What to Figure Out Before You Build Your Therapy Website
For early-career counselors: work on these now, so the investment actually pays off later.
A website is a real investment, and if you're early-career, fresh out of supervision or still in it, you probably don't have the budget or the bandwidth to get it wrong. The good news is you don't need a website yet to start doing the work that'll make it worth building later.
Get comfortable being a person online, not just a clinician
A lot of early-career social media presence reads overly clinical, understandably, since most of us come out of programs that train us to be highly structured. But if your online presence only reflects your education and your theoretical orientation, nobody actually knows who you are. Loosen the reins a little. Let some personality through before you're building a whole website around it.
Figure out your income beyond talk therapy, just in case
This isn't about getting another job unless you want one. It's about thinking through how your therapeutic skills, or entirely separate skills, could show up in other contexts. Very few therapists under a certain age are financially comfortable doing only talk therapy, especially through the supervision years. Diversifying isn't just a financial cushion, either. It teaches you pricing, time management, and the value of your own work, at a stage where early-career counselors are too often overlooked entirely.
Know your differentiator
Grad training is communal by nature, modeled after supervisors, cohorts, textbooks. Private practice asks something different: what makes the way you practice actually yours. That's not a clinical question, it's a marketing one, and it's worth answering honestly before you ever write a word of website copy.
Work through these three, and by the time you're ready to build, you'll be building around something real instead of guessing.
If you’re looking for creative ways to make money, you could start a business before you get into private practice! That’s what I did (hi, hello thank you for reading this blog). Read 10 Things Nobody Tells You About Running a Business in Grad School.
Ashley Rhoden is a former corporate marketing leader turned strategist and website designer who works with therapists and private practice owners ready to stop being invisible online. She's also a grad student in a counseling program — not a therapist, not pre-licensed, just someone who understands this world from both the marketing side and the inside of a counseling program, and brings both to every website she builds.
Work with her to build a website that’s as unique as your sessions are. →
