You are here:Home Archives for Bonnie
February 13, 2012

A Picture is Worth Money (to the artist)

copyright on art photos onlineArtwork makes your website look great.  I do acupuncture. I also do art.   I think of myself first as a writer and as a photographer or photo artist.   I make money off the images I create.  I have them online in order to sell them.   If someone were to steal the images and use them on their website, I would lose money.  However, many people think it’s okay to do so.  They would never consider themselves thieves.   They just don’t understand fair use and copyright.

In one online conversation,  someone recommend that practitioners building a website just go to Flickr and download images for use.  Many artists use Flickr to display their images and promote themselves.  They have their images copyrighted.  It is not okay to go to Flickr and download someone else’s images and use them on your website without permission.  Love the image? Contact the artist.  Some newer artists may allow you to use the image with just a link to their website or have their name in the corner and a website link back.

Artists can watermark their images with a copyright.  The problem is that you can’t always see the details of the image when the watermark is there.  For that reason many artists don’t want to do that.   I use a service that I can have people automatically download after they have paid for an image.  I can’t watermark that image or people wouldn’t be able to download it.  This is true for a lot of artists.

Images are not that expensive to purchase.  Fotolia.com, Istockphoto.com, Dreamstime.com are all places where royalty free images can be purchased for use on a website.  Each image has a license attached.  If it says you can use it for commercial use, you can buy that and use it on your website.  If you won’t want other people using the same image, you can pay more for exclusive use.  The downside of sites like these is that the artist gets very little.   If you purchase a $10.00 item, the artist might get twenty cents.  That means they have to sell a lot of photos to make a living.  However, it is a legal use of the image and is better than searching online and stealing from someone else.

I am working on creating stock photography for acupuncturists and will sell it off this site.  I hope to keep prices low, like the stock sites but I will be able to make more money with the images.  They will be allowed on your brochures and on your website.  They will not be available for use on marketing items.  I create marketing items. I am very protective of what I do because that’s what puts food on my table.   This is true of every other artist out there.

What can an artist do if they find you’ve stolen their art? Or will they find you’ve stolen their art? Many artists do image searches online to find if their image is being used elsewhere. If they find you have done that and do not have permission, first they will send you a letter.  If that doesn’t work, they can contact your website host and complain. Many hosts will remove a site with copyright infringement.  This is particularly true of sites that are business sites rather than small personal blogs.  It is a time-consuming process to work out the details of what you need to remove in order to get your site back online.  It’s better to not have this happen in the first place.

Non artists may think this is harsh and that artists shouldn’t be so territorial.  However, images are an artist’s work.  It is what they are paid to do.  Often artists are barely making it.  The artist can’t afford to look the other way when their work is stolen.  Please use images fairly.  Not sure?  Check sites like this one for fair use.

 

Filed Under: General, marketing notes 4 Comments
February 8, 2012

Making that Connection

Creating ConnectionsI started creating my artwork and marketing materials to reach potential patients who had never tried acupuncture.  I started with my midwest relatives in mind.  Not all of them. Some of them would happily try acupuncture.  A lot of them (and read A LOT because the families were big), would never try it.  They have a niece, cousin, and grand-niece who practices acupuncture and can answer all their questions but they would never really grasp it.  There was this attitude of,  ”There she goes again talking about that weird stuff she does.”

What I didn’t get until recently, nor do many acupuncturists, is that there are people for whom acupuncture is so far out of their experience and their life that they can’t even imagine it being for them.  This wouldn’t matter except that there are a lot of them.   Those same people are often getting a little older and have lots of chronic health problems that acupuncture could help.

Educating them about how acupuncture works, doesn’t work.  After all, they know the basics of illegal drugs but that isn’t part of their experience either, really.  They’re “normal” people.  They are not a Hollywood star, an Asian immigrant, a university professor, a rich person, a well-traveled person.  They are just themselves and they may not even know the kinds of questions you would ask an acupuncturist.  They don’t know how to form a bond of trust with the medicine.

