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With the rise of social media and online review sites, word of mouth is becoming more important to chiropractic business owners than ever. It used to be that an unsatisfied patient could badmouth your clinic to their friends and family, but that was the extent of the damage they could cause. Now, an angry patient can blast their complaints across the internet, potentially scaring off future patients from ever giving your business a chance.

Bad reviews happen to every business, but as the owner of a chiropractic clinic, you can actually harness the power of these bad reviews and turn angry patients into your biggest advocates. The following steps will walk you through what you need to do to turn this potentially negative situation into a positive one. There are two main benefits behind the following technique. First, you will make things feel right for the patient who felt wronged. Second, you will publicly show others that you take the satisfaction of your patients seriously. 

Here is how to turn bad reviews into positive online marketing for your chiropractic clinic:

1. Address bad reviews and comments as soon as possible. This means that you should be monitoring your online reputation so that you can quickly respond to any negative feedback. When you respond quickly to problems experienced by patients, you are demonstrating that you listen to your customers and care about making things right for them. Some helpful services for monitoring what people are saying about you or your chiropractic clinic online include: SocialMention, Google Alerts, and Trakur.
   
   
2. Reply to the negative comment or review by offering to right the wrong. Be willing to take responsibility for the bad experience, even if it wasn't your fault. Introduce yourself as the chiropractor or chiropractic staff member and let the reviewer know you value their opinion and are sorry to hear that they weren't completely satisfied with their visit. Most importantly, offer them a comparable service for free or at a deep discount to show that you will do what it takes to make things better. Look at this step as an investment. Your quick response and willingness to make things right will show other potential patients that your chiropractic clinic is a step above the competition. 
   
   
3. After you have responded to the bad comment or review, wait a few weeks and publicly follow up again with the patient to make sure that you have adequately addressed their needs. This step is crucial because it will really lock in the fact that you truly care to both the reviewer and anyone who sees the online exchange. 

This three prong approach will turn an angry patient from a complainer into your biggest advocate. Instead of publicly putting your clinic under fire, they will now be bragging to all their friends and family about what a great chiropractor you are. Even better, anyone who sees your quick response to the negative review online will feel like they can trust your clinic to provide the chiropractic care they need.

Ok, now that you have responded to any bad reviews, the next step is to start preventing bad reviews in the first place. There is a technique used by the pros to prevent bad reviews, while also generating good reviews for your clinic. This technique is simple and only involves following up with your patients by email after every appointment. First, make it easy for your patients to leave reviews by making sure your clinic has a business profile at popular social sites, such as Yelp and Facebook . Then, when you are following up with patients by email, ask them to leave an online review for your business (with links to all your online review profiles) and make sure to inquire if they had any problems during their visit. This sort of strategy will help prevent most bad reviews from ever reaching the internet since an unhappy patient is much more likely to contact you directly if you ask them about the quality of their chiropractic visit. The fact that you make it so convenient to leave reviews will increase the likelihood that your satisfied patients will go online and talk about how chiropractic care at your clinic has improved their life. 

Would you like to start generating more reviews but are overwhelmed with all the different review websites and social services? Want help linking your website up with places patients can leave you reviews? At ChiroMatrix, our Premium and Elite marketing packages are specifically designed to help chiropractors market their business effectively online, and our marketing geniuses will do all the work for you, including helping you get set up on multiple online review websites. We will even create a "Share Your Experience" page on your website for you, making it easy for patients to leave reviews for your business. Interested? Contact ChiroMatrix today!

You may remember when marketing your chiropractic business was a one-way conversation. As a business owner, after creating your marketing campaign you were pretty much done. Either your marketing efforts worked or they didn't, and success was easy to measure. Whether or not patients responded to your ads or promotions would immediately let you know if your marketing efforts were successful.

Now, with the rise of social media and online interactions, the playing field for marketing has completely changed. With the creation of services like Facebook and Yelp, your marketing efforts are much more likely to involve interacting with your patients instead of talking "at" them. This online interaction has both its upsides and its downsides. In the "old days" a huge company with a sizable marketing budget may have been able to crush a smaller competitor with their marketing efforts alone. Today, a small business like a chiropractic clinic can aggressively compete against larger businesses simply by offering a great product and above average customer service. A chiropractic clinic with a dedicated staff can leverage their superior service and gain a distinct marketing advantage over big marketing budgets. This helps small businesses compete because even a huge marketing budget can no longer protect big businesses from getting hit hard from a negative social media backlash if they offer sub-par service.

But how do you use social media to show off your great service and market your chiropractic clinic? The answer lies in getting patients to talk about their chiropractic experience online. Social media services like Facebook provide chiropractors with a free way to converse with their patients online and get constructive feedback on how to improve their overall customer experience. Interacting with patients on services like Facebook or Yelp also gives you the ability to turn angry or unhappy customers into the number one advocate for your business.

Have you gotten negative reviews or had negative comments made about your business? You don't need to suffer in silence, it is possible to actually use these reviews to grow your business. You can turn a negative review around by contacting the reviewers publicly and making things right for them. This also demonstrates to future patients that you care about making your patients happy. Want to learn more? Check back for our next blog post which will teach you how to turn a negative reviewer into your company's number one advocate!

