28th January 2005

new e-mail d.botsford@ntlworld.com

As a practising hypnotherapist, you can master the most powerful techniques to help your clients become non-smokers in just two days - and get an Early Bird Discount

Dear Fellow Hypnotherapist,

Thank you for visiting this website. Please click here to download your copy of the report "21 tips to help your clients stop smoking" in PDF format (90kb). It is based on twelve years' experience in smoking cessation through hypnotherapy.

The fact that you are practising as a hypnotherapist shows that you have made a commitment to helping people improve their lives, that you have trained at a school of recognised quality, and you are striving to achieve the best for your clients. It is time your commitment is properly financially rewarded.

Climbing the hypnotherapist's learning curve

Every hypnotherapist faces a learning curve between hypnotherapy school and building a successful practice. It ca be a long - and expensive - process to discover which areas of therapy to focus on, which promotional methods attract paying clients, and which techniques are most effective when they arrive.

Sadly, most new hypnotherapists do not make it. Some 85 percent of people who set up as hypnotherapists are out of the field within twelve months - usually because they don't get enough paying clients.

Even for those who survive the first year, it can still be several years before they establish a viable practice. It is usually a process of trial and error to find out which issues to focus on, how to market, and which techniques work best with real clients. Almost every hypnotherapist has to "reinvent the wheel" and go through that same learning curve which thousands have already been through.

You are invited to attend a seminar on 7th and 8th May 2005 which aims to help you climb that learning curve. Its goal is to enable you to build or expand your practice by enabling your clients to achieve a goal desired by over nine million people in Britain today. You are invited to register for:

The Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar:
Hypnotic Techniques and Successful Marketing
at 10 Harley Street, London W1.
Saturday 7th May and Sunday 8th May 2005
Taught by: David Botsford
The purpose of this two-day seminar is to give the hypnotherapist the most effective methods to enable clients to stop smoking - and stay stopped - and to build a viable professional practice through powerful marketing techniques

What makes this seminar unique - and how will you benefit from attending it?

For most hypnotherapists who work with one-to-one paying clients, the largest group they deal with is smokers. This is not surprising. Smoking cessation is the one area where hypnotherapists - if they are effective - offer clients what must be the most advantageous deal they will ever get in their lives. The client who successfully stops smoking though hypnotherapy adds an average of 15 years to his or her life, saves an average of £2000 a year for life, massively improves his or her long-term health prospects and gains social, career and family advantages. The total value is almost incalculable. But the hypnotherapy must be done right. Also, you have to know how to educate potential clients so that they believe in what you are offering and pay you money on the basis of that belief.

Charge a substantial fee - and provide excellent value

Indeed, it is a mistake to under-charge. Given that the client will save tens of thousands of pounds - on average - over the rest of his or her life by stopping smoking, it is entirely reasonable to charge considerably more for smoking cessation than for other issues. Provided that the service you offer is effective - and builds a reputation for effectiveness - you can charge a fairly substantial fee and still get a continuous flow of clients through the door. Indeed, when a service is too cheap, it is often assumed to be inferior or not taken seriously by clients. But you must provide excellent value for whatever you charge and you must commit to ensuring that the client does indeed stop smoking - and stay stopped.

If you can master the art of enabling smokers to quit, and get the message out to more smokers, the potential is enormous.

The pressure on smokers to quit is increasing. There are ever higher taxes on tobacco. More and more places - offices, buses, trains, aeroplanes, and elsewhere - are banning smoking. A man got sacked from his job because a CCTV camera picked up the glare from the cigarette he was lighting as he drove out of the company car park at the end of the day. Forthcoming UK Parliamentary legislation intends to prohibit smoking by law in all places where food is served (including pubs and restaurants). Some people have even been refused certain medical treatments from the NHS because they are smokers. Soon Britain will be like the Irish Republic, California and New York City - each of which has passed laws prohibiting smoking almost everywhere except the smoker's own home. (In California a man was fined for smoking in his own back garden after his neighbour complained about smoke drifting over the fence.)

