Having been in this industry for ten years now I have come to understand the importance of your online reputation. It is so easy for anyone of your patients to hop on a forum or a blog and defame you. If they use your name with keywords like chiropractic or chiropractor the likelihood of search engines finding it and returning it in a related search query is huge.
I used to work for a large internet marketing consulting firm, who shall remain nameless and the firm’s biggest nuisance was the smudge that unsatisfied clients left on the web. Whenever a search was done for the company name all the negative information came up in the results and it was not pretty. The bad outweighed the good because people don’t have much to say about you online when you do great things for them.
Do a search in Google for “paypal”. The page is filled with anti paypal websites and reading these makes paypal sound really risky to use. Do you think this hurts potential clients? I do believe in accountability and if you are an unethical business or chiropractor people should be aware, but there is no way to measure the validity of online information. So anyone can say anything online and your gonna suffer.
There is an increasing number of “interactive” website popping up all the time. Wikipedia is probably the best example of the new generation of interactive websites. Did you know that anyone can create or edit a wikipedia page!? This leads to checks by the general population which is great, but only those who know they can create a free account at wikipedia and edit have a say about the information. You will not be spanked on wikipedia, unless your big time, but there are plenty of places for people to vent and as the awareness of such sites becomes greater trust me THEY WILL TALK!
So what can you do?

I mentioned this before: encourage your patients to blog about your practice. Many people have blogs, if they blog about how you helped them this will easily be found by many potential patients browsing the web. Plus a testimony about you on another website is huge! Choose clients you like and who like you and encourage blogging about your practice without being to intrusive. Simply ask for a review.
Get involved with online communities. Find a forum where you can participate and as a health expert talk to people and answer questions. In your forum signature add the location of your practice and a link to you website. It’s easy and very effective.
Create your own blog and occasionally blog about local topics. Don’t make everything so broad that Google doesn’t relate your blog to your local area. It’s all about keyword use. If you include the city you practice in then you will be found by those most important–>the local population.

Finally:

You can always hire me to manage your reputation. I have been implementing reputation management into my seo and it’s working wonders for chiropractors. The basic premise is to create a large number of pages all over the web talking about your practice in a positive light. If anything negative comes online we will outnumber the bad with the good. This management is standard in my seo at no additional cost to you. Contact me and I can give you more details.

Periodically check the net for information about you and your practice. If you find nothing that’s not a good thing. We want to have lots of great information online about you, so get out there and make it happen. If you find lots of negative…if you deserve it then that’s one thing but if not I can help.

Some popular rating sites:

Yelp

Rate My Professors

Rate Your Chiropractors

Rate My Teachers

There are many more… Find a few and rate your practice. Have fun and it is worth the time and effort.

Blogs are online journals. Millions of people have an account with some free blogging software on the web. There are so many advantages to having a blog I can’t even begin to explain all of them in detail. Chiropractors can capitalize on a clients blog. Lets talk about how.

One of the most challenging things for businesses in this day and age is trying to keep negative comments about a business pop up in the search results. Let’s give a quick example. You sign up with your local cable internet company for high speed internet service. It’s pricey and you have high expectations. The thing never works though. You are very dissatisfied and the company offers no help. You decide to relate your story on your personal, free web log. In the next couple of weeks you may notice that your blog entry pops up right next to the name of the company in a Google search. This is a negative example, but think about this idea in terms of your chiropractic business and your clients blogs!

Simply ask your clients, probably on their patient forms, if they have a blog. Then ask these people to review or comment on your practice in their blog. A simple request should be sufficient, but you may want to offer some incentives if you think it will help the process. I would keep it as informal as possible. They don’t need to follow some agenda to make blogging about your chiropractic office effective. Each of your clients blogs will have a theme and they will think of a creative way to fit your chiropractic clinic in.

People are always looking for new ideas to blog about. Find out who has a blog and simply ask them for a post. It will create great exposure for your site and practice even if your website is not ranked for your city.

Have fun blogging!