If you would like more advice on what you need to do to market your business effectively online, don't wait another day! Download this free Chiropractic SEO Guide by ChiroMatrix and learn how to market your chiropractic business online effectively and get new patients. This exclusive SEO Guide was written specifically for chiropractors by our marketing experts and will walk you through several free and cheap ways to spread the word about your business online. ChiroMatrix also offers "Starter" marketing packages to get chiropractors off the ground with a new website. If you are too busy to worry about SEO and web marketing, you can opt for our "Premium" or "Elite" marketing packages where we will do all the legwork for you so you can focus on handling all the patients coming through your door. Contact ChiroMatrix for a free web marketing consultation today!

If you are a time-crunched chiropractic business owner, you probably want to concentrate on only the most impactful online marketing tools for your chiropractic website. In order to effectively market your business online, you will need to know how new patients are finding chiropractors on the internet. One of the most common ways that patients are locating new chiropractors is through internet searches on search engines like Google.com, Bing.com, and Yahoo.com. But what must a chiropractor do to market themselves online and to be easily found by new patients? Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the most widely-used search engines, but what steps need to be taken to get your information to show up in the search engines and which search engine should you be focusing your web marketing strategy on to get new patients?

For a chiropractor, the first step to generating new patients from the internet is to obtain a search engine friendly and user optimized chiropractic website. For chiropractors without a lot of competition in their area, just putting up an optimized website with business information may be all that is needed to climb to the top of the search results. For chiropractic clinics that are located in competitive markets, however, the first step should be a chiropractor-optimized search engine marketing strategy. If you are a chiropractor who needs help getting started with your own search engine marketing strategy, don't hesitate to refer to our free chiropractic SEO Guide which has been specifically created to help chiropractors market themselves online effectively without breaking their budget.

Because search engine optimization is so important to what we do at ChiroMatrix, we stay on top of new developments regarding successful web marketing and SEO strategies for chiropractors. That is why we've been keeping a close ear to the ground when it comes to the latest developments between competitors Google.com and Bing.com, two of the most popularly used search engines. These search engine giants have recently teamed up with social media hubs to improve their search results, and the resulting partnerships seem like they will have a huge impact on web marketing strategies. By staying ahead of the curve in regards to what will make a chiropractic website successful in the search engines, we help our ChiroMatrix  website owners outrank their competition and turn their website into a new patient magnet.

Facebook and Google+: Can They Help You Get New Chiropractic Patients?

You may have heard that Bing partnered with Facebook in May 2011 to improve Bing's search results based on the websites that users are interacting with on Facebook. After the Facebook social search feature was rolled out, websites that were "Liked" on Facebook appear to climb the ranks in Bing's search results, without making any other changes. This has huge implications for chiropractic business owners who want to maximize their results and minimize their time spent focusing on web marketing. If creating a buzz on Facebook can help your website show up higher in the Bing search engine rankings, then Facebook seems like a great place to invest time with your online marketing strategy. However, trying to interact with patients and attract new business on Facebook has been hit or miss for many chiropractors, where some experience huge successes on Facebook while others feel only frustration. Even though interacting on Facebook may help your website show up on Bing, it is important to note that Bing is still much smaller than Google. While Bing has been gaining ground on Google since its inception, Google still took about 64% of the search volume compared to Bing's 32% of the searches in May 2011 (Credit: Compete). That means that Google gets about twice as many searches as Bing. So what can a chiropractor do to improve their search results and optimize their websites for Google?

Google has recently released its own version of the Facebook "Like" which is known as the Google "+1." It can get a bit awkward to talk about multiple Google +1's, so let's get the terminology out in the open. If a website gets two or three Google +1's, they will now have +2 or +3.

After the release of the +1, SEO professionals have been trying to figure out what the purpose of this new tool will be for search engine marketing. Then Google changed the playing field. Less than two weeks ago, Google surprised the world by releasing Google+ (pronounced "Google Plus"). Google+ is a new take on social interaction on the internet and in many ways is like other social networks such as Facebook. However, there are some major differences, such as using Google +1's instead of Facebook Likes.

Even though the +1 feature has only been around a short while, preliminary tests already indicate that websites which have received +1's tend to show up higher in Google's search results. This is just like how Facebook Likes seem to help websites show up higher in Bing. The fact that +1's can help a chiropractic website show up higher in Google search results has huge implications for web marketing, since this is a brand new way to improve a website's Google search rankings. Some SEO experts even feel that chiropractors may get more bang for their buck focusing on getting Google +1's over Facebook Likes.

So what does this mean to you, the busy chiropractor? Should you be worrying about Google+ and +1's? Chances are, you may have to wait to decide because Google+ is currently in a limited field trial, which means that registration was opened to the public for a short while, and then closed again while Google continues to test and refine the Google+ interface. However, +1's are available to everyone and because the +1 helps websites do better in the Google search results, there are some strong incentives for chiropractic website owners to try to get +1's for their website now, and then try to get a Google+ account when it's officially released.

The most important take away from this article is that social media hubs such as Facebook and Google+ are making a huge impact on the web marketing landscape. Right now, Facebook has a much higher adoption rate while Google+ is still in a closed trial, but Google +1's may possibly be more effective at improving search engine results than Facebook Likes. Chances are, the best results will be achieved by taking a web marketing strategy that utilizes both Facebook Likes and Google +1's. If you would like help creating or marketing your chiropractic website, don't hesitate to contact ChiroMatrix today!

Just a quick message today to thank you for your continued support and wish you a happy 4th of July weekend.

We're very lucky to live in a land where we can practice business with greater freedoms than just about anywhere on earth, whether it's web marketing or chiropractic care. 

Have a wonderful and safe holiday.