In this situation, I am completely sympathetic to, and on the side of, those 70 percent of smokers who want to quit. I am sure that you are too. We as hypnotherapists have an enormous opportunity - indeed, a responsibility - to prove that we can offer a solution that can enable smokers to quit the habit - easily, effectively and permanently. 27 percent of adults in the UK smoke, and 70 percent of that number say they would like to quit. That means there are over nine million smokers who are potential clients for the 4,000 practising hypnotherapists. Even if your success is merely average, there are 2,250 smokers out there right now who are your potential clients, ready and willing to pay you money to achieve freedom from smoking. If you have a systematic, effective approach which gets people to quit smoking, and if you can convince potential clients of that fact, then you can enjoy a good income for life.

This seminar aims to make you much better than average - both at educating smokers so that they choose to come and see you, and at enabling them to quit when they arrive. Once you build a reputation for success, continuous marketing and word-of-mouth brings an increasing stream of clients to your door. The very fact that you helped a friend, family or colleague to quit smoking is itself a powerful pre-conditioning for success.

The three things you need to achieve outstanding success

A hypnotherapist needs three things to achieve outstanding success:

1. detailed knowledge of the most effective, proven hypnotherapy techniques for smoking cessation;

2. a strategic marketing plan which covers short-term, medium-term and long-term methods of educating smokers to choose hypnotherapy in order to quit, and convincing them to hand their money to you rather than anybody else;

3. the commitment to master and practise the techniques thoroughly, and to follow through with all aspects of the marketing plan.

This seminar teaches you numbers (1) and (2) in detail. Everything is fully explained and demonstrated in straightforward language, and your questions or comments are positively welcome. Everything is also written up in detail in the ring binder you are given. This is a valuable reference resource that you will want to consult every time you help a smoker to quit in the years ahead.
The seminar actively encourages you to do number (3) - master and practise the techniques, and persistently market even after the clients start streaming in.

What you learn at this seminar

What do you learn at the Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar? Everything is practical and immediately usable with real-life clients. You can put everything into practice the first day after the seminar.

The first day (Saturday 7th May) covers a comprehensive, structured, effective and proven approach to smoking cessation. You learn:

• how to "pre-frame" your client to successfully become a non-smoker days or weeks before the actual session takes place;

• how to ensure that the person who books an appointment actually shows up;

• how to instantly build rapport with the client at the start of the session;

• how to give your client powerful expectations for success during the session;

• how to follow a proven, reliable structure for your stop-smoking sessions which you know will maximise success;

• how to effectively utilise your client's communications and tailor the entire session to his or her specific experiences and model of the world;

• how to teach your client simple but powerful techniques to ensure that he or she stays a non-smoker in every possible future situation in daily life after the session;

• how to use a range of the most powerful, effective and rapid trance induction techniques - both direct and indirect - to ensure that your client reaches a satisfactory level of trance to achieve success;

• how to use a selection of comprehensive, proven, hard-hitting stop-smoking "scripts" which communicate with your client's unconscious mind to enable unconscious learning so that he or she becomes - and remains - a non-smoker;

• how to check your work at the end of the session to ensure that the client has indeed achieved the success you have both set out to achieve;

• and much, much more.

The second day (Sunday 8th May) starts with a complete live session with an actual smoker who wants to quit, so that you can see the techniques in practice. We are seeking a volunteer to take part. If you are a smoker who would like to quit - or if you know of a smoker (perhaps a friend or relative) who would like to quit and is willing to be hypnotised in front of the group - please get in touch. There is a free place on the seminar for an attendee who either wants to quit smoking himself or herself, and who volunteers - or else who refers a smoker who takes part. If you would like to volunteer, or know someone who would, please get in touch.

After that, the second day covers:

• How to provide continuing support to your client after the initial session. Telephone support and a follow-up session. How to reframe the client's reversion to smoking as feedback, not failure. The different types of back-up and guarantees - their advantages and disadvantages explained.

• Approaches and scripts for the follow-up session. How to draw from the client's experience of the first session and its aftermath (even though the client reverted to smoking) and utilise that to achieve the desired positive outcome the second time.

• The fundamental realities of marketing and practice building. How to create a strategic plan to market and build your practice. The distinction between short-term, medium-term and long-term techniques explained.

• How to write informative and effective marketing pieces which get people through the door. Your website, the changing nature of the Internet and how to use it effectively. How to get the best results from press and Yellow Pages advertising, and trade shows and fairs with the minimum spend. Your brochure, what it should include and how to use it. Sales letters and whom to send them to.

