About

Hi – I am Julie Onofrio -the creator and writer for all of this website. I have been a massage therapist since 1987 starting out with 250 hours of basic massage training. I started working for myself right from the beginning. There weren’t any jobs back then at all except for a few contractor jobs. I went to massage school because I had been working in photography for over 12 year and was burned out. ( I didn’t know anything about burnout back then but I should have known it wouldn’t be the first time!) I mostly worked in customer service after working for part of my career there in the dark rooms developing prints for advertising, weddings – you name it. Everyone needed everything yesterday. I had just started taking an interest in health and had started running regularly and eating healthy. One day I read about massage school on the back of a local newspaper. The ad said something like “go to massage school and learn about massage and health.” I had only had one professional massage before in my life and had mixed feelings about it. I was bruised so badly I could hardly move my shoulders. I am not sure why actually but I just did about 2 weeks of research about becoming a massage therapist asking a few massage therapists if they were making a living and how they were doing it. I was in massage school within those two weeks and never looked back.

But I sometimes think that if I had known how hard it was really going to be and back then there weren’t any books or websites or anything on marketing for massage businesses. Being a massage therapist was more of a lifestyle choice – to have the freedom to live simply and come and go as I pleased. I didn’t think about making tons of money- the freedom is what I was looking for.

I started my business renting a room from a health club with a friend for $100 – I think we split that! With all of my customer service background I think building a practice came easily except for the fact that I was also an introvert and shy to top it off! My friend left to go off to other things a year or two or three…I can’t really remember but then I was the only massage therapist at the club. The owner started catching on to how popular massage was and started charging more. I started paying a percentage and when I got really busy I found that it was too much to be paying so I went off and rented space from a doctor at first and then an acupuncturist and then later another massage therapist. I never had my own space and always rented from someone else who held the lease making it cheaper to run a business. I still rent to day but now I only work 2-3 days a week seeing 12-16 clients a week. I write on the other days for my many websites.

My first site was www.thebodyworker.com – (You can see what it looked like in the early days and see it’s progress at the Internet Archives). I started it in 1999 when websites were not the thing to be doing. Heck – my friends kids taught me how to use the computer. I use the click and go method and that always seemed to work out. If something went askew I learned a bunch about computers! I started that site basically because I was burned out from doing massage and was having some minor but annoying health issues. In the middle of a long series of training with the Zentherapy Institute (an offshoot of Rolfing) in about 1998 I was hit with a bad case of vertigo that left me incapacitated for weeks on end unable to work. It ended up coming and going for about 10 years but somehow I was able to get the website together. Actually it came about because a friend of mine had asked me to create an apprenticeship program for her o go through to get her massage license. She had extensive medical background and didn’t want to go through the whole training. I started collecting info about what I would have to teach her and looked into applying for the apprenticeship program option but decided it was too much jumping through hoops to get accepted so I just one day decided I would put it all into a website. I can remember getting my first server and I was scared to death to upload pages because I thought I would break the internet. Well the internet of course survived and so did I! I just kept adding info as I could. I did it just to keep myself going. I didn’t make any money doing it. I just did it for fun as a hobby.

Then in about 2002 or so I had been reading about Site Build it! for a year or so and finally decided to try it. Site Build it! is a webhosting system that teaches you how to create websites on topics of interest and teaches you how to make money doing them. I started with my first ebook – The Massage Career Guide – The Truth About Becoming a Massage Therapist. I started selling copies of it a month or so after starting my first SBI! site – www.massagetherapycareers.com (See the history and progress of this site in the Internet Archives. )It wasn’t making me rich but it was paying for the site and a few dinners! So I kept going and learned all about writing and getting traffic. In about 2004 I think it was – a few years after Google started it’s Adsense program I decided to try it. I had been avoiding it because I thought no one clicks on ads and back then I thought you could get a virus from clicking on ads. But much to my surprise I started making a little money. I put the ads on my top 25 pages and I think I made about $100 my first month. If I could make that with just having ads on 25 pages – what could I make if I had more pages. Well my site is now over 800 pages and I make about$1500 a month just from Adsense ads. It makes money whether or not I am working on it or not. It makes money when I am on vacation and when I am sleeping. It isn’t getting me rich but it keeps me going and providing more and more free websites and creating more websites. My goal is to be making about $3000 a month just in ads. I also make money by promoting affiliate programs one of which is Site Build it! It is easy to promote because it works and I am the proof of it all. While my site www.thebodyworker.com is not done using SiteBuild it! my first site www.massagetherapycareers.com was. I sold that site in late 2008 the same week the stock market crashed and WaMU bank came crashing down too. I sold it for enough to live on for a year or so but I continued writing and doing massage. I created a new site -www.massage-career-guides.com and am moving towards another $1000 a month just from that site. I hope it doesn’t seem like bragging telling you all this – I hope that it will inspire you to do the same!

So you see – the more sites – the more you can make and the more fun I can have doing massage and just making websites like this to provide info for the massage profession! So that’s it folks!

My many sites -www.thebodyworker.com , www.massage-career-guides.com, and this site -www.massagepracticebuilder.com are my gift to the massage profession because my career in massage has been such a wonderful journey and my goal is to help others in the struggles in becoming a very successful massage therapist.

Thanks

Julie Onofrio, LMP
Seattle, WA

Comments or questions are welcome.