Podcast

Weekly Roundup

• Crazy Rich Asians series 
• Madam Secretary (on Netflix)

Discussion Topic

• Should I delete my blog if I don't care about it anymore?

Quick Tips

• Tie your book & phone together to help you make a value based decision about your activity.

Sponsors

• The Original Jojoba Company 
• ABMP 
• Massage Business Blueprint - Get New Clients 

Transcript: 

Sponsor message:

ABMP is proud to sponsor The Massage Business Blueprint Podcast and we are delighted to have them. One of the many, many benefits of ABMP membership is ABMP Five-Minute Muscles and ABMP Pocket Pathology. These are quick reference apps designed to help you quickly find information that you need to make a decision about your massage session planning. The Five-Minute Muscles includes muscle-specific technique and palpation videos for the 83 muscles most commonly addressed by professional massage therapists. And ABMP Pocket Pathology can help you sort out contraindications before any treatment. These apps are included with ABMP membership and you can go to abmp.com/apps to access them. And non-members can sample demos as well. Again, that's abmp.com/apps.

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:

And Alissa Haines.

Michael Reynolds:

And we are your hosts. Welcome to our episode today. Alyssa, welcome to our episode today.

Allissa Haines:

Thanks, Michael. Welcome to you as well.

Michael Reynolds:

Thank you.

Allissa Haines:

I usually go first, but let's let you go first. What are you been reading or watching?

Michael Reynolds:

I've been watching a show on Netflix called Madam Secretary. Have you watched this?

Allissa Haines:

I watched that years ago. I'm not like... I only watched the first two seasons, maybe.

Michael Reynolds:

Really?

Allissa Haines:

Yeah.

Michael Reynolds:

They make like six seasons, right?

Allissa Haines:

I think so. But I think when I watched it, maybe it was like on Hulu and that's all they had.

Michael Reynolds:

Oh, okay.

Allissa Haines:

I remember watching it, had to have been at least more than four years ago because I remember watching it the last place I lived.

Michael Reynolds:

Got you. Well, I am in love with it, Ariana and I have been watching it. We love it.

Michael Reynolds:

So a little backstory, Alyssa and I are both huge fans of The West Wing. It is probably in our top 10, all-time favorite shows, and it's hard to compare to The West Wing cause it's pretty amazing. But if you like The West Wing, I think you will like Madam Secretary. It has the same vibe. It's got the same, sharp, witty humor. It's just the political drama. I'm really enjoying it. So, I've been watching that. I'm about a season in. We're wrapping up the first season now, and we're hooked. So that's what I've been watching and recommend it to anybody who likes political dramas like The West Wing.

Allissa Haines:

Yeah, I remember it was... I enjoyed it. It was... I mean, it's no West Wing, but it's very, very good.

Michael Reynolds:

Right.

Allissa Haines:

I love Téa Leoni, so rock on.

Michael Reynolds:

She's awesome.

Allissa Haines:

Isn't she married to David Duchovny?

Michael Reynolds:

Yes.

Allissa Haines:

Yeah.

Allissa Haines:

And she was in that movie with Adam Sandler, Spanglish, which was so good. I just watched it like a couple of weeks ago. Rock on, Téa Leoni.

Michael Reynolds:

Okay.

Allissa Haines:

Who's our first sponsor, Michael?

Michael Reynolds:

Well, are we going to talk about what you're reading or watching?

Allissa Haines:

oh wait. Oh my God.

Allissa Haines:

See, I got so confused.

Michael Reynolds:

That's what happens when we get out of order.

Allissa Haines:

Oh, really running a pro shop over here.

Allissa Haines:

So, in my downtime I read the second two of the three in total series by Kevin Kwan, the Crazy Rich Asians series, the books, which I know the first one has been made into a movie. I haven't seen the movie yet. They're fun. They're just fun. And they're funny. And I read some critiques of the books, like some reviews of the books from actually Asian people who were like, "Yeah, there's not a ton in here that's problematic." So I felt like I could go and enjoy the books without worrying that I was consuming content that was going to increase my unconscious racism. So, it was really, they were fun and it's a good story. And I had a little trouble keeping track of all the family trees, which are actually like laid out in a diagram at the front of the book.

