Podcast

Weekly Roundup

• Annalisa Derryberry- Yoga, Meditations & Self Care
• Doctors Begin to Crack Covid’s Mysterious Long-Term Effects

Discussion Topic

• Facebook and Your Massage Business

Quick Tips

• Do a quick review of memberships & subscriptions to see what you can pause/cancel. Review the year of bank statement and make sure you don’t have auto-renewal on anything you don’t want!
• VideoAsk Part 3! Now, with more Acuity!

Sponsors

• The Original Jojoba Company
• Acuity
• ABMP

Transcript:

Sponsor message This episode is sponsored by Acuity, our software of choice. Acuity is the scheduling assistant that makes it easy for both traditional businesses and virtual businesses to keep their calendar full. Acuity is the business suite that takes hours of work off your plate so you can focus on the fun of your massage business. From the moment a client books with you, Acuity is there to send booking confirmations with your own brand and messaging, deliver text reminders, let clients reschedule, let them pay online so your days run smoother and faster as you get busier. You never have to say, what time works for you? again. Clients can quickly review your real-time availability and book their own appointments. You can get a special 45-day free offer when you sign up today at massagebusinessblueprint.com/acuity.

Michael Reynolds Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Massage Business Blueprint podcast, where we help you attract more clients, make more money, and improve your quality of life. I'm Michael Reynolds.

Allissa Haines I'm Allissa Haines.

MR And we're your hosts. Hello. Hello. We're happy you're here.

AH Good morning. I know it could be afternoon or evening when you're listening --

MR Or nighttime.

AH -- good morning to Michael anyway.

MR Yeah. It could be --

AH Evening is part of nighttime, isn't it?

MR I guess. It could be 3 a.m. I don't know.

AH Welcome to this intellectual discussion. Michael, what are you reading this week?

MR [Laughing] This is your way of saying "get back on the rails, Michael." All right. What am I reading this week? So I am reading about how doctors are starting to kind of take seriously and figure out the long-term effects of COVID, the long-term side effects after having COVID. So I find this interesting because there's this big discussion -- and I'm going to get rage-y if I talk too much about it, so I'm going to try to contain myself, but everyone focuses on this death rate thing with COVID like, oh, the death rate is low, blah-blah-blah, and they focus on this one metric. And a lot of people use that metric to downplay the significance of COVID. And for a while, I think most of us have kind of accepted that, hey, there's -- it's not just a binary like, you live or you die. So many people are having these long-term effects like the fatigue, heart issues, neurological issues, cognitive issues, all sorts of things that linger for sometimes months or indefinitely after having COVID.

And so this particular article from the Wall Street Journal is kind of going into detail through all the different symptoms that people are experiencing after COVID, how some of them still haven't recovered, and how doctors are starting to dig deeper into the causes behind these symptoms lingering. There are no real solid answers yet, but work is being done to learn more about those things, which is encouraging because to me, that is -- this whole spectrum is being ignored by these talking-head narratives of people saying you live or you die. It's not -- that's not what it's all about. So I know this is from the Wall Street Journal and it's a paywall site, so I think there are some ways you can create a trial account --

AH It just let me in.

MR It did? Okay. Good. Good. So --

AH I think Wall Street Journal gives you a couple of free articles per month or something.

MR Good. Okay.

AH So it did let me in.

MR Okay. Good. So that's -- and if you can't get in, send me a note. I'll help you out somehow, but that's what I've been reading this week.

AH It's really interesting, too, the graphics. The animations that go along with it are pretty cool.

MR Yeah. Yeah.

AH And I do think it's interesting, I've been thinking a lot about this as we read more about the long-term effects, is that this is immune/autoimmune issues, systemic issues that people are having. And historically, these kinds of health issues, especially autoimmune, have been largely dismissed by medical establishment for years and years and years. How long --

MR It's all in your head, right? Yeah.

