Write a Mini E-Book: The Easiest Way Therapists Can Create a Passive Income

Jeff Guenther, LPC on Feb 04, 2018

One of my favorite topics is how therapists can create a passive income stream. If you’re a regular reader of my weekly blogs, you have probably already combed through my article on 24 passive income ideas for therapists. If you haven’t already downloaded the full list of 24 ideas, click here to do it now

But I left one idea off the list. And it just happens to be one of my favorites and one of easiest for any therapist to create and start selling immediately. Let’s dive in. 

What scripts are you repeating with clients?

As therapists, we tend to repeat ourselves with clients. A lot. Sometimes it feels like we’re experts at repeating ourselves in slightly different ways every week. Personally, I have embraced this. And I imagine you have too. Clients need to hear things over and over again until change starts to occur. And then, once some positive steps have been taken, you end up repeating yourself over and over again about the next topic. It’s a fun challenge that most therapists begin to perfect as they build their career. It’s also something that we tend to hone because we often end up treating a specific niche, demographic or mental health issue. Which causes us to repeat ourselves even more with the same sort of clients or problems. 

Personally, off the top of my head, I probably have ten scripts, or topics, that I have been repeating in some form for about 10 years. They are about:

  • How to successfully comfort a partner who is anxiously attached
  • How to cope with a partner who is avoidant and doesn’t express emotions freely
  • How to behave more securely in a relationship
  • How to speak up and get your emotional needs met in a relationship
  • How to talk to your parents about emotional pain caused years ago
  • How to identify your most important values in life
  • Ten solid coping skills when having an anxiety attack
  • How to stop comparing yourself to other people
  • How to be mindful and observe your thoughts instead of identifying with them
  • How to figure out when your brain has been hijacked by a repetitive thought and how to get out of it

If I spent another five minutes making the list, I could come up with twenty more scripts I repeat over and over in session. Now it’s your turn. Come up with a list of 5 to 10 scripts you repeat in session. 

Make a mini E-book

Now choose one of your favorite scripts that you feel confident about and start writing it up. Imagine you’re talking to a super receptive client that’s just eating up all your wisdom. Jot down everything you would say to them. Think about all the questions the client would ask you. Write those questions down and answer them. 

Don’t force the writing too much or over scrutinize what you are typing. Just get it all out. Write it in a conversational tone like you would use in session. Or be more clinical and professorial about it. It really doesn’t matter. Just get it out of your head and put it on your computer. 

Your script might be a couple pages long. Or it could be ten pages. Don’t worry too much about the length. Try your best not to have one long paragraph after the other. And do your best to make everything as concise as possible with no jargon at all. If you have to use jargon or clinical terms, make sure you define them. Remember that this should be something people can read through and not feel like it’s too laborious to finish. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t challenge them emotionally. It just means that it shouldn’t feel like they’re reading a novel. 

After you have typed everything up, make sure to add headings and sub-headings so that everything is broken up in to digestible bits of content. After that, you can make the first page of the document into a title page. Your title page should contain a name for your script and your credentials. Once that’s complete all you need to do is export your document to a PDF format and you’ve got yourself a mini E-book. 

How to sell your E-book

Let’s not make this part too complicated. On your website, possibly on your homepage, or maybe on a side bar of every page, you should list all the scripts that you sell. Each script, or a bundle of scripts about the same topic, should have their own page on your website. 

Set up a PayPal Business account. It’s free. And then create a PayPal button for your website that people can click on to send you money. Click here to learn how to do that

When a customer on your website sends you money through PayPal, you’ll get an email letting you know that you have received money. All you have to do is email that person back with a copy of your E-book. Done! Or when they send you money through PayPal you can automatically send the customer to a download page where you are storing your E-book. 

There are also other different options when it comes to selling digital products. If you don’t want to set up a PayPal button or you want to configure it differently, it’s not difficult to Google different ways to sell things and find another way to accept money. It’s just important that you don’t let this final step get in the way. Even if you’re not tech savvy, I have confidence that you’ll figure it out. Or that you have a tech savvy friend that could help you out. 

In my opinion you should price your mini E-book between $5 and $25.

More passive income ideas for therapists

Like I said at the top of the article, I have come up with 24 other mostly passive income ideas for therapists. You can read about 12 of them here or you can click here to enter your email and I’ll send you the full list of 24 ideas. 

Jeff Guenther, LPC, is a therapist in Portland, OR. He has been in private practice since 2005. Jeff is the creator and owner of Portland Therapy Center, a highly ranked therapist directory. Jeff, and his team, have launched a new progressive therapist directory, TherapyDen.

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