There is this story that says when the large ships that Columbus sailed to the New World on, the Natives couldn’t see them.  It wasn’t that they were invisible, but the tribes had never seen anything like it so their brain didn’t even register these ships.  I have no idea if this is true.  However, as an acupuncturist, sometimes it feels like people are often blind to the successes of acupuncture because it’s too different for them.

So how to make that connection?  Talking to people in their language is a good start.  This means that they don’t have to learn anything new to understand that acupuncture can help them. It’s not about educating them to acupuncture, but habituating them to the idea.  It’s about reaching them on an unconscious level.  That’s what I seek to do with artwork.  I’m a huge fan of having acupuncturists who see a broad cross-section of people having familiar touchstones in their offices, so that the office isn’t all about Asian beauty and Feng Shui.  Not everyone is comfortable in that setting.  Even one picture or a few magazines that speak a common language can go a long way to making the patient feel more at home.

It’s a tough line to walk to be who you are and embrace all that you are as a practitioner and still make that reach over to the person who has trouble accepting it.  If the profession is to grow then more practitioners need to offer that helping hand, to show people that acupuncture isn’t just for other people but that it can be for them.

 

 

Filed Under: Acupuncture, marketing notes Leave a Comment
February 6, 2012

Facebook and Your Practice

There are a lot of acupuncturists using Facebook.  There are acupuncture groups where acupuncturists can join in discussions about cases, insurance questions and case-law.  My school has both a general Facebook group and an alumni group that is closed to all but approved people.  I see lots of practitioners with their own Facebook pages.

I find it interesting when practitioners want to share their page with other practitioners.  It’s not that it’s a bad thing but is this really the best use of the page?

A Facebook page can be a quick and easy way for patients for find you.  You can offer quick tips about what’s happening at your local practice.  You can keep updates about the weather. What is happening in your community.  It’s probably far more effective for patients for the practitioner to share with local businesses than with acupuncturists from across the country.

I do follow lots of practitioners. I’m looking for acupuncture news.  I want to find news that’s unique to practitioners and see who is doing something novel. Unfortunately all this following means that everyone seems to be doing the same thing.  I find it ironic given that most practitioners strive to be unique.  While many articles are for the general public and talk about acupuncture, often these kinds of articles get tiresome for patients.  Patients want something that touches their lives.  Finding local news can be a way to engage them and get conversation going.  Conversation on the page can be very helpful in the long run, especially if the practitioner can monitor it.

Moving beyond Facebook to other social media is important only if you, as a practitioner enjoy that.  The best social media advice I ever got was to do only those things that I liked and forget about the others.

 

 

Filed Under: Acupuncture, General, marketing notes Leave a Comment
January 31, 2012

Choices: Is it Too Little or Too Much

Making choices in your acupuncture practiceI’m thinking about a number of things in my life.  In growing my business I had some resistance to doing some stuff suggested–adding products and the comment was that it sounds like you’re afraid this could get to big.  And yes, that is true. I have other things I want to spend time on too.

On the other hand, I realized as I was slow to find space in my new larger home that I have a lot of space and that creates its own indecision.  No longer to have to stuff what I can where I can in the closest to the most useful place, but I can plan where I want things to be organized. I can plan how I want to use the space.  It’s an unusual feeling.  This means that I have so many decisions to make about those small things, like extra light bulbs and batteries (which my husband purchases at Costco regularly) that my house still is not quite home.  But it’s getting there.

I don’t have to have things done perfectly.  There are places that will need to be re-arranged.  There are things that I might swap out at a later time when I re-organize and know where I’ll be using things most.  This is far easier to work with than the fear of something being too much.

