How to add professional connections to Psychology Today

Want to improve your Psychology Today strategy this year so you can get more therapy clients? Make sure you're optimizing your therapist profile with endorsements from professional colleagues and referral partners! In this blog, you'll learn how to start adding endorsements to your Psychology Today profile. PLUS: I'll teach you a simple strategy to increase the number of therapy referrals you get from your profile!

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. VIDEO: How to add professional connections to Psychology Today
3. HOW to add professional connections
4. WHY add professional connections?
5. Try this STRATEGY!
6. Recommended resources
7. Let's take action
8. Share this post

Intro

How do you add a professional connection to your Psychology Today profile? That's the question I'm going to be answering here, and I'm also going to tell you why you might like to consider using this optional feature of Psych Today's therapist directory if you haven't already. I'm going to leave you with a strategy that you might not have considered for how best to use those connections on your profile. 

Read on for a simple strategy to help build your professional connections:

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VIDEO: How to add professional connections to Psychology Today

HOW to add professional connections

Let's start with the obvious question. How do you do it? From the profile tab on the back end of your account, you're going to go over to the left-hand side and choose endorsements. You'll see that it's actually set up in a series of steps as kind of a little endorsement exchange. 

You'll use the built-in search tool to identify a colleague of yours. When you find your colleague, you'll click on their name and write them an endorsement. From there, your colleague, who you've just endorsed, will be given the option to return the favor and write you an endorsement in exchange. When you review the endorsement, you'll have the option to approve it, and once you approve it, it'll appear live on your profile. That’s the how. It's pretty simple.  

WHY add professional connections?

Let's talk about why you might choose to include some professional connections. One reason might be simply because you can, Psych Today does limit you in many ways as far as what information you can include and how that's formatted and structured on the profile, unlike your website, where you can create an entire page dedicated to certain topics that you want to bring to the forefront. 

On Psych Today's therapist directory, you're really working within a set structure that they've created for you. Including endorsements from professional colleagues is one additional way to kind of fill in the picture for therapy seekers in trying to understand who you are and what you have to offer. 

A more substantive reason though is that it's good social proof. It's a way of helping bridge the divide between the person you're trying to reach and you as the person in a position to help them. Putting ourselves in the shoes of the person trying to find a therapist, can feel very risky. There's often a sense of time pressure and lots of uncertainty. Likely by the time that person has initiated the search for a therapist, they needed one a while ago. 

Everything that we can do to help give them the information that they need and hopefully instills some confidence in us, our background, our experience, and most of all our unique selves including our personality, our values, everything that we bring into that therapy relationship. Well-chosen endorsements from select colleagues can really help do that. 

Try this STRATEGY!

Now to a strategy that I want to share with you. It's not complicated, but it might not be something you've considered.  Most therapists, when they're thinking through potential colleagues to ask for an endorsement, begin with their innermost circle of familiarity. These might be former classmates, or maybe someone you knew on internship. It could be someone down the hall in the office space that you rent or a member of your group practice.  While there's nothing wrong with beginning there, if you stop there, I believe it's a missed opportunity to be as strategic as you can with your endorsements. What I recommend is to consider your entire network of potential referral partners and allies, your professional neighbors.

These are other professionals who are trying to reach the same people you're trying to reach, but they're serving them in a different way. For example, in your practice, if you specialize in working with body image concerns, your professional neighbors might include registered dieticians, instructors in different kinds of movement, or medical providers.  

Really, the sky's the limit, and I believe rather than just canvassing the whole world with generic networking. These are the people you should be reaching out to, to do some intentional relationship-building, given that you're both trying to grow your practices and you're both serving the same population. For the purposes of your Psychology Today profile, in order to include someone as an endorsement, they need to also have a profile on Psychology Today. This way you're still considering your professional neighbors, you're just tightening up the focus. 

Let's say you work with clients individually, you'd then want to identify those colleagues who maybe work with those clients and their partners, or those clients and their families. Of course, to make it a really robust, meaningful endorsement, these should be colleagues you have worked with. That's going to enable them to write a really thoughtful endorsement about you and how you work. 

On the platform, once you exchange endorsements, it's automatically going to broaden the pool of people who can find you because your name will pop up as an endorser on your colleagues' profiles. It's clickable, which means it can direct people over to your profile. Then once they're there, they'll see the provider whose profile they just came over from listed along with a really thoughtful endorsement of you and how you work.  

It's not rocket science, but most people don't approach endorsements this way. I believe it's worth taking the time because you've already put in the effort to write a supremely excellent narrative portion of your profile, and you've optimized all the other little bells and whistles. Why not put that little endorsement section to work for you, your practice, and the people that you serve? 

Recommended resources

Want to explore more ways to expand your network? Check out these blog posts:

• 10 POWERFUL types of social proof
• Easy ways to engage with your audience (+ 3 tools to help you)
• Podcast appearances: Your new marketing super strategy
• How to use testimonials
• Marketing your therapy practice across state lines

Let's take action!

Ready to implement what you learned in this post? I like your style!

1. Choose 2 colleagues to reach out to and use my strategy.
2. Curious about my Copy Challenge? Come join us here! 
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