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Hi there, Jeffrey Grossman from Acupuncture Media Works and AcuPerfect Websites. I am really glad that you are here right now. Thank you, the American Acupuncture Council for inviting me back here to do one of their live trainings for you. I appreciate that. And I appreciate what they are doing every week to bring all this information, and wisdom, and insight to the profession, to keep us going forward in these strange and weird times. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Jeffrey Grossman, and I am the owner and creator of Acupuncture Media Works and AcuPerfect Websites, and also AcuDownloads. And I’ve been helping acupuncturists grow their practice, educate their patients, and keep their patients in care. Since 2002, I’ve been in this industry of helping practitioners. So, I’m really glad that you are here today. Today I want to talk about five ways to quarantine-proof your practice.
As you all know, these are some really strange times that we’re in and none of us expected to be here. None of us even prepared to be here. And as it stands now, we might be going through various lockdowns over the course of the next few years when things like this arise. So, I want to discuss five different ways that you can quarantine-proof your practice, that you can invest time and energy in now, so when it happens again, if it happens again, hopefully it won’t, but you will be prepared and ahead of the game. So, these are some of the things that I’ve been discussing with my mentees in my mentoring group. And I decided that this is information that would be interesting and, I think, important for the rest of you guys to hear about. So, the the first thing that is important to help quarantine-proof your practice is to learn a new skill.
Now, most of you are acupuncturists so all you really might know about is acupuncture, needling, cupping, gua sha, and all of those things that you do inside of your clinic. And they’re all powerful, and they’re all helpful. But it won’t help you to do those kinds of things in the future if you have to do telemedicine, or distance education, or if your practice has to close. So, it’s important to learn new skills that you can use and start to initiate in your practice now so you can cultivate that awareness. So you can cultivate that familiarity with these. And a couple of things that I would encourage you to think about doing is learning the EFT technique, the emotional freedom technique.
Learn how to do some tapping, learn how to do some distant healing. Also, healing with some tuning forks. Possibly, you might want to learn how to do some facial diagnosis that you could be doing over the telemedicine. Also, one of the things that’s really important is to asking better questions. Now, as an acupuncturist, we have some amazing skills as questioning is a part of our diagnostics. But when we are doing telemedicine and remote medicine, we’re going to need to really balance our diagnoses based upon asking better questions.
Also, you might want to learn how to properly share acupressure techniques with your patients. And some of you might be interested in learning about homeopathy. Now, these are all skills that you could learn now that you could be using with remote and telemedicine. You could be hosting online classes about these. You could be doing this process during your telemedicine classes. The other thing that would be really interesting for you to tap into now, during this time, is how to create and teach online classes and trainings. Now, there’s a lot of things as an acupuncturist that you could teach about. And one of the things that really drew me to this medicine back in the late 90s was that, as an acupuncturist, you’re also that of a teacher. And there are so many amazing things that you could be teaching to your patients to empower their health and to empower their wellbeing and to help support them during these times of quarantine, that are happening now and that might happen in the future.
So you could teach about acupressure points to help alleviate stress and anxiety, to improve sleep and possibly digestion. You could even teach about workplace ergonomics. A lot of people are working from home and they might not have specific ergonomics set up correctly for them. Another thing to teach about is TCM nutrition, kitchen remedies. You could teach about congee recipes. Even breathing techniques like Kundalini or Mantak Chia, the six healing sounds to transform stress into vitality, which is an amazing tool and technique that you can be sharing with your patients that help to talk about and educate about the different meridians. Each of the healing sounds that help activate each of those meridians.
Now, when you’re going to be any teaching, you could be teaching through telemedicine like using Zoom or Doxy.me, or you could be teaching via some specific platforms. Now, I’m going to review a couple of quick platforms here for you and you can choose and check out the ones that you might find more interesting depending upon what your needs are. There’s Teachable, there’s Teachery, there’s Thinkific, there’s Google Classroom, which is free, there’s Podia, CourseCraft and Learnworlds. Those are all specific platforms that you could be using to teach your class. One thing that you might be interested in, something that’s happening in some of my mentoring group, is some of the mentees are putting together online trainings on specific acupressure points. They’re offering them for free to their patients and then charging a small fee for access to these classes and hosting them on a platform like Teachable or Thinkific.
