Podcast

Weekly Roundup

• Betting on You- Laurie Ruettimann 
• My three favorite current events podcasts: 
• Your Money Briefing
• The Daily
• The Journal

Discussion Topic

• Writing a Better Email "Newsletter"
• Tools mentioned:
• Mailerlite
• Mailchimp

Quick Tips

• Clubhouse
• Update on my daily “reasonable expectations” list.

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, and 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. We are glad you're with us today and every day and every time you tune in. Every day, morning, night --

AH We're --

MR [Laughing] Whenever it is.

AH We're just going to say we're especially perky today because we record on Wednesday mornings, and today's Inauguration Day, and it feels good.

MR We're happy about that.

AH We're delighted.

MR Yeah.

AH Michael, what are you reading lately?

MR Nothing specific, but I was reflecting on the past year or so and information sources and media and just all this stuff we've been consuming. And over the past year, I've really found three podcasts that I really, really love, and I just want to share them and kind of describe them. I've referenced, I think, episodes and just information from these podcasts throughout the year in some of these weekly round-up quick tip sections in the past. But I just kind of want to just share these three podcasts I really like. One of them is Your Money Briefing from the Wall Street Journal. The other one is The Daily from the New York Times. And the third one is The Journal, also from Wall Street Journal. And I really love these podcasts.

The Your Money Briefing podcast is usually about ten minutes long; it's super short. And it gives you a very, very clear, efficient, succinct kind of snapshot of something going on in the world of business and money. And it's not just like random big business stories. It's stuff that affects us as well. It's stuff that affects regular people like us that need to care about changes in legislation and retirement planning and money stuff and the CARES Act and the stimulus and all kinds of things like that. It talks about stuff that's relevant to many people. And so I like that one. It's very short, again, very efficient. It gives you a really nice snapshot. They usually bring experts in.

The next one is The Daily from the New York Times. And The Daily goes really deep into stories about stuff that's happening, from political stuff to COVID, the economy, social issues, all sorts of stuff that's happening that's relevant.

And The Journal is also kind of similar. The Journal kind of takes a slightly different spin. They say they're -- it's about business, money, and power. And they basically kind of talk about all sorts of things relevant to the world of business and money and politics.

What I like about these podcasts is this. Sorry, I'm going a bit long; I know. But there is so much hand-wringing and "head on fire" shouting about all the bias in the media -- media's bias in the left and the right and all this stuff. And that's true. I found these to be really devoid of hype and devoid of, at least obvious to me, bias toward the left or the right politically. They're really well done, I think. They're really factual. They're reported very well, in my opinion. And they are devoid of the kind of hype and extra stuff that goes with a lot of other news sources. So I really like them. I've found these three to be kind of my go-to podcasts when it comes to current events in our current environment. So I just wanted to share those podcasts. I put links to them in the show notes as well. So that is what I have been listening to.

AH Sweet. I have been reading a little bit. I've been reading a book by Laurie Ruettimann, who -- when I started following her years ago, she was kind of one of the first big bloggers that I happened on. She was an HR specialist, and so she wrote a lot about HR and communication with employees and how to treat people who work for you. And also she has a lot of cats, and she rescues cats. She's evolved into doing a lot of different things. She's a speaker now. She's kind of a -- I'm creating this term, not her, maybe kind of like a career coach-ish genre. But I love her. She's fun and funny and down to earth, and she's exactly my age.

And she wrote a book, Betting on You, and it's got a long subtitle, so let me go with that. Okay. Betting on You: How to Put Yourself First and (Finally) Take Control of Your Career. This is her first book, and I preordered it because I just love her and really wanted to be supportive. And it came in the mail the other day. It's got great reviews from people like Daniel Pink and other productivity specialists and also business and communication specialists. And I really like it. I'm only like a couple chapters in. It's definitely written with a corporate kind of slant. So not all of it is going to apply to me as a small business owner except that her real message is that you can break out of the corporate structure and do a different career or something on your own, and here's some really practical steps to help you through that. So I really -- I love it. I love her; I like her style. So I have been very much enjoying Laurie Ruettimann's Betting on You. And that's what I've been reading.