• How to become an effective writer and speaker. Speaking at events and how to maximise your impact. Producing products - CDs, books and brochures at low cost - and how to promote them effectively. The "Godfather" technique for rapid practice building - a detailed plan for getting paying clients through the door rapidly.

• and much, much more.

This is intended to be your seminar. Its purpose is to educate you to achieve the best for your clients and yourself. If there is any aspect of smoking, hypnotherapy or marketing that you would specifically like to be discussed at the event, please let me know in advance, so that the areas you are interested in are fully covered. Of course, questions at the event itself are also welcome, and will be answered fully.

Why is this seminar being organised?

What is special about this seminar? How am I qualified to teach it? 
This seminar is special for three reasons:

1. Everything taught in the seminar is what I actually do right here in Harley Street every time a smoker comes to see me to quit. You learn the way to deal effectively with paying clients in Britain in 2005. Everything derives from concrete objective reality. There is no theorising or unproven stuff taken from books. There are no weird and wonderful inductions which may be intellectually satisfying for hypnotherapists or an ego-boost for the teacher, but would have real-world clients turning round and walking out the door. The hypnotic inductions in this seminar may look unspectacular compared to others you have seen, but they are effective and keep the client within his or her comfort zone. Everything is explained and demonstrated in minute detail, so that there is nothing you have to figure out when you go out and do it in practice yourself. Everything is also written up in the binder so that you can look it up when dealing with real clients.

2. Everything in it is unique. When I started in hypnotherapy, I drew from the work of others. But I found that in the light of experience, the approaches taught in books, videos and courses need to be adapted, simplified and strengthened to be effective with paying clients. Over 12 years, I have tweaked and worked on every one of the techniques, inductions and "scripts" - and the marketing methods - to make them maximally effective. No other seminar contains this unique material, at any price.

3. You have a practical plan for getting paying clients which you can put into practice the day after the seminar finishes. We all know that it is possible to have vast knowledge of hypnotherapy but no or very few paying clients to use it with. This seminar teaches marketing which gets the most paying clients through your door at the least financial cost to you.

Let me explain why I believe that I am qualified to teach this seminar.

My first career was in the computer field, mostly programming in a bank. In order to become a hypnotherapist, I enrolled with the National School of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy (N-SHAP). N-SHAP teaches purely Ericksonian hypnotherapy, derived from the indirect and "permissive" techniques of Dr Milton H. Erickson. It does not touch upon direct, authoritarian hypnotic techniques.

The central feature of Ericksonian hypnotherapy is utilisation. The Ericksonian hypnotherapist utilises the client's communications in order to induce trance, tap into inner resources and create a context in which the client's unconscious mind develops its own solution in its own way. Whatever the client experiences is authentic. There is no "right" or "wrong" state for the client to experience, so long as he or she achieves the solution being sought. The unconscious mind is almost infinitely complex. Neither the hypnotherapist nor the client (at a conscious level) can say precisely what the solution is. There may be any possible number of internal "pathways" which the client can choose at an unconscious level to find that solution. The task of the hypnotherapist is to pace and lead the client to that creative state where those unconscious choices can be made. Ericksonian hypnotherapy is individually tailored for each client.

In building up a hypnotherapy practice, this Ericksonian model proved highly effective with clients who came to see me with every presenting problem.

Except one.

When people came for smoking cessation in those earliest days, the use of pure Ericksonian hypnotherapy undoubtedly enabled them to feel relaxed and enter a creative trance state. In many cases they did indeed stop smoking and stay stopped. But others would drift back to the smoking habit within days or weeks of the session.

How could this be? The answer is a peculiar phenomenon known as "smoker's logic". Although the smoker consciously thinks that it would be a good idea to quit, and understands the benefits which would accrue from doing so, he or she will use any rationalisation - however absurd - to justify continuing smoking. Even after giving up, an ex-smoker will often use the most bizarre justification to revert to the old habit. One young lady client of mine said that she had stopped smoking. However, after a non-smoking friend of hers died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 33, she decided to go back to smoking. She took the view that if her friend had died young despite being a non-smoker, she (the client) may as well go back to smoking, as her prospects could hardly be any worse as a smoker!

