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Guest post by Todd Brown

Practice scalability is a prerequisite if you ever want to achieve real wealth and autonomy as a chiropractor.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s THE most important factor for you… if… you want to earn the big money and eventually get free of your practice.

In the rest of this guest blog post I’ll share the two core things needed to scale your practice to incredible heights.

First, let’s start by defining what it means to scale your chiropractic practice.

In simple terms: scaling your practice means your practice cash grows faster than your expenses, without limits, and beyond your own personal efforts.

Said slightly differently: a practice that can go on without you is scalable. If your practice is not able to go on functioning and growing with out you, it is not scalable.

So, what do you need to create a practice that can scale?

Two things:

First, you need systems.

A practice that is built around the skill-sets or abilities of one or two people, instead of systems, is not scalable.  There’s only so much those people can do. And, your practice becomes more and more dependent on the actions of those people.

Instead, when you build a practice that’s driven and powered by systems, and not people, you’re not held captive by any one or two staff members.

Systems allow you to terminate or add new staff members without the fear of a job, task, or process being done in a different manner than your practice has become accustomed.

As well, systems are what produce consistent, predictable results. This is exactly what allows franchises to grow and scale, often at an incredible rate.

Second, you need to a method or process to ensure and maintain quality control.

As your practice grows via reliable systems it becomes essential that you have a process in place for confirming the desired outcomes of each system.

Think of it like this:

You have practice systems that run and grow your office.

And you have a quality control system for checking and confirming that each of the practice systems are being done properly and achieving the outcomes they were designed for.

Together – systems and quality control – give you the ability to scale your practice. And the ability to scale your practice is what gives YOU the ability to build wealth, gain more freedom, and achieve the ultimate chiropractic lifestyle.

About the author:
Todd Brown, Founder of More Chiro Patients, Inc., provides motivated chiropractors with the business-building, marketing, and entrepreneurial skills to achieve wild levels of personal, financial, and lifestyle success.  His free chiropractic marketing videos and articles can be found here: Chiropractic Marketing Blog

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 Marketingprogram 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.

There aren’t too many books published specifically for chiropractic marketing, so I was very interested in seeing what Dr. Reizer has to say in his new book CHIROPRACTIC MARKETING TOOLS THAT WILL ABSOLUTELY GROW YOUR PRACTICE. According to his site, Dr. Reizer “is a former associate professor of Sherman College and has taught numerous graduate level courses in chiropractic technique, x-ray analysis, diagnostic interpretation, chiropractic philosophical applications, and chiropractic communications.”

Dr. Reizer has published numerous other books on chiropractic (which I have listed at the end of this post), as well as three science fiction novels.

The subject matter of Chiropractic Marketing Tools ranges from simple business cards and newspapers to more advanced strategies like writing your own newspaper ads, developing a weight loss campaign, and marketing to health clubs. The book is only 133 pages, but packed full of ideas. I counted at least 24 different marketing tools mentioned. Dr. Reizer spends about 3-6 pages on each of the marketing tools mentioned. In most of the chapters he briefly explains the tool and how to use it, and sometimes gives an sample piece that you can easily use in your office.

One Amazon reviewer said,”Every morning our staff reads a few pages to get everyone thinking about how to promote the office.” This is actually a pretty good idea, as these are mostly marketing tools that your staff could do for you (or setup for you.) So to have them thinking about marketing each day is vital to your practice. Also, many of these strategies your staff has never heard of before, so you can provide a quick and easy manual of marketing ideas for them to use.

I do have two critiques of the book.

The biggest critique is that while the tools mentioned are useful and will “absolutely grow your practice” if done correctly, one of the most effective marketing tools available to chiropractors is only mentioned in passing: direct response marketing. These exact words are not found in the book, but Dr. Reizer does spend a few pages talking about lead generation marketing, which is a form of direct response marketing. He then provides a sample free report, which well written. But no mention of long copy newspaper ads or direct mail pieces. Seeing as one of my Decompression Marketing Elite clients just notified me that they got over 300 new patients this year from my ads, I think newspaper ads are pretty important!

The other critique is related to the first. Overall the book is a great summary of marketing ideas for every chiropractor to use. But the book is going to be used most by those who are new to practice or operating on a low marketing budget. For example, all of the strategies in the book could be done each month for less than $500 (there is no mention of radio or TV marketing). While this is a great place to start, and even marketing veterans should be doing some of the things Dr. Reizer mentions, there is much more that can be done in the way of effective marketing strategies.

Overall I think it’s a book every chiropractor should have in their arsenal. For those in practice less than 2 years, or for doctors struggling, it is a must read ASAP. For others, this book will be very useful for your staff and as a reference guide for ideas.

Dr. Reizer’s other chiropractic books include:

• 15 Secrets to Becoming a Successful Chiropractor
• Up and Running – Opening A Chiropractic Office
• Teaching Your Patients Chiropractic
• Depression – Proofing Your Chiropractic Career

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 couple of years out of chiropractic college, I had hit rock bottom. No money for rent. Barely enough for food. And certainly no money for Christmas presents for our little daughter at the time. (If you want an exercise in empathy, try telling your two year old that there’s not enough money for even a single gift!)

Not being able to provide for one’s family is a heart-wrenching affair, which can send any “tough guy” into a deep depression. And that’s when I had a huge business awakening. Here’s what I learned:

“It’s not just about your patients!”

I know, you’re probably thinking this isn’t any huge breakthrough at all. But here me out a bit. I had been told over and over in school, by consultants and many industry leaders that “If you take care of enough people, they’ll take care of you” or “Don’t worry about the money, just take care of the patients.” Now both of these have an element of truth. You certainly can’t focus your life on the ‘love of money’. You also can’t be worried about ‘numero uno’ all the time. But the problem with these coined phrases is that they don’t tell the whole story.

You see, I had plenty of patients at the time. But I was giving away so much free care and discounted care that I was barely able to feed my family. People would pull up in Porsches and Jaguars to my office, while I was parting my old jalopy at the other end of the parking lot. I realize now that I was ‘doing stupid’ by the shovel full, but at the time I was under the impression that I just needed to see more patients. More visits from more new patients would solve my problems.

Except that it didn’t solve anything because I was marketing to the wrong patients! And on top of that offering them severely discounted care plans!

That’s why it was a huge breakthrough for me. Because for the first time in practice I realized that patients didn’t give a darn whether I drove a jalopy or a Mercedes. They just wanted their care. And I had a lot of nice caring patients, but in the end it didn’t matter to them how successful I was.

So why on earth am I so worried about what they thought of my recommendations. An extra $10 a visit was nothing to them, but a huge blessing to me and my family at the time.

This is one of the reasons I went from an average of $17 a visit to over $80 a visit — in just a matter of 4 months.

Now it wasn’t just charging more that turned my practice around. Thankfully, I was blessed with a wake-up call on how to use effective marketing too. My marketing plan before had simply been this: whoever calls or comes by asking me to market, that’s what I’ll use to get more patients in the door.

A few thousand dollars later and very few new patients I realized the famous “marketing doesn’t work” saying must be true. Little did I know that this saying was both right and wrong. You can guarantee that crappy marketing does not work. But effective marketing does indeed work. The key is being able to determine between the two!

Lessons to learn from this true story:

#1. If you’re not struggling now, make sure you never have to by doing right things right now. Don’t wait to market when you need new patients. Put a chiropractic ad in the newspaper every month. Make sure your internet marketing plan is up to speed. Send your patients “stick letters”.  And more.

#2. If you are struggling, stop wasting money on ineffective marketing and get some good marketing. Passing out business cards and brochures isn’t going to cut it in most cities. Get an ad set up to run before Christmas. (My Ultimate Chiropractic Ads have a 90 day guarantee. What do you have to loose?)

#3. Be thankful for what you’ve been given. I learned my lesson the hard way. But not a Christmas or Thanksgiving holiday rolls by without me thinking back on those hard times, and being thankful for the blessing I now have: a great wife, four beautiful children and I get to help chiropractors grow their business every day!

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.

Dan Clements was kind enough to answer a few questions regarding his new book, The Practitioners Journey.

1. Dan, can you give us a bird’s eye view of what your book is all about? (Or maybe this questions is better phrased “Why did you write the book?”)

After a number of years of working with practitioners, and growing our own business, it was becoming more and more evident to me that the biggest challenge facing practitioners wasn’t information, it was complexity.

Time after time we discovered that practitioners had plenty of information, and no shortage of things on their to-do lists. What they had trouble with was how to look at their practices in a way that made it easier to make decisions and continue to move forward.

2. In the first section of the book, you use the metaphor of traveler getting lost in a cave. I see a lot of chiropractors lost in dark caves like you explain in the book. Do you think we’re seeing more chiropractors lately wandering into the darkest parts of their career?

Between economic shifts, health care changes and the sheer amount of competition in some places, I think the idea of being lost in a dark place is something that resonates with many chiropractors.

What’s important to remember is that being lost is temporary. The cave—how we describe that dark stretch—is really a tunnel. There’s an end, and finding it is something that’s within your control.

CE credits aren’t usually what you need to get out of the cave—the dark parts of your career are almost always related to a lack of NON-clinical development. A new technique or tool might be part of it, but it’s usually about embracing the idea that you’re in business, and continuing to develop that side of yourself.

Invest in your non-clinical education. Learn to manage, to lead. To take risk. To market what you offer. Each lights the way a little more.

3. I’m always telling chiropractors that they need to niche their practices, focusing on certain conditions or types of patients they like to work with. How does this compare to your metaphor of “the crystal” and the story of Maya the chiropractor?

Maya is like many other chiropractors today. She’s in a busy market, with competition right down the street. The appointment book is never as full as she’d like. She’s struggling, and stressed.

The real reason that her competition is a problem, though, is that what she offers isn’t any different from other DC’s.

That sameness means she has to compete. And when she competes, there will always be someone who will be cheaper than Maya. Or closer. Or open later. Or with better parking.

The result? Her existing patients don’t have a compelling reason to stay, and new ones don’t have a compelling reason to choose her. Focusing on one type of problem, or one type of patient is one way to avoid that no-win competition.

4. One line I really found helpful in your book is on page 31: “And there’s the great irony of the CAM industry: no one starts out to be in business, yet everyone has to be in order to succeed.”

I think cash practices are on the rise in chiropractic. It’s going to become the new normal. And that means that you don’t just get to be a chiropractor. It means you run a health care business in which you also happen to be the person providing chiropractic services, too.

It’s not a choice. You have two hats to wear (at least), and you have to find a way to get comfortable in them. Your DC hat only gives you the license to provide services. It’s the business owner hat that lets you find the people to deliver them to.

5. There a great section in the book where you give 6 tips to help alternative health professionals bridge the gap between them and MDs. How important is this?

For me, it’s critical. MD’s are still the gatekeepers to the sick in our culture. If you want to reach and help more people, you need to go where they are. In our society, a huge number of them are still in hospitals and MD offices. And that system is being overwhelmed.

Continuing to fight over the same people who already use chiropractic is a race with no winner. The real opportunity lies in the huge chronic health challenges in our culture, and most of those people who need that help are still inside conventional care.

6. Your second strategy for finding more time in our busy lives is to follow Parkinson’s law. What is Parkinson’s law and how can it help chiropractors?

Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fit the time available for it. In other words, if you give yourself a “day” to do admin work in your practice, it’ll take all day – regardless of how much of it there is to do. The same goes for patient hours. If you offer thirty patient hours a week, it’s common to only bill for half of those or less.

That makes Parkinson’s Law critical for balance. What most DC’s miss out on is the fact that they can almost always earn more in the same time or less. My suggestion is to put your focus on your percentage booked. Start measuring it in your practice, and if you’re not consistently booked at a rate of 75% or more, start cutting back your available hours.

7. How do you think your book can help chiropractors thrive in this tough economy?

I recently interviewed Dan Clements, author of a very helpful book entitled The Practitioner’s Journey.

People find three things helpful in the book. The first is simplicity – the book gives practitioners a way to rise above the overwhelming minutiae of day-to-day life in practice.

The second is a practical way to look at growing your practice. The framework of the book is the same framework we use to do our strategic planning every year—it’s a way to look at your practice from 50,000 feet and make smart decisions about what needs to change so that you can find success on your own terms. When you take a simple framework, and combine it with small, practical and consistent steps forward, you get something very powerful: progress.

Last, I think it’s a book about hope. About believing that there’s no special advantage required to find your way to success – that if you’ve made it far enough to be in practice, you have what it takes to do it successfully.

Thanks for the interview Dan.

Dan Clements, B.Comm., B.A. is the author of The Practitioner’s Journey, and Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple, which has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Success Magazine and on A-list blogs such as Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek.  Dan and his wife Tara Gignac, ND operate StoneTree Clinic in Collingwood, ON. Together they are Contributing Founders of IntegrativePractitioner.com, the premier online community for integrative health care professionals, joining such health care luminaries as Joseph E. Pizzorno, Jr., N.D., Mark Hyman, MD, Alan Gaby, MD and many others.

Their popular practice management blog, www.practitionersjourney.com, attracts thousands of practitioners in diverse health care professions.

Dan lectures at The Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine on practice management, and speaks regularly on health, business and work-life balance.

(Today’s post is by my colleague Dr. Jonathan Walker, co-creator of PI Marketing Mastery.)

Check out this marketing message from a website I stumbled across recently…

“Don’t rely on focus groups and consumers’ ability to express their opinions about your product, let their minds speak for themselves.

At MindSign Neuromarketing(TM), we look at the subject brain response to your ad, game, speech, or film. We look at how well and how often it engages the areas for attention/emotion/memory/and personal meaning (importance). We also look at how well it activates (good) the brain as a whole. From this data we can tell what your audience was thinking while using your software or watching your content, moment by moment, regardless of what that content is. Were they scared or sleepy, happy or sad? Were they even paying attention? We can show you how your product is affecting the consumer brain even before the consumer is able to say anything about it.”

This comes from the website of a company called MindSign Neuromarketing who uses functional MRI technology to literally read the minds of subjects who are exposed to marketing messages. Functional MRI measures blood flow to the brain, so when a particular region is activated it is easy to measure and record.

Am I the only one who finds this a little scary? Although it seems like something straight out of Star Trek, this type of marketing research is being utilized by corporations such as Unilever and Proctor and Gamble to know exactly what consumers are thinking.

While no chiropractor that I’m aware of has figured out how to read the minds of PI attorneys, you can get close. There are very specific questions that every attorney wants answered, and your goal is to answer these before they even have a chance to ask them.

I recently sat down with a local attorney and explained to him how I understood how difficult it was to build a case with no objective evidence. I told him the battle he faced trying to prove his clients were injured when the treating physicians didn’t provide any objective evidence in the form of diagnostic testing.

I then explained to him that I use very specific x ray and MRI protocols that can uncover ligament damage that is common with most whiplash patients. These ground-breaking imaging techniques can be used to show proof of injury in the dreaded “soft tissue” cases that for years have been nearly impossible for attorneys to win at trial.

Knowing the answer to one of the most pressing questions burning in the minds of PI lawyer instantly made me this attorney’s “go to guy”. At the end of our conversation he said, “I like your office and I’m ready to work with you. I’ll probably be able to send 50-60 cases to you over the next year.”

This stuff really works! Answer the questions before they can ask them and you’ll have attorneys keeping your practice full to capacity with high quality PI referrals.

Discover multiple ways of getting PI patients at:
http://newpimarketing.com

Yours for more PI patients,
Jonathan Walker, D.C.