Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

As I was doing my daily searching on Google.com today, I noticed a strange graphic:

The Google image is blacked out. By clicking on the image you’ll end up on their Take Action page which deals with the new SOPA/PIPA legislation before Congress.

Then later today I was reading over at Ryan Healy’s blog and noticed quite a few websites are protesting. Here’s what you’ll see at Wikipedia:

What is SOPA/PIPA and what does it have to do with your website?

Do you market your practice on Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube?

Watch this short video to understand why you should fight against this legislation.

What can you do to stop this censorship, which if passed, will eventually effect your business?

Sign Google’s petition here. And contact your representative. If you’re not sure who your rep is, go to Wikipedia today and they have a neat popup that will look up your representative by zipcode.

Are you staying in contact with your patients through email every month?

You definitely should be staying in contact with your current patients outside of their regular visits to your office.

Regular contact enables you to educate your patients. And this helps with your patient retention.

But the biggest reason to contact your patients regularly is to give them opportunities to refer their friends and family. While this should be done in person during a normal visit, I have found that sending the patient something in writing gets even more referrals.

If every new patient that starts care in your office got a letter in the mail plus an email with education and referral opportunities, do you think you will get some referrals?

Not every patient will refer someone else, but how much did it cost you in time or money to have an email company (autoresponder) send something out?

Nothing, it’s free (other than the low cost of the monthly autoresponder!)

You can also send out emails on for special events throughout the year. This notifies your patient list that your office will be focusing on specific issues and reminds them you can help their friends and family.

Here are 20 ideas you can use to send out a special broadcast email…

1. Patient appreciation days
2. Thanksgiving food drive
3. Toys for Tots at Christmas
4. Valentines day
5. Easter celebration
6. Dog days of summer
7. Back to school kids check
8. Tax man day
9. Chiropractic Birthday
10. Practice anniversary
11. Dr.’s Birthday
12. Staff’s birthday
13. Halloween bash
14. Scratch and dent sale (or we ordered too much of x product and don’t have room, need to get rid of it this week!)
15. FAQ (frequently asked questions) about chiropractic care, decompression tables, home exercises, weight loss, etc
16. July 4th
17. Labor Day or Memorial day
18. Any holiday you celebrate that I haven’t already mentioned
19. Local sports team day, i.e. Dallas Cowboys day
20. Newsflash on chiropractic or chiropractic research
21. Any current event in the news, i.e. political race, Olympics, Hurricane relief
22. Celebrity appearance event (retired, locally known sports greats that could use the money)

Do you see the possibilities for using email marketing in your practice? You could combine this with a snail mail letter or postcard as well. For example, let’s say you send a letter in the mail to announce the event, then do 1-3 follow up broadcast emails to remind your patient base of the upcoming event.

Remember, you should not be sending mass emails out through your normal email account. Most internet companies will mark your email messages as spam if you are sending out hundreds or thousands from your person account. Better to use a company that has all these snags worked out.

My favorite system that handles all my email lists and makes it very easy to send an email is http://www.easyemailsystem.com.

I just received the DVD set from the NeuropathyDr conference I spoke at last summer. Here’s the first 10 minutes of the talk, where I showed the audience why some chiropractic ads bringing in little-to-no results. I’ll be posting more videos from this DVD in the future, but if you like this one, please click through to Youtube and choose “Like” or thumbs up.

Last week we looked at three big marketing strategies you should be be doing this year to build your practice. (To read that post, click here.) Today, let us look at four more marketing methods you would be very wise to use in 2011 for your biggest year yet.

#4. Have Your Staff Do “Focused” Spinal Screenings

This recommendation may come as a shock to some of my readers, as I have often times said spinal screenings are a waste of time for most doctors. And I still tell my clients and customers that. For the doctor, it is not a good use of your time to go and spend 4 hours standing at the front of a business, chasing people with a clipboard in hand. I’ve done enough of these types of screenings in my lifetime and 95% of them were a complete waste.

But there are three reasons you should do spinal screenings: (1) you’re new in practice, (2) you’re about to go out of business and need new patients ASAP, or (3) you can have someone else do it for you at a big event. It’s this third one that I recommend you focus on in 2011. A big event would be a huge festival that your town holds once per year, or a large business that let’s your staff come in to screen (like Walmart, Costco, etc.). Notice I said “your staff”, and not you as the doctor. If you want to streamline this process for your staff, and find out how chiropractors are still getting into Walmart to do screenings, I recommend you get Dr. Smith’s Spinal Screening Program.