Allissa Haines:

But because I read on Kindle, that's not really effective for me. But I was like, you know what? I'm not going to worry about remembering exactly who's who. I'm just going to enjoy the story as best I can.

Allissa Haines:

And I did. It was great. I'd read the first one a while back, but the second two are similarly great. And I would encourage you to go read them.

Michael Reynolds:

Thanks.

Allissa Haines:

There we go. That's what I got. Now, who's our sponsor?

Michael Reynolds:

Now, our sponsor is Jojoba.

Allissa Haines:

Yay. Thanks. Jojoba for sponsoring us and listen, I've talked about all the things I love about Jojoba. I'm going to just highlight a few. It doesn't stain your a 100% cotton sheets, and actually personally, and you can't take this as gospel, but it doesn't stain my half polyester, half cotton sheets. So rock on.

Allissa Haines:

Your linens are going to look better for longer. They're not going to smell weird. They're not going to be stained. It's awesome. Jojoba doesn't go rancid. It doesn't contain triglycerides like most products do. So it won't go bad.

Allissa Haines:

Jojoba is not an oil. It's actually like a wax ester. And it's the closest thing you can get to the actual sebum that your skin produces. So it's nice. It doesn't clog pores. So if you've got clients who are prone to acne breakouts, this is not going to be a problem for them.

Allissa Haines:

You can get 20% off the price of the product when you shop through our link massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba.

Michael Reynolds:

Thanks Jojoba

Michael Reynolds:

All right. Go for it.

Allissa Haines:

Yeah. I have very little to say about this and then I'm going to toss it to Michael.

Allissa Haines:

We get a wonderful question that said, "Should I delete my blog if I don't care about posting anymore? What about social? If I don't want to post anymore?"

Allissa Haines:

I thought about this for a little bit. And I was like, nah, I don't think you need to delete the blog. I think it still can serve a purpose on your website. If you have like comments open, which a lot of people don't anymore, anyway. If you can close the comments, great. If your website settings allow, and you can remove the the publication date of blog post, so that it's like evergreen content and you can just do a quick edit to make it evergreen, so it doesn't matter if someone reads it now or six months from now. I think it's worth keeping it on your site just for search engine optimization purposes.

Allissa Haines:

But if it's a hassle to keep it current, get rid of it. And I feel like ditto for social media. If you hate doing it, ditch it.

Allissa Haines:

I do have questions. And I'm going to throw this to Michael to answer this in a second.

Allissa Haines:

Should you completely delete your business's presence? Like should I just totally delete my Facebook page and my Instagram and stuff? Or should I just leave it there, but not post to it?

Allissa Haines:

I'm going to throw that to Michael in a second.

Allissa Haines:

I think it's a coin toss about what you feel like handling and managing. I do want to note that these decisions are actually easy to make if you have plenty of clients. If you have plenty of clients, you don't need a blog and you don't need a social media presence. As long as you've developed other communication mechanisms for your clients, whether you do text marketing or email marketing, or you just call people when you haven't seen them in a long time. It's a little trickier to make these moves if you are still actively trying to recruit new clients to fill your business.

Allissa Haines:

We do have an episode 364 of the podcast about how to build your business without social media. There's plenty of other options. So even if you are new and recruiting new clients, you don't need to have social media if you're willing to do other things instead.

Allissa Haines:

But that's how I feel about it. Like, I'd say in a nutshell, keep the blog up, just like close it out so there's no comments. And if you can clear the dates, that's great. Make it evergreen. Social media coin toss. What do you think, Michael?

Allissa Haines:

Yeah, a couple of comments.

Allissa Haines:

One is I think a good reason for leaving your blog online is there could be search traffic coming to it that you're not aware of, or maybe you are aware of and you don't want to lose that by taking those down. So it could be benefiting you even if you're not posting new stuff. So that's a reason to consider keeping the blog up.

Allissa Haines:

As for social media, I'm a big fan of being all in or all out. If you just, Alissa and I both know a lot of people in the massage therapy community. They're like, "Well, I just, I hate Facebook, but I feel like I should." They go back and forth. And I'm like, look, you know, it's fine. If you don't want to use Facebook, don't use Facebook. I think deleting your page is perfectly acceptable if you're just not going to post for six months or a year or ever again. I think it often looks a little weird if you have a Facebook page up there that just kind of stops, and the last post was like 18 months ago or whatever. I mean, it just looks kind of odd and I would just take it down or maybe just temporarily unpublish it if the social network you're on allows you to unpublish. Maybe later you can come back to it. That way it's not online.