This led me to conclude that the drawback of using exclusively Ericksonian or "permissive" hypnotherapy with smokers is that they tend to interpret those ambiguous communications as "giving permission" to continue smoking. Indeed, nowhere in the 1,865 pages of the four volumes of The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis is there a single mention of the use of hypnosis to help people stop smoking! It is the same in all the books of Dr Erickson's seminars and interviews that I have seen - no mention of the smoking issue.

How smoking is different from other issues

I realised that enabling people to become non-smokers is significantly different from every other issue with which hypnotherapists deal. You have to tell the smokers to quit in direct, unambiguous terms which cannot possibly be misunderstood - in such a way that the client stops smoking and stays stopped. So I studied and mastered the authoritarian, direct techniques of such hypnotherapists as Harry Arons, Gil Boyne, Dave Elman, Dr John Hartland and Ormond McGill. I read the books, watched the videos, and attended courses on such methods, including seminars taught by the living legends Gil Boyne and Ormond McGill.

But one thing bugged me about the authoritarian approach. It is one thing to tell the client to relax, enter trance and become a non-smoker. But how do you know that the client is experiencing subjectively the things that you are saying? In my practice, I frequently encounter clients who have previously seen a hypnotherapist who uses authoritarian techniques. Some of those clients have critical things to say about the experience. Some dislike being shouted at. Some say that the therapist's words did not correspond to their actual internal experience and that there was no real two-way communication. Some say that they did not enter trance but merely kept quiet for the sake of not causing a fuss. Many said that they did not achieve the result they went to the hypnotherapist for.

So I developed a distinct approach to smoking cessation. This approach combines two elements: first, the Ericksonian hypnotherapist's ability to connect with the client's subjective experience in the moment, and, second, the authoritarian hypnotherapist's ability to deliver a clear, unambiguous message - impossible to misinterpret - that the client is to stop smoking and stay stopped. This new approach drew on elements from many sources and combined them to create new, effective inductions and "scripts". (The word "scripts" is in inverted commas because the goal is to get the essential concepts across, while tailoring your communication to your client's model of the world.)

Making sure that your client stays a non-smoker

Also, clients have to go out and live life as non-smokers now and in the future. It is one thing to induce trance with a client sitting in front of you, so that he or she stops smoking for the duration of the session. You must also teach simple but powerful techniques which ensure that your client remains a non-smoker in every conceivable situation. Such techniques include: eliciting and changing the strategy which leads the person to reach for a cigarette (from NLP); self-hypnosis; affirmations; visualisation; and cognitive self-talk. You must teach these so that the client grasps them instantly and can use them in any and every future situation.

Here is a important point which took me years of experience to recognise. Strictly speaking, our clients who want to stop smoking are not coming to see us to be hypnotised. Nor are they coming in to feel relaxed or good about themselves. They are coming to see us - and pay us - to become non-smokers and stay that way. Whether they experience something called "hypnosis" or "trance" or not is secondary to that purpose.

Of course, hypnotic trance is useful and desirable in creating a resourceful state in which the client's creative imagination finds a solution that enables him or her to become a non-smoker. But there are several approaches to smoking cessation which are known to be effective, and which do not induce hypnotic trance (or at least do not admit to it). I "modelled" (to use the NLP term) the central "message" from these systems and worked out how to communicate it in such a way that client "gets the message" instantly. Whether the client is "hypnotised" or "in trance" or not at the moment he or she gets that message is of limited interest either to the client or to me, provided that the client actually quits smoking. Thus it is possible to enable clients to stop smoking even when they think they "weren't hypnotised" or even "can't be hypnotised". If they walk out the door as non-smokers - and stay that way - they are happy and so am I.

Also, I learned that you must teach the client how to deal with everyday life after quitting smoking. Many people smoke to deal with stress - so you provide your client with rapid, effective, easy stress management techniques. Some clients are concerned about putting on weight after they stop smoking - so you show them simple, powerful exercises to stay slim. The key word here is "simple". All your communications, whether the client is "in trance" or in fully waking awareness, must be so simple in terms of what the client has to do, say or think that it happens without any effort by the client. Effective hypnotherapy can be defined as follows: communicating with your client in such a way that complex and empowering processes of transformation are made so simple that they happen without any conscious effort on the client's part. It is the hypnotherapist's job - not the client's - to make those processes instantly comprehensible and effective for the client.