#5. Email Marketing With Current and Inactive Patients

It’s amazing that many chiropractors still don’t ask for their patient’s email address. It’s as simple as including it on the intake form for all new patients. The reason this is so important in your marketing strategy is that we’re all human, which means we forget things. Patient’s forget appointments unless reminded. And this is especially true of patients who’s treatment plan does not require them to come in often (maintenance or wellness patients, etc.) How much revenue is lost in your practice every week simply because people forgot about their appointments?

The simple solution is to set up a system with your staff to email patients about their appointments. Or society is becoming more and more an email/internet society, replacing the telephone. My dentist emails me a remind before each appointment, which makes a huge difference when I’m extremely busy and likely to forget. Now I don’t recommend this for all patients, but you should make a list of the ones who need to be reminded most. Also, something similar can be done for inactive patients. You can compile an email letter that offers inactive patients to return to care. If your list is set up right, with a click of a button your email can go out to thousands of inactive patients at once. This strategy can really have an affect on your practice in the long run.

#6. Get More PI Patients

As health insurance becomes more difficult to work with in 2011, many chiropractors will turn to seeing more car accident cases. Unfortunately, most chiropractors still think PI marketing is all about using outdated attorney-schmoozing techniques to get new PI patients. While it’s true a few chiropractors do this, its by no means necessary to for having a successful PI practice.

There are much better ways to get new patients from attorneys, as well as MDs, ER rooms, body shops, existing patients, Facebook, and more. This does not mean you must become a 100% PI mill practice. But you should take another look at PI, as the return is much higher because you actually get paid a fair value for your care, if it’s done right. See This PI Marketing program for all the new marketing strategies you can use.

#7. Use Direct Mail

Direct mail has long been a tested and proven marketing method in businesses worldwide. But when the recent recession hit, so many companies pulled out of direct mail marketing that the USPS took a huge hit. And unfortunately many chiropractors did the same. Of course cutting back on your direct mail campaign doesn’t make sense if all your competition has done the same. Like newspaper ads, now is the best time to use direct mail, since others are cutting back or convinced it doesn’t work.

What type of direct mail? I would not suggest fancy postcards. Long copy letters and postcards work best, but they must be written well and not sound sleazy or cheap. Also, list selection is important when it comes to direct mail. Getting a good list from a list broker can increase your return on investment drastically. We’ll look closer at direct mail in a future blog post.

The super-successful practice will implement all seven of these strategies. Which of these 7 will you implement this year?

Have you set up your marketing plan for this year yet?

If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Set your goals high and plan now for a breakthrough year. Big numbers are possible with the right tools. Just a few weeks ago a client told me he had received 300 extra new patients from using my newspaper ads in 2010. What would 300 more new patients do for your practice, and more importantly your lifestyle?

Here are my recommendations regarding the marketing strategies you should be focusing on for 2011.

1. Finally Do Online Marketing Right.

Chiropractic internet marketing is the strangest thing. It’s the one strategy everyone knows they should be doing, as its getting bigger and bigger every day. It’s also one of the lowest forms of marketing you can do for your practice.

But here’s the strange part: most chiropractors are dragging their feet on doing anything. I’ve seen people spend hours “marketing” on Facebook and Twitter, while their website can hardly be found on Google. Every day you wait to do it right, someone else comes along in your town and figures it out. Being ranked #1 on Google is like being king of hill, and the longer a competitor stays king of the hill the harder it is to knock them off.

So here’s what you need to do right now. Make sure your website shows up on Google’s top 5 for your area for the major keywords that patients would type in; chiropractor, back pain, headaches, decompression, etc. If you’re not there, that’s the first thing to work on. Once you’re set up at least in the top 10, add some condition specific landing pages to your website and buy some qualified traffic from Adwords to send to your site. (See my explanation in more detail in this webinar.)

You may choose to put in the time to do this or hire someone else to do it for you. If you hire someone else, please make sure they (1) know chiropractic, (2) can write marketing copy and (3) actually understand how Google works. Very few web designers understand chiropractic enough to present it to the public. And most web designers are more gifted in the technical skills of programming than in writing. This produces a beautiful site with moving spines and award-winning graphics, but wouldn’t convince your mom to come in as a patient.