Allissa Haines:

The caveat to me would be, if you want to keep your username, like, for example, if you're on Instagram and you want to keep the username that you have on Instagram, because it matches your business name really well. And maybe you want to come back to it. You want to think about that. So maybe it makes sure you can unpublish without losing your username depending on the network or Twitter is a good example of that. We kind of go by usernames. So just think about that.

Allissa Haines:

Think about, does it make more sense to unpublish or delete it? Or maybe if you do want to keep it online because that network requires you to keep the account active to keep the username, maybe put like a post at the top that says, "Hey, we are temporarily not active on this network, please visit us at boom. And then put your website address there. It's not the greatest thing, but it might be something to consider.

Allissa Haines:

So yeah, I like being all in or all out. Pick one, either answer is perfectly acceptable. Being all out is fine. You don't have to be all in.

Allissa Haines:

And I think you can totally get away with certain things when you're in like a massage and a health and wellness business, where I think if I was going-- if I decided I didn't want to have a Facebook page anymore and didn't want to deal with it, I think I would probably clear out all the old content. Delete all the old content, except for a profile picture and a cover picture. And I would put up one image with text and also text in the actual image, whatever headline, that says, "I believe quality of life is improved by spending less time on social media. So I've taken my business off. Here's a link to the website." So that even if your business gets tagged, because someone's trying to refer to you or whatever, it's going to go to that post, which is at the top of the page and anybody who's trying to find you is going to be able to find you.

Allissa Haines:

So I think there could be benefit for that. If you are still accepting referrals and wanting to get new clients, I think in a wellness business, we can get away with that a lot more than a retail, whatever. So yeah, that could totally be an option.

Michael Reynolds:

Nice. I like it.

Michael Reynolds:

All right. Before we move on to quick tips, let's give a shout out to our last sponsor, which is us because, hey, it's our podcast. So we can use our own sponsor spots if we want to. And we're going to do that today.

Michael Reynolds:

We are going to talk about our new download that we have published recently called How to Get New Massage Clients. We want to give a shout out to it because we put this together and packaged it in a way that is really accessible, easy to understand, easy to digest, easy to have in one place. And we have made it available for free to you. And you can get it at massagebusinessblueprint.com/getnewclients. That's all one word, no spaces, no special characters, just slash get new clients and what we really like about it and the reason we put this together is that we've noticed there are a lot of coaches and consultants and thought leaders. I'm using air quotes out there. They give advice to entrepreneurs and business owners. And a lot of it is irrelevant and expensive, and it's just not applicable to our small solo massage businesses that we run.

Michael Reynolds:

And so we want to make sure that we focus on advice that is relevant to you. And that does understand that you are a often solo small business with very specific needs and very specific situations that don't apply to a lot of other businesses.

Michael Reynolds:

So this guide is for you. It's got a lot of interesting information about marketing and networking and growth and just ways to get new clients, hence the name. And so if you want it, we would love for you to grab a copy for yourself for free. Massagebusinessblueprint.com/getnewclientsJust pop in your name and email and you'll get it instantly and let us know what you think.

Allissa Haines:

I got to say. I sent Michael a message about this the other day. I feel like we're in the season of business building because I've been getting a ton of ads like in my Facebook and Instagram feeds that route me to such business building programs that are customized for massage therapists. And some of them are massage therapists or people that used to be a massage therapist and are now business coaches and whatever. And when I get these things, sometimes I'm like this looks really interesting. I want to see what's out there. And I'll subscribe to whatever they have for free, and a free webinar or free whatever. And I'll see their follow-up emails. And there's a couple that I've looked at that had been yeah, all right, this teaches niching. That's what I teach. This program could be really great, rock on. I'm glad I know it exists.

Allissa Haines:

And I looked at one the other day, came from an Instagram ad. And it was just like full on business coaching, build your business program. And I kind of looked through the content in it. It didn't look like anything needed. I mean, listen, there's a handful of ways to grow your business and that's it. There's no silver bullet that one person can teach that will work for every massage therapist. There's like 5 to 10 basic principles and concepts, okay. And a lot of people teach them and that's great. So I've got this Instagram ad and I looked at it and it was like the same principles and concepts, like kind of loosely, but given sort of teased out in a way that's like, this is what it's in our program. And I went through and I looked and I had to go through like five pages to finally get the price of the program, which I believe they called an investment or commitment. $4,300.