MR Nice. I'm checking out the website right now. Looks interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Very cool. All right.

AH Who's our first sponsor, Michael?

MR Our first sponsor is ABMP. We love ABMP.

AH We really do.

Sponsor message And ABMP, as it turns out, is proud to sponsor Massage Business Blueprint podcast. That's us. CE courses you'll love are available for purchase or included free with membership, and they're 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. All ABMP memberships include 200-plus video-based, on-demand CE classes. If you are not a member, you can also purchase access to a single class or a package of classes all at abmp.com/ce. And if you want more, that's fine because they'll deliver more. You can check out the ABMP podcast available at abmp.com/podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And I got to say I love the ABMP podcast. It's -- they've got a couple of different types of episodes. Ruther Werner has her series, "I Have a Client Who…" that discusses different pathology stuff. There was a fascinating episode last week on Parkinson's and also some other brain stuff related to Parkinson's or -- that might be misdiagnosed as Parkinson's, and I can't remember the name of that other brain thing. It's fascinating, and it's just a great podcast. And they also have some great interview episodes. They did a wonderful, beginning-of-the-new-year series with Darren and Kristin Coverly. And they're just -- it's great. So check it all out at abmp.com.

MR Nice.

AH That's what I got. But --

MR I love hearing you talk about ABMP.

AH I do too. They've just been such a pleasure to work with. I don't -- I've never had a negative interaction with anyone from ABMP, which is --

MR I agree.

AH -- really saying something because I hate everybody.

MR [Laughing]

AH And I just don't hate anybody at ABMP.

MR I agree.

AH So what are we talking about today, Michael?

MR Well, I am thrilled because I get to listen to you talk about email marketing.

AH Oh, my God. I dig email marketing; Michael does too. I'm sure half of you just shut your brains off because you're like, ugh. But -- and this will be efficient and quick. We're not going to dive into like a 45-minute tutorial on this. But I come back to email marketing often. It is, for many people, a super effective way to remind clients that you exist and that they might want to schedule appointments with you. And we really saw, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, that massage therapists who had already created some kind of email marketing platform and foundation in their business had such an easier time communicating with clients. And then when -- if they returned to work, it was really easy to communicate with clients. It is a wonderful communication tool for most people. I'm going to say that; not everyone. If your clientele is mostly college students, then they're not always super hip with the email, then -- I want to leave room for there to be exceptions that email marketing might not be the best option for everyone. But for most, like 90% of practitioners, if you put some heart into it and put some effort into it, it can be really, really helpful.

So a few quick bits about why I think email marketing can be really effective and why everyone might want to give it a try. You -- overall, in the marketing world and in the sales world, you tend to get a $40 return on investment for every dollar spent on email marketing. And that may or may not apply to massage businesses. But my theory here is that if you send an email to your clients, whether it be a client list of 30 or a client list of 300 or 3,000, if you get one booking for a $100 massage, that's a win because email marketing for most of us, on the small scale that we do it, is typically free. It costs you $0 and a -- maybe a couple hours of work. And that amount of time it takes you to put together an email dramatically reduces the more you do it.

So for me, it takes half an hour or so to put together an email, and I usually get at least two bookings from it. So I have made $200 for a half-an-hour worth of work and zero moneys because my email marketing is so small scale that I can do it on a free platform. And there are a handful of platforms you can do this on free -- do this for free. We at Massage Business Blueprint use a platform called MailerLite. And we pay for it because we have a lot of subscribers, but within your massage business, I believe they have a free level of service. And Michael can vouch for that or not.

MR Yes.

AH Yes.

MR Up to 1,000 people for free. Yeah.

AH Excellent. And that's plenty for the average one-person massage business. MailChimp is also -- they have a free level of service. There's a few others out there, so you can do a little looking around. And they're all fairly simple. It's not hard to create a template, and then you can upload your email addresses. There's a little more to it, but it's not that hard, and it's typically free. And again, for many of us, it works really well. And the best tip we can be -- we can give, pardon me, about having effective email marketing -- people always want to know, what's the best time to send an email? What should I put in the email? Does it matter if my -- I don't have a logo yet, and blabbity-blabbity-blah. All these questions. But the most important part of email marketing to make it really, really successful, is to make it consistent. And that is the hurdle. That is the obstacle for most of us.