In addition, I recognised what not to do in hypnotherapy - at least in a context where real clients are paying you real money to improve their lives. Don't use long words or technical terms. Don't ask questions about the client's personal life, age, occupation or financial circumstances, or otherwise intrude upon his or her privacy. Don't try and claim that the client must deal with other issues as well as smoking, and therefore pay you more money. Don't mention the illnesses or premature death caused by smoking, or indeed communicate in the negative in any way. Don't criticise or belittle the client for his or her smoking habit, or try and create shame or guilt about that habit. Don't talk about smoking as "an addiction", a term which implies that the client cannot get control over it. Don't use inductions or approaches that the client either doesn't understand or which take the client out of his or her "comfort zone". Don't use "word salads" or other "confusion techniques" in which the hypnotherapist talks like a character from Lewis Carroll. Don't use inductions which make the client feel stupid or uncomfortable (like getting the client to move his or her arms and head around like a windmill). Don't use the Gil Boyne induction technique of grabbing the client's head and pushing it sharply onto your shoulder while shouting "Sleep!" at the top of your voice. (Please!) Don't make pacing statements about the client's internal state unless you know those statements are true. Don't ask your clients for referrals - it is up to them to decide whether your services are so good that they want to act as your unpaid sales staff or not. (I have heard of every single one of these "don'ts" being used by hypnotherapists.)

Thus I developed a distinct approach to enabling clients to stop smoking. I worked on it for several years, tweaking and refining it as a result of what I learned from assisting many hundreds of clients to become non-smokers. In 2000, having previously worked almost entirely from home, I set up a practice in Harley Street.

How I built a successful practice on Harley Street

The overhead on Harley Street - as you can imagine - is heavy, and therefore you have to charge a lot more than average for your services. Now people will only pay a lot more than average if two conditions are present: (1) what they are getting for their money is a lot better than average, and (2) they perceive that it is a lot better than average.

Now I knew that the hypnotherapy I offered would have direct and measurable benefits for my clients. The question was: how do I get members of the public to believe that and to pay me quite a lot of money on the strength of that belief?

I had to build up the Harley Street practice from scratch. There was no way the existing clients I was seeing at home would suddenly start paying more than double to come to Harley Street simply for my convenience. So I had to get the word out to brand new clients, and get them through the door handing money to me. And I had to do it quickly to meet Harley Street overheads.

The most important lesson I had already learned about building a hypnotherapy practice is this: get smokers through the door and get them to successfully quit the habit. If you can do that, you can make a good living doing one-to-one hypnotherapy anywhere.

When first learning about hypnosis, I was most interested in its potential as a rapid form of psychotherapy, and as a way of facilitating mind-body healing for those with chronic illnesses. In practice, few clients actually came and paid money to deal with those issues. I spent many hours on the phone giving free advice to unhappy and/or chronically ill people who called me up in response to a leaflet or advertisement. Then they either didn't book a session, or else they booked one and then cancelled or simply failed to show to up. Although there were - and are - exceptions who showed up, paid and benefited from the therapy, the income from those sources was quite frankly pathetic. Indeed, I usually had to charge a much reduced fee to such clients, because people suffering from long-term illness generally have little money and exist on pitiful state benefits.

With smokers, however, it was different. There are so many smokers who want to quit the habit that if you can enable them to quit successfully, and if you can convince them of that fact, and that it is worth their while to pay you to do so, then you can make a pretty good income for life.

Make them an offer they can't refuse

Therefore, when starting out in Harley Street, I developed what I call "the Godfather technique". In the film The Godfather, Don Corleone (the Godfather, played by Marlon Brando) says about a man who doesn't want to do a deal with him: "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse". You probably remember what the Godfather did to make that offer.

Well, I didn't quite go that far. I like horses too much. :) But I did decide to make an unprecedented offer to smokers who wanted to quit the habit. In return for them paying me £195, I offered them a 90-minute hypnotherapy session, plus a self-hypnosis CD to take home and play, plus an optional follow-up session of 60 minutes. I also offered them a 100% money-back guarantee of their success: if the client reverted to smoking within three months, the fee of £195 would be refunded to them in full. (I still offer that guarantee to my clients to this day, except that my fee has gone up to £295.)