AH It's all in your head. And frankly, it's usually in your gut. But what -- for years and years and years, we've seen things like chronic Lyme and chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and mostly health issues that disproportionally affect women be completely disregarded -- thyroid, certain kinds of thyroid issues, be completely disregarded by the medical establishment -- and, I mean, decades that it has taken to get treatment for these kinds of issues and get diagnoses and all of that. And yet, eight or nine months after this coronavirus has massively hit the United States, we already have medical professionals coming around to the idea of these long-term effects, which were mostly, again, dismissed in the first four to five months of this epidemic.

So it's very interesting to me to see, one, what happens when men are equally affected, and two, how much faster the establishment has come around to recognizing and acknowledging and starting to think about ways to treat these issues. And that is mind-blowing and hopefully will have great implications on the treatments for all of these other autoimmune issues in the future. And that's my political commentary on what you were reading.

MR Indeed. What about you?

AH So I have not so much been reading, but I have been watching Annalisa Derryberry, who is a friend of ours and a premium member, actually, of the Blueprint, and someone we've met in person a couple of times. And she is a wonderful, wonderful massage practitioner. And she does the Yomassage, and she does, I think, reflexology -- oh, Thai, she does Thai massage. And she's just a wonderful practitioner and human being in Florida. And she has been -- she's got a great YouTube channel that I'm linking to if you can -- you can just search YouTube for Annalisa Derryberry. She's got the coolest name ever -- again, Annalisa Derryberry -- that I'm not going to try to spell because there's a lot of Ns and A's and Rs and -- lots of Rs. And I just adore her, and I love her YouTube channel of yoga and meditations and self-care.

And I can't say a whole lot more about it that -- I just love it. I throw her yoga on the big TV in the living room and I do a little bit, and then I just kind of sit there and watch them, and then I do a little bit, which is how I do any kind of exercise or meditation. And it's great, and sometimes my kid does it. And it's great to watch; sometimes her cat gets involved in the yoga. And it's just so human and real and not staged, and I would love to be in a live yoga class with Anna. So anyway, Annalisa Derryberry's got a great YouTube channel, and I wanted to throw a little attention to that.

MR Yeah. I agree. I did one of her YouTube yoga sessions as well, and she's really good. Yeah. It was really, really great.

AH Sorry. I had to mute to cough.

MR Oh, how [inaudible] --

AH Michael, who's our first sponsor?

MR All right. Let's show some love to Jojoba!

AH Yes, indeed.

Sponsor message This episode is sponsored by The Original Jojoba Company. And you know that I believe massage therapists should only be using the highest quality products. It's good for our clients' bodies; it's good for our bodies. The Jojoba Company is the only company in the world that carries 100% pure, first-pressed quality jojoba. And we are delighted to be partnering with them. It is nonallergenic; I can use it on any client and every client without fear of an allergic reaction.

AH And I will tell you my little personal story, which is that Massachusetts had a glove requirement for massage therapists, so it was part of the new COVID regulations. And it was dumb; it was misplaced. But anyhow, some really wonderful therapists advocated in Massachusetts and got the glove requirement removed, which means the other day, Monday, for the first time in, I don't know, eight months, nine months, I gave a massage without gloves on, and my hands were so happy to have jojoba back on them for several hours on Monday. And it was wonderful. And I've had some at home and I use it, but they are -- ain't nothing like having your hands in that for three or four hours at a time.

Sponsor message You, my friends, can get 20% off the price of the product when you shop through our link massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba. And I will note that they have great lip balm and also little tins of hand salve that make fantastic stocking stuffers. You should check it out.

MR Yay. All right. So I heard a rumor that you're going to talk about the face place today.

AH I'm going to talk about the face space. We got a wonderful email from a listener, and I am going to read that email, and then we're going to answer it. So let's talk about Facebook and your massage business. All right. Here we go.

"Facebook recently disabled my personal account due to violating a policy. I have no idea what policy I have violated. I've never had a warning or suspension or anything in over ten years. I submitted an appeal and have yet to hear back, and of course there's no way to really talk to a human being. I came across many threads of people dealing with the same issue. Also, many people have business pages with ads that are getting disabled. Even those people are having a difficult time contacting anyone from Facebook, and they're actually spending money. Yikes.

