Dear Fellow Hypnotherapist

Many jurisdictions through the United States and Canada are restricting the places where people may legally smoke. Many privately-owned companies, too, are prohibiting people from smoking on their premises. This new legislative regime will lead to huge demand for those hypnotherapists who know how to help people stop smoking and stay stopped. It also offers unprecedented opportunities for entering the lucrative corporate market with smoking cessation seminars for employees who want to quit smoking.

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

Climbing the hypnotherapist's learning curve

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

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

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

Since May 2005, hundreds of hypnotherapists have attended the live Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar. This live seminar has so far been repeated four times at the same venue due to popular demand. Its goal is to enable hypnotherapists to build or expand their practices by enabling your clients to achieve a goal desired by tens of millions people in North America today.

However, dozens of hypnotherapists have said that, much as they would like to have attended, they were unable to do so because of the distance involved, the expense of travel and hotels, family commitments, or the inconvenience for them of the dates when the seminar was held. They have requested that the seminar be made available to them in DVD format as a "seminar in a box".

In response to these requests, it was decided to make a broadcast-quality television programme out of the most recent Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar.

Like me, you may have seen videos and DVDs of hypnotherapy seminars in which the lighting is either too dark or else overexposed, the camera wobbles about and goes in and out of focus, and the sound is so bad that it is practically inaudible in parts. This is often true even where the seminar instructors are some of the world's leading hypnotherapists, and where the content (what you can hear of it) is good or excellent.

I was determined that the recording of the Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar would be nothing like that. It would have to be recorded by an experienced team of programme-makers, with professional camerawork and crystal-clear sound. This programme would then be professionally edited and put onto fully-searchable DVDs with menus. The technical quality would have to be up to the standards required by television companies in their own broadcasts. This product is available to you in the form of eight DVDs, along with three audio CDs and a CD-Rom, as well as over 300 pages of written notes. The "seminar in a box" can be delivered to your door for you to study it in the comfort of your own home and refer to again and again throughout your career.

What makes this product unique - and how will you benefit from owning it?

For most hypnotherapists who work with one-to-one paying clients, the largest group they deal with is smokers. This is not surprising. Smoking cessation is the one area where hypnotherapists - if they are effective - offer clients what must be the most advantageous deal they will ever get in their lives. The client who successfully stops smoking though hypnotherapy adds an average of 8 years to his or her life, saves an average of over $1000 a year for life, massively improves his or her long-term health prospects and gains social, career and family advantages. The total value is almost incalculable. But the hypnotherapy must be done right. Also, you have to know how to educate potential clients so that they believe in what you are offering and pay you money on the basis of that belief.

Charge a substantial fee - and provide excellent value

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

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

The pressure on smokers to quit is increasing. There are ever higher taxes on tobacco. More and more places - offices, buses, trains, aeroplanes, and elsewhere - have already banned smoking before being compelled to do so by law. A man got sacked from his job because a CCTV camera picked up the glare from the cigarette he was lighting as he drove out of the company car park at the end of the day. Smoking is being prohibited in workplaces, including bars, restaurants, offices, factories, private members' clubs and leisure facilities such as bingo centres, snooker halls and bowling alleys). Millions of smokers who have been prevaricating about quitting will now make the commitment to do so. Thousands of companies, too, will need to adapt to the new legislation and will be more open than ever to purchasing smoking cessation seminars run by hypnotherapists who can enable their employees to quit.

In this situation, I am completely sympathetic to, and on the side of, those 72 percent of smokers who want to quit. I am sure that you are too. We as hypnotherapists have an enormous opportunity - indeed, a responsibility - to prove that we can offer a solution that can enable smokers to quit the habit - easily, effectively and permanently. About 25 percent of adults in the US smoke, and 72 percent of that number say in opinion polls they would like to quit. That means there are over nine million smokers who are potential clients for the 20,000 or so practising hypnotherapists. Even if your success is merely average, there are thousands of smokers out there right now who are your potential clients, ready and willing to pay you money to achieve freedom from smoking. If you have a systematic, effective approach which gets people to quit smoking, and if you can convince potential clients of that fact, then you can enjoy a good income for life. If you can build connection with your local business community and provide seminars which enable employees to quit smoking, then you can enjoy an excellent income for life.

The Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar aims to make you much better than average - both at educating smokers so that they choose to come and see you, and at enabling them to quit when they arrive. Once you build a reputation for success, continuous marketing and word-of-mouth brings an increasing stream of clients to your door. The very fact that you helped a friend, family or colleague to quit smoking is itself a powerful pre-conditioning for success. With corporate smoking cessation seminars, once you get good results with the employees of one company, the management will recommend you to other firms and you will become the provider of choice in your area.

The Successful Marketing for Hypnotherapists seminar teaches you how to get paying clients through the door, how to effectively spread the word about your services with low cost, high-impact methods, how to run your own smoking cessation groups where attendees pay out of their own pockets, how to produce and sell your own products (books, CDs and DVDs) and how to get into the lucrative corporate market.

The three things you need to achieve outstanding success

A hypnotherapist needs three things to achieve outstanding success:

1. detailed knowledge of the most effective, proven hypnotherapy techniques for smoking cessation, with individuals, groups and the corporate market;
2. a strategic marketing plan which covers short-term, medium-term and long-term methods of educating smokers to choose hypnotherapy in order to quit, and employers to purchase smoking cessation seminars, and convincing them to select you rather than anybody else;
3. the commitment to master and practise the techniques thoroughly, and to follow through with all aspects of the marketing plan.

The Home Study Version of the Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar teaches you numbers (1) and (2) in detail. You will see and hear actual complete hypnotherapy sessions in which I work with four actual smokers and use a variety of techniques to enable them to quit the habit. There are also full transcripts of these sessions with commentaries in the written notes. There is the equivalent of two complete days' training in lecture form in the DVDs, with each point written up with additional material in the written notes. With regard to the corporate market, the complete text of a talk to business groups, a sales pitch to an individual company and the corporate smoking cessation seminar itself. Complete PowerPoint slides for each of these events are including in the CD-Rom which comes as part of the product. There are is also an audio CD containing inductions and self-hypnosis routines. A bonus is a copy of the acclaimed commercial CD set "Stop Smoking Today" (2 CDs), and a complete transcript of it.

Everything is fully explained and demonstrated in straightforward language, and the DVDs include questions and comments from attendees which are answered in full. Everything is also written up in detail in the ring binders you are given. In addition, the Home Study version of the course includes lifetime e-mail (or regular mail) support: if you have any questions about any aspect of the course, you are most welcome to send them by e-mail and I will answer them. There is no time limit for this support.

This product is a valuable reference resource that you will want to consult every time you help a smoker to quit, or run a corporate group seminar, and whenever you want to build the effectiveness of your marketing.

The seminar actively encourages you to do number (3) - master and practise the techniques, and persistently market even after the clients start streaming in.

What you learn in the Home Study Version of the Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar

Everything is practical and immediately usable with real-life clients. You can put everything into practice the first day after the seminar.

The first and second DVDs contain a complete, live demonstration of a hypnotherapy session with two actual smokers who want to quit. In the third and fourth DVDs, everything you have just seen is then taught and explained in detail. It is a comprehensive, structured, effective and proven approach to smoking cessation. You learn:

• how to "pre-frame" your client to successfully become a non-smoker days or weeks before the actual session takes place;
• how to ensure that the person who books an appointment actually shows up;
• how to instantly build rapport with the client at the start of the session;
• how to give your client powerful expectations for success during the session;
• how to follow a proven, reliable structure for your stop-smoking sessions which you know will maximise success;
• how to effectively utilise your client's communications and tailor the entire session to his or her specific experiences and model of the world;
• how to teach your client simple but powerful techniques to ensure that he or she stays a non-smoker in every possible future situation in daily life after the session;
• how to use a range of the most powerful, effective and rapid trance induction techniques - both direct and indirect - to ensure that your client reaches a satisfactory level of trance to achieve success;
• how to use a selection of comprehensive, proven, hard-hitting stop-smoking "scripts" which communicate with your client's unconscious mind to enable unconscious learning so that he or she becomes - and remains - a non-smoker;
• how to check your work at the end of the session to ensure that the client has indeed achieved the success you have both set out to achieve;
• and much, much more.