Again there are decisions about where do I want to focus my energy.  What is it exactly that I want to do.  In an acupuncture practice it seems like we take on all of it without choice because there isn’t enough money to not do it all.  Some people find others who will work as contractors for percentages, like insurance billers.  Others hire employees.  It’s important to set up your business so that you are doing that which you love most of the time.  There will always be tasks that need to be done by you that aren’t as fun, aren’t as enjoyable.  However, really get in touch with those tasks that you dislike the most and get someone to help you with those.

Filed Under: Experiences, General Leave a Comment
January 25, 2012

Warming Foods: The Good and The Ugly

Winter Sugar CravingsYang deficient patients need to eat warming foods.  We think of foods like chicken or ginger or perhaps garlic to help warm their spleen yang.  These foods help digestion.  It will warm the body and increase the energy.

I mostly eat okay.  This winter, after having a little too much extra food over the holidays I was starting back on a decent diet and limiting my intake of simple carbohydrates when we were hit by a winter storm.  At first, as it snowed outside I enjoyed watching.  I had some lunch.  I decided to treat myself to a kombucha.  As the snow continued for the next two days I found myself with the increasing urge to bake.

I grew up in a home where my mother offered baked goods on a daily basis.  They were always homemade and she used the best ingredients possible.  By best, I do not mean the most healthful, but the best ingredients that would make the best food.  At some point in my childhood she discovered that Crisco was easier than lard.  By the time I was a teenager a chocolate cake might come out of a box. I remember sitting in the kitchen watching her or at times helping with things that needed extra hands.

The snow brought that back.  After fighting the urge for most of a morning and into the late afternoon I baked some simple cookies.  And I ate.  And ate. I found that I couldn’t get enough of them.  I’m yang deficient. I was cold.  After feeling badly and wondering what was off on my hormones and how could I correct this, it occurred to me to wonder, as I shivered under covers when the power out later that I was surprised at my chill given the sugar I had eaten earlier. It then occurred to me to wonder, was the sugar craving my body’s way of trying to warm itself when there was cold outside?

This didn’t make the sugar binge okay with me, but it gave me an aha moment.  Perhaps our cultural love affair with all things sugar is really our body’s attempt to balance an imbalance. The cold, quick foods so often eaten and the heavy carbohydrates that further inhibit the spleen means that most people in my office were, to a great or lesser extent, spleen qi deficient and often spleen yang deficient.  While there are far better foods that would warm my body, sugar is a food my body has found earlier than it has found many of the other warming foods. Perhaps therein lies the craving.  Maybe my body is taking its limited knowledge of balancing and attempting to make a balance, despite the fact that sugar will cause so many other problems.

Certainly I know to avoid sugar.  Certainly I mostly do.  But sometimes something comes up with a strong craving and I give in.  This gives me another question to ask myself before giving in.  I can consider why now?  Maybe it’s the weather.  Fats are often helpful to manage sugar cravings.  Fats are also very warming.  I wonder if that’s one of the reasons they work to limit sugar cravings.  Although sometimes, fats just aren’t as good as sugar!  Oddly, my choice was peanut butter cookies, so I guess I had some of both!

Filed Under: About Disease, Acupuncture, Experiences, General Leave a Comment
January 23, 2012

Three Reasons To Hire Website Help

Bonnie Koenig, Creative WebsitesSmall business owners, such as acupuncturists often talk about doing their own website.  As someone who runs a small website business sideline, I’d like to point out several reasons not to do that.

First, will you actually create and maintain the website?  Lots of people think about making a website.  They may buy the domain name and look into hosting but never go any further.  If they do create a website, often it is a static site that they then forget to update when things at their practice change.  They may have people listed as being at their clinic who left years before.  Maintaining a website as well as creating one takes time.  Is that what you want to focus on?

Second, do you really know what you are doing?  Many people think they know what they are doing, but really no matter how good the template software that comes with some hosting companies, you can’t make it look as good as a professional.  The longer I’ve been doing websites, the more easily I can pin point those that are done by a hobbyist and those that are professionally done.