"Facebook is how I stay in touch with other massage therapists, as I was in important" -- "several important groups that were full of extremely helpful information. And I was looking to start my LLC next year. And now I'm extremely nervous that I'll even be able to have a Facebook business page and the possibly of getting it disabled that could severely damage my business and networking capabilities. Have you heard of this happening? It's also made me sit back and really think about how much social media affects everything around us. With my Facebook disabled, I can't access my Instagram account or even Pokémon Go games. Just a reminder to not use Facebook to log in to any other apps."

All right. That's the end of the email. And there's a lot in here, and it's really important. And I will start this conversation by saying that Michael and I use Facebook less and less. We've removed our Massage Business Blueprint community, our discussion group, from Facebook and moved it to a private platform that we adore, and partly because we're both just kind of done with Facebook. They're a bit of an unethical monster, and we wanted to get our community off of it so that we didn't have to be on Facebook personally quite so much. And a lot of our members felt the same way.

We also, in the past, spend a fair amount of money on Facebook advertising, and we don't do that anymore. And we've had conversations about if we should do that anymore because Facebook is such an unethical monster. Do we want to give them our money? And we have -- continuously making this decision and then thinking it through because we know we could get a lot more members if we did, in fact, run some Facebook ads. But I'm still really creeped out about giving them our money. So know that we're ethically on the fence about this anyhow. At least I am. I just spoke for Michael when I shouldn't have. Anyhow. Let's get into the actual practical stuff.

So yeah, Facebook is not a replacement for a strong online presence and for exactly the reasons that our listener illustrated here. They can do whatever they want whenever they want, and you can lose all of your connections, including access to your business page. So hopefully, our listener will get her profile back eventually. I think they do have people manually reviewing all of these things, but it takes a long time.

And let's talk about what other people can do to avoid this in the future. So first, remember the point of all of your social medial activity and all of your online activity. The point is to bring people back to your website so they can make an appointment, learn more about your business, or buy a gift certificate. That is the point of all of your online activity, to route people back to your website, which should be the home of your business, where all of the information is aggregated and stored and easily findable by anyone who wants to seek your massage. All of your social activity is just a means to that end.

So the next point here is that you need a website. You need a good website that gives everyone all of this information, has decent search engine optimization, and we have roughly ten podcast episodes on what search engine optimization is. Ideally, you want it to have an email subscription form so people can sign up for your emails. I know not everybody has a target audience that's super into emails, but it's worth having.

Your busines should also have a Google My Business listing so that -- it's kind of like a Facebook business page, only -- but it lives on Google, and it integrates with Google Maps if you have an actual location for your office. So when someone googles you, they find you. So if someone is used to interacting via your Facebook page but all of a sudden they can't find it, they can google you. They can google massage and your town and your first name is that's all they can remember, and they can find your business. They can find your website.

Another thing you really want to do is to be getting client contact info. If you see someone one time, you want to get their contact info. Now, I know that none of you were probably operating without any kind intake protocol at all, but -- although there are plenty of practitioners that are -- I have been to massage practitioners who don't do a paper intake form; they just ask you questions as your intake. It's all verbal. I've been to massage therapists who have never gotten -- maybe they've gotten my email address from scheduling online, but they have not gotten my phone number, mailing address, or anything like that. So you want to get all your client contact info via an intake or some other way. You need to have a way to reach clients, people who have seen you before, on your own, outside of any particular social media platform.

So get that contact info. And again, not everybody does this, and that became very clear at the beginning of this pandemic when people had to cancel appointments, and they had trouble reaching their clients to do so. And now they've had trouble reaching their clients to let them know they're back to work. Get your client contact info.

Another thing you can do is join communities that exist outside of Facebook. And I'm over here in the corner raising my hands. Massage Business Blueprint has a premium community. Yes, it's got a monthly subscription, and it gets you access to a couple hundred other premium members and a whole bunch of resources. And you never have to visit Facebook to be part of our world. You never have to visit Facebook to ask a couple hundred colleagues how they manage a difficult client situation or how they advertise to sell gift certificates at Christmas. It is completely outside of Facebook. And there are other communities out there as well that exist outside of Facebook. Do some googling. Ask around. You can find them.