Also they must understand what Google likes (hint: it’s called a WordPress site layout). Any high school kid can build a website for you. But there is very little chance it will ever make the coveted top 10 on Google. And if you, your wife, and the aforementioned high school kid are the only ones to every see your website…it’s pointless.

#2. Ignore the ‘Death of Newspapers’ Mantra

When I wrote my first newspaper ad for my practice, someone told me it was pointless since newspaper didn’t work any more. The ad brought in 17 decompression patients at the cost of $800. In 2009 my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads brought in a conservative estimate of $20 million dollars for chiropractors in the U.S. (I haven’t estimated 2010 yet, but it has to be about 5 times that based on the numbers of doctors who bought them.)

Here’s the point…

Ignore the gloomy predictions and focus on your practice now. Will newspapers disappear? Maybe they will someday. Who knows. But the question you need to ask yourself is this: “Is there a newspaper in my town?” If the answer is yes, you should be advertising there. When there no longer is a newspaper in your area, then you can join with the naysayers and proclaim that newspapers are dead. Until then, use them for all they’re worth.

Here are the best producing ads according to feedback in 2010:

• Spinal decompression
• Neuropathy (crazy numbers are being reported for these ads)
• Back pain/sciatica
• Fibromyalgia
• Migraine headaches

You can see the commonality between the above…they all are condition specific ads. In 2011, you’ll need to get even better at showing prospects how you can help them with their specific problems.

#3. Get Into Local Businesses

This year, setting up events in local businesses will bring you many more new patients. While this method has been around for decades, the same old techniques don’t work today. New tactics have been tested to educate and schedule new patient appointments from these events. One method that is working very well is using the Teacher Appreciation Program to check teachers in local schools. If you have a massage therapist on staff, they will be very useful in making connections with local businesses.

Where should you go?

The list is endless. Schools, malls, gyms, banks, Costco and even Walmart. (Yes,Walmart is possible. Look for more on this unique strategy in a few days.) Many of these places, like Costco, will have some type of community health event already planned each year.

I’ve got 4 more strategies you must use in 2011, but this blog post is getting a bit long already. Look for the final 4 next week, one of which you will be shocked I’m actually endorsing!

Use this list to and check off what you need to do.Get out a calendar and pencil in dates that ads will run, changes to be made, etc. Let’s make 2011 your best year yet.

If you’ve been putting off all the internet marketing your practice should be doing, today’s post is going to speed things along nicely. In fact, you could have everything up and running in a matter of days if you follow the advice below.

When it comes to internet marketing, there is a lot of technical stuff to know. There’s building websites, handling email, recording and producing videos, tracking statistics, and more. It can fell like you need a degree in computers just to do it all. This is where you have to make a decision. You can either do the work yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.

Most chiropractors will choose to hire someone else, and that’s a wise decision. This is what’s called “outsourcing”, finding someone else to handle the things you don’t want to.

Why Should You Outsource

There’s no rule that says you personally have to do everything in your practice. You can hire out for someone to answer the phone, clean your office, and even hire another doctor to see your patients if you wanted. It’s even easier online to hire or outsource your work.

Here are just a few reasons you might have for outsourcing your online marketing…

• You are too busy with your practice.
• You hate the technical stuff.
• You could do it, but someone else could probably do it better.
• You value your time and know that it would take awhile to do some of the technical parts.

How much is your time worth? I’ll bet it’s worth more than the $10-35 an hour you would pay someone else to do all the internet marketing for you. By hiring someone to do it for you, you bring on a “team member” that can help you build the marketing system you’ve always dreamed of. Two chiropractic systems that do it all for you are Get New Patients and The Chiropractic Dashboard.

Where To Find A Team Member

Outside of these Chiropractic-focused programs, you may want someone you have direct control over what they create and make for you, like an employee or independent contractor type setup. Here I’ve listed my most favorite to least favorite places to find a team member for outsourcing work to.

1. Friends and family

I prefer to have team members I know and trust already, instead of going out to find someone I don’t know. If you have a child or relative that’s good with webpages and blogs, they could help you put together the steps we’ve already covered.

2. Your own staff members or patients

If your current staff has the ability to help you in developing your chiropractic internet marketing plan, you should use them. Patients can also be a great source of finding help. Some of your patients will have the technical skills to help you and do so for very little pay. Be careful of the professional “web designer” though, as they are likely to charge you thousands of dollars and change your blog/landing page to their own liking.

