Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

Maybe it's time to kick some of the low-paying insurance companies to the curb. You know, if you still accept insurance, one of the things that happen is some insurance companies pay very little, and we have kind of a rule of thumb for our clients who accept insurance, and that is if the insurance company is going to pay you a total of less than $68 for the session, you might as well kick that insurance company to the curb, get rid of them, and have those patients pay cash for their services when they come in, for their therapy. And you have to think about which ones that pay enough to stay with, and which ones that don't. Get rid of the ones that don't pay well and put those people on cash. You will see that your practice will increase and that your revenue will increase as a result. What I'd like you to do is take a mental note or go through your files and see which insurance companies pay less than...

Hi, this is Dave Kats of Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

We've talked about this one once before, but it's so unusual what I see, that I want to bring it up again. I would suggest, as a therapist, if you have any extra space, rent it out to another therapist. Now it could be that the only extra space you have is on weekends and evenings, and that's okay. I would rent that time out. I have a therapist in the greater Dallas area that does not work on Fridays. She works Monday through Thursday. So she rents out her office on Friday, Saturday and during the evenings. She rents it to two different therapists, so they split the time, and one pays $300/month, and one pays $350/month. Together that's $650 which pays her rent for that facility. So, it's really a great idea to do. Now, the reason I bring it up is because as a consultant, I talk to clients that are just getting in practice, and I talk to clients that have been in practice for a period of time, and they are...

Hi, this is Dave Kats for Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

Everybody knows that they should have a website and pretty much every therapist now has a website, but some therapist websites are what I call cyberspace junk. They're floating around in cyberspace and nobody ever sees them; nobody ever goes to your website unless you direct them. They aren't going to find it by searching on the Internet because your website is not optimized. It's important to have a website. It's important to have a nice design on your website. It is far more important to have your website optimized so that it shows up when people are searching for you. Now, how do you optimize your website? One of the things you do to optimize your website is to make sure that your titles and subtitles on each page say something about counseling in your area, or your areas of expertise, and the area that you practice in. Let me give you an example. I used to put together a website that I thought was a nice...

This is Dave Kats of Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

One of the best things you can do to keep your practice full is to put out a newsletter on a monthly basis. It doesn't have to be much of a newsletter. An 8 and a half by 11 sheet of paper with print on one side is enough. Email it to your patients each month. I have a therapist with an e-mail list of 200 people, mostly patients. She sends out a newsletter every month and she never sends out a newsletter that she doesn't get a new patient or reactivation of an old patient. So I'm saying putting out an electronic newsletter is very important because it costs you nothing. Make sure you have the permission to send people these newsletters and be absolutely sure that when you send them out, you don't accidentally expose their e-mail addresses to other people. That would be a violation. I had a therapist once that sent out newsletters to about a 175 people and it had all the other people's names and e-mails listed and...

Hi, this is Dave Kats and I have a tip for you. 

People a lot of times ask us, ‘what are the most prevalent and best software out for billing insurance?’. The first thing I would say is this, every therapist should be using their own software. Sometimes I see a therapist that accepts insurance and they will go to Blue Cross to file, Aetna to file, UHC to file. It is better having your own software. If you would like to have something free, I suggest that you use Practice Mate which is by Office Ally. Just look up Office Ally and Practice Mate. It has a great billing system and is absolutely free. If you are a cash practitioner, I would use this type of software to keep your practice organized and your notes organized. If you can afford to pay for software, there are two that have become the king of the hill in the last few years. These are Therapy Appointment and Therapy Notes. We use Therapy Appointment in our office, and we are fans of Therapy Appointment. It cost...

Hi, this is Dave Kats from Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

One of the things you must do if you're a therapist is get on all the pertinent professional referral directories, and, of course, the granddaddy of them all is psychologytoday.com. If you're not already listed on psychologytoday.com, you're making a big mistake, you have to get on psychologytoday.com. Now, psychologytoday.com charges about $30, where the rest of them generally charge about $20, but the $30 is well worth it. Now, in case you don't know what a professional referral directory is, it's just a website where you can list yourself, and information about you, and then people can call you or go to your website from that professional referral directory. Here's what I would suggest you do. There are lots of good companies, there's Psychologytoday.com, there's goodtherapy.org, there's therapy tribe, therapy nation, find a Christian therapist, there's a lot of different ones that you can go to. I'll let...

This is Dave Kats with Therapists Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

One of the best things you can do to improve your internet presence is very simple, and it's free. That's just getting people to review you, to give good reviews about you and your organization. Now, it's become easier than ever to give reviews. Right now, if you have an Android phone, you have Google Maps already downloaded. If you have Google Maps, you can look up your clinic, and then anybody that looks up your clinic can give a review. They'll give a five-star review. They just touch the fifth star, and they'll say, "What would you like to say?" and they'll say something good about you. They'll say, "Okay, this will be posted under your name." They say, "Fine. Post it." and the review is done. If you have an iPhone, you have to download Google Maps. Once you download Google Maps, you do exactly the same thing. Who can give you reviews? It's not professional, in most people's opinion, to have patients give...

Hi. This is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

One of the things you can do to stay active on the Internet is to write articles and put them on your website. What's the difference between somebody that six months ago was in practice, and went out of business and their Internet is still up there, the website's still up, and you, who six months ago were in business, are still in business but you haven't done anything with your website? How does the search engine even know that you're still in business? One of the ways you do it is by having articles posted on your website. I'd say about every two weeks. If you can put an article on your website about every two weeks, that's enough. The good news is the articles can be very short. I'm telling you that an article can be one paragraph. It is nice to be two or three paragraphs, but if it's just one paragraph, that's good. It doesn't necessarily have to be about your specialty. It can be about anything...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

Now, this tip isn't for everybody. We've been talking over about the last five weeks about how to have good internet presence. The last thing you want to talk about, I think you should consider pay-per-click advertising. I'll tell you that a lot of large offices in the therapy profession have pay-per-click advertising and it really pays for them. Now, what is pay-per-click advertising? Well, when you look on Google, when you search something on Google and it comes up, a lot of times, there's ads at the top of Google, or on Facebook, there'll be ads. Well, those are pay-per-click ads. Now, what does pay-per-click mean? It means that you put an ad on there, but you don't pay anything unless people click on it, and so you pay per click. Now, you can decide how much money to spend and you can spend as little as $100 a month. If you have a going concern and good practice, I would suggest that you consider...

Hi, this is Dave Kats for Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

I could tell you how to do good Facebook advertising but there is a guru that tells you for free. I like to do Facebook advertising and it draws in a lot of people but I'll tell you there's somebody on YouTube that does a wonderful job and his name is Miles Beckler, M-I-L-E-S B-E-C-K-L-E-R. You go to him and he has 70 videos on YouTube that tell you exactly what to do with Facebook.
He's very unpretentious. He gives you a lot of information. He could charge $4,000 for this program but he has elected to give it to you free. Go to his video that says Facebook advertising and you'll see exactly step by step how to do good Facebook advertising and how to put in the things in your advertisement that really make a difference.

This is Dave Kats. Thanks for listening.