A little bit of specific advice for this listener, I'd suggest you give it a little more time. Hopefully, Facebook will review your appeal and open your profile back up. But if that doesn't happen in a couple of months, start another Facebook profile. Rejoin the groups. At least you can get some of your massage colleague contacts back, and you can get access to that information that was in all of those groups that have been around for a long time and have a ton of information.

If you do open your own business next year and you choose to have a Facebook business page, add a friend as an administrator on that page so that if, for some reason, your profile gets shut down again, you have a backup, another admin. Another person has access to all the administrative stuff in your Facebook page, and you can get access from it that way. There is also something called the Facebook Business Manager, which is like -- it's a little bit more complex way to manage your business page.

But Michael, if someone had a Business Manager account, they don't need to use their profile to log in, do they? How does that work? Would that help?

MR I don't think it would. I don't know the answer specifically.

AH Okay.

MR That's an interesting question. I think you still need a Facebook profile that is active to use the Business Manager.

AH Okay. So that might not solve the problem. But I wanted to --

MR Yeah. But I like your idea about adding a friend.

AH Yeah. I mean, I have a backup friend as an admin on all of my business pages so that if for some reason I lose access, or even if for some reason I drop off the face of the earth, someone else can shut the darn page down for me. So that's helpful. And that's really all I have. I think the most important factor here is -- for years, people were like, you have to have a business page. And some people took that as a business page is acceptable in lieu of a website, and it's just not. That is just not the case. If you want to do any kind of online advertising, if you want your business to be findable by people who have not found it yet, a website is a great idea. And a Facebook page is not -- or even a Google Business listing is not a replacement. It is the home base. It is the hub of all of your online activity.

That's my final point. Michael, what do you say to this? Michael, are you still there?

MR Yeah. I agree. Facebook is becoming a dumpster fire. Yeah. Yeah. Can you hear me?

AH It really is. I can now. Sorry. It took a minute.

MR Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. I had a little glitch there in the interwebs. Yeah. So Facebook's becoming a dumpster fire, I think. And more and more it's just becoming a place for people to share brainless memes and argue about things and just -- it's just a horrible -- now, I'm -- some of it's my fault. I'm working on my news feed; I'm unfriending people that are just awful. I'm working on that. I think it's going to make it better. But still, I mean, I think a lot of people are feeling just like us and just like our listener where they're tired of Facebook; they're realizing it's not -- you don't have to give it that much weight. You don't have to give it that much significance. The stuff that you own and you control is much more valuable.

And there are plenty of really successful businesses that have zero social media presence. Apple comes to mind. Apple recently has developed social media presence, but for so many years, Apple did not have a single social media profile. And I mean, look how -- they're the most highly valued company in the world. So I mean, it's possible to have a great business without using social media at all. So use it if you want to, but don't get hung up on it.

AH Yeah. I don't want to beat a dead horse. That's all I got.

MR Yeah. Love it. Thanks for that. And thanks for our listener. That's a great question. I'm glad that was sent it. So thank you for that. All right. Before we move on to quick tips, let's give a shout out to ABMP.

AH Word.

Sponsor message ABMP is proud, we hope, to sponsor the Massage Business Blueprint podcast. They've got CE courses up the wazoo available for purchase or included free with your membership in the ABMP education center at abmp.com/ce. You can explore hands-on techniques, complete ethics requirements, discover trending courses like "A Detailed Approach to Low Back Pain" from Allison Denney, and I think I said this last time we talked about ABMP, but she has a fantastic podcast episode. Alison Denney, on the ABMP podcast, you should totally listen to it. It's fantastic. All ABMP memberships include 200-plus video-based, on-demand CE classes. And if you're not a member, it's okay, sort of. You can still purchase access for single courses or CE packages at abmp.com/ce. And like I said, they also have a fantastic ABMP podcast available at abmp.com/podcast or wherever you prefer to listen.

MR Yay.

AH Yay.

MR Thanks, ABMP.

AH What's your quick tip, Michael?