--ChiroMatrix Team

I've been listening to some audios on mindset & success, and a recurring theme is the idea that your pathway to wealth is largely dictated by who you associate with.

Some even go so far as to say that your income five years from now will be the average of the incomes of the five people you spend the most time with. 

Whether you believe that or not, it's very important to have mentors and examples of successful people in your life. 

Ask yourself how many chiropractors you spend time with that are making more money than you.  If you're near the top of your professional circle, it's time to reach higher and associate with people who can help pull you up even higher.

This is a quick heads up for Chiropractors thinking about trying out Facebook Ads

Two new developments have happened that you should know about.

1)    Facebook is now sending out free $50 coupons to get people started on ads.  You may get this in an email or in physical mail.
2)    Facebook is now having account reps reach out to personally help new advertisers.  One of our clients just used his $50 coupon and a rep contacted him before he spent any money.

It looks like it's a great time to get involved with Facebook ads, so check them out and see what they can offer your practice.  

There was a great mini-metaphor in the ChiroMatrix office today about success and wealth.  

I was at the vending machine, where coins sometimes get stuck, and you have to shake the machine sometimes for change.  After getting a soda, I rocked the machine a little bit and a penny came off the top of the machine and fell on the floor.

After picking it up, I turned to a Customer Support Coach nearby and said, "See? When you take action for money, it comes from unexpected places."

This principle really does apply to your chiropractic practice and web marketing program.  Whenever you take action for the purpose of bringing yourself wealth, you set into motion forces that can bring you money from places you weren't even thinking about.  A patient you send a birthday card to might know someone special, or an event you attend might be where a journalist approaches you for an interview.  Continuous action will always help.

In all types of businesses, the webinar is becoming more popular.  This is similar to a teleconference, but instead, you teach something over the internet and people can see your presentation on their screen.  For information and health businesses, there is a lot of opportunity.

One thing I've noticed in this affair, as well as in teleconferences, is the lack of responsibility that speakers can take in the project.  In the beginning of one this morning, the speaker said, "There is an echo, whoever is on speaker phone, please mute yourself."  In another presentation six months ago, a speaker actually shut the presentation off because someone had music playing in the background and either didn't realize it or was unwilling to respect the speaker.

When you take responsibility for your business, you have to assume 100% responsibility for your patient and prospect experience.  This means that you don't leave success in the hands of other people, especially webinar viewers that you have never met.  Instead, you set up systems and contingencies, so no matter what fate throws your way, you are prepared to deal with it.  This may mean muting all callers yourself, or choosing a different webinar company that gives you more control.  When an unanticipated circumstance comes up that you can't resolve, you take note and adjust for next time.  Simple as that.

If you're a traveler through the wilderness, you will find many things on your path that do not go along well with your planned adventure.  The water might not be clean, and the trails might be muddy.  Some places you need to walk through will be covered with rocks you need to climb over.

At this point, you can talk about how it's totally unfair that your journey is difficult and that the land is not custom made to your purposes.  However, most people don't do this because it's obviously useless.  

You don't judge the terrain.

It's the same with patient behavior, Google's new policies, and the IRS.  We're given the land in front of us to work with, and judging it will not help anything.  This doesn't mean we don't' do what we can to make it easier on ourselves, such as negotiating new terms with difficult people, or getting a good accountant for taxes, but we have to understand that just saying that something is "unfair" or "wrong" doesn't help at all.  The most successful chiropractors do the best with what they have, and don't question if it's fair. 

Dan Kennedy, an expert in chiropractic marketing, had this very profound quote on his blog last week:

"It is SO rare these days that anyone who reveals himself, within an organization or to a clientele or market, as being solidly competent.  He quickly attracts far, far, far more work or customers and clients or opportunity than can be handled.

It is, in fact, how we all kill The Competent Employee: you have five but one is The Competent One. All work and responsibility gravitates to her until she is so overwhelmed she becomes incompetent."  (Source: http://dankennedy.com/blog/small-business-marketing-tips/are-you-competent/)

Your practice may be full of competent staff, but this is something worth considering.  Do you have someone who ends up taking the brunt of the work and burning out?  Something to think about.

There are a lot of benefits of being a "stats junkie" for your chiropractic web marketing.  You keep track of how many hits to your website you get, what percentage requests an appointment, and what percentage shows up.  You may even keep track of how many new appointments become regular patients.

However, there is another side to focusing on stats, especially your ratios.  The tendency we can fall into is limiting our outreach to keep a better percentage.  For example, if you know that 15% of your traffic requests an appointment, that's a pretty impressive statistic to brag to your colleagues about.  What happens if you get a new traffic source that gives you thousands of untargeted visitors?  Your conversion rate plummets.

In this situation, you won't lose any patients or money, and you'll probably gain more business.  The only thing that gets reduced is your bragging rights for numerical percentages.  Even that can be a dangerous incentive to limit your traffic and even appointments.  Keep your ratios in mind as something to improve, but never sacrifice your range of outreach to maintain a solid ratio. 

This is a tip that a lot of chiropractors would find obvious for their marketing, but it is one that many people miss.

When you get a referral from a chiropractic patient, make sure you thank that patient after the very first appointment from his or her contact.

People tend to be encouraged by appreciation and discouraged by the lack of it.  You mentioning and thanking the person will make him or her want to repeat the favor again and again.

It can be unavoidable sometimes that bad reviews of your chiropractic practice come up online.  Sometimes a patient can have unrealistic expectations of what an office visit should be like or is just cold-hearted in general.