3. Any of the following online outsourcing companies

• www.Elance.com
• www.Guru.com
• www.Getafreelancer.com
• www.99designs.com (for logo and graphics design)
• www.rentacoder.com

4. Craigslist.com

This site can be an easy way to find an outsourcer or “part time” work at home person to help you with parts of your system.

“What Can I Outsource?”

Here are just a few things you could outsource to the above companies, including the chiropractic specific ones.

• Build a landing page
• Set up your auto responder
• Setup a word press blog on your domain
• Ghost write your blog posts
• Create and install your web forms
• Copy for your landing page (most good copywriters don’t outsource their work on elance.com and other sites)

Other internet marketing tasks you might consider outsourcing are things like press releases, writing articles, blog and forum commenting and other link building strategies. A chiropractic specific service that does this is ASN Solutions. A popular general link building site is Linkvana.

As you can see, there’s plenty of work for an outsourcer or virtual assistant to do. You may like delegating your work so much that you find other things around your office to outsource like compiling patient data, making a mailing list, or doing research for health talks. Who knows, you may even cut back on staff and payroll as a result.

A few months ago I met an super-successful Australian physiotherapist that shares many of my marketing insights and values. (Physio’s in Australia have been dealing with a cash market for years…much like where our market is currently heading.)

When he told me he was giving away 214 marketing tools, a worldwide marketing with hundreds of health practitioners (including many chiropractors), and a monthly marketing CD for less than $100 a month, I thought he was joking.

Click here to see what I mean.

Paul Wright is living proof that a dream lifestyle is possible. He owns 3 successful “Get Active Physiotherapy” clinics in Australia, spends more time at home than his wife likes, never misses a school concert or sports carnival, and visits his clinics for only a few hours each week. He no longer even lives in the same city as 2 of his clinics.

He prefers spending time with his family and friends, at the beach, or at home working on teaching other health professionals how to succeed in business.

How would you like to have the last 20 years of Paul’s best posters, newsletters, articles, lectures, MP3 recordings, handouts and tools that focus on conditions like back pain, neck pain, shoulder and knee injuries and more?

You can grab all 214 of them and much more in his Profit Club Membership Program. All for a measly $67 AUD ($65 US right now) per month.

Here’s what you’ll get…

#1. Unlimited access over 200 marketing resources on the “Member Only Profit Club” website. This includes…

- 14 Medical Doctors Letters and Promotional Materials: Just cut and paste the all or part of these letters to increase referrals and relationships with local doctors.

- 24 General Business Development Items: Includes templates, clinic systems and marketing materials that will increase your clinic productivity and business results.

- 27 Business Building Audio Files: Over 20 hours of MP3s including popular recordings like The 10 Biggest Sales and Marketing Mistakes, The Get Published Interview, The Marketing Triangle and much more.

- 56 Patient and Client Newsletters: Paul and his team currently spend more than 2 days a month specifically writing these newsletters to send to patients and referrers – you can have access to them all. Simply cut and paste the text that you like to build your own newsletter.

- 30 Posters and Signs: Swipe all these high-quality, graphic design marketing materials that Paul’s Get Active has used over the years. Simply add your clinic details to these professional templates.

- 22 Protocols and Procedures: The best business protocols including front desk scripts, sales measurement tools, and cross referral protocols that will immediately increase your revenue.

- 23 Seminar Outlines, Posters and Handouts: Includes seminar handouts, outlines and posters – use these seminars to build your business NOW.

- 13 Vouchers and Other Marketing Materials: Paul’s most effective, creatively designed coupons and flyers that have brought thousands of dollars into Get Active over the years. Simply inserts your contact info and use.

- 5 Financial Tools to Track your Health Business Success: Paul has included here a few of his favorite excel spreadsheets that he uses every day to measure the success of his clinics.

Component #2. Each month you will be mailed an interview with Paul on CD, including topics like: marketing, website search engine optimization, getting more clients, increasing doctor referrals, leadership, customer service and other current issues and opportunities for health care businesses owners.

#3. Marketing Forum. You can instantly access a forum where you and other like minded health professionals can share marketing ideas and thoughts that will benefit everyone – including request signs and posters that our design team can add to the site.

How much for all this?

