Cal Banyan: Hello everybody, Cal Banyan here, Cal Banyan's Hypnosis, Etc. And I'm back again with Erika Flint. And today, over the last two episodes we were talking about using Google AdWords to get hypnosis clients. Now we're going to talk about Facebook. Is it worth putting the time, perhaps money and effort into? Is there a different, you know, approach to doing the fan pages and that kind of thing? Alright, let me introduce you to Erika Flint. Erika Flint is a Consulting Hypnotist, has her hypnosis practice since June 2013. That's right, she's just building her practice, that's what she brings to the show at this point is that new perspective of getting things rolling, getting things started and it just so happens that Erika has a strong background in computer science. Before being a hypnotist, Erika worked in the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley.
And, for over a decade, software engineer, professional problem solver and when she realized she wanted to work with the greatest computing mechanism in the world, the human mind, and she came over to the hypnosis side of life and she received her, after she received her initial hypnosis training there in Bellingham, Washington, she became certified as a 5-PATHer with our distance learning course, the 5-PATH 2.0 program. Now she's looking forward to going through our advanced Week of Power at our training center. And let's see, I recognized her at the National Guild of Hypnotists, she still has been active in our online groups and I said, "This lady's got something going on. I really admired her, really the intellect, her knowledge, the way she holds herself, and, really the drive that she has to succeed in this profession." So, I said, "Come on aboard," and this is probably, I think her fifth podcast with me. Is that right Erika?
Erika Flint: Yeah. I think you're right.
Cal Banyan: Yeah, I can do the math.
Erika Flint: Because there were two. Yup, that's right. It's my fifth one. That's great.
Cal Banyan: Beautiful, I hand it over to you.
Erika Flint: And I'm really happy to be here today, so let me tell you a little bit about Cal. Cal Banyan is the hypnosis celebrity because of his fame in the profession and not just because of the hundreds of hypnosis training videos that he's produced to date, but he's also received almost every award recognition in the profession, which is really remarkable. And his books have made him an authority on the subject of both hypnosis and hypnosis therapy. He's appeared on radio and television promoting hypnosis and one of my favorite books, "The Secret Language of Feelings," and he's the authority when it comes to hypnosis that works. It does work, I use it with my clients all the time and he is the person experts in the profession go to for hypnotism for education and guidance. He's also the trainer of some of the best in our profession. And guess what? He's still teaching, he's still speaking, he's still writing, seeing private clients and making public appearances and he's had a profound effect on me.
It was after I took Cal's 5-PATH® course that I felt confident and comfortable to see my first clients, and I've been running with it ever since. And, so, it's been really great to be here and when I first met Cal, and I first met him at the NGH conference; one of the first things I wanted to do was go and introduce myself. So, it's great to be here, Cal.
Cal Banyan: Well I'm really glad you did. And if you weren't a confident and competent hypnotist, a Consulting Hypnotist that knows what she's doing, you never would have went out and marketed yourself, isn't that right?
Erika Flint: Yeah, well, I mean it's hard to say, Cal. I mean, you know, you've got to go and do what, what you think is right, right? I mean, you might not have had to go, go do these things if you felt confident and confident. I like to do continuing education, so I'm constantly going to go learn and do new things, right.
Cal Banyan: Well, I will run into hypnotists sometimes that are certified but they're not confident and competent and I'll be talking about their practice, they say, "Well, I haven't really been seeing any clients yet." And I say, "Well, haven't you run any ads or dade..dade..dah," and what I'm finding out is, you know, they still want to take one more course or something like that because they really don't want the clients to come through the door because they're afraid that, you know, that they won't be able to help them.
Erika Flint: Oh, yeah.
Cal Banyan: But, once you are confident, you do have a system that works; now you're like chomping at the bit, right? And you want to get out there and you want to get those clients through the door and you want to start helping them. That's the way I feel about it, anyway.
Erika Flint: Yeah, you're right, absolutely. And for me, the way that I look at it is always, we've talked about this before, the end in mind. And for me, the end in mind is when that client has this moment of insight, a realization that changes everything in their life, and you just helped somebody make a huge change, not only in their life but, you know, they're going to go back home and their spouse or their kids are going to be impacted by the positive changes in that client's life too.