The fifth DVD contains a further complete live session with two actual smokers who want to quit. However, this time techniques more appropriate to the follow-up session are used to help them quit. In practice, some hypnotherapy clients who attend for an initial session do stop smoking for a time, but then relapse. This DVD shows you the techniques for the follow-up session in action. Again, the sixth DVD explains everything you just saw in detail. The seventh and eight DVDs focus on practise-building, marketing, organizing group sessions and entering the corporate market. In addition, it is all written up in more detail on paper in the 300+ A4 pages of notes.

You will learn:

• How to provide continuing support to your client after the initial session. Telephone support and a follow-up session. How to reframe the client's reversion to smoking as feedback, not failure. The different types of back-up and guarantees - their advantages and disadvantages explained.
• Approaches and scripts for the follow-up session. How to draw from the client's experience of the first session and its aftermath (even though the client reverted to smoking) and utilize that to achieve the desired positive outcome the second time.
• and much, much more.

This is intended to be your seminar-in-a-box. It is aimed squarely at the hypnotherapist who wants to succeed with smoking cessation clients and advance his or her career by making the most of the opportunities presented by the new laws in 2007 and beyond. This product is entirely practical. It contains no history and no theory.

(Not that there is anything wrong with the history and theory of hypnosis as such, but there are plenty of books where you can read about them. What has been relatively scarce in the hypnotherapy world until now has been practical, hands on information and techniques in which everything - including live hypnotherapy sessions - is presented in detail.)

The purpose of this product is to educate you to achieve the best for your clients and yourself.

Why is this product being made available?

What is special about this "seminar in a box"? How am I qualified to teach it? Why would they be such a valuable asset for your hypnotherapy practice?

This seminar is special for three reasons:

1. Everything taught in this seminar is what I actually do right here in Harley Street every time a smoker comes to see me to quit. You learn the way to deal effectively with paying clients. Everything derives from concrete objective reality. There is no theorising or unproven stuff taken from books. There are no weird and wonderful inductions which may be intellectually satisfying for hypnotherapists (or an ego-boost for the teacher), but would have real-world clients turning round and walking out the door. The hypnotic inductions in this seminar may look unspectacular compared to others you have seen, but they are effective, and they keep the client within his or her comfort zone. Everything is explained and demonstrated in minute detail, so that there is nothing you have to figure out when you go out and do it in practise yourself. Everything is also written up in the binder so that you can look it up when dealing with real clients. However, in case of any questions that do arise, please feel free to e-mail me for an answer. There is no time limit to this e-mail support.
2. Everything in it is unique. When I started in hypnotherapy, I drew from the work of others. But I found that in the light of experience, the approaches taught in books, videos and courses need to be adapted, simplified and strengthened to be effective with paying clients. Over 14 years, I have tweaked and worked on every one of the techniques, inductions and "scripts" - and the marketing methods - to make them maximally effective. No other seminar contains this unique material, at any price.
3. You have a practical plan for getting paying clients which you can put into practice the day after the seminar finishes. We all know that it is possible to have vast knowledge of hypnotherapy but no or very few paying clients to use it with. These seminars teach marketing which gets the most paying clients through your door at the least financial cost to you. Also, it contains all the materials you need to promote your smoking cessation service to the corporate marketplace, and the complete text of the corporate seminar itself (including full PowerPoint visual aids).

How I learned what is taught at these seminars

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

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

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

Except one.

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

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

This led me to conclude that the drawback of using exclusively Ericksonian or "permissive" hypnotherapy with smokers is that they tend to interpret those ambiguous communications as "giving permission" to continue smoking. Indeed, hardly anywhere in the thousands of pages of dozens of books of collected papers, seminars, workshops and interviews of Dr Erickson is there any significant mention of the use of hypnosis to help people stop smoking!

