If you’re just starting up your massage practice, you’ll want to get set up with some folding office chairs. These chairs are very affordable and come in a wide range of designs and colors to fit nicely in with the decor of your reception / waiting area, or in your massage room itself. Much cheaper than buying a couch and nice and portable too.

Clients like to have some where to sit down in the massage room too as they are taking their shoes off (and putting them back on again) and unless you have rack for their clothes to hang, they’ll be wanting to place them on their chair along with their personal belongings. It’s also nice to have a chair with wheels on it that you can sit down on when you’re giving your client a nice scalp massage.

Another great use for folding chairs are when you are out promoting your business at markets and festivals and the like. You’ll be standing up talking to people or doing massage but you’ll want to have some chairs for people to sit down while their filling their form (to enter your competition for a free massage, or some other lead generating promotion), or simply waiting for their turn to hop on the massage table or massage chair.

The best place to pick up your chairs cheaply and efficiently is to head over to Amazon.com. They have a huge range to choose from including folding office chairs, stacking office chairs, heavy duty folding chair and white folding chairs to name just a few. The great thing about folding chairs is that they are lightweight and portable and also stack away nice and neatly. Make sure you have a few in your massage practice.

If you’re looking for the best bath towels that you can use in your massage in practice, look no further than Amazon.com.

Just do a search for best bath towels and you’ll be able to browse through hundreds of them and find the colors and textures that will most suit the decor in your massage room.

Keep in mind that you often get what you pay for when it comes to quality so if you want really great towels for your massage room, go for either Egyptian cotton bath towels or Pima cotton.

You also might like to go with a color as opposed to plain white bath towels. It’s much harder to see marks or stains on colored towels and they’ll look newer for longer.

Also, if you’re not aware of how much pesticides and chemicals they use when they produce cotton they use A LOT. So if you’re prepared to spend a little extra and want to go 100% natural and alternative, then you can also buy 100% organic bath towels, which are just beautiful. Nice to know that you’re really caring for your client’s health and well being by being conscious about what you place on their skin.

However, if you find though that you have a very busy practice and you go through a lot of towels (and laundering time and costs are stressing you), then hiring a linen service to provide you with fresh clean towels every week is a good way to go.

Again, this is a cost versus benefit thing. One thing’s for sure though is you can never have enough clean towels when you run a busy massage practice and it can be a real embarrassment if you’re ever caught short.

Best to keep ‘em well stocked.

Hey guys,

Just a quick post to let you know about a cool little service called Look Phone Reverse.

Ever have a cell number that you don’t recognize? Perhaps you’ve found a piece of paper in your bag with a number on it but no name. You can’t remember who’s it is but it could well be a massage client.

Rather than embarrassingly ringing up and asking who it is, you can simply head over to Look Phone Reverse and type in the number. Within seconds you’ll get a report back with the full name and address (and a few other details) of whomever owns that number.

Pretty cool, hey?

This is just one use. You can use it to track down old friends, old massage clients or to stop a stalker or prank caller in their tracks.

You can try it out for yourself by heading over to http://LookPhoneReverse.com.

It takes just a few seconds and is completely confidential.

A market that I believe to be largely ‘untapped’ by massage therapists is the pregnancy massage, or prenatal massage market.

I’ve talked to several MTs recently and what I’ve discovered is that there is a level of fear/discomfort about massaging pregnant women. The thing is, as long as you follow the contra-indication guidelines and have a very clear understanding with your clients re: the small, but potential risks, pregnancy massage is a wonderful modality to offer.

Of all the people in the world who could use a nice massage, I think pregnant women are right up there at top. The sore lower back and hips, the massive hormonal changes and emotions they go through – these beautiful mums-to-be need some TLC and lots of it.

As a male massage therapist (retired now) I have done quite a few pregnancy massages in my career, which might surprise you. I love doing them. Seeing my pregnant clients hop off the table (well not exactly ‘hop’) looking relaxed and refreshed…and ever so grateful is such a nice feeling.