Only $67 (AUD) a month – and you can cancel at any time. That’s $65 US right now, but the exchange rate changes vary daily so sign up now and lock in this low price.

Join here:
http://www.netofficetoolbox.com/app/?af=1247001

Join now and grab these Three Special, Limited-Time Bonus Offers: Special Bonus #1: Your choice of one of Paul’s “Million Dollar Health Professional” DVDs. (Valued at $125 AUD)

Special Bonus #2:FREE CD Interview “The Biggest Mistakes of Health Business Owners –How They are Costing You Thousands” with Health Business Coach – Anthony Capiaghi, D.C. (Valued at $75 AUD)

Special Bonus #3:FREE CD “How Your Website Can Make Money for Your Health Business” with Web Guru – Derek Recsei (Valued at $75 AUD)

Click Here to Get Everything Listed Above

Yours for greater success,
Michael Beck, D.C.

P.S. Paul has a 30 day money back guarantee so you really risk nothing by joining now. Grab the 214 resources, monthly CD’s, marketing forum and the 3 bonuses now at:

http://www.netofficetoolbox.com/app/?af=1247001

Is Google Adwords an effective way of doing chiropractic marketing? And if so why aren’t more chiropractors using it?

Before we go in depth with this question, let’s look at some basic terms. Adwords is a program by Google whereby you can place your ads on their search engine. When people type in certain phrases, called keywords, your ad will show up. If the person clicks your ad, they are taken to the site you have linked up with the ad. You only pay if someone clicks your ad (hence the term “pay-per-click advertising” is sometimes used) and do not pay if your ad only shows up but is not clicked. You bid a certain price for your ad to show for a certain keyword. So I might bid $2 for the keyword “back pain”. To keep it simple, we’ll say that if I’m the highest bidder my ad will show first. If the second highest bidder, my ad will show second, etc. (It’s actually a bit more complex than this, as you can beat out the highest bidder by having a higher click-through rate.)

So with that introduction, let us discuss the use of Adwords for chiropractors.

Fact #1
It’s a proven that your potential patients are on the internet, looking for solutions to their problem. Just look at how many searches Google’s keyword tool show occurred in the last 30 days in the United States:

chiropractor = 450,000 searches
back pain = 1.8 million searches
sciatica = 301,000 searches
neck pain =368,000

These are just a few general keywords. I haven’t even included all the specific keywords like “herniated disc back pain”. If we included all these specialty keywords, you could probably double or triple the categories listed above. Just click on this picture and you’ll see there are over 800 related terms just to back pain.

Now some chiropractors might say, “None of these searchers in my town!” Depending on how big of a city or town you live in, there may be only a few searchers for each keyword. But when you market to multiple keywords, you can bet all those keywords added up together make up some serious numbers. For example, my average ChiroPatients Online client has 798 keywords in their account.

Fact #2
Adwords does work to bring in more revenue. Google’s recent earnings report shows they made $7.29 billion last quarter, up 23% from this quarter last year! And guess where 99% of Google’s revenues come from? Their pay per click advertising. In addition to ads on their site, they also manage (or serve) ads on other large websites like Ebay, Blogspot.com, Youtube, and many more. So the question is why are more and more people spending money on advertising if it doesn’t work? Sure there are a few people out there who will spend money every month regardless of if they ever see a return. But in this economy, no small business is going to shell out tons of money on something if it proves to be a waste of time. And most of Google’s advertising clients are small businesses.

So given these two facts, why aren’t chiropractors making better use of Google Adwords? One of the biggest reasons is due to “bad experiences” with Adwords in the past. (Which sort of reminds me of the patient who’s uncle had a “bad experience” with a chiropractor, so he’s really scared to come in.)

Let’s look at some of the mistakes doctors have made:

1. Using XYZ yellow page company to send you “clicks”.
Clicks in general mean nothing in the broad picture. What you want is quality patients coming to your website and scheduling appointments. So these guys who promise “300 clicks a month” are really not doing much at all for you. You can hire a person in the back room to click your ads just as easy as they can.

2. Not setting a budget.
Some doctors will try Adwords a time or two, but forget (or not know how) to set a budget. Next thing they know Google is charging them $5000 for 1 days worth of clicks from China. Which bring us to the next mistake…

3. Not setting a geographical radius.
I usually set a 10-20 mile radius around the doctors practice. This means only people searching from computers inside that area can see the ads. If you’re in Paris, TX you don’t want your ad showing up in for people in Paris, France or Paris, Idaho. Plus there are bad people who will hire guys in India or Pakistan to just sit there and click your ad all day, running up your bill, which makes you stop advertising. This is called click fraud and Google will catch it most of the time, but some slip by.