When this happens, it's best to not get into an arguing match or flame war online.  This will only make things more intense and reflect badly on your professionalism.  

Instead, if you are allowed to reply back, publicly invite the patient to call in or come in so you can resolve issue.  Don't agree with untrue assertions, but if you show you are willing to work with the patient, this will make you look very good to other viewers, and the patient might even remove the review.  

It's amazing how counter-intuitive some of the best practices are for chiropractic web marketing.  Longer sales copy works better, simple graphics often beats fancy ones, and here's a new fact:  

If you email your prospects more often, both unsubscribe and spam complaints go down. Some marketers speculate that it feels less jarring to get emails frequently than once a month or a few times a year.  Either way, the statistics are below, so see for yourself.

During a lunch break last week, a couple coworkers and I went to a pizza place that was well reviewed.  When we got there, we saw a sign over the door saying "Due to events beyond our control, we are closed today."

For some reason, that statement really bothered my coworkers and I.  It felt like an excuse; a "Don't blame me!" statement.

It turned out that the pizza place was closed because of a gas leak, which truly was an event beyond their control.  Still, it would have been much better to say something like "Closed due to construction," or simply just "Closed due to unexpected circumstances.  Our apologies."  

One thing to keep in mind with your chiropractic practice is that you win no points for overtly relieving yourself of accountability and responsibility.  When you take the stance that you are 100% responsible for your patient's experience, then you have their respect, even when things go wrong.  

This week was a very important day for us, being our first time in the new building.  Here are some photos from the ribbon cutting event:  

Today marks a new day for the ChiroMatrix brand and team.  We are happy to announce we've moved to a brand new location, due to our recent expansion and growth as a company.   

This morning we had a fantastic ribbon cutting ceremony and celebration of this milestone.  We'll still be providing the same great service in the new location.  If you're in the San Diego area, feel free to come check out the new location.  

Here's to new beginnings!

Here's another way you can expand your chiropractic marketing.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but the more links you have in your email communications, the more likely someone is to click on one. This is most helpful when the links are all to the same place.

Interestingly enough, this does not increase the unsubscribe rate. In fact, it actually lowers the amount f people that unsubscribe. Keep that in mind for your future chiropractic email marketing campaigns.

When you're sending an email newsletter to your chiropractic patients and prospects, a great way to increase your clickthrough rate is to include relevant observations about what's going on.

This is a lot easier than it seems.  Mentioning world news events is fine, but you don't even have to go that far.  Even mentioning that it's a Tuesday or that it's right after Memorial Day can make a difference in how subscribers react to your email.

Experiment with this and see how this affects your results.

As a professional with a chiropractic website, you'll often be hearing rumors about what Google is doing, where the economy is shifting, and how you should treat the coming events.

While rumors can often turn out to be true, I suggest you stick by the Ben Franklin quote, "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see."

This doesn't mean that you assume everything to be false until proven otherwise.  However, what it does mean is that you take all rumors, news, and reports with a very heavy grain of salt.  People often misread what's going on or report based on what will get them more attention.

The second part of the quote is a bit more tricky.  Even when we're seeing events and phenomenon with our own eyes, we tend to filter them through our histories and pre-set beliefs.  Because of this, it's good to even take your own observations with a grain of salt before making a business decision for your chiropractic website. 

If you're marketing your chiropractic website on Facebook Ads lately, there have been some interesting changes you should be aware of.

Right now, Facebook is letting you target based on broad "multiple choice" categories instead of just whatever you can think of.

One cool feature is that you can select what sports your potential patients may be playing and then target those.  The article is at http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/04/27/broad-category-family-status-targeting/ if you're like more information.

This weekend I was watching an old Sopranos episode. It was originally from the year 2000, but if it had aired in 2008, you would have thought it epitomized the claims of unaccountability for certain players in the economic crash.

In the episode, there's a guy named David, who is an acquaintance of some members of the mafia, but not a real friend or associate. He has a gambling problem, and wants to get in on a poker game they're hosting. They refuse, and say he'd be in over his head in the game. He manages to track where the game is, then argue his way in, borrow $10,000 to play, then borrow another $10,000 after he loses, and manages to get $45,000 in debt within one night, costing him his savings, his business, and possessions. When the mob boss is slapping him around for being late on a payment, David has the nerve to say, "Please cut me a break... I've been unlucky!"

This is an extreme example of not taking responsibility for your predicament, but we all do it to an extent. When a situation doesn't give us the outcome we want, we still have to acknowledge that we put ourselves in the situation where that risk would be likely.

This doesn't mean you should "blame" yourself or feel bad over mistakes. It's always a great first step to acknowledge that you are responsible for both your success and failures as a chiropractor.

Someone recently showed me a picture of a $5 million dollar house and said "I'd hate to have the kind of money to get that.  Too much cash makes you weird and screws your head up." She proceeded to give examples of very weird behavior from millionaires and billionaires she knew of.

This is an example of a belief system that will certainly repel wealth: the fear that money will turn you from a normal, nice chiropractor, into an insecure, bizarre chiropractor.

There are several fallacies that this type of thinking is based on.  For one, there are a ton of very strange acting and abrasive people who aren't wealthy at all.  If someone in a fast food line is nasty and complaining, you could assume it's because he's too accustomed to being waited on from being rich.  Or you could assume he's sick or his low paying job and taking it out on the cashier.  Or you could assume he's just a jerk.  