And the beautiful thing about these platforms is that they are an all-in-one solution. They host the videos for you. They will play the videos, you can add downloads that people can access. And also, you’ll be able to email patients through those platforms as well. So, it’s important for you, as a practitioner, to move beyond your skillset from treating inside the clinic, to moving outside into the world of tech. And I know that many practitioners are not very tech-savvy, and I get that. I totally understand it. Fortunately, I am. I’ve grown up in this world of tech and I’m very tech-savvy. And that’s why we do websites for acupuncture. That’s why we have a lot of digital online programs and trainings for acupuncturists. But I encourage you all to really cultivate that tech side of you and cultivate that side of you that is comfortable in this realm of doing online videos or online trainings, or even putting on courses for your patients.
Now when you do have any of these courses, some of them could be live, sure, that’s fine. Or they could be prerecorded, which gives you the option to edit them and perfect them as you will. The other thing that I would really encourage you to do is to diversify your income. And one of the ways to do that is to set up your online store. For those of you that have a website, there are definitely a lot of plugins that you could be employing on your website that create a shopping cart for you. So, what should you sell? Well, you could sell your own products. Many of you are gifted in creating herbal remedies or poultices or other topicals. So you could sell your own products in your website store. You could sell another practitioner’s products on your website store. You could do herbal consultations and sell herbal remedies through your online store, or even hook up with companies like Emerson Ecologics, and having a wholesale account with them and sell some of their supplements through your online store.
You could sell aromatherapy, you could sell ointments and other topicals, but I definitely want to encourage you to really diversify your income. And if you’re not already selling anything other than just acupuncture in your clinic, you should tap into adding to your income by selling other products. One way that I’ve been working with some of my clients is in helping them cultivate their herbal remedies in their clinics, helping them manage their process through doing herbal consultations through the internet, through telemedicine, and then making some recommendations. And then having people buy the herbs through their website store. Also, a lot of these stores allow you to dropship for you.
So you don’t even have to carry any product. So, when you get set up to sell some products through your website store, you could do it in a few ways. One, you can open up wholesale accounts. You could have dropshipping where the order’s made through your website, and then it is automatically dropshipped from the herbalist or the herbal company to your patients. You could also set it up where there’s an affiliate arrangement. Where, let’s say, you’re working with another practitioner. And if you sell their product, you get a small commission based upon that sale. Something to also make sure that you have, is you have a shopping cart on your website, you have an order page on your website. And if you can’t do that, the least that you could do is set up a direct link to a wholesale account for the products. And for those of you that have WordPress websites, it’s easy to embed some products on there with links that link out to other shopping carts.
Ultimately you’d want them to add the materials to a shopping cart on your website. That might be a little more robust than a lot of the websites that you guys have, but that is one way to help you quarantine-proof your practice. There’s a couple of different types of software that you could be using on the back-end to create a shopping cart. One of them that’s really great is WooCommerce, W-O-O commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, Cart66 Cloud, and WordPress EasyCart. Those are really simple cart softwares that allow you to put and embed a shopping cart on your website very easily.
And the fourth thing that I encourage you to do during this time is to audit and improve your website visibility. So what to do? Now, during this time of quarantine, when you’re home, you might have a lot of time on your hands. And I would encourage you to take this time to audit your website. You want to check your SEO to make sure that your website is updated and that your pages and your plugins are updated on your website. You also want to make sure that you take this time to really update and modernize your design and your website. Make sure that if you are putting out new offerings on your website, like selling products, or hosting telemedicine classes, or teaching a class on acupressure, that there is an “offerings” page on your website that has those new services and offerings that you’re putting out there.
Make sure your blog is updated too. So we’ve spent three months in our homes, and it’s a good time to really focus on really upkeeping your website. There’s no excuse for your website to look like it’s five or six years old, it should be current. That’s the first place people go to when they start thinking about you and your services. Also, the other thing that you want to do is to really tap into social media marketing and promote your website, and your services, and the products that you offer on social media regularly. And make sure that you have a backlink from social media back to your website.
The other things to check while you’re doing this is to make sure that your title tags are set up correctly, your alt tags are set up correctly, and your meta tags. And one thing that I find anytime I do any type of website evaluation or an audit for a client, is that they do not have many calls to action on their website. So I encourage you that when a person hits your website, you want them to take some sort of action. You either want them to schedule with you, to pick up the phone to call you, to set up a telemedicine class with you, to sign up for your acupressure class, or to even just schedule a regular treatment with you. So you’ll need to have multiple call to action buttons on your website. The other thing to do is to make sure that you have videos on your website. Talk about videos about how became an acupuncturist.
What was your road to get you to this moment where you are right now? All right, what kinds of things can you teach your patients that can add value to their life during this time? Make sure your website is mobile-ready, make sure that you have downloadable intake forms, that on your website there is a link to the maps and the directions. Also, make sure that there is a way to capture an email address. So when people visit your website, that if they don’t schedule with you or sign up for a class that you’re hosting or download an ebook that you’re having, that there’s something that you have there that will capture their name and their information. Okay? So, for those of you that are interested, as you know, we build websites for acupuncturists. And if anybody is interested in a free website evaluation to find out what your website is missing, we have a team that is standing by to put together a checklist and go through your website absolutely free.
You can visit this link right here, which is acu.pw/aac-eval. And that will take you to a page where you can submit some information. And my team will go ahead and start conducting evaluations of your website so you can see what kinds of things that you might need to work on during this time to help you quarantine-proof your practice. So go ahead. For those of you that are interested, you can visit accu.pw/aac-eval. And you can just request a free website evaluation there. Absolutely no charge, nothing hidden around that. It’s just something that we do for our clients. And I’ve got a team that is waiting to kind of evaluate your website for you.
And then the last thing that is important for you to do is to make sure that you stay in top-of-mind awareness with your patients. So, couple of ways to do that. Well, before I say that, even though you’re not in practice right now, it’s important for you to have your patients be aware that you still exist and to let them know what you have available to help them to get well, to reduce stress, to reduce anxiety, and to just stay in top-of-mind awareness. So a few things that you should be doing is to email them regularly. I know many of you think that email is bad and that you shouldn’t be doing it, but especially during this time there is a lot of valuable information and content that you could be sharing with your patients and getting in front of them about immune health, or stress reduction, or acupressure techniques.
Another thing to do is to do some direct mail. A lot of people are home right now, and they’re still getting mail. And it’s rare for people to get anything from a healthcare provider. So you can send out a newsletter, regularly, through direct mail. Posting to your social media channels on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter will keep you in top-of-mind awareness. And also, it’s important to make calls to check in. With my coaching clients, I encourage them to make their list of their A-patients and reach out to their A-patients on a regular basis just to see how they’re doing and what’s going on, just to check in with them. Because your A-patients are patients that you love, they know you, they like you, they trust you, you have a really solid relationship with them. And you might not be in their top-of-mind awareness because they’ve got other things going on. But I think if you were to reach out with them and just to check in with them, just to see how them and their family members are doing, it would go a long way in building that trust value with you.
The other thing to do is to schedule regular times to reactivate inactive patients. And you can do this by making phone calls to inactive patients that you haven’t seen in a while. Let them know what your new offerings are. Let them know that you are offering telemedicine, let them know that you are offering some online healthcare consultations, herbal recommendations, nutritional recommendations, or whatever it is that you are offering for them. So, that’s pretty much it. That’s just a quick five ways to quarantine-proof your practice. Again, thank you to the AAC for having me being part of this.
If anyone is interested in a free evaluation, feel free to reach out to us. There will be a link that we’ll be adding here, and we’ll be responding to any comments that you have with regards to wanting a free evaluation. But I just want to encourage you to stay strong and to carry on. These are some strange times, none of us have ever predicted this to be here, but don’t just stagnate and sit there and freeze up and not do anything. You still have a business to run. You still have to generate some type of an income. And there are numerous ways for you to do that, that I covered in today’s training. So, thank you very much for joining me here today. Join us next week when Yair Maimon is going to be joining us on the AAC’s live training. So, if you have any comments, questions, please post them below this video. And I will be sure to respond to them. Take care, stay strong, stay healthy, and we’ll talk soon. Bye-bye.
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