4. Not cutting out bad keywords.
Sometimes you put in words like “chiropractic” but Google keeps showing your ad for searches on “Parker College of Chiropractic”, or some similar keyword. So now you’ve got to tell Google not to do that anymore by labeling that as a negative keyword. This will lower your costs since you won’t be wasting bad clicks anymore.

5. Not testing ads
Just like when you test offline ads, you should be testing Adwords ads too. In most campaign ad groups I’m testing two ads against each other. I’ll then pick the winner, delete the loser and write a new ad to start testing. This will gradually increase the number of people clicking on the ads over time, and lower your costs per click (due to complex algorithms we don’t have time to address here.)

6. Having an ineffective website.
Having a bad website is not a subjective term. Google has a complex system of analyzing your website to see if it will be pleasing to the visitor. Even if you’re not using Adwords, if you have a website they have measured it according to their standards called page rank, quality score, incoming links, internal links, number of pages, content, keyword saturation, and more. So the quality of your site can rise or lower your prices per click.

But more than Google liking your site, you want your site to convert visitors to patients. This can only be done by what’s called a landing page. A landing page will educate the visitor on why they should pick up the phone and call you to schedule now. Most landing pages are designed to fit the specific keyword the person was searching for on Google. So it works like this: person searches for “back pain” on Google.com, they see your ad that talks about back pain, they click the ad and land on a page that tells them why you are the doctor they should see for back pain. One of the biggest mistakes people can make with Adwords is by sending them to a non-specific web-page, like your homepage on your site.

Why aren’t you using Google Adwords? Leave a comment below.

You need traffic to your landing pages, blogs, and website to make your internet marketing system run. Too many doctors spend thousands of dollars on a pretty website, and are very disappointed to find little-to-no traffic or very few new patients.  Remember, more Internet traffic to your sites means more new patients. And more new patients equals more profits for your practice!

There are two major categories of website traffic: paid and free. Paid examples would include Google Adwords, newspaper ads with your website address, mailings, press releases, etc. But today I want to focus just on how to get free web traffic.

#1. Post on other blogs.

One of the best ways to get free traffic and great incoming links is to visit other people’s blogs. What you want to do is look for blogs relevant to your practice. These would be blogs on health topics, chiropractic issues, medical issues, or even legal issues dealing with healthcare. For traffic purposes, it’s best to look for local blogs, but for incoming links you can look for blogs anywhere in the world.

Visit some of the blogs and find post/articles that are relevant to your practice. Comment on the post and make sure to fill out the box for your website. This should be your blog or main website, the place that you want to rank higher in Google. I would not recommend doing this for your landing page.

Remember most blogs are an ongoing conversation; so make sure you are contributing to that conversation. Do not be promotional. Leave a comment that is relevant to the topic, not an ad for your website. Most comments must be approved by the owner, and if your comment is not related or overtly promotional, it will be deleted as if it was spam.

The first time you comment, simply use your first name and website link. With following comments, you can be a bit more aggressive by using your first name and some key anchor text, like “Dr. John – Dallas Chiropractor”. They may decide to edit out your anchor text, but many blog owners will allow it, so it’s worth a try.

(You should even comment on this post below, giving me your thoughts. Remember, enter the conversation, don’t just be promotional.”

#2. Participate on forums.

Another free way to generate traffic and incoming links is to post on message boards. This strategy is more for incoming links than for traffic, however if you are in a larger city there could be many discussion boards to post on.

Go to Google.com and search for “yourtown message boards”. You should also try the terms discussion boards and forums combined with yourtown. For example, if I practice in San Diego, I would search for “San Diego message boards” or “San Diego forums”. This is for local traffic.

Make sure that when you register at these message boards that you create a resource box (sometimes called a signature box) with your website or blog link. That way you are subtlety telling the reader to visit your site.

For an incoming links strategy, find a larger, more popular message forum and post messages related to the topic. Also, if the message board is health or chiropractic related, this may provide for a better incoming link. An example site would be http://www.healthboards.com/boards/index.php as it has a high rank with Google. Incoming links from sites with higher “Google page rank” are more valuable than sites with lower page rank. And remember your resource box on these forums, as that is where you will get the incoming “link juice”.

If you want to know exactly what page ranks a site has, you can download the Google toolbar at www.toolbar.google.com

#3. In-Office Blog Promotion.

There are numerous ways you can encourage your patients to learn more and get them to revisit your content on the blog. Why would you want your current patients to read your blog articles? There are many reasons, but here are a few: become better educated, find out about other services and products your practice offers, stay informed about upcoming events like P.A.D.’s, be reminded about referral opportunities, and so much more.

The first thing you can do is print a flyer that reads “To Read The Latest Health Articles And Updates Written By Dr. Beck, Be Sure To Visit www.blogsnamehere.com” Have this flyer in one of those nice, clear standup displays at the front desk where all of your patients can see it.

Another great place to mention your blog is in the newsletter. (You are sending out a printed newsletter to all your patients right?) Simply place a similar text like I quoted above in a prominent place in your newsletter, like at the bottom or top of each page.

You should also put your blog’s website address on all your business cards. This can be used inside and outside the office to better connect with patients and potential patients. Even if you already have a website listed, add your blog address.

#4. Submit to blog carnivals.

There are blogs out on the internet that are looking for different posts to link to on their site. They will typically get quite a few blog posts and put them together into a “blog carnival”. You can submit your content rich blog posts to blog carnivals, and in return may receive free incoming links to your site as well as a chance for good traffic.

To submit to a blog carnival, go to http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit.php. You’ll need to find a non-promotional blog post on your blog to increase the likelihood of a carnival linking to your blog.

#5. Outside Promotions.

If you do any outside promotions for your practice (you should be), I recommend you have your landing page address on any materials. Most people who pick up some information will not act on it right away. But later, when they start feeling worse, they’ll pick up that card, brochure, etc and go to our landing page to learn more.

When doing a talk, if you’re making an offer for new patients go ahead and do that first. But after that has been made, make sure you have a slide shown or a flyer handed out with your website information on it. This may sound basic, but you would be surprised at how many chiropractors don’t do this.

Today I was reviewing the practice stats of a Decompression Marketing Elite client and noticed that this client was doing exceptionally well with internet marketing, getting a whopping 1873% return! The internet is one of the most cost effective ways to market your practice. There is at least a billion people using the internet in the world. And it’s growing more and more every day.

At this point, it’s not a matter of if you should be marketing online, but simply how you should be marketing online. But where do you start? What works for chiropractors?

There are literally thousands of different ways to market your practice online. But not all of them will bring you a return on your time or money spent. Some are frankly a complete waste of your time, no matter what anyone tells you.

Let’s take Google for example…

On the Google search engine there are only 21 slots on the results page (11 paid, 10 organic) for keywords. And we all know you gotta be in the top 5 listings are you are going to be overlooked. How do you go about getting in the top 5 listings?

Some “web site experts” are still claiming you’ve gotta have good meta tags, and they’ll gladly do that for you at the low price of $1000. Most chiropractors don’t have a clue what meta tags are (why should they) so this geeky language makes the “expert” sound like he knows what he’s doing.

The problem is that on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most important components of your website, meta tags are about a .05. Which means you could leave meta tags out and still be at the #1 spot if you did everything else right. Meta tags were hugely important in 1998, but in today’s world they are simply minor in comparison to other components.

So as you can see, there’s a ton of information to sort through and learn. The problem is you have very little time to do it. And neither do I. This is why I have developed easy to use tools for internet marketing, as well as found great services that can save you time and money.

Here’s a list of some great internet marketing resources you can use. Most are chiropractic specific. A couple are my own and the others are people I’ve dealt with in various ways in the past, meaning they can be trusted.

ChiroPatients Online – My own niche specific done-for-you website, blog and Google Adwords automated system.

Complete Internet Marketing System – A fully automated new patient internet generator that includes email, videos, blogs and more.

Automated Social Networking – A system where all your online social networking is done for you each month.

Customized Twitter Backgrounds – Semmy has the lowest prices on high quality Twitter backgrounds.

Aweber Email System – The best email system on the internet.

ChiroMarketing Academy – My membership site on how to lessons on internet marketing, print marketing, conversion and more.

Leave a comment below and tell us if internet marketing has worked well for your practice.