It's a common human tendency to over-estimate our ability to link causes and effects in people's behavior.  To maximize your potential for chiropractic wealth, give rich people the benefit of the doubt as much as you can.  

One of the toughest things for small business owners to realize is that there really is no "staying at status quo" or just getting by. Your practice and your chiropractic website will always be moving in some direction, either up or down.

Your success in finances, health, and relationships are similar to a bicycle. You can't stand in one spot very long or you'll fall down. This can be frustrating because at some point, we'd all like to say our SEO is "DONE" and just sit back and reap the rewards, but it doesn't work that way.

Because of this, you have two choices. You can either aggressively build your business, gaining as much ground as possible every week, or hire someone to do it for you. There's no shame in having a "hired gun" aggressively fighting for your chiropractic website to get to the top of Google and Bing, so consider that option.

When working on your chiropractic website and practice, you will find yourself in situations that make you a little uncomfortable. The fear might come from charging patients at higher fees, submitting press releases that make your name more recognizable, or giving a speech in front of a large group of people.

These scary situations are common throughout your entire career and the chiropractors and business owners who are the most successful are the ones who lean into their fears instead of lean away from them. You don't have to aggressively do things that terrify you, but to consistently move in the direction of things that make you nervous will help a lot.

Accepting that discomfort is a part of growing and that you will make mistakes along the way will make it a lot easier to go through some of these career challenges. There are, of course, some risky and irresponsible ideas that would make anyone uncomfortable to consider doing. The way to tell for sure is to ask yourself, "Is discomfort the main reason I don't want to do this?" If so, then move ahead.

The great marketing copywriter John Carlton has something called the Professional's Code: "You show up where you're supposed to be... when you said you'd be there... having done what you said you'd do."

How does this apply to your chiropractic website marketing?  It's very simple.  In this day and age, we live in a world of flakes.  People break promises, are late to both social and professional meetings, and half-deliver results.

Even in the medical industry, where there are higher standards, people half expect to be billed improperly or be in the waiting room for a ridiculous period of time before they get called in for their appointment.

If you can simply iron out any difficulties in the Professional's Code, you'll be way ahead of the competition in your area.  Even something as small as emailing your patients exercises when you said you would will contribute to this.  You become someone they can trust.  Your competition is likely slacking in at least some aspect of this so take advantage while you can.

The idea that you are not your customer/client/patient is applicable to many parts of business, including proficiency with software and internet tools.  

Yesterday I had a phone appointment with a large advertising provider of ours.  I called the account manager's phone number several times, with no luck.  It turned out that she wasn't flaking, but had sent an Outlook invitation with a special phone number and conference call number included.   She also was taking the call in another part of the building so she wasn't even able to pick up and let me know to use the conference line instead.

A recurring line from the crime boss in "Under Siege 2: Dark Territory" is that "Assumption is the mother of all f--- ups."  It's a constant refrain, because the hero keeps surviving because the criminal henchmen erroneously assume he's out of the picture over the film.  

Her assumptions were that I was familiar her way of setting up phone appointments.

My assumptions were that if there was a special line to call, that there would be instructions in our email back and forth, instead of in just the Outlook invitation, as well as that she'd be at her desk for the meeting.

On both of our ends, the assumptions we carried resulted in some issues.

We always have to operate under basic assumptions so we're not always second-guessing.  However, it pays to question whether your map of the world is a match with the patient or provider you're dealing with and give detailed explanations when possible, especially in areas of technology where many are still catching up.

In an earlier post, we talked about the folly of imitating competing chiropractic websites without knowing the reasoning behind the actions. Part of what we mentioned was how a web page you're looking at might be an experiment, or simply a failed marketing plan that hadn't been corrected yet.

Another area I wanted to caution you about was selecting providers based on competitors or leading companies in other industries. It can seem straight forward to think if the top company uses a certain provider for email marketing, accounting, or other services, then it is a good pick. Often, there are reasons for picking a sub-par provider.

One company I talked with had recently switched web hosting providers from a premium service to a relatively unknown small shop. When I asked why, the answer was "The new provider is a lot cheaper. Hopefully they will still be good." Would you want to be choosing how your business runs based on another company's gamble?

Make sure that any provider you go with is someone you would feel secure with even if the "star client" was not with them.

In the groundbreaking book "Psycho-Cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz, we're introduced to the concept of seeing your subconscious mind as a guided missile. You give it a target and shoots towards your goal. When you go off base, you get a signal and auto-correct. A missile will veer too far to the left and auto-correct, moving to the right. Then if it overcompensates to the right, it changes back veering left.

I've heard that for 99% of a missile's journey, it is off-course in some way, zig-zagging along. As a chiropractor with wealth dreams for your practice and your website, you have to see yourself in the same way. Maybe you'll understate the importance of your care to a new patient and lose him. Maybe you'll hard-sell another patient on your care and lose her. These mistakes are not failures, but signals to your guidance system that improve your calibration.

The benefit that a missile has that we don't is the lack of emotion, and self punishment. If a missile behaved like we do, every time the wind pushed it a little too far to the left, it would give up and drop to the ground, forgetting about the target. This is part of the intimidating power of characters like the Terminator and the sociopath stalker from "No Country for Old Men."

You don't have to have a heart of stone to hit your targets effectively, but you do need to learn to embrace mistakes instead of punish yourself for them. You also don't even need to consciously think of what you should learn from a mistake. Just make a note of it and move forward. 