I gave my massage therapist partner Tania lots of massage on the Gold Coast while she was pregnant with our son and he is just the most peaceful and happy little boy…and surprise, surprise – he LOVES to be massaged.

Actually my partner Tania enjoys doing pregnancy massage most of all, and she has built up a bunch of pregnancy massage clients just through ‘word of mouth’. These ladies talk to each other (breathing classes ring a bell?) and so you need to do very little marketing once you get a couple of them on the table. Provided they love your massage.

It’s not a hard massage to do. Nice, relaxing and nurturing with a little bit more pressure and friction in those sore and tight areas. The most important thing to ensure (beyond the standard contra-indications) is that they are as comfortable as they can be (use lots of pillows), and that your hands have a ‘loving’ touch…after all there’s a beautiful little baby inside who can feel and sense it all.

So if you’re not already offering pregnancy massage and you feel you’d like to, I’d certainly encourage you. Not only is it a really fulfilling ’service’ but it is also considered a ‘premium’ massage and so from a business perspective it’s very worth your while, as they tend to have several massages throughout their pregnancy, at least our clients do/did.

Anyway, happy massaging those beautiful, smiling bellies!

Ok, so here’s a useful tip for marketing your massage business online, regardless of whether or not you have a website.

What you do is find some high ranking online directories that cover the area where you practice and create a listing about your practice.

Some directories are free and some will charge you a small fee, however it can be very well worthwhile.

For example, my partner Tania practices massage on the Gold Coast, here in Australia and a really great online directory the Gold Coast Directory (http://goldcoastdirectory.com).

There they let you create a free listing which can also include a link back to your website, if you have one.

If you don’t have a website, don’t worry. As long as you create a compelling webpage with a great massage offer, that’s all you need to potentially pick up some new clients.

However, if you have a website, the link from the directory to you will help to boost your ranking in the search engines.

Getting back to my listing in the Gold Coast Directory, I went a step further. If someone goes to this website and types in Massage, they are taken to a page with all of the massage businesses listed in the area.

The title of each listing is the business name and this is a hyperlink to the full page listing for that business.

Now, having done some keyword research using the free Google Adwords keyword tool, I discovered that the term ‘massage gold coast’ gets the most searches each month, within Australia out of all of the Massage On The Gold Coast related terms. So, I created a listing for my partner’s business using the keyword, ‘Massage Gold Coast‘.

Fast forward a week later and for the term ‘Massage Gold Coast’ the massage page with all the listings in the Gold Coast directory itself comes up in position 2 in Google on page 1 and then on the second page, the ‘individual’ listing I created for my partner also comes up in position 6. No other massage practitioner’s listing from that directory is anywhere to be found.

So now my partner’s website is getting traffic from both page 1 and page 2 of Google for her absolute best and most targeted keyword, ‘massage gold coast’. Pretty cool, huh.

If you want to check it out, go to Google.com.au and type in ‘Massage Gold Coast‘ and check page 1 and page 2 for the Gold Coast Directory listings (note: I’ve actually managed to get her 5 listings out of the top 20 results in Google.com.au for ‘Massage Gold Coast’. I wonder if you can find them).

Overall, she gets between 15 and 20 inquiries per week from the Internet (resulting in about 5-7 clients), which is really cheap and effective massage marketing.

The fact is, people are using the Internet more and more to look for products and services in their local area. You gotta have some kind of Internet presence or you’re going to get left behind!

This is just one of the many Internet Massage Marketing tips that I have coming up for you. Stay tuned.

Hey guys,

Sorry I haven’t posted for a little while. My partner Tania’s parents are selling their Vanuatu Property and are moving back to Australia and they have asked me to market it on the Internet.

The site is almost finished and I thought I’d share it here to show you how quickly you can get a new site indexed in Google when you know what to do.

