For those who have been following this blog, you know that the premise I operate from is that the chiropractic patient of today has changed dramatically, thanks to lightning fast information exchange courtesy of the internet. Not just emails, but Twitter posts, FaceBook comments, Yelp, and of course, online news sites.

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