Which keyword phrases should you try for? I usually say go for the big as well as the small. But you need to look at the pros and cons. If it makes no sense to try to acquire a rank for a city where the people are not going to travel to come to you save your money. Otherwise if you live close to or in a large city go for both! Enjoy the video. Email me and I will let you know how many searches are done for your area.

A while back I posted some thoughts about how to do some online marketing. The third point I made was to make a video of your office and upload it to a video sharing network. This allows people to “run across” your video online and potentially contact you for an appointment. This post is to teach you how to upload your video once you have it. I am going to use pictures to guide you through this.

1 – You need an account with youtube. It is totally free. Click on the sign up link and fill out your personal information.

2 – Click on the My Account link.

3 – The top right hand side of the page will have a button to upload your video. Click it.

4 – Fill out all the necessary information about your video. It is crucial that you include a number of descriptive tags. This allows people to search and find your video. Make sure you have your city, state, and the word chiropractor in your tag.

5 – Click the browse button. Find the video on your computer and upload. It cannot be larger than 100 MB. If you have a larger video go to Google Video and do the same thing. The problem with Google video is that it’s not as popular.

You are done! Now it’s online and people can watch it. You can track how many times it has been viewed simply by looking at the video on you tube and looking at the stats.

Good luck and have fun. It can be a very effective ice breaker. It is also 100% free. You just need to take the time to do the work.

As always if you have any questions about the process please email me.

I want to hear about your success using video sharing! Good Luck.

If you have never been to the web site craigslist.com it is a free classified advertisements site that is sorted into various topics. The great thing about craigslist is that is broken down by cities and states. You can therefore add information about your practice to the craigslist community for your specific area.
Here are a few ideas to help you advertise in craigslist.

First of all never spam craigslist or any other site. Spamming the craigslist community is very simple. If you go to craigslist and find postings that seem relevant to you and then email them solicitations you are spamming. There are some classic examples of craigslist spam but the best one I have is a personal example. I listed a car for sale in my local craigslist. About a week later I started receiving emails and phone calls from a company in Vegas that wanted to sell my car on eBay. I asked them 3 times on the phone to stop calling me. To this day I receive emails from them offing to sell my car. Spam is unwanted solicitation. Do not do it on craigslist. Their response to spam is simple. Once they catch it you will be totally blocked from accessing any of the craigslist pages.

Posting on craigslist is really easy. Just go to the city you want to post in and look in the top left corner. It should say post to classifieds. You will then be prompted to pick what area to post under. You will usually be posting under services offered. If you are looking to hire someone you can post a listing in the jobs area. Write your advertisement and you’re done. If you have an account then make sure you sign in before you post. If you don’t have an account then after you make a posting you will receive an email that you must confirm before they give you a listing.

Try different types of postings. The best way to find your advertising style is to simply try different approaches and see which one works the best. Test Test Test.
Good luck and have fun. There are lots of people looking at craigslist and you may be able to reach many interested people if you just try. Give it a shot and post a comment if you have success.

11/25/06

SEO is a newer term and many chiropractors may not know what it means. This video was made to answer that question. In a sentence SEO is the process of helping a website rank more highly for a desired phrase. It is so awesome for me to see my clients sites rank in the best spot on the engines. Enjoy the video.

I hope everyone enjoys my video FAQs. Please call me if you want any further explanation.

I want to write a few short articles to teach you how to create a website for your practice yourself. I know not everyone is a DIYer but this is pretty easy to do. There are a few technical aspects to this process so I will try to outline the process as simply as possible. As always you can contact me for some free advice and I am always for hire to set everything up for you. If you want me to do the work for you click here for more information about chiropractic website setup.

Okay let’s talk about websites in general. You defiantly need one. Setting up your website should not be hard or expensive. I like to build sites by paying for reliable hosting and then using easy to use website building software for your site creation. This is not the only way to do this by any means, but the end result is a professional looking website. Let’s get started.

Hosting:
This is a quote from glaserweb.com/glossary.php about hosting…“While web pages are designed and developed on a single computer, they must be transferred to a server, or host, so that they are available to the rest of the world over the Internet. A host is simply a computer that has a constant, high speed connection to the Internet. Hosting companies rent space on these machines. Depending on your needs, a hosting plan can cost anywhere between $10 and $200 per month.” Simply stated a host is were your website lives. You need to rent this space online. This will be your only expense if you follow my method.