MR All right. I feel like I've unintentionally created this weird, little three-part series about this app called VideoAsk, but there's a reason for it. Hear me out. Okay. So for the last two episodes, I've talked about how much I really love this app called VideoAsk. If you haven't listened to the previous ones -- you probably have, but just in case -- it's a little app where you can record videos, you can send it out to clients or whoever you want to, and they can respond via text or make their own video back to you, or they can book an appointment. And last episode, I talked about, hey, you can -- I got to know it better; I really love it. But I was bummed out because you can only integrate with Calendly for people to schedule appointments. I was like, God, that doesn't work for our members because most of our listeners use something like Acuity or something like that.

So in the one day between recording and publishing of that episode, they released Acuity integration. So you can now -- and I realize not everybody uses Acuity, but a lot of our listeners do. And they'll probably start adding more, but you can now integrate Acuity with your VideoAsk videos. So here's what you can do. You can create a little video; you can say, hey, I'd love to invite you in for an appointment, blah-blah-blah, here's a special we're running or whatever, or it's been a while, or how's your -- are you feeling okay after our follow-up, whatever you want to say. And you can drop your Acuity scheduling link in there, and there will be a button right there on the video that the recipient can click to book an appointment. So you can kind of close that loop and have that integration to say, hey, if you'd like to book an appointment, here's a way to make it really easy. So I'm really excited because VideoAsk now has a way that Acuity can be integrated to make it easier for our -- for some our listeners, anyway, to offer a booking link with the video. So I really like it. It's really cool.

AH Nice.

MR So that's my three-part -- my part 3 of that whole thing.

AH That's so cool. I'm going to try to challenge myself to use that in some way in the next month or so. So try and remember to ask me about that again at the end of November.

MR Will do. All right. What do you got?

AH My quick tip is -- was almost the full topic of this week's episode, but it just didn't excite me enough to spend that much time on. But let me tell you a little story. So at the end of our recording last week, Michael and I are talking about all of our Massage Business Blueprint stuff, and I'm like, hey, what's this $100 charge from this weird thing in our bank account? And he's like, oh, that's our subscription to our -- the thing we needed that we don't need anymore. But it automatically renewed. And that reminded me that we should all be doing -- I like how this story is all about how Michael made a mistake, but he didn't really. So we all need to do a quick --

MR Thanks for that.

AH [Laughing] We all need to do a quick review of the last year of bank statements and make sure that we are not auto-renewed, we are not set up to auto-renew on any subscriptions or memberships or any things that we don't need, especially now. It could be that if you're not practicing and you're not going to practice again for six or eight months, if you didn't already shut off some subscriptions, it might be time to do that. If you had subscribed for a year's worth of something and at this point you're like eight months in, email them. Say, can I get a refund, or can you at least pause my subscription, and when I get back to work, start it again with that extra four months added on? What can you do for me? Or just straight up cancel stuff.

And I don't like to tell people that they should cancel their liability insurance or anything, or their memberships to any professional organizations. But do an assessment. If you're not practicing, if you know you're not going to practice for a while, if you know that you don't have the bandwidth to utilize all the resources of an organization that you're a member of -- if you're not going to do CE, if you don't need the ongoing discounts -- if you don't need any of it, maybe it's time to not renew if your renewal is coming. And then you can just resubscribe, become a member again, when you get back to work. You're probably going to lose your longevity, so in though -- if you were going to get your five-year membership pin, now you might not get that. Now you might start from scratch. So if that's important to you, then make your decisions accordingly.

But as I have started to get all of my money stuff together and my tax prep stuff together, I am definitely doing a quick review of all of my annual memberships and things like that and seeing what might accidently auto-renew. And I -- this happens to me. It's happened a lot last year. I really scaled back, and then all of sudden something would auto-renew that I'd forgotten about from the last year. So I've really made a point to log into those accounts, make sure that it's not set for auto-renewal so that I don't get charged again. And that's my quick tip.

MR Great tip. All right. Love it. Anything else you would add?

AH No. I'm done, man.

MR All right. Well, hey, thanks, everyone, for listening. We appreciate you being with us today. As a reminder, our website is massagebusinessblueprint.com. You can check us out there. And you can explore our private community, which we talked about today, for 30 days free. If you want to check it out and kind of get to know us, we'd love to have you jump in. So with that, have a great day, and we will see you next time.

AH Bye.