How smoking is different from other issues

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

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

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

Making sure that your client stays a non-smoker

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I built a successful office practice

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

Now I knew that the hypnotherapy I offered would have direct and measurable benefits for my clients. The question was: how do I get members of the public to believe that and to pay me quite a lot of money on the strength of that belief?
I had to build up the office practice from scratch. There was no way the existing clients I was seeing at home would suddenly start paying more than double to come to my office simply for my convenience. So I had to get the word out to brand new clients, and get them through the door handing money to me. And I had to do it quickly to meet the overheads.

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

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

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

Make them an offer they can't refuse

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

Well, I didn't quite go that far. I like horses too much. :) But I did decide to make an unprecedented offer to smokers who wanted to quit the habit. In return for them paying me the fee, I offered them a 90-minute hypnotherapy session, plus a self-hypnosis CD to take home and play, plus an optional follow-up session of 60 minutes. I also offered them a 100% money-back guarantee of their success: if the client reverted to smoking within three months, the fee would be refunded to them in full. (I no longer offer that guarantee to my clients.)

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

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

The techniques and approaches taught in this seminar enable any hypnotherapist - trained or student - to achieve maximum possible success in helping clients to stop smoking. Everything is explained in detail - and is written up in the ring binder as a permanent reference source.

Equally important, the seminar covers effective marketing - how to get the message across to potential clients so that they come in pay you to become non-smokers. You learn short-term, medium-term and long-term marketing methods - and how to create a specific plan to carry out those methods. You learn how to organise smoking cessation seminars for the corporate world - and the complete text and materials of those seminars.

The goals of this seminar are simple - to ensure that after viewing the DVDs, reading the notes and listening to the CDs, you achieve the maximum possible level of effectiveness in enabling smokers to quit - and that your marketing gets you the maximum possible number of paying clients at the lowest possible financial cost to you - and keeps them flowing in year after year.

This seminar is suitable for hypnotherapists - not for people with no knowledge or experience of the field. As a hypnotherapist, already trained and with an existing or developing practice, you are already in a position to benefit from it phenomenally. Even if you are enrolled in a hypnotherapy training school, this product is suitable for you to put into practice once you complete your initial training.

Towards a "gold standard" in smoking cessation with hypnotherapy

There is also a broader purpose for this seminar.

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

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

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

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

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

Also, it is a mistake to stop marketing once you have a reasonable number of clients. This is because hypnotherapy has a disadvantage compared to most businesses. In most enterprises, if you get satisfied customers, you get repeat business. If you are in office supplies and your customers are happy, they keep re-ordering from you. If people like your restaurant, they eat there every Saturday night. If you are an accountant and your clients are satisfied, they keep you on year after year.

With hypnotherapy, the opposite is true. The more effective you are, the quicker your clients leave you. If you enable a client to stop smoking (or overcome fear of flying, or lose weight, or manage stress, or build confidence) that client has no need to come back. So you can be a victim of your own success. Word of mouth does get referrals, but it is not usually enough to maintain a full-time practice, partly because many satisfied clients prefer to keep secret the fact that they have been to see a hypnotherapist.

Offering your smoking cessation seminars to the corporate world is a way of getting around that. If you provide them for a large enough company, they will have many smoking employees for whom you can run more and more seminars. Once you have got good results with smoking cessation, you can offer the same company seminars in stress management, effective communication, sales training and other areas of interest to the business world.

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

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

Now available at a discounted price

So how much does this seminar cost? Those who attended the live seminars paid as much as $1000 to attend the weekend, plus the cost of hotel accommodation, air and train fares, petrol, taxis, restaurant meals and other expenses.

The official price of the Home Study Version of the Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar was originally $595 all inclusive. Of course, it will be delivered to your door at no extra cost, thus saving you hotel and transport costs. Also, the Home Study Version contains detailed extra notes, particularly on corporate smoking cessation, which were not included in the handouts in the original live seminars.