Now there are advantages and disadvantages to offering such a guarantee. Obviously, you have to be certain of your ability to enable smokers to stop - and stay stopped. But the Godfather technique did the trick. A regular flow of smokers came through the door, paying me money and generating cash flow. As every business person will tell you, cash flow is the vital ingredient that can mean the difference between survival and bankruptcy. That cash flow from the Godfather technique enabled me to survive in Harley Street - and ultimately to thrive. Today, five years on, I have one of the most successful smoking cessation hypnotherapy practices on Harley Street.

It is not necessary for you to offer a 100% money-back guarantee to your clients who come to you to stop smoking. (Indeed, there are strong reasons not to do that. It can give the client a perverse incentive to revert to smoking after the session. All the client needs to do is to smoke one cigarette and get a cash reward.) At the seminar we will discuss in detail the different types of guarantee, support and back-up you can give your clients, and their advantages and drawbacks, so that you can decide for yourself which is best for you to offer.

The techniques and approaches taught at this seminar enable any hypnotherapist - trained or student - to achieve maximum possible success in helping clients to stop smoking. Everything is explained in detail - and is written up in the ring binder as a permanent reference source.
Equally important, the seminar covers effective marketing - how to get the message across to potential clients so that they come in pay you to become non-smokers. You learn short-term, medium-term and long-term marketing methods - and how to create a specific plan to carry out those methods.

The goals of this seminar are simple - to ensure that after these two days' training you achieve the maximum possible level of effectiveness in enabling smokers to quit - and that your marketing gets you the maximum possible number of paying clients at the lowest possible financial cost to you - and keeps them flowing in year after year.

This seminar is suitable for hypnotherapists - not for people with no knowledge or experience of the field. As a hypnotherapist, already trained and with an existing or developing practice, you are already in a position to benefit from it phenomenally.

Towards a "gold standard" in smoking cessation with hypnotherapy

There is also a broader purpose for this seminar.

When I worked in information technology, we had recognised benchmarks - ways of doing things which are recognised as "best practice" - methods which have proved themselves over many years as being a "gold standard". These are means by which one person's experience of doing things right can be conveyed to other people in the same occupation. As a result, newcomers do not need to "reinvent the wheel" as they learn the trade, but can draw from the experience of those who have gone before. Possibly you had similar concepts in the field you used to work in.

Yet in the use of hypnotherapy for smoking cessation, we have hardly anything like that. The goal of this seminar is to teach you my version of a "gold standard", a "bench-mark", a "best practice" in the use of hypnotherapy to enable smokers to quit the habit. I invite you to take part and benefit from that. If we can get consistent results through such a "gold standard", then in the long run, hypnotherapy could gain acceptance as the first choice as a method of stopping smoking - either from officialdom or at least by word of mouth among smokers who want to quit. Hypnotherapists could then play a much more central role in helping the nine million smokers in Britain who want to quit achieve their goal.

In my initial hypnotherapy training, we were taught almost nothing about marketing - how you get the word out so that paying clients come through the door. This is not to denigrate the course, which was excellent in what it did teach. But in building my first practice from home, marketing was a process of trial and error - and expensive error at that. I wasted thousands of pounds on ineffective paid advertising. Most paid advertising - whether in local "free-sheet" newspapers or magazines, GPs' appointment cards or television screens in GPs' surgeries - usually brought me more calls from people selling advertising space than from clients or even enquirers.

This led me to study the literature on marketing, advertising and promotion. This literature demonstrates that the fundamental principles of effective marketing are the same whether you are selling washing powder, engine oil, cruises, accountancy services or hypnotherapy. I applied those principles in promoting my new Harley Street practice. I produced publicity material based on known, proven principles which demonstrated to potential clients how hypnotherapy can help them - and got that message across to as many people as possible.

Successful marketing can be divided into short-term, medium-term and long-term methods. At the seminar, each of these will be discussed in detail, with a specific plan for you to carry out each of them to optimise your success. The marketing of hypnotherapy can be a lengthy, gruelling and expensive process. You will still have to work at it consistently after the seminar. As a rule of thumb, when you are setting up a hypnotherapy practice, you have to spend nine hours marketing for every hour you spend actually working with a paying client. But at least after this seminar you will know how to direct your efforts so that you get the maximum return on every hour you work on it and every penny you spend.

