An Interesting, Annoying Tactic

I try to stay on top of developments in the online hypnosis community as best I can, and I've noticed something interesting over the past couple of weeks.

Someone's gone out and registered a bunch of domain names that are of the form *state name*hypnotist.com and is then using automated posting to fill them with content, mostly pulled from Yahoo Answers or article databases. They even pull the responses and post them as comments.

What are they looking to gain from these sites? I would assume they hope to be able to pull traffic from local searches, with the goal of either selling the urls or pushing referrals, since the targeted domain name would help, but they might just try to do affiliate sales or link building.

It bothers me to see people putting more junk and duplicate content (Especially when they don't own it!) on the internet, especially in areas that I care about.

Indiana Hypnotist Committee Closed

For a while there, Indiana was an interesting location for hypnotists - it was one of the few states to regulate hypnosis and the only one to require licensing from a state board to practice hypnosis. For the most part, the rules only applied to pure hypnotherapists who didn't hold any other certification, but it was still an important consideration.

According to the comittee's website, however, effective July 1st the committee, and thus all it's associated laws, ceased to exist. Thus as I understand it anyone, with any level of training or certification, can now practice hypnotherapy in Indiana.

Now, considering some of the issues caused by the committee, I would almost say this is a good thing. Certification was difficult in some cases, and many of the applicants were actually practitioners from other states simply looking to become 'state-certified' for marketing purposes. There is no true non-profit overarching accreditation organization for hypnosis, that I'm aware of, to base standards on either.

Lawsuit - Hypnosis for Sexual Harassment

Here's yet another accusation of someone using hypnosis for nefarious purposes.

Supposedly, her boss had her lie down on his 'magic couch' where he hypnotized her, gavve her pleasure suggestions, touched her inappropriately, and possibly posed her for pictures in various states of undress.

Now, there tend to be two camps about hypnosis. One says that hypnosis is a magical tool giving the hypnotist untold powers. The other claims that nobody can hypnotize you and force you to do something you wouldn't normally want to. My position, and the position of iHypnou.com is that the second option is sort of right, but "wouldn't normally want to" has a lot of wiggle room, depending on the situation.

Is her claim ridiculous? Probably. Possible? Probably. Worth $5 million? I'd say no, but then again, I've never been hypnotized and molested.

Amazing Response to Hypnosis How-To

iHypnoU does more than just offer great hypnosis .mp3s and hypnosis videos - we're also hard at work preparing educational materials so you can learn how to hypnotize people.

In that vein, we posted a how-to on Instructables.com on one of Michael's favorites: the super easy magnetic hands induction.

In just 5 days, we've had almost 1300 views. It's been selected as a featured instructable, and has attained 'popular' status thanks to how many people have read it. If you're looking to learn hypnosis, it's a good place to start.