In a perfect world, you would send a little email once a week. Every other week is great too. Monthly is okay, but it leaves a lot of time between emails for clients to forget that you exist and to stop expecting to get an email. And then it also -- if you try to just do it once a month, it's almost not frequently enough to learn the system and begin to do it really fast and efficiently. So it becomes a little bit more of an arduous task, and it gives you a little bit more time to procrastinate which, I think, makes it less likely you'll get the email out on time. So this is my argument for a minimum of every other week of an email. And before you freak out and think that's going to be hours of work, let me kind of go through what good content is in an email. And I think we -- it would help to really lower your expectations of what you're going to put in an email. It doesn't have to be a multi-segment newsletter and, in fact, is better if it isn't.

So let's talk about what you would put in your every-other-week email: your content. What do you want to do here? So we have to think, before we create an email, what's our point. What is our goal? What is our call to action going to be? And "call to action" is a marketing term that just means what you're going to tell the client to do. So we want to be clear on what our mission of this email is. And we really don't want to have more than one mission. We don't want to muddy it up and be confusing. Do we want people to schedule an appointment? Or are we trying to sell gift certificates? Or is our goal simply to teach our client something about self-care or something they could do between appointments or something they can do to help themselves while you're shut down because of a pandemic? What is the goal of the email?

And what I just named is the most common goals, the most common call to actions: schedule an appointment, sell a gift certificate, teach your client something. Once you've decided on that, you can start to kind of draft your content. You want to customize your subject line. You don't want it to be Email from Haine's Massage. You don't want it to say January Newsletter. That's superdy-duper boring, and no one wants to open that email. So let's say I'm sending an email to -- I want -- and I want to -- I've got a couple of open appointments, and I want to get people on the schedule. My subject line is going to be something like Open Appointments This Week, or Schedule Your Massage this Week, Availability Now, Do You Need a Massage? -- subject lines that are not Update from Allissa. You want it to actually reference the content of the email in a way that makes someone want to open it if that's their goal: Gift Certificate Sale Now, 10% Off Gift Certificates Through December 31st, whatever.

You'll also want to keep it simple. Just like I said, you want one main goal, one to two sections, one to two segments. You -- it doesn't need to be a 200-hundred-word welcome message and then some pretty picture with a link to schedule and then another blurb about the local community wellness event and then a picture of the cat you massaged. It doesn't need to be multi-segment. Take that weight off of yourself. Keep it simple: one to two sections, a couple of lines about, hey, how's your back feeling after we got that blizzard, and I've got open appointments next week, so click the button here to schedule. That's it. And you can keep that format exactly the same for every single email. You can use the same template for every single email. So you've got your logo embedded on the top. You've got a field for some text. You've got a button embedded, "Click here to schedule," or "Click here to buy a gift certificate." And it becomes much easier and super fast to create an email when you just follow the same format.

And when you're following a similar format, it's more recognizable and comfortable and easy for your clients to receive and read that email. If you make it different every time -- if you make the background a funny color and you make the text a funny color and it's hard to read, and then then next month, you've got some different images, and it's got two columns instead of one, and they can't find the schedule button, and you've changed the fonts -- that's terrible. There's no consistency in that, and it makes it hard and confusing. It makes it work for people to understand what's going on in there. Just keep it simple: one template maybe. If you're super into flowers or whatever and you want to put a different flower, a picture of a flower, in every email, that's great. But make sure it's in the same place and it's the same size and it's formatted well for that particular email. That's totally cool. But keep a consistent shape and format of that email.

Be human. You don't need to write in a super business-y, authoritatively hyper-professional way. Of course, you want to keep it professional, but be human in the words that you choose. Don't act like you're writing an essay for your college English class. Act like you're sitting across from a client having a conversation with them. And then clean up your grammar a little bit.

What people -- when we talk about content, they're like, I have no idea what to write. So some thoughts on that. You can make a note about what's going on in your business or community if there's events or stuff. If your schools have been closed down for a week because of the blizzard, you can reference how exhausted people might be from having to mess with their work schedules and be at home with their kids if -- or that's a big pain point during this pandemic. You could, again, write about something they could do to help themselves: a very quick tip about stretching in the morning for their shoulder or whatever your primary clientele is interested in.