And so it's all worth that, so you know, even feeling confident and competent, you know there are still things too, that, you know, that I still get worried about, right. I mean we always want to do a really good job, you know, so I always get a little nervous before, before a session because I just want to do a great job. But, the one thing I keep in mind is the client, and so marketing myself, you know, I'm thinking about bringing in somebody, right, I think in my mind, "There's somebody sitting at home that is suffering," right.
They're suffering from something, they don't know what else to do and so I market myself and, oh, we just made that connection with each other and they're coming to see me and thankfully, they can change everything in their life because of that.
Cal Banyan: Exactly, and now we're kind of making that segue from Google, where we talked about people go there with wanting a solution. They're looking for a solution. They practically have their credit card in their hand, with a question in their mind, or a challenge that they're trying to overcome. But, Facebook's a little bit different. Isn't that right?
Erika Flint: Yeah, Facebook is very different. So Facebook is, let me just give you some statistics here, that I looked up today. It's the largest social sharing site, social networking site. So, it's the very largest one, okay. It has a billion active users worldwide, active, not just people that have signed up and not ever sign in again. And it has the largest opportunity as far as, you know, being able to, if you were to advertise or growth, etc. 2.5 billion shares a day, it's enormous. But people go there for a completely different reason, okay. People go to Google to find something; people go to Facebook to kind of hang out, right. So, the strategy has to be a little bit different and so one of the questions that I wanted to figure out and something that I'm still trying to understand to some extent is, is Facebook, you know, is putting a lot of time into Facebook worth it?
Because, you know, the idea is not to sell something. Okay, Facebook is not very good at selling direct sales they call it, right. So, Facebook is really good at brand, building your brand and client engagement, right. So, you want to build an audience. And I know, Cal, you have a fan page, right?
Cal Banyan: Absolutely.
Erika Flint: Yeah, no, do you guys have a, do you have a strategy when you were thinking about, "Okay, what do we want to do with this fan page?"
Cal Banyan: Well, you know, when Facebook first came out, everyone has a Facebook page. And, but it's a personal page. And very quickly I learned, because I was right on the edge there studying about marketing, and Facebook didn't like you marketing on your regular page. They said, "If you're a business, you're doing business stuff," they want you to open a fan page. And, so I did that and, for you folks that are watching this, you might want to go to our fan page if you're not already a member of that fan page, so you can, well, look at some of the things that I'm going to be talking about. So, go to Facebook.com/hypnosisetc. So, that stands for hypnosis etc, it's the fan page that goes with our, with this program. And it's a place where we continue the dialog, we talk, we share about things, some people leave their comments on CalBanyan.com, right by the podcast video and some people like to engage us on Facebook. So, and I'm, I'm going to fill in where Erika's talking because the thing is with fan pages now, I'm not doing any advertising yet on Facebook.
But, I plan on doing that, that's one of the things I'm going to be doing over the next month or two. But, right now, what I do is I think in terms of a funnel. And, I know that when, that Facebook will recommend pages. If you're on Facebook in your news feed, they'll say, "You might also like..." right. Or you can actually search in the search box "hypnosis," or, "baseball," or, "motorcycles," or, "bicycles," or whatever your interest is and things will come up. So, I know that people are finding our fan page, Facebook.com/hypnosisetc. For, by either that suggestion or by searching on it or because somebody else likes one of the things that we've put on there and, so then, we've got about 1600 fans right now, we're constantly growing and I'm constantly learning about this. Every time we do a podcast, as soon as we get done with this video, I'm going to make a one minute or two minute announcement video that's going to go on the fan page and it's just a very short version of the whole video and I'll say: I just completed a video with Erika Flint.
