Often doctors using my ads will send me a copy of what they ran in the newspaper, so that I can critique it.

Recently, I had a neuropathy ad sent to me, which I’ve shown below. The doctor was not happy about the return on investment. The only numbers I have are that he got 3 new patients, so it is difficult to know if that is a good ROI or not (to figure ROI we need to know the ad cost and the total amount the 3 patients paid for care).

Now, this is one of the best performing advertisements in my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads package. I get so much feedback from this neuropathy ad, I’ve had doctors beg me to write more that are similar to it. So before I saw the ad, I was very curious as to why it didn’t work.

Can you give the reason this ad didn’t bring in more new patients? (Not the blurriness, as I did that for copyright reasons.)

There’s actually more than 1 problem here. Be sure to keep in mind most neuropathy patients are over 60, and a slight majority are female.

Online videos are a big marketing tool these days. You should have some on Youtube at least, if not Vimeo and other video sites.

One of the terms used in video marketing is the word “viral”, which essentially means it’s being passed around to multiple people very quickly.

Now you may be wondering what’s the point of making a video that goes viral around the country (or world) when your patients are within 10 miles of your practice?

A couple of a reasons actually.  First, the more people who see it on youtube, the more likely someone in your area will see it. Also you can have the ability of telling people in your practice about it, and if it’s truly good they will show others. In addition, you can put a link to your website on the Youtube page, and if your video get’s lots of view, that will be a very important link.

So how do you get your chiropractic marketing video to go viral?

Simple, do something unique. The problem with most chiropractor’s website videos is that they are just plain boring. A guy in a white coat lecturing me on what he does is not very interesting to watch.

You don’t need a huge budget or a film crew to make a good video. Start with a good idea. Let me show you some examples to get your creative juices flowing.

Here’s a video that really speaks to the conversation going on in the heads of their potential customers:

This next one was an international sensation that Roger Ebert called “The Greatest Music Video Ever Made.” You can see how it’s very catchy and makes people want to watch it.

In this last one, the company gets an awareness message across in a unique way. And people will want to share it so their friends can be amazed too.

Need more ideas. Click here to see 100 of the best viral videos in 2011. But let me warn you, there is a reason they went viral, so you may end up spending hours watching all of these!

One last note: if you want to see some chiropractic viral videos that are done for you at a very low cost, check out the Get to Know Chiropractic videos.

One of the main reasons we open a business of our own is to make a good living helping others. Another is to employ people so they can make money to support their family.

Coaching seminars and popular books teach that if I just think about money the right way — focus really hard on it — then it will just show up in my lap tomorrow! (Try this and tell me if it worked for you.)

In chiropractic school, I was often told to “do the right thing and the money will come.” The idea here was that if you pursue money, you could be doing the wrong thing (instead of the right thing.)

I did the right thing (helping sick people get well) for a couple of years when I started out, yet that didn’t seem to be enough pay the bills. Was there something more? (Yes, see full story here.)

Some people say that “money is the root of all evil, after all the Bible says so.” Actually the Bible says “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10).

You see it’s loving money more than anything else that makes money an idol. People who love money will treat others badly. They will become immoral and unethical because the ends (more money) justify the means.

But money is just paper and coins. It doesn’t have a mind of it’s own. Even the value it holds is what a government or a person gives it.

True, money is necessary in our world. And can be used for good. Financial guru Dave Ramsey, in Total Money Makeover, says:

It is the duty of the good people to get wealth to keep it from the bad people, because the good people will do good with it. If we all abandon money because some misguided souls view it as evil, then the only ones with the money will be the pornographer, the drug dealer, or the pimp. Simply enough?

So money is just a tool. A tool that can be used for good or evil. Accumulation of it can be seen as the end goal of a person’s life, where he or she is essentially worshiping it as a god. Or it can be a tool to bless others, feed and clothe your family, help your neighbor, educate your children, etc.

Maybe that is what J. Paul Getty meant when he said, “Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.” If we just pile it up like Scrooge, are we actually using it for it’s intended purpose?

This leaves us with the big question about money. The question most coaches, consultants, and secret books don’t want to talk about.

