anxiety versus having a whole bunch of small, say 300 word posts?
[MICHAEL]
Good question. So first the blog posts of 300 words are starting to fade. People want more information than what you can share in 300 to 400 words. So now we’re seeing our blogs closer to six to 800 words, and then that 5,000 word mega article could be chopped into maybe three, 1500 to 2000 word articles. Or if you’re going to do a 5,000 word article, you are one topic with all of the things that are within subtopics of that main topic so that you can, every 200 words repeat that main keyword that you’re really trying to get. That keyword is going to be something that people are searching in your area of your practice can cover. So if you’re in like telemedicine, obviously that could be anywhere that you’re licensed to do that but if you’re a brick and mortar practice, then you want to keep it local.

So if you’re local, those huge articles are not as important as a lot more of those short articles or blogs. You can take a short article and make it into three blogs. So if you have a 1500 to 2000 word article, okay, you put that out, say like on Medium, and then you have links to each of the individual blogs that you kind of break out for the point, the main points of that. Now you have what we call backlinks going between your blogs and your articles, which are all referring to your website. And now what Google sees is that there’s all these things pointing to your website and your content saying, oh, this person is an authority on this keyword.
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[JOE SANOK]
So once you start getting more traffic, I think a lot of people struggle with great, we’ve got, for a counseling practice, even if you get a couple hundred people a month, that’s still a ton of people if you’re just looking to fill a caseload of five or 10 extra clients. What strategies really work to help with that conversion that, hey, pick up the phone and schedule appointment, or click here to get into my calendar, or reach out to our team in some way? What’s working to boost that by 26%?
[MICHAEL]
So the biggest thing is to focus on the visitor. Too many times I see practitioners focus on them and why they are awesome. I’m telling you right now, your potential patient doesn’t care about you. They’re there to solve their problems. They want to —
[JOE]
I just want to pause right there and underline what you just said verbally, because I swear every website that hasn’t listened to our podcast starts with, “I went to Western Michigan University. I was an honor student. I did my post in this. I did this.” It’s like, oh my gosh, nobody freaking cares. Their kid is angry and they want to know, like start with I love helping angry kids. Okay, great. Now that person knows. I just love that you started there.
[MICHAEL]
I mean, at the top of the website needs to be the angry kid. If you’re niching down properly, there is one focus that you’re really targeting. A lot of practitioners get worried that, oh, if they niche down too far, there’s not enough demand for that. Well, if you’re talking about angry kids, you probably have plenty more business than one practice can handle. But just because you are focused on teen angst or something, like that doesn’t mean that other parents that have related issues won’t come out and say to you, can you help me with this as well? Because what they’re looking for are people who have relatable solutions to their problem. So the first thing you want to do is be very clear about what problem that visitor is most likely coming to the website to get an answer for.

Then you are going to pose your solution. A lot of times we going to offer a little bit of the free stuff. Because we want to qualify people with a big enough problem that it’s going to be worth your staff and your resources to help people. But if you can help them without ever them calling you, you’ve just saved them time, energy, and money, you time, energy, and money, and cleared your plate for the people who really need that deep dive and are going to be long-term clients for you.
[JOE]
So I’m wondering about that though, because I think in counseling it seems like by the time someone’s on a therapist’s website, they usually seem pretty clear that they want therapy. I feel like there’s been a big discussion in our communities about how much should you have free opt-ins because that might just distract people from actually scheduling this $200 an hour counseling session. It’s like which call to action to focus on? Should it be the free opt-in for my handbook on helping angry kids or should it be, just schedule an appointment? Do you have a sense of that specifically kind of for counselors and because oftentimes people are like ready to get counseling going on the website?
[MICHAEL]
Yes, both. You’re going to use both. Your free stuff is usually going to, nine times out of 10 they are not going to end up on your homepage immediately. Usually they’re going to end up on a blog, an article, an authority piece, maybe a directory and those types of things. If they hit in a directory yes, they’re going to be right there on your homepage. But that free stuff that you’re getting is that free advice that you’re giving through the blogs, articles and maybe even your subpages that rank higher than your homepage. Does that make sense?
[JOE]
Yes, that totally makes sense.
[MICHAEL]
So as far as counseling goes you can have some freebie stuff or maybe you have a pamphlet that has the 10 checklists that your kid has ADD or something like that. Then these are the things that you need to look for, dot, dot. Here is a workshop that we have, dot, dot, dot, whatever that looks like. But mingled in there is, “For immediate help schedule now, schedule an appointment.” Have the schedule appointment, even in your free stuff, sprinkled in so that when they get to the point where it’s like, this is more than want to try to figure out they’re coming to you right then and there. So you always are offering a little bit of information and then help, a little bit more information, then help, a little bit more information, then help. If you’re authentic through that process, you’re going to get the people who are willing to dive right in and don’t need a big opt-in process. It’s just more, they want to feel that you can solve their problem and you can solve it fast.
[JOE]
That makes sense. So then what other tactics have we missed that you think would be really helpful for therapists?
[MICHAEL]
So on the conversion side, it’s a matter of making sure that your website is mobile responsive. In SEO, we have to do that anyway and even more so on the conversion side, you want to make sure that you have all the information from your desktop version on your mobile version, because over 50% of the people are going to be finding you and making those searches on a mobile device. So if you don’t have all of the information there and easily digestible, because it’s a different science, it’s a different design, so many people rely on the mobile responsive programming that comes with say WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or any of those website builders and they never really look at and optimize their mobile version of their website for conversions.

