We are now into our eighth month since creating the LLC for Massage Professionals of Jackson Hole. This is only issue number 10 of this blog about our experiences so far – and yet I am already able to back-track, learn from my mistakes and assumptions – and share with readers.

Earlier this summer, when I started the Blog, I did so with reluctance – who wants to be a blogger? Who wants to spend any more time sitting in front of a computer (why many people come to us for massages these days)? Who would ever read this stuff  even if it could be found among the millions of blogs that now completely bung up the internet? In fact – I even wrote that the reason for writing the blog and including strong key words (for us they’d be massage, body work, deep tissue, Jackson Hole, Spa, and so on…) – has nothing to do with human beings actually reading the blog – but it’s all for search engine spiders / robots / crawlers that comb web sites and blogs looking for rich content.

Therefore, I admit, I wrote a load of drivel stuffed full of key words. I didn’t really care if the blog had form or consistency in style or in the way I set up the headers – because nobody would be reading it. You will notice I still don’t have a fancy header or any graphics and so far I have decided that images and lots of linking etc. is too time-consuming and a bit tiresome. After all – how many images of anything to do with massage are truly unique? And how relevant are fancy graphics when what I really need to spend my time on is writing the blog and getting the rich text in there?

But I was stunned to learn that people (so far other massage therapists) DO read this blog and have relevant, positive comments to make: Jen Ryan who is a life-long Jackson Hole and Star Valley massage therapist, and Yvonne Clapper of Massage by Yvonne in La Habra, CA, both commented on my recent blog post: Gaining Confidence as a (Male) Massage Therapist.

Jen and I work together at The Spa at Spring Creek Ranch in Jackson Hole. Again – I was completely taken-aback that somebody would read my blog and was grateful that I had put a little more care than usual into what I wrote. Jen loved it and was just generally very complimentary – most important to my confidence as a massage therapist and a startup business owner.. I made a note to myself that I need to pay more attention to this blog-writing thing.

Then Massage Professionals received an e-mail from Yvonne Clapper whose response to that same post about homophobia in the massage industry (not wishing to be massaged by a male therapist) is here: I really enjoyed reading this.  I’ll be sure to look you up if I’m ever in the area!  I am a massage therapist, but must admit I have a hard time relaxing when I receive treatment from a male therapist.  School helped with this tremendously, however, I still have insecurities when it comes down to it.  I agree 100% with your reasoning, but would like to add body image issues, and a history of abuse to your list of reasons.  Thank you for sharing! Thank you Yvonne this is a most useful and informative insight.

The learning curve in starting this new massage business in Jackson Hole is steep – at this very early stage I have already learned that not only are people reading this blog, but that their input is genuinely worthwhile.

In Massage Professionals JH Blog Post No. 11 I will describe how this blog, combined with Rochelle’s phenomenal job of keeping up with a strong Social Media campaign is helping to boost our position in the search engines.

Be Well,

Hamish and Rochelle