Where does the money really come from? Your patients? The tooth fairy? God? Your bank? The universe? The government? A money tree?

Tell me what you think below in the comments?

This is a guest post by Dr. Jonathan Walker

For most chiropractors, receiving referrals from medical physicians is looked upon with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you’ve been in practice for a long time you likely remember a day when MDs would just as soon refer their patient to a witch doctor as a chiropractor. If you’re newer to the profession you might feel intimidated by the prospect of trying to explain the neurophysiology of spinal manipulation to a seasoned medical veteran.

There is no single “magic phrase” to open the referral floodgate, but there are 3 crippling fears keep MDs from referring patients for chiropractic care. These are not pie in the sky theories, but rather secrets I’ve learned from marketing to over 300 medical providers in my area as well as working with doctors all over the country.

1. Fear #1: You’ll steal their patient
Regardless of what variety of conditions you treat in your practice, when working with MDs your emphasis must be that you’re a specialist in conservative musculoskeletal care and will not try and usurp their role as the patient’s primary care provider (PCP).

I always make sure to tell other doctors that we do not function as PCPs, but that we find patients are best served when their chiropractor and medical physicians are all communicating together. This gives them the comfort that you won’t try and undermine their treatment of the patient. We expect professional respect and courtesy from MD and this goes both ways, even when you may disagree with a particular element of their management plan.

As a matter of fact it’s a good business (and social) practice to go out of your way to tell the patient what a great doctor they have and what good hands they’re in. Odds are this compliment will make it back to the referring physician, and that’s always a good thing!

2. Fear #2: They don’t really understand what chiropractors do
Most MDs seem to view chiropractic in the same light as many chiropractors do acupuncture. They believe that there is validity to the treatment, but they don’t know a lot about how it actually works.

This fear is easily conquered by ongoing education to provide familiarity with chiropractic, our level of expertise in treating musculoskeletal conditions, and the latest peer-reviewed research. For all of my PI Marketing Elite doctors we recommend one print, one electronic (e-mail) and one live contact a month. We provide cutting-edge MD newsletters and e-newsletters 100% “done for you” to make this process automatic.

3. Fear #3: Their patient will get a 6 month long treatment plan on their first visit to your office
I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of recommending long courses of care with cash pre-payment, but I do want to point out that if you want to receive medical referrals MDs cringe at the idea of a 6 month long treatment plan given on the first visit.

I explain that in my office we do a trial course of care, typically lasting anywhere from 2-4 weeks, depending on the patient’s condition. At the end of the trial we reassess the patient and if they’re making progress we start spacing out the time between visits and giving them home exercises to do.

This type of approach fits the paradigm they’re used to working within when they refer to a physical therapist, so in their minds you then become a viable option for referrals.

By preemptively dealing with these three common fears you’ll unlock an untapped goldmine of referrals, and help countless patients find relief with chiropractic care. I’ve seen it work first-hand in my own practice, and you can replicate this success in your office!

Dr. Jonathan Walker is president of PI Marketing Elite, and a full-time practicing chiropractor. MD marketing is a key area addressed in the marketing modules of PI Marketing Elite, and we provide you with turnkey tools, scripts, and strategies to use in your practice. Log onto www.newpimarketing.com or call Dr. Walker directly at 904-616-1284.

Does everyone who calls in for an appoint show up? Do you ever wonder how many new patient appointments are being lost on the first phone call?

I frequently get this type of email message…

“Hi Doc. I just ran one of your ads. We got 20 calls and 11 came in for the exam. How can we get better results from the ads?

Unfortunately, this is a huge problem in chiropractic offices (or any health practitioner for that matter!)

The problem here isn’t the ad. After all, it intitiated 20 new patients calls! But to have only 55% of those calling in show up for the first visit is ridiculous.

But you want to know the scary part? This is happening in almost every office around the world.

Your office may not be as bad as the example quoted above, but as you know even one lost new patient is worth thousands of dollars to your clinic.

How many new patients are you missing out on just from bad calls.

Here are a few current numbers on this issue reported in our industry:

• 98% of all new patients call on the phone first to schedule.
• 50% of all lost patients are caused by poor patient handling at the front desk.
• 79% of all advertising is wasted on leads that don’t convert to new patients

Click here to watch this free webinar.

Are you using the internet to its full potential in your practice?

Most chiropractors are only touching the tip of the iceberg. The list is almost endless of tactics to use: email marketing, PPC ads, blogging, mobile apps, Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google SEO, etc., etc.

In every country around the world more people are using the web every day. Check out this short video showing just a few stats:

Here is your chance to see an updated version of my friend Paul Wright’s free webinar entitled “The Practice Acceleration Program – 12 Steps to a Great Health Business in ONLY 42 Days”.

There are 3 different days you can register, go here to find out more:

http://www.netofficetoolbox.com/app/?Clk=4287445

This presentation outlines the 12 Essential Steps that you DID NOT learn in your university or technical education, but MUST know to be a successful health professional in these trying financial times.

Here’s just a sample of what Paul will cover…

• The 12 essential steps to a great health business – are you using them?

• Why failing to use these steps will leave you chained to your business forever.

• How these steps allowed Paul to run his clinics remotely – in fact he has only visited his six clinics four times in one 10 week period.

• How your admin team can kill your profits and what to do about it.

• Actions steps you can implement NOW to make you thousands in lost profits.

• The importance of cancellation reduction and how to make every treatment session “too important to miss”.

• How to get your hands on Paul’s exact procedures, scripts, steps and protocols that have taken him 20 years to develop and refine.

Click on the link below to check webinar times and register for this FREE event.

http://www.netofficetoolbox.com/app/?Clk=4287445

The most difficult (and most frustrating for some) part of Google Adwords is dealing with the quality score.

The quality score is a way for Google to keep a high “quality” advertising network. It punishes people for being dishonest and stupid.

So if your website is selling chiropractic services, you are going to pay a lot more for running ads that only talk about back surgeries and don’t mention chiropractic. In many cases you will pay 10 times more!

Therefore, you do not want to make Google mad when it comes to quality score.

Let’s look at some things you can do to raise your quality score…

1. Make sure your keyword is in your ad headline. This means if your ad is about back pain, you should have the word back pain in the headline for sure, and possibly the first line and the domain name. That means in this example, don’t write an ad all about chiropractic and not mention the keyword “back pain”. Google will just think your site has nothing to do with back pain and make you pay a lot more for these bids.

2. Use ad groups in your account. We looked at this one above.

3. Use your keyword in your headline on your landing page. Continuing our “back pain” example above, if your site is really about “back pain”, then you should have that phrase prominently on your website somewhere right? If you don’t, another strike against you in Google’s book. More strikes = higher bid prices.

4. Make sure your landing page or main website loads fast. If your site loads slow, and Google’s searchers are going there, then it can make Google look bad. Would you refer one of your patient’s to a restaurant where the service was slow?

5. Use items on your landing page that makes the visitor stay longer (video,
audio, etc). The longer people stay on your site, and the more pages they visit, the more relevant Google thinks your site is to that keyword. If people go to your site after clicking your Adwords ad, and then click the “back button” immediately, that’s going to lower your quality score.

6. Make sure your landing page has a privacy policy link on it. For an example of this, go to http://www.ultimatechiropracticads.com and look at the bottom of the page for the privacy policy.

7. Put a link on your landing page that links to another website with a lot of
content (your blog!). This one is a big factor of quality score. Basically, the more pages you have on your site (or a site you link out to) that is relevant to a keyword, the better off you are. So for the keyword “back pain”, you can’t just have a small website with very few pages about back pain. This is why the blog is so important, because it gives you an “article database” of information to link to, some of which will be about “back pain”.

To  learn more about how to get new patients with Google Adwords, watch a free webinar at ChiroPatientsOnline.com

Here’s an interesting infographic on the use of email over at Mashable. A couple of things to note:

1. “The average email user receives 147 messages every day, and spends more than 2.5 hours on email a day.”
Wow, that’s a lot of time. I recommend spending no more than 1 hour max per day on email, and only 30 minutes if possible. This means you’ll need to stop receiving emails from people who don’t deliver value. Now you may be wondering why I’m saying this when I send out emails regularly to my list of doctors. But I’m not saying never get emails, only that you should be listening to a handful of people on any one subject, not every single person out there who has an opinion. Hopefully you’re getting value from my emails and this blog, but if you’re not, then you know what to do.

2. The best time to send email messages to your patients is early morning. If you look at the graphs regarding the best time to send emails, they all show that pretty much early morning is the best. Are you doing this now or waiting until later in the afternoon?

This whole infographic was put together by Boomerang for Gmail. I just downloaded the Boomerang plugin for Firefox and look forward to testing it out. Not so much for email broadcasts, but for handling all the individual emails you send or get in your own email box. For broadcasting to your patients, I recommend this email system.

Here’s a short video showing you how Boomerang for Gmail works works.

Google Analytics is a free website tracking program,  to use it you’ll need a Google account setup (like gmail, Adwords, etc). If you haven’t, you can (and should) get started with Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics/

It’s fairly easy to install and I’ll show you again in the beginning of today’s video. If you have a techy person who does things for you, the installation should take less than 5 minutes.

Here’s how analytics works. Enter the website you want to track, then they give you a short “script” to put on your page.

Every time someone comes to your website, the script is activated and starts tracking what that visitor does. The script is hidden in your website code, so it’s not even visible on your page.

What This Software Can Tell You

Analytics offers many features and Google adds new features monthly. What I want to do is show you which aspects you need to use and how it will increase the amount of new patients you get from the internet.

Here’s what Analytics reveals about your website and why it’s important to you.

Unique Visitors. What you need to know is the number of “unique visitors”. The stat only counts the visit when they first arrive on the site. No matter how many times they return to the website, they will only be counted as one visitor.

Time on site. Time on site is almost always a good thing. Assuming you have some content on your website (articles, videos, etc) the longer a person stays there, the more involved and interested they are in what you have to say. This is not justification for putting up lots of boring content, as people will still leave fast if it’s not interesting.

Sidenote: Also, “time on site” is very important to your Quality Score when running Google Adwords. You may remember in the last lesson we spent some time on quality score. At this point in time, it appears 1 minute is the critical time for your Adwords landing page. If visitors are staying less than 1 minute, you will be punished on your quality score.

Page Views. Depending on the type of website your tracking, a higher number of page views can be a good indication. For example, a blog site where you aren’t selling anything but just giving away free information is a place you want people to view a lot of pages. This is an indication of someone who wants more information from you.

If you have a “traditional” website with navigation bars and links, a high number of page views may be a bad sign. It’s likely that people are clicking around and having trouble finding the information they want.

Pages/visit. “Pages per visit” is a similar stat to the above page views. This is an important number to track if you have a blog. When running a blog, you want visitors to visit quite a few pages per visit. The reason you want this is because it means they are connecting with you each time they come to the site.

Traffic sources. In my opinion, this is one of the most important stats you can know about your website. Your traffic sources will tell you exactly where people are coming from when they land on your blog, landing page or website.

It will tell you if most of your traffic is coming from Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. Use this information to go to these search engines and do pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you’re already doing PPC,  use this info to increase the PPC according to where your traffic is coming from.

You’ll also know if another website has linked to you, since people will click through the link and visit your site. The traffic sources page can tell you if your social networking is effective, since you may see visitors coming from LinkedIn or Facebook.

After you release a press release on PRweb, you’ll be able to tell how effective it was as a traffic generator. The same goes for posting articles on sites like Ezinearticles.com

Location of your visitors. Analytics will tell you where your website visitors are located down to the city level. This can be valuable if you practice in a populated area with many surrounding cities. You may notice a majority of your traffic coming from a certain area. Using this information, you can make some offline marketing decisions like where you want to advertise in the newspaper, with direct mail, etc.

Bounce Rate. This is one stat you want to be low. The bounce rate is how many people only see one page of your website and “bounce” off. So if you have a 71% bounce rate, that means almost 3/4ths of the people visiting your site are leaving before viewing another page. A high bounce rates means that people are not finding what they want and are hitting the “back” button on their browser. (A high bounce rate can also hurt your Adwords Quality Score.)

A good bounce rate is between 50-60%, as you can’t expect everyone that hits your site to view more than one page.