Lisa Hanfileti from Insights for Acupuncturists wrote Complementary & Alternative Marketing: How to Attract New Patients, Market Your Practice, and Earn Passive Income With Your Acupuncture Website. In it, she details how she made $11,168.81 in her first year online, working part time.

The best part is, it’s passive income. She’s setting up things once, but will be paid for them with almost no ongoing work. She provides a valuable service by sharing her expertise and recommending products/services that will help her website visitors.

What’s not made clear in the book is that she made her passive income with her Insights-for-Acupuncturists.com website. This is different from her clinic’s website, which did not make nearly as much. Insights-for-Acupuncturists is tailored to acupuncturists who are looking to build their practice.  This is a specific group with a specific purpose.

It’s vastly different than the wide variety of people who are looking for a solution to their health problem.  Lisa obviously has expertise and credibility with acupuncturists, because she’s gone through the same struggles.  However, you might have more work to do to earn same expertise and credibility with your website visitors.

While the book claims you can have local patients but global customers, I’m a little leery of this approach. Every patient you have represents an average of $150-$450 in income, and even more if you’re good at getting referrals (explained in my book).  By selling them a $40 product, you may be costing yourself that $150 to $450 (on average) if you lose them as a patient.

The way I see it, the purpose of your clinic’s website is to turn people into patients as soon as humanly possible. It’s almost a race against time. If they don’t become your patients while it’s still on their mind, every day, hour or even minute works against you. People get distracted, get busy, forget what they were originally thinking, or just plain change their minds.

I can’t say for sure. It’s possible I’m wrong. I would love to be wrong.

However, I’ve yet to meet an acupuncturist that actually makes a decent income from selling products from their clinic’s website. If you’re one of them, please leave a comment below! What I’ve seen so far is that people who sell things from their website don’t even make the money (or time) back that they invested in setting up their store.  That’s why we don’t support online stores at Acupuncture Clinic Websites.

That being said, you do have very specific experience and expertise as an acupuncturist.  There’s no reason why you can’t turn this into your own source of passive income.  There are many people out there searching for what you know.

My suggestion would be to have a separate website tailored to your specific niche.  Perhaps you work with people who need stress relief or stress management.  Or you help women with fertility.  Or you specialize in another area.  You can turn that expertise into income while helping people.  That’s pretty much what most acupuncturists want to do!  Even better, it’s passive income.  If you’ve read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you’ll understand why this is important.

Lisa’s book is a great starting point for this approach.

However, in this case, my website service is NOT for you.  Acupuncture Clinic Websites is focused completely on getting you more patients.  Nothing else.  This is on purpose. I realize I’ll lose customers for pointing this out, but I’d rather you have the best chance possible of making a passive income if that interests you.

So instead of using Acupuncture Clinic Websites for passive income, I recommend Site-Build-It, which is the service Lisa uses.  Site-Build-It actually focuses on passive income, just as my website service focuses on getting patients.  Even if you only have a passing interest in setting up passive income, I suggest checking them out.  Here’s their guide to being an affiliate, and here’s their guide to selling a service.

The touching part of Lisa’s story is how she went through difficult times when she was barely able to run her clinic.  If she knew then what she knows now, her life would have been much easier.  You can read her story here.