Escape 101

The Secret Language of Money,

Go-Giver

I’m happy to say now, however, that our guide to success in practice, The Practitioner’s Journey, is on its way. Until it hits the stands, though, I’d like to introduce you to someone else’s book. Not only is it available now, it has the advantage of also being free.

There are a lot of free ebooks out there, but Practice Building 101 by Brooke Thomas is great because it’s great, not because it’s free. You don’t need to sign up to get it – it’s just there for the taking. You’ll find it a super-practical guide to growing your practice, particularly if you think you should be doing more online, but aren’t sure what the heck that means, or where to even think about starting.

It’s full of helpful, easy to digest ideas and resources, and Brooke has a great track record in growing her own practices (three in three different states, if I recall correctly!) – she knows what she’s talking about.

Brooke also has a great course called Practice Abundance – registration starts today, and last just until March 20. You can find all the details here: http://practiceabundancecourse.com/sneak-peek.

Happy Reading, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

-Dan

Practice Building 101

To see the difference in the search results, click on these two links (they open in a new window):

Naturopathic medicine (non-geographic)

Toronto naturopath (geographically specific)

Notice that instead of just a list of websites, the geographically specific search shows a map with a list of practices.

Here’s what you need to know:

• You can be on that list
• You don’t even need a website to show up.
• It takes only a few minutes to sign up – less if you already have a Google account (for gmail, for example)
• Geographic searches are really important

Why geography rules for your practice
The search engine traffic you want is the geographically specific stuff. Someone searching for “acupuncture for back pain” isn’t that relevant to you unless they’re searching in your area. Someone searching for “Boston Acupuncture”, however, is a new client waiting to happen if your practice is in Boston. For CAM practitioners, geography is king online. And since geographic searches are turning up results differently, this is worth your time.

How To Do It
Back during our practice website series, Bonnie mentioned Google and Yahoo local on her blog – it was something I’d overlooked at the time, but I signed up right away. More recently, I discovered that Dr. Michael Beck of DCPracticeTools.com has a short video that shows you how to sign up – it’s very simple.

If you’re in a rural or lower population area, you may not see these local listings coming up – do a quick search of your town and profession to find out. And remember: More people now search online for business information than in the Yellow Pages – this is a few minutes well-spent!

DC Practice Tools

So…as a practitioner, do you need one? Should you have one? Do you want one? Does it matter?

The Benefits of Blogging

There is a substantial upside to blogging, particularly if you’re jazzed about marketing your practice online:

• Blogging can help your search engine traffic – search engines tend to like the blog format, and the freshness of the content.
• Blogs are a great tool for generating discussion, creating community, and keeping topics current.
• Because patients can “subscribe” to your blog and receive updates automatically, you can stay in touch with some of your existing patients with minimal cost and effort.
• For clinics with multiple practitioners, a blog can be easier to sustain, and give prospective patients a taste of each practitioner’s style prior to their visit.

But is it a great tool for CAM practitioners to build a practice? Before you make the leap, it’s worth considering the drawbacks.

The Downside

• There are millions of blogs languishing in cyberspace. Stale-dated, untouched and unloved, they just hang around aging. While there’s nothing really wrong with trying a blog on for size and then abandoning it, remember that a blog becomes another part of the public face of you and your practice. From a credibility perspective, having no blog at all beats a blog that hasn’t had an update in six months.
• It can be time consuming, and if it takes you away from other marketing you should be doing, it may not be worth the investment.
• If you’re not a strong writer, it’ll show on your blog.

In the end practitioner blogs are for those who will enjoy the actual act of keeping an online journal. In other words: blog as an end, not a means.

But, if you’ve got something to say, and really want to make the leap to blogging, here are a few tips to help your startup:

• Write 20 or so Posts in Advance. Really. Before you do anything else, just keep a diary for 30 days on your computer. If, by that point you’re still jazzed about blogging, you’ll know you’ve got some time and stamina. You’ll also have a clearer idea of what it is you really want to say, and have a nice backlog of posts to start with.

• Use Your Own Domain. Don’t mess around with a hosted blog at www.myblog.blogspot.com, etc. Get your own domain, or add your blog to a domain you already own. For the $8 or so per year, it’s a small price to pay to build a brand, and enjoy full control over your blog.

• Use WordPress.org. This blog was started in Blogger, and recently made the transition. WordPress is a far better way to go. Just trust me.

• Remember You’re on Stage. You’re putting yourself out there – good for you. Just remember that your patients can now easily see a far more personality-driven side of their health care provider. What you choose to say and how you say it is up to you – just remember that it’s public.