Consumers in this age have known more product disappointment than probably any generation in history. Because of the lighting-fast growth in technology, products and services are rolled out before they're fully tested, resulting in bugs, crashes, and sometimes even security risks.

As a small business owner, this hits you even harder because you can lose mounds of money when a product or service works unexpectedly.

There's a way that you can turn this around and keep positive in your chiropractic business.

Ask yourself, "Is this something wrong, or an imperfection in something awesome?"

More often than you think, it's the latter. Facebook will change your privacy settings without your permission, and it'll feel like you're getting screwed over by a big firm, but guess what? There's never been anything in history like Facebook for all the value it provides. If you use it properly, you can make more money from it than ever could take away from you.

Now, suppose a web designer is three weeks late on a deadline for your chiropractic website. If you ask yourself the same thing, it could go either way, but I would lean toward the first answer, that something is wrong when a contractor can't get something done on time. In that case, you just look at the competition and replace your provider if he or she is not measuring up. If there's no competition at all that can match your provider, I'd treat it as an imperfection and just roll with it

We've talked before about using visualization as a tool to help propel you to success.  Here is a new way to use this powerful concept to get you toward your goals.

To do this, all that is required is that you have a quiet spot with a pad or paper and pen.  Think of a goal you want to achieve with your chiropractic website or practice.  Suppose it's to achieve an income of $1 million a year from your practice.

Some personal development experts recommend you imagine what it would be like to have this kind of income, but this technique is a little different.

Instead, ask yourself, "What kind of person makes $1 million a year in his/her practice?"  Write the question down, and then think of what personal qualities this person would embody.  Then write down each quality and visualize yourself with the characteristic.

Maybe "resourceful" would come up.  "Confident," "disciplined," or anything else.  Whatever it is, build for yourself an avatar of that wealthy chiropractor and step into it.  Don't think about how you'll apply these in real life tomorrow.  Just see yourself with the characteristics.

If you do this for a half hour a day, you'll see changes very quickly.  You can do this for any personal or professional goal.  

When you're adding content to your chiropractic website, it can often be tempting to cut costs wherever possible.  When you add a picture to your blog post or home page, it may seem like a good idea to swipe one from Google Images or another website.

We want to caution you that it is well worth the small investment to pay for stock photos. If you take an image off another website, and that person owns the legal rights to it, then you could be facing some litigation trouble, which, aside from being a hassle, never looks good to your patients if it gets out.

Each year, more places show up to advertise your chiropractic website. Some places will let you auto-populate ads with a user's location and interests.

Yesterday, I saw an ad that misused that very function. It said "California: Is it a scam?"

This very ad framework has been effective in many niches, with examples being, "Acai Pills: Is it a scam?" or "Work at Home Biz: Is it a scam?"

To see a question of if your whole state is a scam is a pretty funny experience for the viewer, but not so much to the advertiser wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Whenever you buy advertising, be careful to make sure any text that is auto-generated will make sense.

The following is a real question asked in the advice column of a newspaper:

"Dear Abby, I have a man I can't trust. He cheats so much, I'm
not even sure the baby I'm carrying is his."

When we see questions like this, our first instinct is to laugh, and second instinct is share with someone else (I've satisfied both by posting this).

The question is, how do you handle these questions when they're asked of you as a professional? Suppose you get a question like "Will these exercises still help my back if I switch insurance?"

When this happens, you may want to sneer, chuckle, or stare with a confused look as you ponder how someone can be so stupid.

However, I suggest you take the reverse approach, and answer the question as "matter of fact" as if he or she asked if a back-brace would get in the way of the exercises. Since early classroom days, people have been scared to ask honest questions out of fear of ridicule. Often they know that a question has a high chance of embarrassment attached to it, but need to know for sure anyway.

 If you can be the chiropractor who is completely non-judgmental and passes on any opportunity to even internally find amusement to a patient's question, then you will open yourself up to much greater opportunities. You'll be the chiropractor your patients trust and refer their friends to. Being the "safe" health professional to ask a question to can be a unique selling proposition in itself. Never forget that.

It can help both your readership and your SEO rankings to have regular content on your chiropractic website. The problem sometimes can come up when you either are "out of ideas" or short on time to put on a post.

When this happens, an easy fix is to find a related article in your industry and post about it, giving the link and a few sentences of your opinion.

Just make sure that you're linking to either informational sites or chiropractor sites from another state.  Linking to your local competition is always risky. 

Today I was calling printing companies to get services for a brochure we'll be sending out soon. A number of printing service companies do not have pricing on their websites, so I called for a quote. At one of them, the lady on the phone asked for my specifications for my order, and then said, "Thank you. We'll email you a quote in the next few minutes."

After I hung up, I was very puzzled. Having a live lead on the phone is not a trivial opportunity. This person fulfilling my quote request not only didn't give me pricing on the spot, but neglected to even ask for my phone number for a follow-up call.

By hanging up on me, she left me no other option then to keep calling other companies on my list, one of which I selected for our brochure order.

When you have a potential patient on the line, do whatever you can to set up an appointment on the spot, or at least to set up a follow-up call so you can schedule an appointment then. You can't expect someone to take the initiative on their own.

One big time-saver in your chiropractic marketing is identifying and completing microtasks.

I call these "microtasks" because they take two minutes or less to do. A lot of junk you're procrastinating about could be done very quickly, sometimes in under 30 seconds.