You could reference something that you read or watched that is relevant to your target clientele. You don't have to create every little bit of content to become -- for it -- you to use it. You can reference it. So I can say -- and this is just like the stuff we share on social media. If you listen to a podcast that is fantastic about managing stress in very stressful times, you can send an email about that. You can say -- send an email that -- and I'm literally creating this off of the top of my head right now as we record. You can send an email that says, hey, I know there's a lot of time between your appointments right now. Or in my case, hey, I know that because I'm closed right now, a lot of you are trying to find alternative ways to manage your stress and your anxiety. I saw this -- or I listened to this podcast from NPR's Life Kit about how to manage your anxiety in stressful times, and I thought it had some really great tips, especially the one about, I don't know, X, Y, Z. Take a listen. Here's the link down here. Hope you're doing well. That's it. That's my email.

That is my email, and the point of that email is kind of two-fold. It is to stay in touch with clients while I am out of work and also teach them something about self-care and how to manage their stress and anxiety, which, for my clientele, is super relevant because I mostly treat people for stress and anxiety. So there it is. I just created my email in 60 seconds as we record. That would be the content of my email, and I'm thinking I'm actually going to send that out. So that's some content. It doesn't have to be this huge, massive project with all written segments and multiple pictures and links. One thing.

The next tip here, in regards to content, is to always, always, always, always have someone proofread it for you. Always. One person, one trusted friend with half a brain, they don't have to be a grammar specialist. They just have to be capable enough to read -- and trustworthy enough to know that they will read through your email and let you know if anything is dramatically out of place. If you've repeated a word or forgotten a comma, just -- or your link doesn't work. It's very, very hard to proofread your own work. Now, if you do not have a friend who can do this for you, the best option is to wait 24 hours. Send the draft email to yourself, wait 24 hours, and then open that draft and read it out loud to yourself. And then make sure you test every link. That's your fallback. But I can guarantee you, if you do not have someone to reread it or you do not proofread it in an effective way yourself, there's always going to be an error.

And the final note about content is, calm the hell down if there's an error. It's going to happen. You will send an email with a misplaced comma or an accidental apostrophe or whatever. It's fine. It's not the end of the world. As long as your email is not completely rife with errors every time you send it, it's fine. Finished is better than perfect, and your clients love you even if your computer program and your spellcheck mixes up "your" and "you're." It's okay. And that's all I have to say about content. I'm going to dive just a little bit into a few technical bits, and then I'm going to invite Michael in to cover anything that I may have forgotten.

So one of the primary technical bit -- and we covered this a little bit earlier when I said you want to use a certain platform, a program intended to send bulk emails. There's a couple reasons why you want to do that. You need to have certain aspects in place to be compliant with email marketing laws. I'm not going to dive into the laws. It's called the CAN-SPAM Act. And there's just certain rules regarding commercial emails. And if you use a platform like MailerLite or MailChimp, that -- all of those factors are automatically considered. And your -- if you follow the rules as you set up the account, and you import your subscribers, you can be comfortable that you're following all the rules and you're legally compliant. That's the primary technical bit.

Now, there's a few other things you can do, technically, to be more effective in your email marketing. If you have a really varied clientele, you can segment or separate your email list in order to target the right content to the right clients. So I mostly see -- and all of the new patients I take are people looking for massage to manage their stress and anxiety. I still have a handful, maybe a third of my clients, from when I was doing all kinds of different work who still see me because they get sore between workouts, or maybe they're in some kind of a training regime or whatever, X, Y, Z. So when I send an email that has all kinds of self-care tips about managing anxiety, I don't necessarily need to send it to those other clients. Some of them might be interested, but at this point, I know those clients well enough to know who wants to get that content and who doesn't. So I know people who are not interested in the health fair going on down the street next week or my tip for managing your own stress and using meditation for that. I know they're not interested, so I don't send them the emails with that. There you go.