Some additional info (these links are not affiliate links, just honest advice):

• AlternativeHealthPractice.com is hosted by HostGator , which provides automatic WordPress installations. The domain was registered with GoDaddy.

• For newbies wanting to set up a personal blog, you can ask the folks at Install4Free to install WordPress for you. Free is a very reasonable price.

• For commercial blogs (like your practice), you can ask your local geek, or try WordpressInstall.com – they’ll do it for $20.

If you’ve got a practice blog, tell us about it in the comments so we can all be inspired. Happy blogging!

This post is part of the Practice Website Series.

Today’s job? Teach you how to replicate this for your site using search engine optimization – creating your site in a way that helps it rank higher on search engines like Google. (If you’re not doing this on your own, pass these on to your web-geek. Web designers are often designing for looks not results, and a few little things can make a big difference.)

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these tips are CAM-relevant, and will give you the most bang for your buck:

1. Search Engines Need to be Able to Find Your Site

Google can’t include you in a search for “Wellville chiropractors” or “Healthstown Holistic Clinic” if it doesn’t know your site exists. Here are a few ways to make sure Google knows you’re on the scene:

• Have someone else who’s site is listed with Google put a link from their site to yours
• Submit your site to Google here
• Use Google Sitemaps to tell Google about your site

Really, it’s all about the first method because it means all the major search engines can find you without submitting to all of them. And it’s really not hard to get a few links – keep reading for some practice-friendly options.

2. Search Engines Need to Be Able to READ Your Site

Search engines use little programs to crawl the web from site to site by following links, just like you do when you’re surfing. The thing is, these “spiders”, as they’re sometimes called, can only read text. They can’t see pictures. So if your links and page content are made up of images, flash files, movies and other non-text content, you won’t rank as well. Make sure you/your designer uses a design that keeps almost all your words in text format.

3. Choose Your Keywords Wisely

Keywords are what users type into a search engine like Google in order to find something. The higher on the page your site shows for the results for those keywords, the more people will visit your site.

To get a good overview of keywords, try these free guides at Wordtracker. There are specific considerations for CAM practitioners, though. Keep these in mind:

• Geography is Important: Most CAM practitioners are looking for local patients. That means your site is geographically specific. Unless you’re particularly focused on making money online, someone visiting your site from the other side of the world isn’t much good to you. For that reason, you’ll need a place as part of each keyword phrase – your town or city.

• Profession Trumps Condition: The second part of your phrase is likely going to be your profession and/or practitioner description. Chiropractic, massage therapy, acupuncture, etc. So your keyword phrases start to look like “Wellsville chiropractor” and “chiropractic Wellsville”. Notice that I’ve used both “chiropractor” and “chiropractic”, to cover the profession and the practitioner. You can do the same for your area of specialty: acupuncture/acupuncturist, massage therapy/massage therapist, etc. What about conditions, like “back pain”, “fatigue”, or “colitis”? I don’t feel that people searching for those terms are likely to search locally. So “colitis Wellsville” isn’t likely to be common search. Certain forms of treatment, however, like “colon hydrotherapy” would be. If that’s a big part of your practice, you’d include geographically specific keyword phrases like “Wellsville colonics” too.

4. Use Your Keywords On Your Site

While Google is reading your site, it uses, among other things, the text on your page to help it better understand what your site is about. Once you’ve got your keyword phrases put together, you’ll need to make sure they actually appear on your site. You should use your chosen keywords in the following places:

• Page Titles / Title Bars: This is the bar at the very top of your browser window. It should, for example, have “Wellsville Massage Therapy” in it, as opposed to just “Home” or “Massage” or the dreaded “untitled”. You can use variations in your titles on different pages: “Contact our Wellsvile RMT Office” on your contact page, for example.
• Tags: Meta tags are bits of code in your web page that describe what a page or image is about. While not critical, they occasionally show up in the description area of search engine results, and can encourage people to click on your listing. Also, make sure you or your web designer use <h1> and <h2> header tags in your content. (If this is Greek to you, just pass it on to whoever works on your site.)
• Content: You’ll need to use your keyword in your writing, but the trick is to not spoil the flow of your language. So instead of saying, “Welcome to the Acme Naturopathic Clinic”, try “Welcome to the Acme Naturopathic Clinic in beautiful Wellsville, Alaska”
• Links: Google puts emphasis on hyperlinked words, so you should use your keywords in links to other pages on your site. For example, “Here’s a map to our Collingwood Naturopathic clinic.” The phrase “Collingwood Naturopathic” is hyperlinked to the page with the map.
• Contact Info: Make sure you put your address on every page, including your state/province. Use a variation of short form and long form for referring to your state/province. NY and New York, for example.