They’ll optimize it for speed. They’ll optimize it for load and all that stuff, but they won’t optimize it for the actual user experience. That user experience is extremely important because if you have things out of order, because it automatically did it, WordPress automatically did it for you when you created the homepage or the desktop version, then you might end up with content first and then an image, or maybe you have images that don’t make any sense anymore when you’re going into a vertically linear process of digesting your content. So I think that’s like the next big, big thing for folks who already have websites out there that might not be converting as high as they’d like it to be.
[JOE]
So a lot of what we’ve talked about has been probably more aimed at individual practitioners, smaller practitioners. What about mega group practices, so people that have 10 or 20 therapists, they’re million dollar practices? I imagine saying we only help angry kids. That probably changes when you start to scale at that level. What would you adapt from what you’ve said for those million dollar plus practices?
[MICHAEL]
The million dollar practices have a different challenge because they have say 10 practitioners and each of those practitioners might have specialties. That means that you have to then optimize for each of those practices that are being funneled through one major website. So if you look at it at trying to capture everybody at the homepage, no, what you’re looking actually to do is funnel them out to your subpages or your sections of your website, and then treat each section individually for your SEO, individually for your advertising. Because if you get too broad and try to be everything to everybody, you become absolutely nobody to nobody and you’re going to get what you want. So you’re still doing those exact call to actions in your advertising. You’re still looking for the very specific keywords your search engine optimization. You’re still being very clear with your content and each of the sections to be go deep. So you’ve gone wide, but you still have to go just as deep with each of those verticals.
[JOE]
Got you. That totally makes sense. Well, the last question I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world we’re listening right now, what would you want them to know?
[MICHAEL]
That you don’t have to do it alone. So many practitioners try to do a lot, especially in the early stages. You don’t have to do it alone. For established practitioners that have had bad experiences with digital marketers, keep going, keep trying to find the right person for yourself because you can’t do it alone. When you start talking 10 practitioners and everything it takes to create an ecosystem that will feed a website to create that predictable revenue to your practice, it’s not going to be coming from within. It’s going to be coming from professionals like myself. And there’s many of us out there. Find the one that you connect with the best and work with them and bring them in as a teammate so that, they’re not working in a silo because digital marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum. So you need to make sure that you’re sharing just as much information with them as you might with your marketing director, that’s doing your gorilla marketing and your street, word of mouth and referral processes and all that other stuff and make sure that they’re working together.
[JOE]
So good. So Buzz, if people want to connect with you, if they want to learn more about your services, learn more about your book, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?
[MICHAEL]
I have everything in one place at buzzworthy.biz. That’s B-U-Z-Z-W-O-R-T-H-Y.B-I-Z. The book is there. All of our services are there. You can see exactly what I was talking about when I talk about the funneling out to different verticals because we do have more than just SEO, more than just the book. We have the tactics and tools for the ultra small practices all the way up to the multi-million dollar practices and the tactics and objectives to get those taken care of.
[JOE]
Awesome. Well, Buzz, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[MICHAEL]
Thank you so much for having me, Joe.
[JOE]
Don’t do it alone. Such great advice. You know, when you’re first starting out, usually time is on your side. You’ve got more time than you know what to do with, with your business oftentimes. So you put on multiple hats, you do the bookkeeping, you learn how to do contracts. You do some SEO, you do all these different things and you wear multiple hats. And that’s appropriate. You want to learn that stuff, but more times than not, we keep those hats on way longer than we should. I mean, I remember when I had this mega group practice going, the podcast was going awesome, and I was still doing the design for every single podcast episode. So every episode would take me a good two to three hours.

I’d do an interview like this, and then I would go do the show notes and then I would spend all this time being artsy fartsy, making these cool images, which I love doing. I love doing the artsy things, but when I handed that off to Sam, my chief marketing officer, at the time she was mostly just doing design for me, when I handed that off to her I then could do podcast after podcast, after podcast, and then do two, three shows a week instead of spending two hours with two thirds of that time being admin stuff that I could outsource at a much different rate than what my hourly is. So when you start to aggressively take those hats off and outsource things to other people, it’s amazing how it just multiplies the best use of your time because then you have that energy and that time. And all those things that I talk about on Thursday is the New Friday. So make sure that you are figuring out what you need to be taking off your plate so that you can do those highest level things.

Also, thanks so much to our sponsor today. It’s our e-course, that’s totally free for you, Pillars of Practice. Head on over to pillarsofpractice.com. You can select whether you are just getting started with your practice or whether you’re an established practice that you want to grow. We have all sorts of eight-minute experts in there that are going to walk you through all sorts of different aspects of your money, your websites, your SEO, that’s all totally free. As well, we have taken all of our downloads. So we used to give away one at a time where you had to opt in for each and every single one we put them all in there. So it’s got checklists, it’s got blueprints, all sorts of training, a hundred percent free over at pillarsofpractice.com.

Also, if you missed any of the recent episodes I had a solo show yesterday. We also talked about how to grow a practice in episode 639. We talked on the 23rd of November. Tony talked with us about how the Estonians won their freedom through singing against the Soviets. It was one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve done in a really long time. Right before that, we talked about how do you stop feeling like an imposter? So all sorts of amazing content we’ve been covering over the last few weeks.

Hope you’re doing awesome. Thank you for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.