Also, it is a mistake to stop marketing once you have a reasonable number of clients. This is because hypnotherapy has a disadvantage compared to most businesses. In most enterprises, if you get satisfied customers, you get repeat business. If you are in office supplies and your customers are happy, they keep re-ordering from you. If people like your restaurant, they eat there every Saturday night. If you are an accountant and your clients are satisfied, they keep you on year after year.
With hypnotherapy, the opposite is true. The more effective you are, the quicker your clients leave you. If you enable a client to stop smoking (or overcome fear of flying, or lose weight, or manage stress, or build confidence) that client has no need to come back. So you can be a victim of your own success. Word of mouth does get referrals, but it is not usually enough to maintain a full-time practice, partly because many satisfied clients prefer to keep secret the fact that they have been to see a hypnotherapist. 

So you have to keep marketing and promoting as part of your daily and weekly routine. This seminar teaches you the essentials of effective marketing, and what marketing techniques to follow in the short term, medium term and long term. As a general rule, techniques which cost a lot of money but are easy to do (such as paying for advertising) are the least effective in getting clients, while techniques which take considerable work but cost you little or nothing financially (such as writing articles and giving talks) are successful in getting clients.

The seminar shows how your marketing efforts can have the maximum impact for the least money (but not necessarily the least work). When you go out and promote your practice after this seminar, your marketing will be based on accurate knowledge of what works and what does not.

A special Early Bird discount for you

So how much is it to attend this seminar? A good question. There are today, and have been in the past, a number of seminars which aim to teach hypnotherapists to help their clients stop smoking. Some cost hundreds of pounds, one costs £1,500 for two days, and a couple of years ago some people were offering a four day seminar costing no less than five thousand pounds (£5,000).

Now this seminar will not cost you £5,000. In fact, it won't cost you £1,000, or even half that. As explained above, this seminar represents my version of the "gold standard", the "bench-mark", the "best practice" by which hypnotherapists can enable smokers to quit the habit. I intend to repeat this seminar at least once a year, so that all hypnotherapists - wherever they were trained and whatever organisation they are members of - can benefit from it. I want to make the seminar affordable for all hypnotherapists. Therefore the official price of this seminar is £495.

However, in order to make attendance even more affordable, if you enrol before 28th February 2005, you qualify for the Early Bird Special price of only £295.

This is a one-off offer which applies only to the seminar being held on 7th and 8th May 2005. If you want to attend this seminar when it is repeated in future years, you will of course be most welcome. But you will have to pay full price (and you will still be getting a bargain).

Smoking is the "cash cow" of one-to-one hypnotherapy

This course can pay for itself very quickly. Let me tell you quite frankly - if you don't already know it - that smoking cessation is the real "cash cow" of one-to-one hypnotherapy. You can justify a relatively high fee for smokers, because such clients know they will get their money back within weeks of the session by savings on the price of cigarettes. By getting excellent results in smoking cessation, and successfully marketing to other potential clients, you can continue to bring in those fees year after year.

The financial income that I derive from helping people stop smoking allows me to pursue other projects which do not bring in immediate financial returns. Also, it enables me to continue using hypnotherapy in areas that particularly interest me - such as rapid personal development and mind-body healing - even though relatively few clients attend for those particular issues. 

If you master and consistently follow the practical techniques and marketing methods taught on this seminar, you too can enjoy a secure income from one-to-one hypnotherapy while pursuing interests close to your heart.

Just think how few new smoking clients you would need to get in order to pay for the seminar. Two? Three? Maybe four? When you put into practice the knowledge you gain at this seminar, you are likely get back what you pay for this seminar within three months at the absolute limit - and probably a lot sooner. After that, it's pure profit in your pocket, month after month and year after year throughout the rest of your career.

So send in your registration form with payment - or call me on (020) 7727 6262 with debit/credit card details TODAY - and prepare for a life-changing seminar.

If we haven't met before, I look forward to meeting you on 7th May.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

David Botsford

PS You can save £200 by claiming the Early Bird Special - if you register before 28th February 2005 it will cost you only £295 (as opposed to the full price of £495).