It’s is important to point out that you do not need to have a website to make email marketing effective. The best thing about email marketing and a website is that you can gather email addresses from a person who may not be your patient yet.

Lets talk about gathering email addresses. This is the first step you must take. It’s very easy to do for chiropractors. When you get a new patient make sure you ask them for their email address on your new patient form. Once you have the email address you can import the name into your constant contact account.

If you would like to gather your clients addresses who may already be visiting your office simply have your receptionist request them to fill out a email address update card on their next visit. It should be a piece of cake to do.

If you have a chiropractic practice website you should be very careful about which email addresses you choose to throw into your list. You never want to send unwanted emails to people who may have been to your site and asked you a simple question. To avoid this you may simply send them a message asking them if they would like to be included into your newsletter for future updates and promotions.

By using the form that constant contact offers you will be able to gather email addresses without worrying about whether or not they want to receive them or not. By signing up for your newsletter they are giving you permission to email them.

Constant Contact gives your subscribers the option to “opt-out” of your newsletter at anytime. You should never need to worry about manually adjusting the settings of your list.

A word about spam. It is illegal to spend unwanted emails trying to solicit people to unwanted things. Keep it real with your subscribers. Never send them promotions that they would not want and always respect their privacy by never giving or selling their addresses to anyone.

For chiropractors building your email list will be easy! Set a goal to start gathering all the email addresses of your patients if you haven’t done so already. if you have a website make sure you add the constant contact email gathering code to your pages so your web site traffic can sign up for your newsletter.

The next lesson will be on how to configure your email marketing program.

Have you ever purchased something off the web and a few days later received a follow up email from the same company? Or maybe you subscribe to a newsletter that offers promotions and sales. This is email marketing.

I want to release a few articles about how chiropractors can harness the power of email marketing. This first post is about the technology side of things. It will shortly be followed up with some how to articles for you to ponder and try. Let me say this though; in my years for doing online business email marketing has been the most powerful tool in my tool belt. Whenever your hungry for some action you can go to you personal pond and start fishing.

To have a successful newsletter or email marketing you need some software. Newsletter programs or “auto responders” will allow you to send massive amounts of emails to your clients without sending them one at a time.

I only recommend one program to my clients. Constant Contact is the best. Here are some of the features you get with their service.

First of all its free for the first 60days. Chiropractors can try it out for 2 months before they decide whether or not to go for the full service.

If you have a website you can customize a form and place it on your pages for your website visitors to sign up to receive your newsletter.

They have many templates to choose from so you can have a customized look to your emails and newsletters. These are all very professional looking. It will not look like a homemade newsletter (my pet peeve)!

It has fully functional list managers to choose from. Allowing people to subscribe and unsubscribe without your assistance. Trust me that is a good thing. You don’t have time to worry about that.

One of the best things to understand and look for in a newsletter program is statistics! You need to know who opens and reads your emails. Who clicks on your links and comes back to the pages in your site and more.

They also have free tips and tricks for effective newsletters and emails.

So go get your free trial and come back and learn how to run effective newsletters in my other articles about chiropractic email marketing.

If you have a website with content that also shows up on other chiropractic websites you will not rank very well in the search results. In fact your duplicate site will never rank naturally in the search engines. Make your homepage unique if you can. I hope this video and the examples I use make this point clear. Thanks!

2006 Thanksgiving was great for a few of my clients. They took my promotion and ran with it. Some very large cities are now being dominated, on the search engines, by a few lucky chiropractors.

This month I thought it would be fun to target some smaller areas. I am offering a 99 dollar special to any chiropractor for a number one ranking on search engines. If you live in a big city you may be in one of the suburbs or be a city within a city. You may also live in a small town somewhere in the world and not be near a major city. In both of these cases I will rank you on the engines for less than 100 dollars.

I just thought I would throw this out there and see if I have any takers. You have nothing to loose and as usual I offer my money back guarantee if your rankings never show up.

Give me a call and I will start ASAP.

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.