For example, even a big shipping box that's lying around your main office could probably be thrown out within a minute, but it's been put off. During all this time, you could have moved in and out much more quickly and been significantly more efficient in your operations. Other microtasks could include a call that has to be made, an upload to make for your chiropractic website, and other tiny tasks.

Remember that every time you think "Oh yeah, I have to do X," you're taking up mental space and energy, so it's much better to have those little things out of the way.

In your chiropractic website marketing, it's important to know where your results are coming from. Many companies make bold claims, but it's really questionable what results are coming back.

This is why ChiroMatrix has call-tracking.

The way it works is, for Premium and Elite clients, we can put a special number on your website or online promotion. The amount of calls or patients that come from this number is proof of when something is working.

Think about your chiropractic website promotions and whether you have assurance that things are paying off.

There was a very clever SEOmoz.org April Fools' joke where they introduced "FutureRank BETA." This is a program where you could enter your site and favorite keyword in and the program would tell you your ranking a month or year from now, assuming you continued the same SEO building activities you're doing now.

It turned out to be a big joke, of course, but it got me thinking. What if you took your site and for the next year, continuously took the same action without any real break? Chances are your site would rank a lot better and you'd get better traffic.

Think about some helpful actions you're taking right now, and whether you plan on continuing them once you start seeing results. The decision to keep doing the small things are what could take your chiropractic site to the next level in the future.

Whether you have chiropractic web marketing service or not, there will be times when work is being done on your site and your opportunities will be limited. It might feel that your hands are tied.

"I can't work on my blog while it's being installed," or "I can't ask for links while my website is being updated by developers."

It's fine to take a break, but make sure it's an intentional, deliberate break and not one out of "default." If you just rest your laurels when things are being updated, you really are just taking excuses. If your blog is locked for editing, then write some posts offline. If your website is not presentable during an update, then research relevant sites and compile a spreadsheet of who might link to you. If the internet is shut off on the entire continent, then start calling some networking contacts.

There is ALWAYS something to do.

Today we have another "break room food" edition of the blog.

To celebrate some recent achievements for ChiroMatrix, we had pizza delivered to the break room. We were treated to a half dozen types of pizza, and it was all delicious. I was curious what place had made the pizza, so I could go there on my own sometime.

The pizza box said "Made by your neighborhood pizzeria." You couldn't find the actual name of the pizzeria anywhere on the box. Does that pizza shop have any idea how much branding they're losing out on by using a generic box without their name on it? Most customers will not take the time to find out a name of a service provider if it's the slightest bit difficult. A couple hours later after eating, I still haven't bothered to ask anyone the name of the pizzeria. By tomorrow, I might have forgotten about the pizza entirely.

If you're giving or selling any sort of product from your practice, be it supplements, joint braces, or anything else, make sure you at least have a sticker with your practice information on it. Ideally, you'd have your name on the actual product label. You never know who might pick it up and wonder where it came from. 

As a business owner, you always want to distinguish yourself from the pack. There are plenty of opportunities for specialization as a chiropractor. Some take their unique positioning even farther by referring to themselves as "health & wellness specialists," or other terms.

We saw a funny example of a company taking this too far at this link.

A publicist for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, previously the WWF) asked the publication TV Week to remove the term "wrestling" from a press release headline, because WWE is now a "global entertainment company." Chuck Ross from TV Week followed up with Kellie from WWE.

Chuck Ross: Your release says that Carey is being recognized as being an entrant in the 2001 Royal Rumble. I believe that was a wrestling event.

Kellie: No, we don't do wrestling events. They're entertainments. And we don't call them wrestlers. They're superstars and divas.

Chuck Ross: Kellie, I really don't have time for this. WWE presents wrestling events. I'm not going to change the headline or anything in the item. If you'd like, I'll just remove it. What do you want me to do?

Kellie: Remove it.

I think we can all see the absurdity of this conversation. It's fine to position yourself as something other than what you officially went to chiropractic school for, but there's no reason to passionately fight off a common label that you may still be associated with.

Every month at ChiroMatrix, we have some cake, candles, and fun to celebrate recent birthdays on the team. Today it got a little interesting.

We ordered two cakes, a Raspberry Bavarian Cream and a Chocolate. On the outside, both had white frosting, but there were chocolate shavings all over one of them to help us tell the difference.

The shocking truth we discovered when cutting the cakes, were that that NEITHER were Chocolate. They were both Raspberry Bavarian Cream, and our order had been screwed up. The chocolate shavings on top were merely smoke and mirrors.

I don't think the bakery tried to screw us over, but it brought an interesting lesson to the table. If you make a mistake in your services, don't try to dress it up. As nice as the chocolate shavings were, it only delayed the inevitable disappointment and actually made us even more annoyed than if we hadn't been misled by the appearance. 

 

Every now and then we like to share a web tool that can help you be more productive, get more patients, or get more traffic to your chiropractic website. Today, I wanted to share a tool that SEOmoz posted about today on their site. The original SEOmoz article is here.

When you use Google Intelligence custom alerts, you can get a heads up immediately when something is a bit out of whack with your traffic, lead conversion, or site processing. For example, if your web traffic drops 50% in a day, you can be alerted over email. Maybe this means that you lost a valuable linking site or that Google lowered your rankings. An alert like this would help with that.

You can use this for other factors as well, such as if your traffic spikes up or flatlines. This can alert you to site management issues. See what you can do with this.

Earlier this week, we talked about what time was best for sending emails out.  Today we're going to explore the best days to send a blog post out.

Unlike email times, which have a specific numerical value, the most important concepts for blog posts are consistency and regularity.