When I an email for open appointments, I send it to the list that I want to schedule. I don't send that email to clients who want deep tissue massage because I don't want to do more deep tissue massage. I'm only going to send it to my target clients who I want to come back in. I'm not going to send this email to clients who I don't enjoy. I'm only going to send it to clients I enjoy. So you can segment your list to get the result you're looking for. That said, if I know I want to make some extra money and I know that it's going to be 5K season, and I think, well, this is a good way to make some extra money for the months of April and May, I will send an email just to my super athletic or runner clients. And I will encourage them to make appointments based on the fact that I know they're going to be running a bunch of 5 and 10Ks in the next two months. And I'm going to include content that encourages them to schedule based on massage being good for athletes and recovery and whatever. So you kind of get the idea of how I would segment that -- the list, the people I send those emails to, to get the result that I want.

Also, if you are using one of these platforms like MailChimp or MailerLite, this becomes very easy, but you want to make sure that your -- the email you send is mobile-friendly. And all of these platforms have templates that help you do that. It usually just means a single-column email that displays well in a small mobile device. And you want to use short subject lines that are also mobile-friendly. If you look at the emails you receive in your own mail box when you're looking on a mobile device, you'll see that shorter subject lines you can get the idea from just a few words versus having to open it and read the subject line. So there's that. All of these platforms are going to allow you and encourage you to size the images in the email properly. They all have image edit functions that will make it so that your huge picture get scaled down to be smaller so that it sends easier, and people's email boxes can receive it easier.

And the final bit of technical advice is to clean your list a lot. Every couple of months, look through that email list, maybe before you send an email, and say, one, this client has never opened an email from me in the last 12 months. I'm just going to take them off the list. Or, you know what? This client, I did not enjoy seeing them. Take them off the list. For my massage practice, the -- back when I was working full-time and I was seeing like 18 to 20 clients a week, that means I have a base of about 100 clients. My email list was only like 120 people. It's all it needed to be. The size of your list is not necessarily relevant. The utility and the functioning of your list is what's really important. And it's okay to remove people from your list if they're not a great client for you or they just never open emails, and you feel futile about sending them stuff. Just clean them off your list.

And that's all I have. Michael, what have I missed as far as the basics?

MR I can't think of anything that you have missed, but I do want to emphasize the "less is more" message. I think so many emails are cluttered with so much stuff. And the more stuff you put in emails usually, my opinion is the less they're going to get read. So I agree with less is more. Simple and clear.

AH One of the most effective writing tips and helpful writing tips I ever read was to write your content and then edit it as if you have to pay a dollar a word to publish it.

MR Ha, I like that.

AH It's so -- it really helps me. So write what you -- write down what you want to say, or if you have trouble writing, speak it out loud into your phone's voice recorder feature, and then listen to it and transcribe it. And then clean it up to be written words. So if you want to say something -- and I say this as someone who, clearly, is pretty long-winded. I do this. I write what I want to say, and then I edit the crap out of it until it's probably a third as long as it originally was. So that's my little trick. And those are all the tips I have. We are -- and part of why I'm covering this topic now is I am in the middle of creating a huge and updated email marketing resource for our private Massage Business Blueprint Premium Community.

So if you feel like you really want to dig into email marketing, and sorry for the sales pitch, it might be a good idea to consider joining our premium community and looking at those resources which I will have ready probably the first or second week in February. And then you get to have all your questions answered, and you get to share with other people in the premium community as well. Unintended sales pitch. Sorry. But that's why I was inspired to cover this in the podcast. It's been a long time since we covered it. And I got to say email marketing is actually the first marketing topic I ever taught. And I think it's -- probably one of the only classes I've taught myself is "Intro to Email Marketing" and then really diving deep into it. So I can super geek out about it. I really love it.

MR Yeah. I consider you the Chris Brogan of the massage therapy community because --

AH Oh, thank you. And he -- because he's all email all the time, baby.

MR Yeah, he loves email marketing. Yeah.