Third, if something goes wrong with your site, can you fix it? Do you want to take the time to fix it?  I was reading where one person was certain that an increase in visitors that came from his website was because he changed the name of his clinic.  A good webmaster could have made the clinic name work.  First they would have made sure all the special keyword tags and descriptions focused on the location of the clinic as that’s how someone would search.  Then the webmaster would have made sure there were sitemaps submitted to Google.  Finally, if google was still ignoring the site, they could have found out why–direct from Google.   Sites do get blacklisted.  It’s the domain that gets blacklisted and that can carry over to the new owner of the site.

Say, someone owned mysite.com and it was a spammy site with lots of things Google doesn’t like.  It might get blacklisted.  The spammer drops the site and moves on.  I come along with my clinic named mysite.  I find the domain name  mysite.com and buy it, having no idea of the history.  Google doesn’t know it’s changed hands and it’s going to take a long time and a lot of work  move up in the search engines because of that.  In fact, many people who make money on the web will change the domain name rather than put up that fight.  A good webmaster can think like that. They can advise and work with things like that.

If you’re doing acupuncture do you really want to spend the time learning this and checking it out?

My final issue is this. An acupuncturist trained as an acupuncturist.  A webmaster also studied and trained.  It becomes disrespectful to think that as a hobbyist you are going to do the same job as well as professional.  Both professions are art.  A poor website may not be life and death — or maybe if you have  a service that will save their life and the patient can’t find you, it CAN be. Hire out to people who do the work.   They have the time.  You pay them the money.   Focus on what you are passionate about.

 

Filed Under: Acupuncture, marketing notes Leave a Comment
January 18, 2012

Stop SOPA Now

Please check out the internet links on SOPA.  We can’t allow the United States to censor our internet.  STOP SOPA NOW.

Filed Under: General Leave a Comment
January 16, 2012

When your Goals Conflict

When Goals ConflictI’ve often struggled with success in many areas of my life.  One idea that often comes up as I try and work with that issue is that are the conflicting commitments.  How many patients come in and want to lose weight but also want to eat the sugary carbohydrate rich diet that made them fat in the first place?  The foods taste good.  We’re committed to enjoying our food.  We may be more committed to that than to losing weight.  Recognizing the commitment inherent in overeating (it could be anything from enjoying food to emotional self soothing) and then working with that to see which is more important–the commitment to be at a healthy weight or the commitment that allows the overeating–can be the key to getting to where you want to be.

I was thinking about this again while reading the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.  When staring Apple, Jobs wanted to do a number of things.  He wanted to change the way people thought about computers.  He wanted to put computers on the desk of every person.   He wanted to make a computer that anyone could afford to have.  There were some other goals, but it was interesting to me that he wanted to be the computer of the masses.

I love Mac products.  I’m of an age to have been a geeky techy person when the Mac was new.  I remember being there when a friend got the first Mac and everyone gathered as he removed the cover around to look at the signatures embedded there.   The Mac is a good machine.  It is not a cheap machine.  I can get a PC with a bigger hard drive, more memory and an equally fast hardware loaded with software for about 60% of what I would pay for a new Mac.   Office software is typically $10 to $30 less on a PC than on a Mac.  Back when you purchased PC games for use on your computer, Mac games were often $20 higher and took an extra 6 months to come out.

The Mac is a good machine.  Jobs did that.  He made a great machine.  I’ve had Macs still run after 10 years of hard use.  One of the ancient Macs was at an office where I worked.

Macs, however, are not affordable for everyone.  This was one commitment that Jobs couldn’t keep.   His main commitment was in building new and innovative machines that worked and worked well.   The commitment to being a machine for every man fell by the wayside.

The question becomes, does this make him less of a success?  I doubt anyone would say it did.