Allissa Haines:

$4,300 for a how to build your business program, which there's some live interaction. There's some recorded webinars. And I just laughed. I laughed because, come on, if you're building a massage business, where the heck are you going to come up with $4,300 for a coaching program. Especially when there's like phenomenal coaching programs around for a couple of hundred bucks, or under a grand. Or you got a community like Massage Business Blueprint, where for $17.99 a month or $13.99 if you're an ABM team member. You can totally have almost the same content and almost the same level of coaching and community.

Allissa Haines:

I'm still laughing about it. $4,300. I just was like, dude, that's good down payment on my new car. Which I guess is why the business coaches are charging that. And in the end it's run by people who are not even practicing massage anymore. I can't even.

Allissa Haines:

Okay. I'm done. I don't like to make fun of other things. And I think there are plenty of other people in this space doing wonderful work. I watch and participate in a few communities that are wonderful and teach similar stuff to us. And it can be a great space. And then you get something like this and I just couldn't stop laughing.

Allissa Haines:

Okay. I'm done.

Michael Reynolds:

I am all for making a wise investment with your money and that may not always be the wisest investment.

Michael Reynolds:

All right. So yeah, go grab it and let us know what you think.

Michael Reynolds:

Quick tips. [crosstalk 00:15:24] I don't think I have-- Oh yeah. Go for it.

Allissa Haines:

I was going to say the URL.

Michael Reynolds:

Say it again! Go for it.

Allissa Haines:

massagebusinessblueprint.com/getnewclients.

Michael Reynolds:

There you go.

Michael Reynolds:

All right. I did not have a quick tip today, so I'm going to lean on yours. What do you got?

Allissa Haines:

I do. Okay. So y'all know, I took a lot of August off. I was trying to minimize my workload and maximize my self care.

Allissa Haines:

And one of the things I really wanted to do was spend less time browsing stupid crap on my phone. And I couldn't just be like, I'm going to shut my phone off, or I'm going to take all these apps off my phone, because some of it I use and need for business. But I really wanted to minimize getting caught up in things.

Allissa Haines:

So what I did is I, for the month, I kept my Kindle with my phone. So I would put my Kindle on top of my phone or just under it. But wherever I brought my phone in my home, my Kindle would be with it. And there was even a point where I was carrying stuff back and forth to my little backyard office, so I just elastic banded them together.

Allissa Haines:

And I did that so that whenever I would reach for my phone, if I was reaching for it from boredom, I was like, you know what, instead of scrolling, TikTok, why don't I read the book I started? And it would remind me that I had a book I really wanted to get back to, you know?

Allissa Haines:

And it worked really well for me. There was, I mean, I still caught myself a couple of times where I'd open the phone to do something for business and I would stay in there too long, just messing around. But I tried to, even as I was holding my phone, put my Kindle behind it and hold them both so that I would remember that I have this other thing that I wanted to do as soon as I finished the task at hand. It worked really well.

Allissa Haines:

I mean, you can see, I read like a crap ton of books in August. So anyhow, I feel like it helped me make a better value-based decision about how I wanted to spend my time by reminding myself and having that book there as a reminder that I don't want to lose time doing nothing on my phone. I want to spend my time actually reading for pleasure or for knowledge and education or whatever. That's it.

Michael Reynolds:

That's a really good idea.

Allissa Haines:

Thank you.

Allissa Haines:

You know, my life is just like a series of hacks to accommodate my own stupidity. It's working.

Michael Reynolds:

If more people did that though, I think we'd all be in a better place.

Allissa Haines:

Right? Right? There you go.

Michael Reynolds:

All right.

Allissa Haines:

That's all I got.

Michael Reynolds:

Well, hey, thanks everyone for joining us today. As always, you can find us on the web at massagebusinessblueprint.com. That's your starting point. If you'd like to get to know us and reach out, you can also email us at podcast@massagebusinessblueprint.com.

Michael Reynolds:

And, as always, thanks for joining us today. Have a great day. We'll see you next time.

Allissa Haines:

Hi