AH And they just actually -- his company just did a whole thing on it too. And I -- he sent in a couple of emails to his marketer's list what makes a good email. And also Ann Handley, who's a super famous marketer, and she's actually out of Boston, she does this wonderful, every-other-Sunday email called Annarchy, Total Annarchy. And she's been doing it for a couple years now, and she called it her fortnightly email. And I love it. It's so -- I expect it every other Sunday. And if every so often it publishes a few hours late -- and normally it's in at like 9 a.m. But on a Sunday when I know it's coming in and it doesn’t come until like 1 p.m., I'm like, ah, man. where's Ann's email? And there's a couple other people who use email really effectively. Chris Brogan's business partner, Rob Hatch, every Thursday morning an email comes and it's short; it's insightful; it makes me think. And then I expect it the following Thursday. The consistency and setting the expectation, people will really look forward to it. So yeah. I -- see? I went off on a tangent again because I geek out so much about it.

Okay. Shutting it down. Who is our sponsor, Michael?

MR [Laughing] Jojoba!

AH Another thing I can talk about just endlessly.

Sponsor message Thank you, The Original Jojoba Company, for being our long-time sponsor. You know I think that we should be using only the highest quality products because our skin is soaking it in as well as our clients. The Jojoba Company is the only company in the entire world that carries 100% pure, first-pressed quality jojoba. They're just a good company, and we are so delighted to be their partner. Also, jojoba is nonallergenic, so you do not need to freak out about a client having an allergic reaction to it. It's not nut-based; there's nothing in there. It doesn't have coconut oil, which some people find to be irritating. It's got zero crap in it. Nonallergenic, people. And you, my friends, can get this crap-free product -- sorry, guys; sorry, Jojoba -- 20% off the price of the product when you shop through our link massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba. And it's been a while since I've spelled that out, J-O-J-O-B-A, massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba.

MR I think by now, our sponsors pretty much know what they're getting into, and they're okay with it. So we love them for it. [Laughing]

AH I know, right? Bless their hearts. Quick tips. You go first.

MR Okay. So Allissa is annoyed with me right now because I am trying a new shiny thing as I am prone to do. It is yet another social media thing that has surfaced called Clubhouse. So here's the caveat: I fully expect this to fizzle out. I think there's probably a 32% chance it will actually stick around and go somewhere because it's so new and weird and interesting. I don't know if it's going to get wide adoption, but I find it interesting. There's a thing called Clubhouse. It's really an iPhone app. It's a -- kind of a network, but it's only for iPhone users. It's only for mobile. It is an audio-only kind of social network. So Clubhouse is set up in a such a way that when you join, you can create a room or you can join rooms or you can schedule rooms. And a room is basically a place where people can jump in and just talk. And it's audio only. There's no video. There's no text. It is simply -- it's kind of like an old-school party line. If you're --

AH Yeah.

MR -- old enough to remember the party lines, basically, you can pick up a phone, and there's the people talking.

So the way it works is if I'm hosting a room -- let's say Allissa and I are hosting a room. So we're going to start a room, we're going to schedule it, we're going to talk about X, Y, Z in the massage business world, whatever. So we're hosting a room. If you're on Clubhouse, you can search for those topics and find the room. Or if you follow one of us, you will see it pop up if you get notifications, saying, hey, Allissa and Michael are in this room right now talking about X, Y, Z topic, and you can then click to jump in the room. As you join the room, you join as a listener. And then a moderator, like Allissa or I, can select you to be a speaker on the stage, the virtual stage, so to speak. All it means is you kind of get moved to the section of speakers, and then you can unmute yourself and you can talk to us and we just have this group conference call type of environment. And if anyone else joins, they can be a listener. And if we invite people up on stage, then they can accept that and then speak as well. Or they can just still listen to the conversation.

So if you've ever gone to a conference or an event, and you've gone to panel discussions, it's basically kind of like that. It's like a panel discussion where a group of people on the stage are talking, and the microphone can be passed out to people in the audience to ask questions and to speak as well. But the panelists are the one kind of in speaking mode. And I'm finding it really interesting. So I've joined Clubhouse. I kind of like it. I'm messing around with it. Yeah. So I kind of wanted to share that.

AH I'm sorry. I fell asleep there for a minute. [Laughing]

MR Yeah. I figured you might.

AH I love that you are so open and willing to try new things.

MR And I've sent you an invite, which you've ignored.

