by Niclas Marie

Created on: December 14, 2009   Last Updated: December 15, 2009

How do your clients make an appointment with you today? If the answer is by phone only, you're missing out on a lot of new clients and money. By letting them book with your new online appointment scheduling software, you can earn a lot more each year. Or you can can work less and have more spare time, it's up to you!

Currently, your clients can't make an appointment with you at night, on weekends or when you're on a vacation. You probably have an answering machine that gets all the phone calls. What you might not realize is that a lot of people don't like talking to answering machines. How about changing your answering machine message to this:

"Hi and welcome to my hair salon! I'm busy making a great hair cut on a client, so I can't help you right now. But if you like to get a new amazing look, make an appointment on my website right away!"

Then just add your website address to the message, and the clients will rush in there to make an appointment. You save the time needed to listen to your answering machine, and you got a new customer, which might have hung up if you wanted her to leave a message.

So how much money will this make you? Let's say you charge $80 for an hour of hair styling. Each week you work five days, eight hours a day. This would give you $12,800 a month. Now a problem a lot of hairstylists face is that they are booked at only 60% of their capacity. Also some clients forget appointments, some cancel in the last minute and sometimes you have double bookings. This will cut away another 10% of your income.

WIth just a little effort in marketing your website and your new online appointment scheduling software, your bookings can go up to as much as 90% of your full capacity or higher. This would make you a total income of $11,520 a month, which means $5,120 extra each month. Now that's more than $60,000 a year!

And in case spare time means more than money to you, it's great to know that the $5,120 extra each month would give you 2 days off each week. Don't tell me the idea of working three days a week and make as much money as you currently do is a bad idea! What do you prefer - more time or more money? With an online scheduling software, you can get a lot more of both!

There are a lot of services to choose from. But you should find one that is easy to use and has the features you need. Don't pick the one with the most features, they're usually a lot harder to use. The less features it has, the easier it is to use, and you'll have a great time using it.

When you're set up with the online scheduler, all you need to do is put a "Book now"-button on your site. Your clients will find it and start making appointments. Just don't pick the first scheduling software you can find, there's a bunch to choose from. You will be using it for years to come, so choose wisely!

One last tip - market your website carefully. Except for telling all your clients that they now can book online, try to get to the top of Google's search results. This is vital to your business and the number of appointments you will get. A lot of traffic to your site means a lot of new clients. A good investment would be $2,500 in search engine optimization. Find a good SEO-company to help you modify your website and invest some money in pay-per-click ads. It's usually much better than putting an ad in a newspaper.

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