5. Get Links from other Sites

You can’t do enough of this. “Inbound links” are links from other sites to your site, and they’re not as difficult to get as you might imagine. Here are a few specific sources of links for alternative health care practitioners:

• Advertisers: Many print publications offer online versions of their content, and offer links to their advertisers. If you’re paying for any print ads, make sure you take advantage of this.
  
• Suppliers: You may be listed on supplier websites as a reseller or provider of a specific product or service. Contact them and ask them to include your web address in your listing.
• Patients: Patients with their own web pages may be willing to link to you. Use this where appropriate.
• Other practitioners: Swap links with your referral partners. We link to other practitioners in our area, too, even the “competition”.
• Online directories: You might be surprised to find out how many local directories you’re already in. Do a search for yourself and find out where you’re already mentioned, and where you might be able to add a link.
• Associations/regulating bodies: Most associations have a “find a practitioner in your area” directory. Get you and your website listed.
• Schools: Does your school have an alumni directory or listing?
• Your competition: This is my favorite. Search for your competition, and find out where they’re listed online, and get in there too.

6. Update Regularly

Google likes updated information. So do your patients. You don’t have to update daily, but try to keep your site up to date with new info when you can.

7. Track Your Results

The search engine game is a lot more fun when you can keep score. You can use Google Analytics (free) to keep track of your traffic, and how it reached you.

Be patient with your website results. Getting traffic can take time, particularly if your site is brand new, but it’s well worth the effort.

Unless you really love doing it, it’s not worth your time. As a CAM practitioner, your time is better spent on your practice or on other things you love.

What follows is a simple strategy for getting a great looking site at a fraction of the normal cost. You can use this info yourself, or you can pass it on to your web-savvy uber-geek (more on finding that geek below). Either way, it’s valuable info whether you’d like to improve your existing site or are just getting started.

Domain Names
A registered domain name is your own unique .com (or .org, .net, etc.) address. We use www.godaddy.com for our domains. Cheap and easy. For about $8 a year, you can get www.yourpracticehere.com. That’s the price of a couple of visits to Starbucks. Get your own domain name. Trust me. This is not negotiable. There are lots of domain resellers. Don’t pay a lot.

Tips:

• Do a quick web search for “godaddy coupons” before you checkout. You can often grab a bit of a discount. Not much (how much can you really save on $8?) but for some reason it’s kind of satisfying…
• I prefer a short dot-com (as opposed to .net, .org., .us, .ca, etc), but since your practice is likely localized, you can use the country code domain if you like (.us, .ca, .uk, etc.)
• If you use a clinic name, like www.myclinic.com, bite the bullet and get the domain for your own name also. Clinics can change over time, but most people keep their practitioner names forever.

Hosting
Hosting is basically space on a computer where the files that make up your website are kept. We use www.hostgator.com, but you can get cheaper options for a single site. GoDaddy will also do hosting very inexpensively. If you pay a year or two up front, it can easily cost you less than a single visit to Starbucks per month. Cheap.

Tips : If you plan to blog, get a host that offers automatic WordPress installations (like hostgator). WordPress is a great blogging platform, but it’s tough to install on your own. It also offers “static pages”, meaning you can have your blog, plus additional pages like “about us”, “services”, “contact”, etc. It’s all FREE – you just pay the hosting. There are beautiful WordPress templates available, so you can have a great looking site for free. (If you don’t plan to blog, it’s not the ideal solution, and has some other limitations., but it’s great for a quick, simple site, though. More on blogging later in the series.)

Site Development
Essentially, domains and hosting are pocket change. The costs are negligible. It’s the creation and editing of your site that can sink you. Here’s how to dodge that bullet.

1. Find a designer/programmer you can comfortably work with

• Ask for recommendations from your patients and other contacts. What you’re looking for is someone who’s easy to work with. We’re less concerned with price at this stage (you’ll see why shortly).
• Call them up. You want to get a personal feel for them. It can be faster to sort some things out on the phone, and you want someone who can function in the world of humans as well as computers.
• Tell them you’re looking for a designer who will…

2…Use a template. These days you can get a phenomenally beautiful template for your site for free online, and your web designer can tweak, adjust, and add your words. This saves you some of the big bucks – you just need someone to drop your words into a pre-made template.

Many of these templates are properly set up for search engine optimization, and tested on all relevant web browsers. Odds are, you’ll get a far better site than you could by paying your local web designer.

Where to find templates:

• Use the WordPress solution above. If you’re going to blog, you can look through all the WordPress themes for something you like. Or do a search for WordPress themes online. There are many.
• Use a free template, like http://www.freecsstemplates.org, or here, or here. Better yet, check out this big list of template sites from Smashing Magazine.
• Buy a template. Many of the sites offering free templates also sell them. Don’t be afraid to drop $100 on a template. It’s far cheaper than paying someone to design it. Most of the high end templates have thousands of dollars of time invested in them. Talk to your web designer first.

Tips:

• Think “Work-in-Progress” The beauty of the Internet is that you can change and edit anytime – it’s not like print. You’re far better off to have one page up with your contact information, than you are to try to get your site “perfect” before you release it to the world. (It also takes time for search engines to find your site, and for it to gain credibility online. Getting a single page up is worth it.)
• Don’t spend a fortune. Just don’t. Get a great looking template and find some friendly, talented help. If you can’t find someone local, try elance.
• If you want great photos for your site, you can get exceptional pix for $1-5 at istockphoto or stockxpert. Don’t get sucked into paying hundreds for images for your site. You can get free images at stock.xchng.
• Check the licenses on your templates and photos. Most are quite flexible, but you want to make sure you can use it for marketing and commercial purposes online.

Next: Creating your content and maximizing your search engine rankings.

Although you can make money directly online – you can sell supplements, run ads, sell books, etc. – the reality is that it takes some time and dedication to make money doing business this way. For the average CAM practitioner, your practice website is about patients. And although you can create good reasons for people to regularly re-visit your site, it’s new patients that provide a particularly compelling motive for having a website and making sure it does its job.

Prospective patients who visit your website are doing so for two reasons. Satisfy those reasons, and they become your new patients.

Reason #1: They Need a Practitioner
Let’s start with a real example:

I’ve been watching the stats on Tara’s website. Each month a large number of her site’s visitors come from people searching with some variation of “collingwood naturopaths” – naturopath collingwood, collingwood naturopaths, naturopaths in collingwood, naturopathic doctors collingwood, etc.

These “keyword phrases” are words people typed into a search engine (like Google), which in turn led them to our site. This is called organic traffic – people who arrive at the site from search engine results.

What’s so special about these particular visitors? They’re all looking for a naturopath in our area. Not Tara specifically, but a naturopath. That means they’re all new, local patients who are up for grabs. They’re already interested in naturopathy. What’s more, they’re actively seeking an ND. What could be better?

In fact, we’re projecting 100 new patients in 2008 from Internet searches alone. That’s one hundred new patients who just show up at the office because they were looking for a naturopath and found the site. One hundred patients that cost virtually nothing to attract. That’s cost-effective marketing, and it’s more than we’ll get from the Yellow Pages, at a fraction of the cost.

What’s important for these patients: search engine optimization (i.e. ranking higher on Google – more on that later in the series).

Reason #2: They Want More Information on a Known Practitioner (You)

These are the folks who already know your (or your clinic’s) name – in our case, they account for the other big chunk of the traffic to the site. Once they know you, it’s easy for them to find their way to your site – optimization’s not as critical. For these patients, your goal is to give them the information they need and get them to make contact.

What are they looking for? A variety of things, including:

• Your contact info (many people would rather use the Internet than pick up a phone book)
• Directions and office hours
• Pricing/rates
• Services offered
• Credentials, training, licenses, experience, etc.
• Testimonials and other compelling reasons to call

What’s important for these patients: information and conversion. (Conversion is the process of turning visitors into customers.)

Want 100 new patients of your own? Commit to your website. It’s worth the effort. Over the next few posts we’ll look at how to do this by:

• Creating a decent website (or improving your existing one) on a budget
• Improving your search engine ranking (for those Reason #1 visitors)
• Improving conversion (for those Reason #2 visitors)
• Using your site to increase return visits from existing patients

• Why it’s critical to have a website for your practice
• What your site should include
• Easy, inexpensive ways to get up and running
• How to get visitors to your site, and ensure that your site gets the rank it deserves on search engines

The posts are CAM-practitioner-friendly: as low-tech, and high-impact as possible. They should be helpful for any practitioners who don’t currently have websites, or those who want to get more out of their existing site.

If you’ve got anything in particular you’d like some insight on, let us know in the comments!

The Practice Website Series

1. 100 New Patients: Why Your Practice Website is Critical
2. Get A Great Practice Website on a Budget
3. Website Optimization for CAM Practitioners
4. Does Your Practice Need a Blog?

NDUnion is a new website for Naturopathic students and alumni, with a mission to provide “open and secure communciation within the Naturopathic community.”

If you’re a grad or current student of a four-year graduate level Naturopathic medical school, you can post ads and events, network with other ND’s, and even get a free one page personal website from NDAccess. Registration is free.

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