She's sharing how she's going full time in her hypnosis practice using Google AdWords, Facebook, and I just do that little video because the internet loves video. And, so we will send people to CalBanyan.com where the videos are by way of Facebook. So, the thing is, people like to take classes from people who are recognized authorities that they already know, like, and trust. And using Facebook is a way for people to get to know me and 5-PATH, and 7-PATH, and "The Secret Language of Feelings," get to know my personality, my teaching style and say, "Gosh, if I ever want to learn hypnosis," or, "I want to take advanced training in hypnosis," or, "I want to read a book. I'm going to check out that Cal Banyan stuff, because he's obviously the one you want to train from." So, it's all getting people in that funnel that comes down from Facebook, Google; they start going into this funnel, and they, while they're in the funnel, they get to know, like, and trust you, and they find out, you know, I really care about this profession and I care about hypnotists, and as it comes along, the know, like, and trust is built.
And then when they are ready to take the class or get the book or get the CD or have sessions, you see, the people who are in my classes, most f them, only about a third are local. The rest come out of state, I mean from outside of the state, or outside of the country. And, it's because they have gotten to know me through the internet, through my training programs and through word of mouth, through my clients. And, Facebook is a very inexpensive way. Guess how much I paid for my Facebook fan page? Zero, zero. And, I'm kind of taking up all the time in this, but I know a little bit about it. Is there anything you want to add in there, Erika?
Erika Flint: Well, yeah, I mean, that's a really good point, Cal. It is free, you don't have to pay anything to get started and you can just start bringing people. I'll tell you why I use it. So, I don't have nearly as many fans as you have. I have like 200. But, you know, it's growing, and I'm okay with that, right. So, I post things on my fan page that I want people around to know about, right. So, I'm teaching a class on self-hypnosis, I'll post it there, right. And then, and then people can find out and attend my class in self-hypnosis. I post other, I post interesting articles, and I post things that I believe are important for the message that I want people to understand, kind of giving people more insight into who I am and the things that I care about, right, things that I think are important. And, so people can come there and they can find out what's going on. I don't know that I get a whole lot of activity yet, but that's alright because it's helping me build my message, okay, it's helping me understand what's working.
And the other thing about it too, is you can find out to some extent, you know, if you post something and you get a lot of people responding, oh, well that might be something that you want to investigate, right. I mean, and Cal, maybe you even use that to determine what podcast you might do next, right. Like, if you get a lot of feedback on a particular issue on your fan page, you might do an episode on that, right?
Cal Banyan: Yeah, you know, in the beginnings of the internet, my first website, which still exists, Hypnosiscenter.com, was basically back in the day - 1996, an online brochure. But now the internet is about connections, making connections with people and businesses you want to know, like, and trust. And, so, yeah, as we start doing this, I post on average, three times a week. And, some of them are, like I just said, announcement for the new podcast that's come out. I also watch for hypnosis news that's of interest, I have a Google Alert so when, when something about hypnosis hits the web, or hits the news, Google sends me an alert about that and I look at it and I'll make a post about it. As I'm looking down my timeline, about an hour ago, before we started recording this, I put in an update that, "Erika Flint is building a full time hypnosis practice and this is how she's using it, using Google and Facebook." And, so, it was that simple. And that’s just letting it out there.
Before, that is a post about the last podcast that went up. Now here's something that's interesting. When I'm watching T.V., sometimes there'll be something about hypnosis on T.V. - Hollywood hypnosis. And, I'll just grab my phone, and I'll record whatever it is on the phone. For example, what was it on April 12th, which is just four, four days ago, I was watching a show, and there was Hannibal, Hannibal is the show and the psychologist was hypnotizing this guy to find out something about his memory. They do a lot of age regression hypnosis on T.V. and the movies, and I'll just hold my phone up to the T.V. hit, hit record the video and then upload it to Facebook saying, "Hey, what do you guys think about this? Do you think this helps the profession or hurts the profession when hypnosis is portrayed this way?" And it just keeps the conversation going. And, so I can just scroll down and I see news articles, I see video announcements; I even get stuff out of like a gossip column.
So, I have one that was written up about ten days ago that says "Hypno-gossip? Okay, this one almost made me laugh out loud. I just read an article online stating that Katy Perry is seeing a hypnotherapist to get over John Mayer." And so, and I have a picture of her and it says, "Can help, can hypnosis help me to fall out of love?" See, it's just about keeping the conversation going, being at the forefront of people's minds and also these little things like that people share, they like, and they comment, and they wind up in front of people that will then like it and then they'll start receiving your updates too in their news feed, right?
Erika Flint: Right. And you know the whole Katy Perry thing, it's really interesting because I've had two clients with that exact same issue, and it's really important to recognize that when you're keeping up with what's going on in the world, you know, the current news, that type of a thing in the world of hypnosis, this is what your clients, a lot of your clients are learning these same things. They might ask you about this stuff, right? So, as you are able to find, you know, information about hypnosis and you're posting it on your site, keep in mind that even if your clients aren't necessarily seeing your particular post, they might have read about that somewhere else. So, it's good for you to understand what's going on out there, right, the news of hypnosis in the world.
Cal Banyan: Right. And to answer your question, when I put these out, I'll also say, "Hey, do you have any questions for my next podcast? If so, send them to Brenda or send them to Erika and we'll look at them and who knows maybe we'll use your question. So, it's I think people like that that they can send out that question. You see, so many people they get trained in hypnosis and then they are orphaned. They don't really belong to a community and here at the Banyan Hypnosis Center, we have our Yahoo Groups community, we have our CalBanyan.com video blog with comments, we have the this community that's going on, on Facebook, and I think that's what people are looking for. Nobody wants to be the lone hypnotist out there by themselves. You want to be hooked up and connected, so I, nobody in this profession does as much as we do here at the Banyan Hypnosis Center to support grads and the profession as a whole, except for maybe you look at the National Guild of Hypnotists, which is a huge organization and they're able to do a convention and that kind of thing. Please, continue.
Erika Flint: Yeah, well, I mean, for me right now, I would say that Facebook is worth it. I get something out of it. It makes me think about things, and I do engage with my customers and some prospective clients, right. And, so I think one really good rule of thumb would be to, you know, you don't have to put too much time in it. You said you do three posts a week; I might do two or three as well. So, it doesn't have to take a lot of time. Now, keep in mind if people are engaging on your side, you're going to want to, you know, keep them engaged right. if somebody asks you a question, make sure that you're, you're checking in on that, and that's something that we are going to talk about I think in the next episode, Cal, where talk more about other social tools and your online social reputation too and how to manage that and making sure that, that everything's looking good there, right.
Cal Banyan: Perfect, yeah, you know and what is it that the saying says, somebody leave a comment down below on how to say this right, but if you do a job you love, you never have to work a day in your life. And, so doing this stuff, looking up fun and interesting things about our beloved profession, it's not even really work, it's stuff you'd be doing anyway. Finding out news about the profession, you know, quirky little facts, maybe writing a little article and posting it, that it's up on Facebook, it's not even hard, it's fun, right?
Erika Flint: Right, it is fun you know, and when you do have your fan base, right, because Facebook really is intended to be kind of like an engagement, a long haul type of a thing, right, you're building a relationship with somebody so then when you're ready, let's say you have a product or you do have something that you want to share with your clients, you already have a base built in to share with them, right. Now, you can do the same thing with Google, which we talked about last time, you could advertise your new product there, and that would be great, but you could also just post it to your fan page. It's like a built in audience for you, right?
Cal Banyan: Perfect. Alright, well, let's wrap it up.
Erika Flint: Alright, well, I'm Erika Flint I'm very happy to be here today. If you want to be a hypnosis professional, let me just tell you, you can do it. I'm a new hypnotist, I've been doing it for less than a year and here I am today and I'm very happy to be here, answer all of your questions so if you have any please let me know and you can leave them below this video on CalBanyan.com.
Cal Banyan: Hey, why don't you give them your website and also your Facebook fan page address?
Erika Flint: Alright, so, my website is Cascadehypnosiscenter.com and my Facebook fan page is Facebook.com/cascadehypnosiscenter. Yes, please, like me on Facebook. So, and then I can connect with you even more.
Cal Banyan: That's right, let's keep the conversation going. Let's not have it a one way thing. Share, add to what we've said, share other resources that we didn't come up with and update it from time to time. Let's do great things together. That's one of my favorite sayings. Alright, see you in class or see you at the convention coming up in August, that's going to be great it always is. This is Cal Banyan signing off.