AH I have absolutely ignored it. I have zero space in my brain or my bandwidth to learn a new platform right now. And that's not on you. That's just on me. So I'm saying no to pretty much every invitation in every way. [Laughing]

MR And I don't blame you.

AH Yeah.

MR But I was thinking about how it could be used for our audience, so just some ideas, so as a massage therapist, if you are building a community around, let's say, your email list and things like that, experts and practitioners are using it to host rooms about a topic. So if you want to host a wellness discussion about X, Y, Z wellness topic, that might be an interesting way to host a room with your clients to talk about a wellness topic or ask questions. So that's going to help --

AH Only clients who have iPhones.

MR Yes. It's iPhone only. Yeah.

AH I feel like that's problematic.

MR Oh, it is. It's totally problematic. Yeah.

AH But we'll see how that goes.

MR There's not a day goes by that people don't complain about lack of Android access on Clubhouse. And they just don't care because they have no money, and they're a start-up. And they're like, well, we only had money to do an iPhone app, so that's what we did.

AH And rock on.

MR So there you go.

AH That's how growth happens.

MR Yeah.

AH I do want to say that I have actually started to utilize -- I'm not posting anything yet, but I have actually started to be an observer on TikTok. And it's pretty interesting. When you hone in on content that you find interesting which is, for me, not videos of young women applying makeup and telling stories, but TikToks from physical therapists and dieticians and some -- I can't think -- there's a few people and our friend, actually, Meg Donnelly, a massage therapist on there and kind of using it for business. And I love the cooking TikToks. So I've found that kind of interesting, and I've been kind of proud of myself just for investigating a new platform. I haven't figured out the utility for massage therapists yet, but -- and I don't know that there is, but that's been interesting. So I at least have tried something new.

MR Yeah. I tried TikTok for a minute.

AH Yeah. And I think -- I found enough people to follow with content that interests me that I'm doing okay. So my quick tip is mostly just an update. A couple weeks ago, I gave a quick tip on creating like a daily reasonable expectations list. And I have to say it's going pretty well. It's evolved a little bit into a to-do list that I don't always accomplish all of the things, but I'm working on backing off from that. But pretty much every day, I open my bullet journal and I make a list of the things that I feel confident I can accomplish that day based on how I feel that morning, and it's really helping. Also, I write my three words, which are patience, pace, and purview, to remind myself of the things I am working on to make my life a little better. And it's going pretty well.

And then I realized this weekend that I didn't touch it, my bullet journal, at all. I never made an expectation list, and that was okay because it kind of made it so I didn't have any expectations for the weekend. And my primary goals were just to, as much as possible, be present with the kids and do some things. I did a big embroidery -- not a big but a small embroidery project this weekend. So it was kind of good to have two days with zero expectation. And then I jumped right back on Monday morning with my list of what I want to do based on how I feel when I wake up. And I'm feeling good about it because I have managed to do some kind of exercise and/or at least an outdoor walk every single day. And that's really good for me. And it's also helped me kind of just be mindful in the morning of what I can do.

And I did notice last week a couple days it became a to-do list, and I couldn't accomplish it all, and then I felt crappy. And then I was like, you know why? That's because I did not think through properly what I could manage today knowing that I lose steam around 3 in the afternoon, and no brain work is going to happen. Or pretty much I lost steam after three hours of brain work, sometimes two, two and a half hours. So it's going well, and there's my update. And maybe a daily reasonable expectation list could work for you.

MR I like that. Thank you.

AH That's all I got. Wrap it up.

MR All right. Let's do this. Thanks, everyone. We appreciate you being a listener. As always, you can find us at massagebusinessblueprint.com. And if you are a new listener, welcome! We love you for being here, and we appreciate you being a listener. And if you don't know much about us, again, our website has all the info. And if you want to check out our private community, which Allissa mentioned earlier in the episode, click on that Community button, and we'd love to have you in. You can try it free for 30 days, so it's totally no risk. Hop in, get to know people, look around, see if you like us, and you can stick around if you want to. So if you have a question or a comment or feedback for us, you can email that to us at podcast@massagebusinessblueprint.com. And again, thanks for joining us today. Have a great day. We will see you next time.

AH Bye.