I use Blue Host for my hosting services. Here are some of the nice features Blue Host offers.

50 Gigabyte Hosting Space (NEW!)
web hostingHost 6 Domains on 1 Account!!!
2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts
999 GIGS of Transfer (NEW!)
SSH (Secure Shell), SSL, FTP, Stats
CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
2000/2002/2003 Front Page Extensions
Free Domain Forever!
24/7 Superb/Responsive Sales/Support

There is more space that you should ever need. Free domain name for life. You can also have up to 6 websites under the same hosting account. It’s a really great deal. Depending on how long you buy your hosting for your price will change a bit. Normally I would pay for hosting on an annual basis. If you do you will pay $7.95 a month. It’s $6.95 a month if you do the 2 year plan. It’s a really good deal. Dare you to compare!
Here is a link to go to Blue Host. Go and reserve your hosting and domain name now. Don’t forget your have 30 days to cancel if it doesn’t work out.

The next step is to get the website building software.

Marketing your chiropractic business online can take on many faces. Gaining new patients from the web can be an extremely effective way to grow your business, but how do you do it? Here are five specific things you can do to market your practice on the internet.

1 – Website. There are too many things to list in this article about how to market your chiropractic business so let’s focus on the basics. Build a websites that is as easy to navigate as possible. To do this you should include multiple links on each page that allows your visitors to find your important information. Make sure your website has unique information about you specifically. Inform people about your practice specifically, not just chiropractic care in general. Let them know what makes you the right choice. Here are a few ideas for your content. What will they expect from their first visit? How do they go about setting up an appointment? Do they need a MD’s referral? Will the need insurance? Provide as many contact points as possible; phone, address, and email. You never know the preferred method of contact by a new patient. Once you have your site you need to send people to it. Try informing your patients to have their friends and family visit the site for more information. Don’t forget to keep track of the visitors that come to your site. If you don’t have this ability to track people you will never know if your website is effectively working for you. There are many free tracking tools online. Statcounter.com or google.com/analytics are very good at giving you this information at no cost. Then learn how to get your site ranked in the major search engines. You can do this yourself or hire a firm that will get your site ranked for you. Unless you market your site you will probably never really get a good rank in the engines.

2 –Online Community Forums. There are many places on the web that allow you to socialize with other people interested in chiropractic care. You can try to become involved in a community forum. There are forums all over the net that are geared towards chiropractic, health, your local area, etc. By getting involved in these communities you can help create awareness for yourself. Try looking for a forum that is dedicated to your local community. Don’t go in with your guns blazing and spam the community telling them to come to your office, but simply add a link to you website in the signature of the posts you leave and people will take notice. If your comments are helpful and honest people will become interested in your chiropractic services click on your link and potentially come to you for chiropractic care.

3 – Videos. Make a video of your office. Think of this as a virtual tour for prospective patients. Take people through the office, introduce them to staff, show them the treatment rooms, etc. Make the video as friendly and inviting as possible. Try to answer common questions and concerns you have seen in the past with people new to chiropractic. When the video is done get it online! There are many social video networks that you can upload your video directly into and host it on the web for free. Google Video, YouTube, and MetaCafe are just a few places to host your video for free on the web. Once the video is online, take the embedded video code and paste is somewhere on your website. This will allow visitors to your site learn more about you via video sharing technology. This will also give web surfers a chance to find you without ever coming to your website. They may be in the video sharing network and find you video tour. This is a fun, free way to promote your office. You may also want to film any special events that happen with your practice. Let’s say you do a free blood pressure test for your local retirement community. Film the experience and post it online. Video marketing will become very big in the near future, it’s already a great way to promote yourself. Click here to learn how to upload your video into YouTube.
More to come….

Scott
11/01/06

Marketing your chiropractic care online can be tricky. Trying to reach out to the people in your area using the World Wide Web may feel cold because you never really see the potential patient before they come in your door. This is an easy way to connect with your website traffic before they ever come in.

Add an “ask the chiropractor” section of your website(or something similar) Adding this small feature to your site can make all the difference in the world. Surely you have seen these types of features on other websites. Asking the expert is a time honored way to help your traffic make a great first contact to you. This is especially important with chiropractic care. You can answer questions; follow up, invite, and much more with this concept. Let’s look at how it’s done.