The site is clean, simple and personal and is now live and you can view it at: http://vanuatuproperty.net. Googlebot hasn’t been out to visit but I’ve been laying out some bait around the net, so I expect to be indexed sometime today. You can keep watching by typing site:vanuatuproperty.net.

Shortly I’ll tell you how I got the site indexed and high up in Google so quickly. I’ve got tonnes of Internet Marketing tips to share with you about marketing your massage practice online which I’ll get to over the next couple of weeks.

I just need to finish putting in the groundwork for Tania’s parent’s site so they can start ranking in high in Google and start getting visitors/enquiries.

Exciting stuff to come. Stay tuned.

P.S – On the backburner I’m working on a large scale massage marketing project – a website that will have sooo much great info on our to build your practice (proven, real strategies, not just fluff), I know you’ll just love it. Oh and it’ll be 100% free too!

Hey Massage Marketers,

Just wanted to share with you an online massage marketing strategy that I’m testing out with my partner’s massage gold coast practice.

I’m using a short video demonstation, plus a free 30 minute massage voucher that visitors to the website can download.

This is basically a modified version of an offline strategy that has worked well – the free 30 minute massage for first time clients to build up a database quickly and then market to regularly at very low cost.

Actually, we just tried this recently as a Mother’s Day promotion where we made up special Gift Vouchers and gave them to a local florest to include with all orders over $50. This has resulted in a fabulous response and has added another 50 new clients to my partners practice.

The great part is that she was able to upsell over 60% of each ‘freebie’ into a full hour treatment and these clients just paid the extra $$.

Anyway, go and check out the webpage I’ve set up for her and see if it gives you any ideas for your massage business. I’ll post again and let you know how this test goes.

Massage Gold Coast

Til then, happy massaging!

Hi all,

This is just a quick post to let you know about a project I’ve been working on for the last few months.

It’s an online self improvement magazine called Self Empower.

Here’s the website:

http://SelfEmpowerMagazine.com

There you’ll find lots of self improvement articles, videos and resources to help you increase the 3 major aspects of your life: your health, your wealth and your happiness.

Hope you’ll come on over and check it out. I’ve just converted a video I made (that was very popular on YouTube) into a FREE screensaver that you can download. It’s based on my ‘Empowering Visualization’ video.

So if you’re seeking a little self improvement and want to make your life better, you’ll find lots of really great information in our free Self Empower Magazine to help you do this.

Hope to see you there!

Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of your day!

Self Improvement

Massage Gold Coast

Yes, it’s now official. My partner Tania Hodder is returning to massage after taking a break to have our baby boy Jaden.

She’s excited about it too and so are all her old massage gold coast clients. Tania is such an incredible massage therapist and her passion lies with one modality in particular, an Hawaiian style of bodywork called Lomi Lomi (also known as Kahuna Massage).

She has such a beautiful loving touch that can lull you into states of relaxation you never thought you could reach. At the other end of the scale she also has a phenominal capacity to go very deep, even on those clients who like very strong massages.

If you’ve never experienced a Lomi Lomi massage before and are curious about it, go check out Tania’s short video demonstration by clicking on the following link:

Lomi Lomi Massage Gold Coast

It really is beautiful to watch…and just amazing to receive!

Massage Gold Coast

I’ve recently found a website that just may be a great place to advertise your massage therapy services on.

It’s called USFreeAds.com and not only does receive a lot of regular visitors on it’s own, Google also loves this site and many of the actual ads on the site rank well in the search engines.

Now I’ve not used it yet to market massage therapy, however I am using it successfully the do some affiliate marketing on some health products I really believe in.

Here some links to my ads.

I Want Six Pack Ab
At Home Abs Workouts
Abs Flatten
Flat Stomach Diet
Flat Abs Diet
Six Pack Ab Program
Menopause Belly Fat

It only costs $9 per month to have unlimited ads so I suggest you start running some ads and test it out. It may work pretty well.

TIP: Make sure you use the keywords of what you offer in your practice in the titles and links of your ads. This will help them rank higher in the search engines.

All the best!