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.

Google has been working on a pair of glasses that would allow anyone to use their products, services, and the internet from anywhere while sitting, walking (or driving!)

As I was watching the video below, I wondered how useful this will be for health care offices to quickly pull up patient files. Is this something you could see running your office software, or does it seem too far fetched to be of any practical use?

Internet marketing for chiropractors is no longer just a good idea, something that you might get around to if you have time. It is now a necessity!

Current research shows that 80% of Americans use the internet on a regular basis.

That means 8 out of every 10 people in your community are getting online to look for things to buy, socialize on networking sites, email friends, conduct business, look for local businesses (like you!) and dozens of other things.

I would like to help you a bit with one major factor in getting more new patients. If you’ll answer a short 6 question survey about how you use the internet in your practice, I’ll give you…

A free, downloadable 9 page report on The Quickest Way to Get New Patients with Google Adwords

…which includes step-by-step instructions on how to setup your account for longterm results, a couple of my best ads, and over 50 my favorite keywords.

The survey will only take you a couple of minutes and then you’ll be able to immediately download the free report.

Click Here to Take the Short Survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TSSDHLC

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:

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.

Should you be building links to your website from your Facebook and Twitter accounts? How important are these to your Google ranking?

This is a question that I’ve been asked in our ChiroPatients Online program.

Here’s the short answer, straight from Matt Cutts (of Google). Matt answered this question in response to this article:

1. Get More Links
The number of incoming links to your website makes a big difference in where your website ranks with the big search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Links to your website are a way of measuring its authority in the industry. The big question often debated by SEO gurus is whether it’s the quality or the quantity? I would say both. Two years ago, Google appeared to put more weight on link quality (how important is the website, where your link is found). But with the new Panda update, it appears quantity is once again a big factor.

Here are three easy strategies to get good links:

A. Provide guest posts on other people’s websites, which includes a bio of you and a link back to your website.
B. Visit other blogs and leave comments, making sure to give your website link when asked in the comment box.
C. Register at popular forums, making use of the website links offered in your signature and profile features.

2. Increase the Content on Your Website.

The more pages of good content you have, the higher your rank will be. When Google comes to your website, do they see it as a massive university library for your subject, or is it more like a toddler’s bookshelf? Two factors to keep in mind with content is the number of words on a page and the total number of pages on your website. Every time you post a new article to your blog, you build a new page on your site. 500-700 word articles work best for good content. But any words on a page is better than nothing. Obviously you want the content to be readable, not just gobbledygook spit out by a software program (this will actually penalize your website.)

3. Make Sure Your Keyword is Mentioned

A keyword is simply the words or phrases people are typing in to find your business. For most of you, that will be “your town + chiropractor” or “your town + spinal decompression”. Other examples of keywords are “neuropathy treatment”, “sciatica help” and “back pain”. If you live in MyTown, USA, how often is “MyTown Chiropractor” mentioned on your website?

Now you can overdo this. If you’re keyword is mentioned too often, that’s called keyword stuffing. And it will cause your site to be penalized. So make sure your keyword occurs naturally in your articles and website.

4. Use Content Management Software

This sounds a lot more technical than it is. The most popular and common website software nowadays is called WordPress (WP). Many of my websites use this software. Originally it was designed for blogs, but not any type of website can use it.It makes pages out of our content, categorizes them and has tons of plugins to easily customize your site. WordPress is highly favored by search engines too!

The best thing about WP is that it is extremely easy to use once set up. I don’t recommend you set it up, so have someone else do that. We do this for a limited number of clients as part of my ChiroPatients Online program.

http://www.chiropatientsonline.com

5. Included Contacts Us, About, and Privacy Pages

The big search engines want to make sure you are a real business and that customers have a way of contacting you. This contact page should have a Google Places map in addition to your address and phone numbers. You should also have a page on your site that gives a bio of yourself: where you went to school, special services you offer, why you do what you do, etc. I’ve also heard that Google likes to see a privacy policy somewhere on your site, describing how you will protect your users.

Other “legal type” pages that you often see may be needed are Terms of Use, Warranties and Earnings Disclaimer. Your business may not need all of these, but ask an intellectual property attorney, as I am not qualified to tell you one way or the other on legal matters.

A big mistake in practice is that chiropractors do not nurture the relationship with their current patients. We take it for granted that if the patient starts care, they will always do what we tell them to do.

This is not reality. Look at your stats. How many patients have quit care and never been seen again. We may never know why they quit. But there are certain things we can do to help them complete their treatment plan.

I’ve never been a fan of strong arm tactics to get people to do things. Why?

Because it’s rude and it does not work. Sure you can convince someone with hype and “rah-rah” to stay on wellness or maintenance care. But the truth is a few weeks later, the “pep talk” has wore off and the patient will begin asking themselves…

“Do I really need to keep going to see that chiropractor?”

So what’s the solution to this mistake?

Consistent, monthly contact through direct mail (and email). The best and proven way to maintain a relationship with your patients is by sending them a monthly newsletter. This will keep your active patients connected to you and feel like they have a better relationship with you. After all, no other doctor or chiropractor sends them something in the mail each month.

I can not tell you how many patients I have had over the years “return” for care in my office, simply because they got a newsletter from me. Some of these patients we had ‘written off’ because we thought they were never coming back .

This works so well, we even had a few patients that we thought would never come back because they actually left the office upset about something.

And, we got new patient referrals from the newsletter as well. This is because every month there is a personalized letter from me with an offer on the back page.

Marketing guru Dan Kennedy talks about “putting a fence around your herd.” He says if you don’t put a fence around you’re herd, they will get out and go into other people’s pasture (you’re competition!)

And the #1 method Dan Kennedy recommends for keeping your customers is a monthly newsletter.

What should your newsletter be about?

It should include relevant topics to the care you give. Healthy living tips, studies, and seasonal articles are great content.

The slam-dunk thing about newsletters is that they are very inexpensive to produce and mail. For about $10-15 per patient, you can stay in contact with your patient list monthly for a year.

If you have the time and skill, you can write your own newsletter. Another option is to let a service do it for you. There are quite a few newsletter services out there, but not one that I specifically recommend at the moment.

Just make sure you get few samples of their newsletter before you sign up with the service.

If you stay in contact with your patients, they will stay with you longer. And if you give them an opportunity to refer other new patients, they will. Try it for a year and see if it isn’t an excellent low cost marketing strategy.