First you need to add the page to your site.
It is suggested that you have a page dedicated to this. This is the most effective if you can have some sort of form to add on your page. This allows the person to simply fill out the form and press the submit button. If you can’t make a form and it’s not in your web building software please provide your email address. Don’t forget to add a new link on tour homepage that will entice people to ask you a question.

Ask them for the specifics.
If you use a form or not please tell them specifically what you are looking. You may want to know how long they have had the problem, what the problem is, what they have done to correct it themselves, and the ever important question of their previous chiropractic experiences!!! Depending on their level of experience in the past with other chiropractors you may vary your answer a bit. Give those more to chew on if they can handle it.

Your responses must be quick.
Try to get back with them right away with the best diagnosis you can muster. If you have been in practice for a while and have had many of the some complaints you should be able to give a general diagnosis based on the information you receive. You may also try to give them an idea of how long they might be a patient to recover from their pain.

Give them hope and call them to action.
People need hope in this world. If you can bring them a small piece of hope that they can recover and live a pain free life they will come running. You can also include testimonies from other patients you have had in your response. Ask them to come in to pay you a visit. You may want to offer a free first visit to attract them in. Don’t forget to follow up! If they don’t come in within a few weeks they may need a reminder. Follow up and ask how they are doing. That is simple but extremely effective.

Be a leader in your city and help as many people as you can. Add your own personal flavor to your website pages and responses. Be the expert your city is craving. This technique works well so give it a try.

Scott Larsen
10/1/06

I don’t really think that, but this idea comes from many conversations with chiropractors about gaining new clients via the internet. It is written specifically with chiropractors in mind hopefully clearing up some myths concerning internet marketing.

A technical definition of internet marketing for chiropractors might read something like this: using the internet as a means to convey your chiropractic philosophy, gain new customers, and conduct market research. Simply stated internet marketing is the process of getting traffic to your site and then bringing them into your office.

Let’s look at the top two myths about internet marketing for chiropractors.

Myth #1 – There aren’t any searches online for my city and chiropractors.

This is totally false. Obviously the numbers will vary depending on how large or small your city is, but I promise you that no matter where you are people are looking for chiropractors in your area online. One way to understand this is by looking in your local phone book. Why would you list your practice in the phone book if you didn’t think that people are looking there for a chiropractor? The same idea can be applied to the internet. Why wouldn’t people do a search for a local chiropractor on Google, Yahoo, MSN? It may be even better than the phone book because you can display an entire site to the searcher. In the phone book you’re limited to certain amount of information. It makes sense that people are looking for you and it pays to be found by them online. If you want a report for your city please contact me and I will let you know what the numbers are for your city.
Myth #2 – The patients that come from the internet will be poor quality and won’t last.

It’s no secret that many chiropractors marketing approach is the word of mouth technique. Some even go as far as to offer incredible incentives to patients that refer friends or family. They feel that by doing this they are likely to have first time patients stick around because they have already been prepared by a friend. This is a great approach and a true concept. In discussions with chiropractors about gaining new visitors from the internet they often express questions about what the new patient will be like. The simple answer is we don’t really know.

Even though you don’t know exactly what the patient will be like or what they are looking for we can be sure about what we tell them of ourselves. Having a clearly stated philosophy on our website is the key. Tell people exactly what you plan on doing when they come to see you. Give them the specifics of your practice instead of explaining what chiropractic is in a general sense because there are many other authority websites that will do a much better job. REMEMBER what they are searching for! They don’t want to learn about chiropractic in a general sense. If they did they would have searched for chiropractic. They want to find the best chiropractor in there city and learn how that chiropractor can help them. Tell them about why you are the best choice.

Ultimately you don’t know who they are and what type of patients they will become. We do know that they want quality chiropractic care and if you are a true healer that’s all that should matter right? There are more myths floating out there but these are two common misconceptions. Millions of people everyday are looking for chiropractors in their local area. They want the best possible care because they need someone who can heal them. The importance of having a web presence is becoming more and more important if you are in private practice. Embrace the technology and reach people through cyberspace.

Scott Larsen
9/28/06