However, you will not have to pay the full price. In order to make it as affordable as possible, the course is now yours for only $397. As soon as your order is received, it will be sent to you the same working day by the US Postal Service. (As each parcel is tracked with an individual number, its location can be traced.)

100% guarantee of satisfaction - or your money back

Also, you are taking no financial risk whatsoever by ordering this course. Your satisfaction is completely assured by a 12-month no-risk 100% money-back guarantee. You can order the product, study it, put its lessons into practice in getting individual and corporate clients and enabling them to become non-smokers, and you must be satisfied that the value you have achieved from the course is significantly greater that what you paid for it. If you are unsatisfied with the course, for any reason or no reason at all, then you may return it at any time up to 12 months from the date of purchase for a prompt and courteous refund, with no quibbles and no questions asked.

But I believe that you will be delighted with the product. My goal is ensure that every hypnotherapist has access to what I think is the most effective, thorough and valuable approach to smoking cessation available today. But don't just take my word for it. Don't even take the word of those attendees who have written comments about the live seminar. Judge it for yourself by ordering it at no risk whatsoever, studying it and putting its lessons into practice in the knowledge that if you are not satisfied with the positive results you and your clients are getting, you can return it for a full refund at any time up to a full year from the date of purchase. Can I say fairer than that?

Please do be aware, though, that success in smoking cessation through hypnotherapy - as in any field of endeavor - takes hard work and commitment. You have to thoroughly master every part of the course and apply it consistently with every client, tailored, of course, for the unique requirements of each individual. But it is not enough to know how to enable clients to stop smoking when they arrive. You also have to commit to extensive, continuous marketing of your service so that potential clients know about your service and understand how they can benefit from it. In order to establish a service providing smoking cessation to the corporate market, you will have to commit to sustained effort to establishing connections with local business decision-makers, getting your message across to them repeatedly and persistently. If you want to ensure long-term success, you will have to keep your marketing continuously active even when you get busy with paying individual and corporate clients. It will undoubtedly be a lot of work, and may well mean getting out of your own "comfort zone".

However, the fact is that you have already made the commitment to becoming a hypnotherapist. The purpose of this product is to make sure that the efforts you put in to mastering techniques and promoting your practice - with regard to smoking cessation - are put to the best possible use.

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

This product can pay for itself very quickly. Let me tell you quite frankly - if you don't already know it - that smoking cessation is the real "cash cow" of hypnotherapy. You can justify a relatively high fee for smokers, because such clients know they will get their money back within weeks of the session by savings on the price of cigarettes. By getting excellent results in smoking cessation, and successfully marketing to other potential clients, you can continue to bring in those fees year after year. Once you get established in the corporate market - and you are getting consistent results in enabling smoking employees to quit - you can build a very lucrative business indeed in the medium- to long-term.

The financial income that I derive from helping people stop smoking allows me to pursue other projects which do not bring in immediate financial returns. Also, it enables me to continue using hypnotherapy in areas that particularly interest me - such as rapid personal development and mind-body healing - even though relatively few clients attend for those particular issues.
If you master and consistently follow the practical techniques and marketing methods taught in the Home Study Version of the Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar, you too can enjoy a secure income from hypnotherapy while pursuing interests close to your heart.

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

So send in your registration form with payment - or order via e-commerce HERE - and prepare for the product which will transform your career.

If you have any questions about the product and whether it is right for you, please feel free to e-mail me at sales@selfhypnosiscd.com, with no obligation. I only want you to order this product when you know that it is right for you.

Always glad to help.

With best wishes,

Sincerely,

David Botsford

PS Remember that you are protected by the 12-month, no-risk 100% money-back guarantee. Order the Home Study Version of the Smoking Cessation Mastery Seminar, study it, put its lessons into practice in the real world, and if you are not satisfied with the results, you may return it any time up to a year after the date of purchase for a prompt and courteous refund. Will this product satisfy your requirements? You be the judge.

PS For a printable version of this letter in PDF format, click HERE