I created ChicagoPsychology.org in order to help mental health professionals, especially those working in the Chicago area, to effectively market their practices and to effectively market themselves as professionals.
You can have your own free web site or weblog on this site at chicagopsychology.org/yourname/.
If you really want your own subdomain (yourname.chicagopsychology.org), or a completely separate domain name (yourname.com), we will set one up for you for a reasonable yearly fee. But I’m going to convince you that you’ll get a greater benefit from setting up your web presence at chicagopsychology.org/yourname/
Why A Free Site On ChicagoPsychology.org Is More Powerful Than An Independent Site That You Pay For
At first glance a lot of people in the psychology field might guess that it would be somehow better or more professional to have your own yourname.com domain name. I will tell you why this is not the case: when you set up your own individual web site it takes a lot of work to build up any kind of authority for that site. You will have to write a lot of content and do a lot of footwork to help market the site and make sure people know about it. Otherwise, you’ll find that you are the proud owner of a web site that no one ever looks at.
Occasionally someone will see your web address on your business card and type the address directly into their browser, but as you know that is not the way that most patients will find your practice. Most patients will either ask their doctor for a referral, or they will open up their browser to one of the major search engines and type in the service they are looking for. People will search for something like:
- cognitive therapy in chicago, il
- marriage therapy in oakbrook
- couples counseling in andersonville
- family therapy chicago loop
- therapists in the chicago suburbs
Now in order to have your site show up in the search results for any of those terms, it has to possess two qualities: relevance and authority.
In order to be relevant, your site has to have content that is about the type of thing that the searcher is looking for. The actual text that you put on your site is what lets Google and Yahoo and Bing know what the site is about. Then they estimate how relevant your site’s content is to whatever the searcher has entered into the search box. So the more content you put on your web site, the more you write about your services and methods and experiences and philosophies, the more likely it will be that your site is seen as being relevant to the search query.
In order to be authoritative, people have to like your site enough to link to it from their own sites. This means that people are writing articles about you, are quoting articles written on your site, and are actively directing people to your web site. Over time, the things that people say about you and your site begin to reflect on the site itself, so that if you are often mentioned in articles about cognitive psychologists, your site will be more likely to show up in a search for “cognitive psychologists in joliet.”
One of the main benefits of setting up your site on ChicagoPsychology.org, rather than setting up your own separate domain name, is that you get to pool your resources with all the other mental health professionals who are using this site to promote their psychology careers. You are therefore able to build up collective authority by building all of your relevant content and all of your authority up within a community.
So each site created on ChicagoPsychology.org makes all of the other sites even more powerful, and even more likely to rank highly for a variety of web searches. That is why it is better to build a free site on ChicagoPsychology.org than to pay someone to set up a separate site for you.
How To Set Up Your Own Free Psychology Web Site
To sign up, just click the sign up link at the top of this page. At the end of the signup process, you’ll be able to create your first blog on ChicagoPsychology.org. I check each and every blog by hand before it is activated, because I want to make sure that everyone using ChicagoPsychology.org is a legitimate psychological professional and not a spammer.
When the account is ready you’ll receive two e-mails. The first will contain your username and password to log into ChicagoPsychology.org. The second will contain the address of your new site, and a link to log into your site’s dashboard.
What To Do Once Your Site Is Created
The first thing I recommend doing is clicking on the “Users” tab on the left sidebar, where you will see the option to edit your profile. You can fill out this information about yourself, and also change your password to something you will be able to remember.
I have the site set up so that everything is pretty much configured for you, but it would still be good to take a minute to familiarize yourself with the settings that you have available. The left sidebar of your dashboard contains all of these. For example, under the General settings option, you can type in your own tagline for your website, so that visitors will have a better idea of what your site is about and what it is that you do.
The most important thing for you to do, as I mentioned before, is to create content. The more text your site contains, the more relevant it will be for searchers. Therefore more people will find you and find out about the services you offer.
How To Create Content
There are two types of content that you can place on your site, and your use of them will affect the way that your users interact with the site. You can create traditional web pages under the “Pages” tab in the sidebar, or you can create more fluid blog-style pages under the “Posts” tab. If you are unsure how to structure your site, then it is recommended that you follow these steps:
- Under the Pages tab in the sidebar, click the “Edit” link. You will find that an “About” page has already been created for you, and it contains some sample text. You can edit this text just like you would in a word processor. You will find buttons to make the text bold, indented, to create lists, or any other basic text styles. When you are finished, click the blue “Update Page” button on the right-hand side of the page.
- Next, I recommend creating a new page for your contact information so that it will be easy for your visitors to find out how to contact you. To do this, click the “Add New” link under the “Pages” tab (not the one under the “Posts” tab!) and just type in your title and text the same as you did for the about page.
- The next step is to begin populating your site with content about yourself, your practice, your theoretical orientation, techniques, and anything else that might be relevant to your target audience. To do this, click the “Add New” link under the “Posts” tab and begin writing posts. The more text you include the more easily people will be able to find your site. And the more interesting and engaging that text is the more likely people will be to find your contact information and get in touch with you.
How To Promote Your Psychology Site
There are many ways to promote your web site. As I mentioned earlier, the authority of a web site accumulates over time, and so the first most important thing to do to get people to see your site is to simply build it up. Put as much content as you possibly can on the site so that it becomes a rich source of information about the types of psychological phenomena that you are interested in. The more information you include, the more valuable your site will be to the reader and to you as a professional, because it will begin to naturally attract traffic. You will really see the benfits of this start to snowball around the time you reach your 100th post on your blog.
You can also market your web site both online and offline. Of course you’ll want to put your web address on your business cards and any materials or presentations that you put together. But online marketing is also critical because that is how you begin to get regular readers and people who will link to the content you post. You can start to build up a readership by regularly commenting on your own favorite psychology blogs, or even by offering to write guest posts for other sites. This will provide you with valuable links and valuable traffic that will really help to build up your site’s authority. Participating in the ChicagoPsychology.org community by joining groups and posting to group blogs will also help to build your reputation and to build the authority of your personal web site.
The best part is that your efforts will be multiplied by the efforts of all the other users of ChicagoPsychology.org, so it will be easier for you to build up your web following than it would be for someone who was using their own separate web site to market themselves. A site like this really offers you the opportunity to connect with other professionals and with potential patients, employers, consulting clients, etc, so make sure that the quality of your content really stands out.
Good luck!
