Leveraging YouTube to Build Your Therapy Business with Dr. Marie Fang

Michael Fulwiler [00:00:36]:

This is heard business school, where we sit down with private practice owners and industry experts to learn about the business of therapy together. I'm your host, Michael Fulweiler. Building a successful therapy practice requires not just clinical skills, but also an understanding of business and marketing. Today's guest is doctor Marie Fang, a progressive christian therapist passionate about empowering folks who have been misunderstood and marginalized by the church. In addition to being a private practice owner, Doctor Fang also hosts a popular YouTube channel, private practice skills, to help fellow therapists navigate the complexities of private practice. She has been a longtime partner and supporter of Heard and I was recently a guest on her YouTube channel, which was a lot of fun. In our conversation, she shares her experiences growing up in a conservative evangelical context and how it influenced her approach to therapy. She also discusses the challenges she faced when starting her private practice, the mistakes she made, and the lessons she learned along the way.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:01:38]:

She shares her strategies for growing her YouTube channel to nearly 60,000 subscribers, the types of content that resonate with her audience, and how she balances being a therapist and content creator without burning out. Here's my conversation with Doctor Marie Fang. Enjoy. Doctor Marie Fang, welcome to the show.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:02:00]:

Hello. Thank you for having me.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:02:02]:

Super excited. Yeah, super excited to have you. You know, it's not an overstatement to say that you've helped thousands of therapists through your YouTube channel. You've also been an incredible partner for us at Heard. I've talked to so many therapists who heard about Heard from your channel, so just so grateful for you and the relationship that we have.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:02:25]:

Yeah, likewise. And that's very kind of you. I like to hope and think that that's true. It's nice to hear it. Yeah, I'm glad to be here.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:02:34]:

We're going to talk about YouTube. We're going to dig into that. I also want to talk about Doctor Marie Fang, the therapist and private practice owner. As well, I think a great place to start is why you got into this field in the first place. You've talked about how you grew up in a conservative evangelical context. Could you talk a little bit about what that experience was like for you and how it's impacted your career as a therapist, particularly the population that you work with in your practice now?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:03:06]:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we could spend hours on this, and I won't, so I'll try to do the abridged version. Yeah. The origin story for how I got into the field really originated from when I was 14. I had a severe panic disorder, and happy to elaborate on what that looked like, but it was just incredibly debilitating. Lasted for years, and I had a really bad experience, one session with a therapist who was genuinely terrible and inappropriate. So I decided to go to the library and see if I could learn anything myself, and I did CBT, systematic desensitization on myself, and it worked. I loved it.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:03:47]:

I was obsessed. And so I knew from 14 I was going to be a therapist. But of course, the journey evolved from 14, and it's shifted over the years. So I first specialized in working with anxiety, but then I started to find over time that marketing myself as a christian therapist at the time that a lot of the church clergy, church leaders that I was working with who were coming in for anxiety were also experiencing a lot of other things below the surface. A lot of folks were closeted LGBTQ Christians who couldn't come out. And so I realized this was a trend, and that started influencing my interests as a practice owner as well. So my specialty definitely shifted over the years. It wasn't, like, overnight, but it just kind of gradually moved towards that increasing interest and passion of mine to serve folks who, whether they identify as LGBTQ and Christian or just feel misunderstood or marginalized by the church in different ways because there's unfortunately, a lot of ways that that can happen.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:04:52]:

So that's the short version.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:04:54]:

So, jumping ahead, you go into private practice in 2012, I believe.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:05:00]:

Yes.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:05:00]:

Could you walk through what that experience was like and kind of what the steps you took were to start your own business?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:05:09]:

It was such an accidental experience for me, which feels odd to say it that way, because I know it can be so much work and so intentional, and I was just looking for a postdoc at that point. So I had graduated, but I wasn't licensed yet, and I needed to get my hours to be licensed, and I applied all over. The only place I could find was in this private practice setting. But it turned out that I loved it so much that then once I was in private practice, there was no looking back. So it sort of found me in that sense. But, yeah, getting started. On the one hand, I had lots of handholding because I had a supervisor. It was a group practice, and so there was a lot of kind, loving, supportive people.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:05:53]:

And on the other hand, and it felt like I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, and I'm just gonna make up a bunch of stuff as far as, like, how do people get clients do this thing? And I pretty much tried all this stuff for, like, two, three years before. I felt like, oh, there's this. It's not random. You can have a system. So I have plenty of stories from that phase, if it's helpful to share. But, yeah, that's how it found me.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:06:19]:

Yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to dig into that. What were some of the early challenges that you faced and kind of how did you overcome them?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:06:30]:

The number one challenge was, how do I get clients? End of storm. If I could just get clients, maybe I'll be okay. I think by month six, I'd had maybe two intakes. Month six of private practice. So, yeah, the biggest challenge for me was how do I get people to find me and then actually book an intake with me, let alone stick around? I don't think those first two even came past one or two sessions either. So that was the biggest challenge, hands down. Plenty of other challenges on the list. If you'd like a list, I'm happy to give a list.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:07:07]:

Yeah, let's stay there. So how did you try to get clients? What did you try and did it work?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:07:14]:

Mind you, this was 2012, so it was a little bit of time ago, but also for 2012, I was using some pretty outdated techniques, I would say, to try to get clients to find me. So one of my favorite strategies, favorite in that it was so terrible, was sending out snail mail flyers to try to get clients. Because I was marketing myself as a christian therapist, I was sending snail mail flyers to churches or, like, similar kind of faith based groups and organizations. Say, basically, hey, hey, if there's anyone come in that might need some therapy, miscellaneous therapy from an intern, feel free to send them my way. And I'm quite sure I got zero clients from that. It was a lot of work, so it felt like I was doing something. And then I also tried filling my practice through workshops. So offering free workshops with churches, other faith communities, to the leaders, basically, of those communities, and then hoping that those leaders would send folks my way that they were leading, but it turned out that a lot of the leaders themselves wanted or needed some therapy.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:08:20]:

So that actually did have a little bit more of a fruitful practice filling component to it. But yeah, those were some of my most memorable ways of trying to fill my practice at the time.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:08:31]:

What were some tactics that did work for you?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:08:34]:

I think at that time, that was pre Marie's SEO days, which is now my favorite. So I didn't have a website. So at that point, probably the most successful strategies. Washington word of mouth networking type interaction. So let's say it was a workshop that I gave. I would end up talking to people after the workshop who had maybe specific questions about whatever is going on with their family member situation that they're in, and then those people might tell a friend or somebody they're connected with, like, oh yeah, you're looking for a therapist. There's this person. So at that point, the word of mouth ended up sticking a lot better than any of the other stuff that I was actually really trying to do.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:09:16]:

And it was still a slow stretch at that point since I wasn't being intentional about word of mouth. But that was how most of the clients that ended up coming in ended up saying, like, oh, yeah, that pastor so and so, or whomever, you know, they went to that workshop, or they told me they met you somewhere and they gave me your name. So that that stuck the best.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:09:36]:

Did you say that you didn't have a website initially?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:09:39]:

Oh, no, I did not have a website. Again, this is 20. It's like 2012. So it's sort of like probably everyone could have had a website in 2012. Like, we're not talking about 1990, like, very much. Websites were a great tool for businesses, and I did not have one. I think if I had one, that would have been a great idea. I think I would have just crushed it quickly.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:10:06]:

But I was featured on the website of the group practice, which I think, even though I'm joking about it being 2012, I think that's still very common for group practices to have just one bio page or even just a list, one page with all of their profiles on it, and there's a missed SEO opportunity there. So most of the people who booked with me were not finding me from any sort of online presence at that time because I didn't have one.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:10:35]:

Right. That's so interesting, because today that's the first thing that most therapists do, right, is create a website. It's so much easier now through Squarespace, you know, Orlando wix, or WordPress just to create a simple website for yourself. And I would say that's a great first step for folks who are going into private practice or thinking about going into private practice is getting your website and that URL set up, because that's your real estate on the Internet, is how I like to describe it. I'd love to follow that line. I'm thinking, did you set up a website at some point? You mentioned SEO. Is that something that you started to learn about and invest in?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:11:19]:

Yeah. My journey towards finally building a website was actually quite long winded. Eventually, word of mouth really did keep me full in that practice. So it was a group practice that I was working in. Once I got licensed, I became an independent practice owner working in the same building as this group. So. But I just. I didn't have a website.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:11:40]:

I did not have a website.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:11:42]:

How did people contact you? Did they call you or email you or.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:11:46]:

I did have an email address. So I can claim that I had an email address and a phone number. Most people would email, and it was, when I say word of mouth, I mean, like, a new potential client is a friend of a friend of another client and they're removed enough that it's not some sort of conflict of interest for them to come through. But, yeah, once you get a few folks on your caseload who are very therapy forward, pro therapy advocates, they'll kind of announce to all their friends, like, therapy is great. And then people eventually go away, who's your therapist? And then it starts to spread. So that did work for me in that first practice. So to answer your question about when did I have an online presence? It was only in 2016, four years after I started private practice, that I launched a website. And the reason why I did is because this whole time, I'd been working 50 miles away from where I lived, and I realized I can't move my practice because I'm just going to lose all my clients and I'm never going to be able to replicate this.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:12:43]:

So I'll just commute forever. But eventually I decided, you know what? I have a full practice in San Francisco. I was living in San Jose. Can I just one day a week try subletting an office to see what happens? And so I started subletting an office in San Jose. And that is when I, like, really hit the ground running with, like, let me learn about online presence. I started a website. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was consuming any free resource I could about SEO.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:13:14]:

At the time, there weren't many therapists at the time talking about SEO, but there certainly was a lot of information about SEO in general that worked. It was like, no therapists are thinking about SEO in 2016. So if you just pop up a website, throw in a few keywords, and put up some blog posts, you're going to be showing up at the top of search results pretty quickly, like, in months at that point. So I know that's not always true everywhere, all the time, but that's where it was for me at that time. And so I thought, oh, my goodness, this whole time. And finally, my clients were, like, super tailored to, like, this is my specialty, this is who I work with. And people contacted me were just such a good fit. So at that point, I was like, this is a game changer.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:13:57]:

Why aren't we all doing this? There was no looking back after that from the SEO point of view, for me, yeah.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:14:03]:

I want to talk more about content creation. I think that's a great segue into YouTube. Before we move on, are there other challenges that you experienced? We've talked about getting clients. What about how much to charge or how to pay yourself? How did you think about the financial side of your business?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:14:22]:

We could talk forever about all the hard parts or even just, like, how do you even logistically get the business license and all the things you need to just start a business? But the setting your rate piece was really challenging for me. And I mentioned I was an intern when I started in private practice, so I wasn't even in charge of setting my rate when I started. And this is again dating me, 2012, my supervisor told me as an intern working in San Francisco, I should charge 120 per therapy session. And I remember I heard that number and I was like, I can't charge that much. That is so much. I was thinking, like, 40. And he's coming back. He's like, if you charge 40, then I can't pay you.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:15:03]:

Your overhead costs are more than $40 an hour. And, you know, just, that was so helpful to me to have somebody there who'd been doing this for decades at that point to say, no, you have to charge enough to pay overhead and then, you know, actually take a paycheck at the end of the day. So that was a helpful starting point. So once I had gotten licensed, then it felt like a natural jump to say, okay, I'm going to increase my rate now that I'm licensed. And then after that, I would just increase my rate every year by enough to at least meet inflation plus a tiny bit. And I kept that up until private practice skills started paying my bills, and now I've just. I've been chill about my rate. But, yeah, it was a big hurdle to overcome setting my rate at the beginning because it felt like I'm not allowed to charge that much money.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:15:50]:

But it's sort of like you want to pay your rent, right? You're wanting to maybe keep doing this for a while, and you have to pay your bills, so you have to charge enough for that. Took so long to wrap my head around.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:16:02]:

Could you talk a little bit more about that? Because that's a common thing that I hear this feeling of I'm not allowed to charge that much, or this feels too expensive, or could you talk a little bit about the money stuff that comes up around that and how you handled that?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:16:20]:

Yeah. Well, I certainly can speak from my own experience, and I think there might be some folks who relate to how I saw things at the time, at least. I mean, the messaging that I'd had, and I really internalized, too, is that I might say, I still believe this. We do this not because we're trying to get super rich. If you want to get rich, there's a bunch of other professions you might want to try before becoming a therapist. We've. We become therapists because we genuinely want to help people. And so that messaging was something that I received quite a bit of, felt aligned with why I was becoming a therapist.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:16:55]:

The piece that I think gets missed in the messaging is like, and you're a person, and you also deserve to pay your bills, and that you don't necessarily have to. Just have enough to barely, maybe scrape by while carrying student loan debt, probably credit card debt while you're at it, probably not saving up for retirement, which everybody else in professional careers fully expect to be able to do, especially if you've accrued all this debt in a graduate level training, you gotta at least pay that off. So to come into a field and then make less than folks who have no graduate level training often, or maybe barely the same, it just doesn't make sense. But in my head, that's what I felt like I was supposed to be earning. Because if I earn anything that feels like slightly extra, beyond my most, most, most basic needs, needs, then I'm being greedy. I'm just. I'm in it for the money. I don't really want to help people.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:17:54]:

I just want to cash grab and run away from helping people. Just pocket it. And I have that picture of, you know, whatever cartoon duck it is, like, rolling in their coins. Daffy Duck. Or Donald Duck. I get them mixed up, whichever criticism.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:18:11]:

Actually, not sure, but yeah, I know what you're saying. Yeah, I'm glad you're bringing this up, because there's this narrative that if you're a helping professional, whether you're a therapist or a nurse or even a teacher, that you're not in it for the money. And it feels like an excuse to underpay people. And I think that that's something that we should challenge. Like as a therapist and a business owner, it's okay to make a good living and also serve your community and the population that you work with.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:18:43]:

And I think the piece that has stuck with me now that I've been doing this for a little more than a year or two, is if you want to be a good therapist, actually providing effective treatment for your clients. I mean, maybe you can kind of hang on for a brief period of time, maybe earning such a small amount of money, but eventually most people's expenses go up. If you grow your family or you realize you do want to save for retirement at some point or buy a house or whatever it is you, whatever your goals are, most of it costs money. And what a lot of therapists end up doing is seeing more therapy clients to pay for those things and then seeing so many clients that you just are burnt out or you don't have time to be a person, live out the other values that you might have. And so you're going to see your treatment quality suffer over time. That's just because we have limits. We're human. So just endlessly adding more clients to our caseload, at some point it's going to break down.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:19:40]:

So if we pay ourselves well enough, we can also offer the best treatment, in my opinion.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:19:46]:

Definitely. I think there's two points there. One is that if you're only charging $40, $50 a session, you're going to have to see more clients in order to pay your bills. The quality of therapy that you're providing is not going to be as high then just emotionally. It also can lead to burnout. And if you burn out and end up leaving the field or closing your practice, and you can't help anyone. Right. So it's about finding that balance.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:20:18]:

Yes, absolutely.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:20:20]:

Is there anything that surprised you when you went into private practice that you weren't expecting?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:20:26]:

Personally, I was surprised by how much I loved it, even with the struggle and everything. And if I could go back, I'm sure I could streamline it and make it way less filled with struggle. But I thought I was going to go into this internship and do my private practice thing and then go back and I was going to do community work or agency work, and I just realized that working for myself personally just fit so well. I enjoyed it so much. So that was probably my personal biggest surprise, was just like, I don't think I can go back. I love this so much. But of course, I was surprised by a lot of the hard parts as well. I thought you could just put a profile on that leading online directory and then you would fill up in a couple of months.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:21:10]:

Isn't that what other people do? And if it's true for some, it wasn't true for me. So just kind of realizing it's hard to fill your practice and realizing that was true about other people that I was working with as well just kind of like, yeah, it takes a long time to build up enough of a caseload, and that's just kind of how it is. That was a perspective that I heard, at least. So that was also a surprise.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:21:34]:

At what point did you start private practice skills?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:21:37]:

I started private practice skills in 2018. And the kind of origin story of that was I'd always known every, ever since before graduate school, I want to say that I wanted to teach someday. So I figured that at some point in my career, I'd start looking to see if I could teach graduate level classes or maybe college level classes. That just seemed like I knew I was going to love it. I don't know how I knew, but I knew. And so in 2018, I got the opportunity to teach a graduate level MFT course. And I loved it. I loved it so much.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:22:09]:

Just completely opened up a completely different part of my brain and way of interacting with people compared to therapy. And I knew once I did it one time, it was an obsession. Like, I had to teach more. I don't know how to explain it sounds maybe unhealthy. Maybe it was unhealthy, I don't know. But I just felt like I had to keep teaching, and it pays so poorly. So if I did the math, it was less than minimum wage per hour between, you know, prepping and lecturing and grading and office hours and all the things, which for a while I thought, okay, I'll just do this on the side. But I also was wanting to hopefully have some children and Beverly more flexible with my hours when I had children.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:22:51]:

And so I thought, you know, I don't think I want to choose into teaching graduate level courses while I have children because it just consumes my whole schedule and it's not even paying bills. So that's when I started to get a little creative and think like, well, I like working for myself in private practice. Can I work for myself as a teacher? So I thought I would just dabble, I should say I was exploring different possibilities. And specifically, there was one night when my husband and I were on vacation. Something was making, making it hard for me to sleep because I kept thinking about, like, I want to teach, I want to teach, but how am I going to make this work? And so I literally woke up at 04:00 a.m. while on vacation with my husband. And the whole thing for private practice skills, like, it felt like magic. Like just downloaded into my brain.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:23:35]:

And I got out of bed, busted open the laptop in our Airbnb, and I like, I bought privatepracticeskills.com. i got the name on YouTube and just like, I'm doing this and I wrote out like, what are things that people might want to learn about in private practice? And I came up with 50 video ideas just sitting there at 04:00 a.m. and I thought, like, I don't know if it's going to work, but like, I have to do this. So that's where, that's where it started.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:24:04]:

Amazing. Were there other therapists that were doing this at the time? Like, were there therapists who are on YouTube creating videos for other therapists?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:24:14]:

Yeah. I certainly wasn't the only therapist at that time making videos. I'd say there was more of a podcast presence at that time of therapists teaching about private practice, which I found I benefited from. Right. Is super useful. I wanted to take a different approach to YouTube than I at that point, seen other therapists take. I had already had two other YouTube channels prior to that one that were unrelated to this topic. And so I had known enough about, like, how to edit a video a little bit, still very, very, very amateur.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:24:47]:

I mean, I still am, but just I knew enough about how to string together a video that I hadn't quite seen other therapists do. So I wanted to kind of create at that point, like, snappy content delivering, like, here's the five steps to do this thing or the five things to think about and deliver it in five to seven minutes or so at the time and that I hadn't really seen other people doing yet.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:25:11]:

What were the topics of your other YouTube channels?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:25:15]:

So back in grad school, this is like early YouTube days. I start, I want to say 2009 or 2010, I started a YouTube channel about being gluten free because I have celiac disease. And back in 2009, no one had heard about celiac disease, and almost no one had heard about gluten free. Now it's all trendy, and I love it. This makes my life so easy. But at that point, it was incredibly difficult to figure out how to eat, basically, and be gluten free. So I wanted to teach people, as I learned about, you know, what are the little tips and tricks of how to be gluten free, your favorite products? And then the next YouTube channel that I started was. I want to say it was.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:25:54]:

Was it 2016 or 2017? It was in the realm of starting my practice in San Jose and really learning about marketing and all of that. I started a channel that was mental health focused. It was a little too broad. It was like, tips and tricks to be your best self today or something like, that was my catchphrase. And even that channel, if I look back at those videos, they feel quite cringy. I ended up privatizing both of those, because then it gets confusing. You just see my face all over the Internet, but I'm talking about all kinds of different stuff, so just focusing on this stuff now, but all of that definitely helped prepare me, because at that point, I probably made at least 500 videos on other YouTube channels. So I feel like that's an important thing to name, too, because some people are like, you seem like you know what you're doing.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:26:39]:

Like, I did this for 500 videos, and they're real cringey. They're real, real cringey. I'm gonna tell you. I can't watch. Oh, gosh, it's so bad. And. But I think we're all cringey when we, like, turn on a camera and we're like, I don't know what to do. And then we just act weird.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:26:57]:

It's what humans do. So, you know, you learn over time how to kind of hone it in a bit.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:27:03]:

Well, definitely. And anytime you start something new, you're gonna be a beginner, right? And you're gonna be learning, and it's gonna be awkward and weird. And I think something that I appreciate about your content, and I know other therapists do as well, is, like, it just feels very authentic, and it feels very you. Could you talk a little bit about that? Like, how you think about your voice and how that comes across in your content.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:27:27]:

I appreciate you saying that. I mean, that is as an enneagram four. You just kind of stroked my ego. Like, oh, you think I'm authentic? Thank you. That is such a priority. Of mine. But it's also something that I teach on quite a bit because I fell into this trap and I see this so over and over and over again as therapists, when we're trying to market ourselves, whether it's on a website or anywhere, we can fall into this trap of, like, I call it like academic professionalism. And we sort of lose our sense of authenticity and professionalism.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:28:02]:

Academic language, they have their place. If you are writing an academic paper to be published, throw in all your academic, professional language, by all means, have at it. But it's when we exclusively present ourselves in this very kind of jargon filled professional academic language that we, I think we kind of create a mask and we hide ourselves. And for most of us therapists, we're not talking to our clients like that in session. It's sort of like you have it on your website like that and wherever else you might be kind of putting yourself out there, and then you show up with your client and you seem like a very nice, normal person talking like how you talk or like how I'm talking to you right now. So I'm always advocating for leading with authenticity, whatever that looks like, starting with our language. But I mean, it opens up so many possibilities starting with what specialty you want to pursue. You know, you don't have to just mimic whatever you see other people doing, but that you actually have something special and unique to you.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:28:59]:

So that's a value that I hold and I try my best to just like, the effort comes in releasing the COVID ups or like the things that we use to hide. So. I already forgot the question, but.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:29:11]:

No, I think it's a. No, no, just about your. Yeah, your tone of voice. I think that's an authenticity. Right? Like, I think it's a great takeaway for listeners here is that it's just, it's not just with YouTube content, right. Or video content. It's how you show up online across the board on your psychology today profile or on your website, like speaking directly to potential clients using language that they understand. I see so many therapist websites who, in their copy on their site, they're talking about themselves and their academic background and the certifications and the trainings that they have, which are all great and important, but for someone who's looking for a therapist, they're not necessarily going to relate to that.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:30:02]:

That's not going to connect with them. To your point, you wouldn't speak to a client in that way. So why are you speaking to them on your website in that way?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:30:13]:

Absolutely. And I think for me and for so many of us, the reason why we use such professional academic language, where we focus on our certifications, on places like our website, is because we believe that if we just presented as us and the certifications are there and they're important and we can put them at the bottom somewhere. But if we just led with who we are, that maybe no one would want to book with us. And so it's really working through our own insecurities, which we all have them, but to just realize, like, I have something unique and special, and not everyone's gonna be my perfect client, not everyone's gonna wanna work with me. But if I present who I am, those people who really would benefit from working with me will see that, and it might get lost in the clouds of, like, I did all these trainings. Look how qualified I am. You end up losing the clients that you might really be able to help.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:31:05]:

I want to dig into your creative process as a YouTube creator. You mentioned that the first night that you had this idea for private practice skills, you sat down and wrote 50 topics. Where did those topics come from? And now that you. You've made over 300 videos, where do you get ideas for video topics?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:31:30]:

Yeah, it's really, really changed over the years. So initially, the question I was asking when I was sitting down at 04:00 a.m. writing down topics was, what were the things that I was struggling to find when I started private practice? And it was kind of two rounds. It was like the 2012 private practice when I was interning. But then again in 2016, it'd be like, I'm learning about SEO that's so hard to find, or I have to go in these nooks and crannies of the Internet, but I'm not hearing therapists always talking about it, or if I can find it, it's not concise. I don't just want the information delivered quickly. So that was the mindset I was using to come up with topics then, and also very much using an SEO framework, which I would say in 2018, YouTube was. I would view it much like a search engine where you want to use SEO and keywords in order to be found.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:32:22]:

I need people to find me in a search query. So I was doing a lot of SEO research as well to see what are people typing into YouTube? Are there videos on that already? If not, let me make it. If there is one, how do I make it better? So that was the strategy I used for the first two, three years, and just new questions would keep popping up and eventually you build an audience and people leave questions in the comments or send you emails and, okay, add it to the queue of topics and YouTube's really changed since then, and I've really changed since then. Just how much information is available for therapists about private practice has completely changed, which makes me so happy. I do not want to be the person at the leading edge of this. I want there to be so many different resources and now there are. So it feels like I can kind of fill a different hole or need rather than kind of leaning in further to the private practice stuff. Especially because now, even though I still own my own private practice, my income now comes from content creation primarily.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:33:21]:

And the private practice is very part time. So I don't have the most cutting edge private practice in 2024 stuff in my tool belt. So maybe somebody else who has it can lead on that front. So it really has shifted over time. I don't know if it's. I'm happy to speak on that if it's helpful too.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:33:39]:

Yeah, I definitely want to talk about the income piece. I did just want to say that as we think about growing this show on YouTube, you're definitely the model for us. We look at private practice skills, you know, that really like such a great, great channel, something we aspire to be, you know, hopefully in, you know, two to three or five years from now, so.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:34:03]:

Well, may it be so for you, but yeah, I just feel like it's like I'm little old, me just making my videos over here. Glad some people find it helpful or watch for whatever the reason. Reasons. But yeah.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:34:16]:

How have you been able to grow the channel? I'm curious, like, when you first launched it, I imagine there's probably a process where for a while you're getting like ten views on every video and it's like your friends and family, right? And so, like, how did it grow over time? You mentioned SEO. So people are either searching on YouTube, people may not realize this, but when you search on Google, YouTube videos also show up in Google search results, which you know, is something to think about when you're titling your videos. But I'm curious, like, what that process was like for you, not just in the content creation, but the content distribution as well. And like, how did you grow your following on YouTube?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:35:00]:

One thing I had as an advantage was because it wasn't my first YouTube channel. I just knew at least the first ten videos, you're just not getting any views. Maybe there's like the lucky few that randomly get that viral video, but I'd done this before and not that I built up the prior YouTube channel to huge numbers. I mean the second one got to like 6000 or 7000 subscribers, so that's nothing to like scoff at. But it was the same story. You just, you post stuff and no one sees it. And that's part of the origin story of every single YouTube channel, every single website. I would say too, if you start blogging.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:35:35]:

So you just assume that you're going to keep plugging away and in time one, the algorithm observes this person and keeps posting stuff. So wonder what that's about. And if it all starts to fit into a theme, the algorithm can start to get a sense of what you're about. If you think of your YouTube channel like a tv show or a talk show or something, you kind of have the topics that you tend to focus on, the algorithm picks up on it. So I trusted that enough. And between that and targeting keywords, I figured that my videos would start showing up somewhere in search results when people were looking for help with the problems I was talking about. And so then on top of that, the way the algorithm works is if, let's say only two people click on your video, if those two people stick around and watch the whole thing, or even better, if they subscribe or they like or they comment, the algorithm remembers that and maybe it bumps it in front of five people next time, and five people is not that many. But if those five people like it, well, next time it's going to be ten and next time it's 100.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:36:37]:

And so if you just make great content that's successful for however tiny your audience is, even if it's two people, the algorithm is, for better and for worse, smart enough to pick up on all of that and we'll keep pushing it and learning and figuring out who wants to watch your stuff. So I just hoped and trusted in that system. So you're right. The first, I think I went back not too long ago, a couple weeks back. Like what kind of views was I getting on my channel? Channel? And I think it was still three months in. I had like maybe four views a day across at that point, 2030 videos, right? So yeah, it was once a week, maybe it was, maybe it was like 15 or 20 videos or something. It was very, very slow at the beginning and then somewhere around six months and stuff kind of started picking up little by little. I think it was exactly a year in that I hit 1000 subscribers, which I was not planning on ever getting to, but I was like sweet.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:37:33]:

This seems to be working year to hit 1000. And then what was the growth trajectory like after that? Did it kind of slow and pick up or was it kind of steady?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:37:44]:

I am a slow and steady wins the race, girl. I'm not looking for the like super exponential growth. So I think it was a year that I hit 1000 and it was just under two years that I hit 5000. And then thereafter I've had the same rate of growth. And now we're almost six years in this summer. It has not gone faster, it has not gone slower. I just get, every month, I get 1000 subscribers a month. So if you wait long enough, eventually you get close to 60,000 subscribers.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:38:14]:

But I'm not looking to multiply that because the strategies to do that, it would be less authentic for me to kind of speak more to the masses and I'm not super interested in that. So just keep plugging away little by little and the growth still comes.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:38:28]:

Yeah. I think that patience is really important because people get impatient, right? If they launch a podcast or they're trying to grow a following on Instagram, Instagram or they launch a YouTube channel and it's not growing as fast as they would like. And my advice to folks is really to think about it in years and decades. This is something you want to be doing for five to ten years versus something that you're looking at on a weekly or monthly basis. You really just need to commit to it. And it's about the consistency over time.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:39:01]:

Yeah. And I think that applies not just YouTube. I've heard it from people. They start their new website for their private practice. They posted two blogs and it's been two weeks. And they say, I have two visitors on my website. What am I doing wrong? And I'm like, you're doing great. That's great.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:39:16]:

If you could post a couple more blogs over the next couple months and it'll pick up to have that expectation managed, it takes a long time for things to build up. As a point of reference, when I started the YouTube channel, my plan was for the first year year that I would see almost no traction that I would just post for a year, not plan on making any money or anything like that. Just, I'm going to post for a year and then I'll see if there's any traction happening. If I'm getting some subscribers, then I'll keep going. And my hope was to start earning a little bit of income second year, and I did. I thought this was a lofty goal, but I was like, I'd love to learn earn six figures by year three. So it is still like three years is a long time, but also six figures is nice. I did reach that goal financially too.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:40:03]:

So it's like, well, we go to grad school for years and delay income. We're good at doing that. So it kind of feels similar, like I'm just going to invest in something for a long time and the payout will come later.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:40:15]:

Let's talk about that. So can you explain how income generation from YouTube works? Do you have sponsors of your YouTube channel? Do you have ads? How does that work?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:40:28]:

Well, I don't even want to say recommendation. My personal approach that I have enjoyed and I think is probably most sustainable, most replicable is to have diverse revenue streams even within just YouTube. So all of those things that you said are true about where my income comes from. And I think we were just talking offline. A lot of people have the misconception that when you say you make money from YouTube, they think it's from the YouTube ad ads and you do make money from those, but it doesn't tend to be that much. And it's also super variable. It just depends on the market. So, you know, even now there's some months where my YouTube ad revenue, so the income you get from the like, commercials that they put next to your videos, it could go up to close to 2000 a month, which again, not quite enough to quit your job over, but a nice bit of pocket change for sure.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:41:22]:

But some months it's, it's like 280. It's like not reliable. And I've been doing this now for almost six years. Right. So it's super variable, but that is one stream of income. Sponsors are another reliable stream of income as well. And then I'd also say affiliate revenue is a really strong stream of income. And all of these have fluctuations.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:41:46]:

So if you have a lot of them, then it starts to stabilize over time. One drops when the other goes up and you don't see these big hits and misses over time. And personally, I also have a product that I sell, which for me is in the form of courses, but that also feels really reliable in the sense of like, if YouTube just dies tomorrow, I still have my email list, which is almost as big as my YouTube subscribership, and I still have my website, which probably brings in more revenue for me, honestly, than YouTube does. It's just a little less sexy to say, like, I make money from SEO versus from YouTube. But honestly, if my YouTube channel died tomorrow, my income would take a hit, but it would still be probably at like 70% or something of what it is now just from my website and my email list and being able to have products and affiliate links there as well. That wasn't a quick answer, but that. That was the quick version that I.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:42:49]:

That's a great point. We talk about the difference between a borrowed audience and an owned audience. And so your audience on YouTube or Instagram or on social media is one that's borrowed. Right? Like, people are following you on a platform, there's a third party in between you and them. So if YouTube. YouTube were to shut down, or Twitter, for example, was acquired by Elon Musk, and now they're making all these changes. And for me personally, that's definitely impacted my engagement on Twitter. And, yeah, TikTok for sure could be banned, right?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:43:27]:

Yeah, they can all go away at any moment for sure.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:43:30]:

Like ten years ago when I was at the Gottman Institute, Facebook was a huge focus for us, and we built this big Facebook page and then, and it's like overnight we weren't even able to reach people who were following our page. And so it's very important to move people from a borrowed to owned audience, right?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:43:51]:

Absolutely.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:43:52]:

And so getting people on an email list, because if they're subscribed to your email list, you do have direct or direct relationship with them. Right.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:43:59]:

No one can take your email list.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:44:01]:

Exactly. Like, Gmail is not going anywhere.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:44:03]:

Yeah.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:44:04]:

How have you built that email list? How have you been able to not just have the YouTube channel, but also the email as well?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:44:14]:

That was actually the first paid course that I ever took because I made a rule for myself, like, don't spend money on this business until it makes money, and then I'll put that money back in the business. So the first paid course that I spent any money on for private practice skills was how to build an email list was related to that. And so I learned a lot from that. I still use all those tools and the general ideas for me through SEO. If people find in my website, if I can deliver additional free content, it's in exchange for their email, then I offer that. And so it's often tools that people are searching for in a Google search. My biggest, we call them freebies, right. It's free in exchange for an email.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:44:55]:

My biggest freebie is a giant PDF checklist of everything you need to know to start your private practice. And that that alone gets a thousand downloads a month. And every download is a new subscriber. On my email list, people are free to unsubscribe, and plenty of them do and I'm like, great, enjoy your checklist. Love it. I do that all the time, or I subscribe and unsubscribe for free stuff, but the people who want to stick around will stick around and get my content and it keeps growing over time. So I have a lot of these freebies kind of floating around that hopefully the freebie itself is helpful and also brings people onto the email list who hopefully some of them might like to.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:45:32]:

Stay to get tactical here. I think this is a really cool flywheel that you've built. You've created SEO content. People come to your website from Google Search. They see that you offer a free private practice startup guide, so they download that. Now they're on your email list. Within that guide you have affiliate links. Full disclosure, you're an affiliate partner of us at Heard, so there's a link there so you can monetize that way.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:46:04]:

Now that people are on your email list, you're able to send them your latest YouTube videos and then they subscribe to you on YouTube. You get them into your ecosystem, and then in the future, if you have a course that you're offering or you want to publish a book, you have this engaged audience that you've built through delivering value over time. And it almost gets to this point where it's self sustaining. I mean, you have to continue to create YouTube content. Right. But it's kind of this wheel that's running on its own at this point, I would imagine.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:46:41]:

Absolutely. I think that's an important thing at this point. If I did quit making YouTube content that it would take a while for my income to really drop. I mean, everyone's free to leave. Maybe it wouldn't, but no, it would.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:46:52]:

Still be a valuable resource.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:46:55]:

Yeah, it's kind of like because it wasn't a get rich quick or it's based on a viral thing that then drops off. It's spread out now in so many places that it would take a while, or even just the existing YouTube videos will still kind of sustain an audience in a way. So investing little by little over time takes a long time. But then it goes the other way too, that if you ever stop investing, it kind of would take a long time to really decelerate too.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:47:23]:

Now that you've been doing this for a while, are there common misconceptions about private practice that you've seen that therapists have?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:47:34]:

I think we all have some kind of misconception and just kind of what flavor does it come in? Some of the ones I hear the most I think people tend to sway towards one extreme or the other in this particular misconception of either. I thought it was going to be easier to start my private practice, and now I'm overwhelmed because it's too much. Or I don't think I can do private practice because I think it's going to be way too complicated. I'm not going to be able to figure it out. So I'm not even going to try, even though I kind of. I really would want to. So those are some pretty common misconceptions that I hear both ways then. I also hear misconceptions about, like, you automatically are, like, wealthy and private people think that you charge this rate, whatever that number that looks so big, and those people are just rolling in the dough.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:48:25]:

But if you break down the expenses and all of it, and that person is still earning, just hopefully a reasonable living, but they're not rolling in the dough, typically you have to be charging a lot more to be just wealthy in the sense that I think people are imagining that you're just pocketing the entire cash rate. So that's also a misconception that I hear a lot. There's many others, but those are some of the common ones.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:48:55]:

It's such a mindset shift, right? Like when you think about charging $100 per session, it's not the same thing as having a salaried position and earning $100 an hour, right? Like just for one, you're not billing 40 clinical hours a week, hopefully, right?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:49:13]:

Please not.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:49:14]:

And then when you're self employed, at least 30% off the top needs to go to taxes, right. Depending on where you live. Of course, if you have state income tax and then you have all of your expenses as well, you're reinvesting in your business. And so I think just like understanding when you're thinking about setting your rate, which is something we talked about earlier, right? Accounting for all of that.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:49:38]:

Yeah. I always encourage people to kind of anticipate in advance. And of course, you can't know perfectly, but try to figure out what are your expenses, what is the tax rate, if you have a goal, annual income amount, to do the math kind of backwards, like, okay, if I want to earn this much, my expenses are going to be here. I only want to see this many clients a week. Okay. Actually, if I want to still make that income after everything's set, done. Oh, that number is a lot higher than I maybe would have thought if I just tried to come up with a number. Best guess, without doing the math.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:50:10]:

So I always encourage people to sit down, do the math. And if math is not your friend, find a friend who knows math. Do it together.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:50:17]:

Yeah. Or a service like Hert. Right. Which can help you with that stuff.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:50:22]:

Absolutely.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:50:23]:

I'm curious today, what are some of the challenges that you're facing or things that you're thinking about now that you've been in this for ten years?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:50:33]:

I have to be honest, I'm so fortunate. Sure, there's challenges, no doubt, but this feels like I found the cheat code. I won the lottery. I don't know what you want to call it, but I genuinely do love this setup for me. I work part time, even though I have these two businesses. I see clients one day a week, and I do private practice skills. I mean, some weeks I feel inspired, and I'll spend three and a half days on private practice skills stuff and squeeze in some extra clients, and then it's a full time week. But it's not unusual for me to spend two days on private practice skills.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:51:06]:

And then I'm hanging out with my kids, I'm gardening, I'm going to the beach, and that's my life. So in that sense, as far as, like, the bird's eye view of running the two businesses and balancing it out, I've just been super fortunate at this point that it's arrived at such a level of balance to be able to do what I love in my workplace, pay the bills and, like, have fun and do other stuff that I feel passionate about. But as far as challenges that I see, I mean, things that I think about, and I don't know how normal this is, but I'm terrified of having too many followers on YouTube. So there's this point where I'm, like, I always say, if I hit 500,000 subscribers, I'm gonna quit. And I don't know if I ever get there. Who knows if that's inflated to even say that. But this idea of, like, I feel I'm such a sensitive soul, so I. I can't read all the comments on my YouTube channel when I do.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:51:57]:

Most of them are so nice, but I am that person where it's like, if there's one not nice comment buried under 50, just super nice ones, like, I will remember that. I will stay up at night thinking, did I miss something? And I don't want to do that, but it happens. So if it starts getting big enough that I just. I can start feeling overwhelmed. Like, oh, no, there's so many people. Make sure you're kind of stewarding whatever you're sharing with the world. Well, is this the most important thing to talk about? So that's kind of maries flavor of challenges, which are all very, very privileged challenges to have. But those are kind of the category of things that can keep me up at night, so to speak.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:52:39]:

I'm glad you brought that up because there is this darker side of content creation, growing an audience, even going viral. It's happened to me wherever. It's like you put something out on social media and it starts to get beyond your immediate circle, and then you start to have trolls and people who are just, like, commenting negative stuff, and it starts to get very weird. I don't know if that's happened to you or not. And it just takes a toll on you. And it's something that I don't think people think about. It's like, oh, I want to go viral. I want to have a million followers.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:53:17]:

But the larger your. Larger your audience becomes. Right? Like, there's like a negative side of that as well that I think is important to manage.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:53:25]:

Yes. I actually, I most enjoy the videos that get less views relative to my average because it tends to be, like, my audience. And then the videos that I have that have the most views, like, far above at my average, you end up finding a lot more weird stuff in there. And I just, like, don't even. I try to just not even look at the comments because I know myself. I just get lost in them.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:53:49]:

We're coming to the end of this conversation. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing so much knowledge. We like to end with a segment which we call the footnote. And my final question for you is, what is one thing that you want therapists to take away from this conversation today?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:54:10]:

Thank you for asking and for having me. I was thinking on this question, and the answer that came to mind immediately is the one that still stuck. And we got to talk about it, too, today. If I could give one tidbit to every single therapist, private practice, content creation, agency, work, if you're still in school, whatever it is, is the importance of authenticity. And I know that's one of those kind of cliche, jargony words that gets thrown around and what do I really mean? But to focus on leading with your values, who you are, what's important to you, I mean, even down to, like, how you dress or speak to, of course, stay professional. But it's sort of like professional for you. Like, be yourself. And that's one of the really wonderful advantages of our profession, is that when we are ourselves that's when we're most equipped, I think, to not only help clients and be successful in that way, but also also things like fill our practice or grow our YouTube channel or whatever else might be there.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:55:11]:

And I think it's really easy to try to hide who we are and replicate something we thought we saw someone else being successful somehow. Let's try to be like that. And it's more helpful to say, like, what's my personal secret sauce? And lean into discovering that if you're not sure what it is.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:55:27]:

I love that. Thank you so much. If you're watching this on YouTube, go to private practice skills. Subscribe to Doctor Marie's channel. We'll also link it in the description in the show notes. Where else can folks connect with you if, say, they want to learn more about courses that you offer?

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:55:44]:

Oh yeah, you can always check out my website, privatepracticeskills.com and there's a courses tab there if you're curious about courses. I also started podcasting, I guess sort of accidentally so you can find my private practice skills podcast as well. And wherever the podcasts are located, Apple and Spotify, I think so those are some good spots to find me.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:56:07]:

Great. We'll link to that as well. Thank you.

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Dr. Marie Fang [00:56:09]:

Thank you.

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Michael Fulwiler [00:56:10]:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Heard Business School brought to you by Heard, the financial back office. For therapists, visit the Heard resource hub at joinheard.com to support you in your journey as a private practice owner. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you in the next class.