As we step back from our conflicting commitments, perhaps it’s time to take a look at those we kept to ourselves and how we can make ourselves proud rather than focusing on where we failed.  I doubt Jobs ever looked twice at the fact that at one point in his life he wanted to make computers for “the masses” and instead turned out a high-end product that not everyone could afford.  He went with what was a priority to him and didn’t question when something was not aligned with what he really wanted.

 

Filed Under: Experiences, General Leave a Comment
January 11, 2012

The Story of Wind-Heat

The Story of WindThis is the first in a series of acupuncture stories that are simplified stories about health and disease from the paradigm of Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Liberties are taken for the benefit of the modern reader so these should not be used to diagnose or treat oneself, unless one is already an acupuncturist and understands the medicine at a deeper level.  These stories are meant to be enjoyed and, perhaps, to make us think of health and dis-ease in a different way.

This is the story of Wind-Heat.

On a warm day in early fall, when the leaves have started to turn but the air is not yet chill with the breath of winter,  the squirrels enjoy the sun while packing up the last of the harvest that will see them through the winter.  People are walking, turning their heads to the sunshine, taking of jackets to absorb as much sun as possible. Even Wind comes out at this time.

Wind wafts through the trees, into open windows and even a little ways down chimneys.  Enjoying the sunshine, it’s not angry or driven but merely playful.   Here and there it tickles the back of an exposed neck.  And here and there, exposed necks are far more exposed than they think, holding open doors for Wind to enter the body.  Like a playful kitten, sometimes Wind inadvertently closes the door behind him and is trapped.

Locked in the body with no way out, Wind hammers at the eyes and the person has a headache.  He moves more quickly through the body and after his sun warmed flight, he’s hot..  He sees the narrow passage of the throat as potential way out and runs up leaving behind a sore throat.  Alas, he is trapped there too.  He tickles the nose and although his friend dampness gets expelled, he is still trapped.

Wind sinks into farther into the body, leaving the body tired and feverish with his heat and despair.

Fortunately for Wind, there are those who know what to do to restore the balance.  The acupuncturist and herbalist offer treatments that open the body’s doors so that Wind can escape.   As he leaves, he takes away his extra warmth, so that fevers come down and throats are soothed.  The body moves into true rest rather than the fatigue of Wind’s despair.

And that is the story of Wind Heat’s Invasion of the Body

Filed Under: Acupuncture, Stories Leave a Comment
January 9, 2012

Acupuncture Lessons Learned from My Cat

The Water Type CatI have a young cat who has not done well with the two moves in three months that we went through.  He mews constantly at night.   I’ve had him to the vet, the animal communicator and a friend of a friend is doing some shamanic work with him from a distance.   The general impression is that this cat is terrified.  He is afraid to the core of his being.  He doesn’t even know what it is to feel safe, although since I have had him he has always been a safe and loved indoor only cat.  One of my other cats is very easy-going and my Siamese was more into withdrawal from him than any aggression when she was upset by his presence.

Clearly, he’s a water type cat.  I have no idea how he will come into his wisdom but I am working with him to feel safer.  It’s hard to watch him, knowing that many of his problematic behaviors stem from fears.  I’ve leaned a few things to remember in working with him.  First, he might be fear based, which suggests kidneys, a good play time workout does wonders for him for the next evening.   My husband has been doing some clicker training with him and I think this builds some self-confidence and does wonders for him.  I’d tend to think of those as more liver related but it seems to help the kidney fearfulness. Perhaps because the liver is stronger and can feed back to the kidneys the needed energies to handle what is going on.

I think we all need to remember to treat the whole body in any patient.  It’s important to remember how even the smallest changes in organs that don’t seem part of a diagnosis may change the whole picture.   Very often in diagnosis, we try so hard to only treat what is really necessary without seeing that building up another organ that may need just a little attention can be the key to healing the whole body.

The issues this young cat have are great but I have hopes that something will work for him. I am incredibly grateful to the wonderful people who have just stepped in and offered their assistance to me.

Filed Under: Experiences, General Leave a Comment
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »