I strongly advocate that chiropractors and other small business people learn how to build, or at least edit their own websites.  There are two distinct advantages to this:

1. You force yourself to learn a skill that will save you money and make you money (not just in chiropractic).
2. You will personally be in control of the content, functionality and creative aspects of your website and will be able to make changes on the fly, rather than have to translate to your webmaster what you want, and then have to wait for him/her to actually do it.

Let’s say you notice that you get a lot of website visitors but they only stay on your site for less than a minute (this is referred to as a high “bounce” rate).  Chances are, something is unappealing about your website.  Could it be your headline, your header, your opening paragraph?  If you had the knowledge, you could change any one or all three of these factors within minutes and stop the bleeding.  Perhaps a very positive story on chiropractic came out in the media.  Wouldn’t it be nice to mention this on your homepage the next day, while its fresh in peoples’ minds?  You can do it quickly if you knew how to edit your website.  You’ve really got to “own” the knowledge of website creation in order to quickly adapt to your constantly changing business environment and keep one step ahead of your competitors.    As the saying goes, ownership has its privileges.

There are many website creation software applications out there, some of them free.  They have a basic “WYSIWYG” approach:  what you see is what you get.  You design them by clicking buttons and dragging elements around with your mouse, and the software codes it in the background.  Then you upload it, and presto, you have your website.  But, the more cookie cutter you go, the less sophisticated your website will look, and that, too can be a problem.

The website creation software that I highly recommend chiropractors consider is SiteBuildIt, or SBI.  Actually, calling this thing a “website creation software” is a big understatement.  SBI is veritable self-contained business creation application.  In other words, once you buy it, you won’t have to buy anything else related to your website.

SiteBuildIt has all the tools necessary to take your website from concept to money maker, and it does so in a user-friendly, fool-proof, systematic way.  It’s main selling point is that it has many software tools within it to tackle the critical elements of building a website:

• keyword research (very important, it is the foundation of your site and will determine how well it ranks in Google).
• search engine optimization
• form builders
• graphics design
• email newsletter creator
• rss syndication (automatic notifications of your site on the web)
• sitemap builder (helps with SE rankings)
• social media tool
• monetization tools
• link exchange (exchange links with other SBI owners to increase SE ranking

Best of all, SBI contains all the support manuals you need on design, content, traffic generation, niche selection, advanced tips and tricks, and so on.  SBI also boasts an active online forum comprised of motivated business owners who help each other out.  SBI is really like one, big happy family!

There are people who quit their day jobs because the income they generated through their SBI-built websites replaced and exceeded their 9-5 income.  Imagine being able to work from home, or from your hotel room in Maui!  That’s what you can achieve if you have a website that brings in money without you having to be there.

So where is all this going?  Listen, I think we all know that running a chiropractic business is ten times harder than it used to be.  Every chiropractor knows the story:  reduced insurance reimbursements, patients dropping out of care, sharp decline in new patients, PR battles, internal/disorganized leadership problems, having to cut fees while the fixed costs of running a practice– rent, malpractice, business insurance, payroll, advertising, etc. continue to rise.  All of this has the effect of sapping your energy, time and money.

The new world order for chiropractors is to start a side business to make up for lost revenue, and the best model is an internet-based business– low start up costs, minimal risk, enables you to keep your day job.  Yes, you can use SiteBuildIt to create an entirely new business that can make you money on the side, and quite possibly exceed what you are making in chiropractic!  Just take an inventory on your skills, interests, hobbies, and training.  Chances are you can monetize all of them in one form or another, online, and the SBI video will show you how.

If this all makes sense to you, watch this  SiteBuildIt video.   But only do so when you are relaxed (preferably at home) and have a clear mind so that you can absorb the concept.  It does a great job explaining how to turn your interests/skills into money by using a carefully planned and proven online business model.  This video could very well be the start of a highly profitable, (dare I say) life-changing journey.  It has already done that for many people before you.  Go ahead and check it out, you’ve got nothing to lose.

 Technorati Tags: chiropractic websites

You see, a link to your website is seen as an internet “vote” for your website, in the eyes of Google.  After all, the website with your website’s link is essentially encouraging it’s visitor to leave the website for your website.  And it wouldn’t do so unless it thought highly of your website, or at least that your website content is important enough to check out.  That’s how the Google algorithm interprets it.

So, now you’re thinking, “Great!  I have two other websites.  I will just place 100 links each on those websites and point them to my chiropractic  website so it will rank#1!”

Not so fast.  If it were that easy, everyone would do it.  And, Google isn’t that stupid.

Here are the basic guidelines for good back links:

• the anchor text of the link should be the keyword you’re targeting.  For example, for my chiropractic website I would like to have many links like this:  San Francisco Chiropractors pointing to my website.  This is the keyword that many people search for to find chiropractors in my area.
• the website that your back links are on should be related to your website.  So, good back links to a chiropractic website would come from health-related websites, including other chiropractic websites (more on this later).  The Google spiders analyze the content of the linking website will place more value on the back link if it is from a website in the same industry or niche as yours.
• websites with the .gov and .edu domains hold greater authority in general than .com websites.  So if you can somehow link to your chiropractic website from a government or school website, you’ll get a leg up on your competitors.
• If you have other websites in different niches, it still wouldn’t hurt to link to your chiropractic website.  But if you do, you can only do it so many times.  And make sure you link out to other websites.  For example, my San Francisco Chiropractor website has a link to Mercola.com, the biggest natural health website on the internet.
• reciprocal links aren’t as powerful as one-way links.  A reciprocal link is a “scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” set up:  you contact a website owner and offer to put his link on your site if he puts your link on his website.  Google views reciprocal links as artificial and perhaps gives them 50% weight as a one way link.

So how do you get all those one-way back links?  There are several ways, but the best way to get natural one-way back links is to write great content for your site so that other people find it informative, and link to it.  This is why blogs are so popular.  You have more artistic freedom with blogs and can write interesting and fresh content.

You can write articles about chiropractic topics like back pain, neck pain and carpal tunnel syndrome, and submit them to article directories like Ezine Articles.  You place your URL in your signature box (remember to use your keyword for the anchor text!) and submit the article to the directory.   Webmasters from all over the world browse these article directories and use the articles as content for their sites.  They are required to keep the author’s URL intact.  If you write enough articles (good ones) and they are picked up by many webmasters and added to their sites, you’ll start building up a lot of one-way back links.

A third way is to visit other blogs and forums related to health.  Create an account as a commenter, and include your website URL in your signature box (not all blogs/forums allow this, though).  Every time you post a comment, your URL will stay on the forum and you’ll have a one way link to your site.

There are several other ways to get back links to your site, including some stealth ones that most people don’t know about.  If you like to know what they are, click here.

Till next time,

Dr. Dan

Let me introduce you to what I believe is one of the best website builders out there.  Bear with me for a moment, even if you already have a website.

The biggest problem for most people when faced with building a website is where to begin:  What should I say?  What colors should I pick?  How should I lay out my website?  How do I add video and other elements to it?  And, the most important– how do I get my website to be SEEN by people so that it actually DOES something; i.e. BRINGS IN PATIENTS?

There is one website builder that knocks all of these concerns down, and it is called SiteBuildIt, or SBI.  SBI has been around for many years, and it was actually conceived by a doctor (I believe from New Zealand) who has a natural understanding of the challenges of making a viable commercial website.

SBI is a web-based (no software to download) website builder that takes you, step by step, through all the important processes of building a website.  It’s loaded with useful tools designed to accelerate your website’s visibility on the internet.  It even has a way to tell you if your pages are fully optimized for the search engines before you publish them.

If you’re one of those people who wants to dispense with the techie details of building a website, and be able to produce an attractive AND search engine optimized site without having to study too hard, then check out SiteBuildIt.  Once you see how powerful SBI is, you may be tempted to use it to build other ecommerce sites to supplement your chiropractic business!

Dan Perez, DC
Guerilla Chiropractic

The result: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the chiropractic profession are in broad daylight for all to see, including your current and potential patients. The miracle stories, the good PR coming from the sports world and other positive chiropractic human interest stories are competing with the stroke comments, chiropractor insurance fraud stories (who among us hasn’t read such an article in our local news?), and witch doctor comments. Yes, some of the Bad stuff out there isn’t true– after all, anyone with a heartbeat can post anything online. We can cry foul when these things occur, but by that time it has influenced a lot of minds. This is the information age, and we’re in a fight to win over the minds of those who need our services.  And everyone knows the old adage that bad news spreads more quickly than positive news.  So, you’ve got to operate as your own PR agency.

In 2010 and beyond, chiropractors should consistently put out positive PR for their practices. And you’ll need to do it via the internet, because the internet and its many veins is a huge well of influence at this moment in time. This means you’ll need to set up:

• a website. Not just any ordinary website, one that is conversion optimized, incorporating all the psychological triggers that keep visitors interested.   A self-playing welcome video is a nice, powerful touch as people are used to seeing video online.   If you currently have a crappy site, get rid of it!  It could be costing you a lot of business.  You have three (3) seconds to convince the online shopper that you are worth looking into.  Nothing scares away a visitor more than a website that looks like it was made in the 1990s; or one that takes too long to load because of fancy flash animations (I do not recommend flash for chiro websites).
• An email opt-in box for your website visitors.  This is a special graphic visible on your site that gives visitors an option to receive email promotions from you.  Here’s an advanced one that I use, but there are more simple ones.  Make sure you offer something of value in exchange for their email; like health tips or a free eBook on exercises and stretches for the office worker, etc.
• a blog. Place the blog inside your website; i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/blog. Post daily to your blog. It should have an RSS feed, which enables your patients to subscribe to your blog and receive posts in their email or feed reader. The blog posts will essentially make your website bigger (more pages) and will drive it higher in Google’s natural search.
• SEO activities (search engine optimization).  You’ll need to learn how to get your website ranked naturally in the major search engines.
• Google AdWords listing.  Get your site on the top of Google by paying for it initially.  Be careful, you need to know what you’re doing here, or you’ll be wasting money on clicks.
• an automated e-newsletter delivered by an email marketing software such as GetResponse. The system takes the emails you gather from your website visitors (see email opt in box above) and sends them monthly newsletters (that you write ahead of time) that promote your services, with a link pointing back to your site or an appointment sign up form.
• a Twitter identity. Don’t use your personal Twitter account to promote your business; create a new Doctor identity. Tweet every day, with your website URL in your tweet (Tweets now show up on Google search results, so obviously use the word “chiropractor and chiropractic” in your tweets).
• a FaceBook Page. This is your online presence on the huge, 300 million member FaceBook. You’ll post news about your clinic periodically, and link your FB page to your Twitter account so that when you post something on your FB page, a tweet to your list is automatically generated.
• a YouTube branded channel.  It’s like having an online TV channel for your clinic, for Free.  You’ll make short videos of things like a short commercial of your clinic; how to stretch, how to lift, how to set up your workstation ergonomically– you get the point.  You’ll include your clinic phone number and website URL in your videos.  These videos get indexed in the Google search results.  Don’t sweat video; it’s real easy to do.  The lazy (but good enough!) and easiest way is to use this: Flip UltraHD Camcorder, 120 Minutes (Black).  You point, press record, stop, and plug it into your computer’s USB slot and edit the video.  Then, upload it to YouTube.  You can literally put a video on YouTube in less than 30 minutes from start to finish with the flip phone!

So these are the minimum things you’ll need to get going.  If you need any help on any of these steps, I can offer you my web consulting services for a modest fee.  Just contact me via this blog’s contact form or give me a call at (925) 788-6253.

If you want to give it a shot yourself, a good place to start is my Internet Marketing guide (70+ pages) that gives you the details on all of the above, as well as a lot more underground stuff that will give you a head start over your competitors.

Dan Perez, DC

Case in point:  there was a recent thread on my chiropractic email list (several hundred members) about marketing.  One of the list members who used to be a chiropractor went to work for AT&T Yellowpages, and shared some interesting stats.  Many members chimed in that they were STILL spending money on yellow pages and most were not happy (lost money, or broke even).  One member even quoted a chiropractic journal study done in the 80s that showed dissatisfaction with yellow pages advertising among those chiropractors sampled, even way back then when there was no internet!

The ex-chiropractor member said that about 31% of consumer goods/services searches in 2008 were done through the yellow pages, and about 33% were done via the internet.  My estimate, based on my marketing efforts since 1998 is that it’s more like 20% or less on yellow pages and 70% or more via internet (search engine) search.  But maybe that’s because I’m in San Francisco, a major metropolitan region with heavy tech use among its residents.  But I doubt it.  These days you can find internet access in even the most rural areas of the U.S.

I shared my experience with the email list, saying that over 60% of my new patients found me via internet search (Google or Yahoo).  I also extended an offer to the list to share some tips that I learned over the years that helped me get the #1 Google listing for the search phrase “San Francisco chiropractor.”  Well, only a handful were interested.   That surprised me, because it is so evidently clear to me that people are using the internet to research and buy products and services, ESPECIALLY professional services like doctors, lawyers, accountants, auto mechanics, etc.  The internet has made it very convenient to research businesses and COMPARE THEM to others, in seconds.  You CANNOT do this with the yellow pages because there is only so much information a business can squeeze on a 4″ x 4″ space, whereas a website can have a hundred or more pages to help  the visitor make a decision (not that you need that many). 

Also, people spend a lot of time in front of their computers– at work and at home.  Many surveyed said they sometimes shop online during their lunch break; or research on Google a product or service they intend to buy within the next two weeks (such as chiropractic services!).

For many people, the yellow page book is usually still wrapped in plastic and is being used to support something like a computer monitor (that is, if it wasn’t thrown into the recycling bin).  Plus, it’s very heavy and cumbersome to use.  People prefer using Google to find businesses because it’s faster, more convenient, more relevant and timely (updated), and provides a means to compare other businesses.

So, are YOU one of those chiropractors who is failing to see this?  Each day that passes where your website is not ranked within the TOP 3 listings for (your city) chiropractors, you are losing potential business.  If you lose just two (2) potential patients a day because your site is on Page 2, with an average case value of $500 per patient (if you are losing auto accident patients, make that $1,000), that’s 2x12x$500 = $12,000 a year in lost revenue.  And we both know that two lost patients a month can easily be $20,000+ lost each year depending on your style of practice.

So, take the test.  Google (your city) chiropractor, for example Denver chiropractor.  Where is your website listed?  You need to be in the Top 3, because statistics show that the #1 spot gets the most clicks, and the click rate drops sharply after that, even for the #2 spot.  You can forget it if your site is listed #6 or beyond.

My site www.sf-chiro.com is ranked #1 for my keyword and has been for the last couple of years.  I invite you to confirm this yourself.  Just Google San Francisco Chiropractor (it may be #2 in some areas, depending on which Google server you’re closest to).

If you want YOUR website to rank #1 in Google, I can help you accomplish this.  Very soon, I’ll be publishing an instructional book that contains all my tricks on how to make your chiropractic website rank #1 on Google for all your primary keywords.  If you wish to be notified when it comes out, make sure to add your name to the opt in box that pops up at the bottom of the page.  If you closed it, refresh this page and it should pop up again.  IF it doesn’t, email me at dan@webventuresinc.net and I’ll put you on the notification list.

So if you no longer wish to lose $12,000 or more a year because your website is not in the Top 3, make sure to take action.  You are losing patients every day if you don’t secure your position!  And, you’d better act sooner than later because rising to the top in Google takes time (even with hard core search engine optimization efforts it can take six months or more, depending on your competition).  The bottom line:  the sooner you take action, the sooner you’ll get to the top.

Dan Perez, DC
Chiropractor San FranciscoTechnorati Tags: chiropractic, chiropractor, websites, Google, internet marketing, yellow pages

Most web designers know how to turn out a very decent looking website with all the works including flash animation (spinning spine, anyone?), embedded videos and nice graphics and layout.  But most web designers are not familiar with the subtleties of marketing.  It’s like how a Fortune 500 CEO would not necessarily make an excellent instructor for an MBA program.

I don’t care how great your website looks, if it doesn’t rank in the top 10 listings in Google for the search phrase (your town) chiropractor and derivatives of it,  and/or it doesn’t compel the majority of visitors to contact you for an appointment, your website is a failure.

You have five seconds to form an impression on your visitor.  If  your website doesn’t have the necessary “marketing layout”, visitors will leave and not come back.  They’ll move on to the next one listed in the Google search results page or internet directory.

Did you know that you can check stats on your website, such as how many hits/views it had per day and per month; what keywords visitors used to find your site; what links referred visitors to your site (where they came from), and– very important– how long the visitor stayed on your site.  If 90% of your visitors left your site within 3 seconds, you need to know this!  This could be costing you a lot of business.  Now, don’t be too alarmed if you see a lot of visits between 10-20 seconds.   What people usually do is scan your site, make a mental note of it, and then check out the next site for “comparison shopping.”  A typical visitor will compare at least three businesses before making a decision.  If your site wins the battle of impressions, and is within the distance the visitor is willing to drive, she will return to your site and call your office.

I am coming out with a very comprehensive ebook tentatively titled  “Internet Marketing for Chiropractors.”  It will reveal the essential elements of a business-generating website:  what to include, what not to include, where to place it, and more.  It will cover just about every single internet “trick and tactic” under the sun to attract and keep patients and it will be easy to understand.    If you want to add yourself to the waiting list, just enter your name and email in the opt-in box at the bottom of your screen, and you will be notified when it comes out.

In the meantime, I do offer free  website analysis:   Send me your website’s URL and I’ll send you my comments.

Dan Perez, DC

Guerilla Chiropractic

Hopefully by now, you have a website for your clinic.   If you do, does it actually work?

If you don’t know if your chiropractic website works, take this short survey:

1. Does it show up in the top five (5) listings in Google for the search phrase “[your city] chiropractors”?
2. Does it show up on Google’s Local Business 10-box?
3. Is it receiving at least 100 visits per month?
4. Is it referring you patients?
5. Does it collect visitor names and emails, and market to them automatically?

If the answer is “Yes” to all five, you are rocking.  If you answered “No” to any of these, then you are not making full use of your website.  If you answered “No” to #4, you are wasting your money.

I’ve been telling chiropractors for quite some time to not take any shortcuts with their websites.  Don’t go cheap on this; it’s too important to your business.   Think of your website as the virtual representative of your chiropractic clinic.  It should have the same “look and feel” as your physical clinic.  You should use your logo and your corporate color scheme in your website.  Your prospective patient’s transition from visiting your website to arriving at your clinic should be a smooth one; there should be no surprises, and all her expectations should be realized based on what she experienced visiting your website.  Whenever there is confusion, it will kill the sale.

In my experience, most chiropractic websites can use some work in one or several areas such as design elements, functionality, content, optimization for marketing, and ability to capture visitors emails.   The essential goals of your website should be:

1. Aesthetically appealing AND optimized to sell your services
2. Ability to capture visitor information and market to them later
3. Ranks on the first page of Google for the search phrases:

• [your city] chiropractor
• [your city] chiropractors
• chiropractor [your city]
• chiropractors [your city]

So, put your website through this test.  If you feel it is not up to par, send me a post and I’ll give you a free assessment of your website.

Dr. Dan

Guerilla Chiropractic