If you post only once a week or twice a week, that's fine, but make it the same day for each time.  Even a blog post that's on the first Tuesday of every month is acceptable.  It may seem odd that people would care about the spacing, but they do.  It's actually much better to have 4 blog posts spaced out over a month than 7 blog posts that show up erratically.  As for time of day, morning is best for the actual posting, but this is secondary.

One question that comes up is when the best time is to send emails from your chiropractic website. Whether you're sending a newsletter or an appointment reminder, there are better times than others to send an email out.

After some extensive testing, it was determined that emails sent between 6 and 7 am get the largest readership. This can be an issue for national companies with multiple time zones, but for local businesses, there isn't any problem.

Schedule your emails at that time and see how the open rates are affected.

Smart business sense demands you make a profit when you spend money on initiatives, particularly on the internet where things are so well tracked. With your chiropractic website, it's not always going to be clear how your money is coming back to you when you use social media.

As you're building a Twitter following or Facebook friends list, you might be spending on advertising or paying an assistant to help market yourself. Social Media, like search engine optimization, requires some time to build up, so you will not necessarily see how much money it's made you until you've put the bulk of your efforts in.

To track this the best you can, ask every new patient how he or she found you. This will at least help cover your new acquisitions. Keep in mind that you'll never really be able to get a firm number for how your social media marketing affects your repeat appointments. 

One question that comes up sometimes is how capitalization fits with your chiropractic website. Does it matter if your URL has capital letters in it? What about your actual content?

In terms of ranking for your keywords, it doesn't matter if your keywords are capitalized or not. This is true for both your backlink anchor text and your on-page content. However, capitalizing words awkwardly is never a good idea from a user standpoint.

As for your URL, the capitalization does not affect search rankings, but it really can affect how easy it is for users to find or link to you. It's best to keep all your URL's completely lower case. The domain name is automatically converted to lower case, but your directories and file names are case-sensitive. The one reason you'd want an upper case filename is if you want to limit traffic to people who've clicked a link.

In your chiropractic website marketing, you'll no doubt consider submitting your site to directories at some point.

Directories can be a great way to increase your link volume and improve your search engine rankings. However, not all directories are created equal. There are some directories called "link farms" that are notorious for letting anyone and everyone put their site up. Because of this, Google will often not reward a submission like this and might even punish it.

If you're not having a professional submit to directories for you, then it's best to stick to relevant directories for your niche. For example, you will be a lot more likely to get results from submitting to chiropractic, health, and medical directories than places that have every category known to man.

When you set up your chiropractic website, you will have some choices over how your internal linking is set up. There are roughly two types of structures you can have.

Flat architecture is when you are only a few clicks away from any page on your site. If you have an extensive menu system like ChiroMatrix can provide, then you can easily be in the clear for this and do well with Google.

Tall architecture is when you have to take a relatively large amount of clicks from the homepage to one of your smaller pages. The more clicks you have to go deep, the less credibility those bottom pages have with the search engines.

With your chiropractic website, try to keep your site architecture as flat as possible.

When marketing your chiropractic website, you have to give the impression that you're a professional in every way. This is part of the reason why an attractive website is so important.

Something that you will want to move past as well is using non-branded email addresses while doing business. You can use any personal email address when dealing with friends and family, but when you have the Dr. in front of your name, it will look really unprofessional to end your email address with @aol.com or @hotmail.com.

This is one reason why we provide special email addresses for our clients. When a patient hears from you, you have much more credibility when your email is based on your website domain.

One of the biggest hurdles that new chiropractic websites go through is effectively communicating what service you're actually offering. Remember that your audience is not in your head and some things that seem obvious to you may elude their understanding.

Before I was working at ChiroMatrix, I was doing some freelance web marketing. To make sure that a message is getting across correctly, I created the "coffee shop test." I would be working on a website while at a coffee shop, when the idea occurred to me. I took the laptop to several random people and asked them to tell me what the website was about. If they could say so within a second or two, I knew that we were on the right track.  If someone had to stare at it for a while and got a fuzzy look in his or her eyes, I knew that there were major design and message changes needed.

It's always good to have a random third party audience looking at your chiropractic website. Whether or not they fit your patient profile, they should be able to tell what it is.

If you have a "Request an Appointment" form for your ChiroMatrix chiropractic website, you might wonder when you should follow up. If someone becomes a lead on Friday night, should you wait until Monday or make the contact on Saturday?

We would say that you should follow up with your new lead as quickly as possible. Many of your prospects want a chiropractor right away, and if you have an appointment open 3 hours from now, they'll snag it if they can. They may also have contacted 3 other chiropractors, and if you're the first to call back, even on a Saturday, you may get them as a long term patient.

The only limitation to this is respecting their sleep hours (and possibly Sunday, if your community treats that as a no business day). When it's not an appropriate time to call, you can always email them back and invite them to schedule through email, with a note that you'll call the next business day otherwise. This is the best way to capitalize with prospects on your chiropractic website.

As you're improving the search rankings for your chiropractic website, you may have realized that doing well with your keywords is not enough. As Google continues to refine its algorithm, the company is making search results much more multi-dimensional.

Because of this, even if you do well ranking for your keyword, you may be bumped to a smaller spot by Google Places results, which are not optional anymore.

Make sure you register your chiropractic website at Google Places and start asking for reviews. This will make a world of difference in your local search traffic.

As we've been previously discussing some simple but often ignored tips for your chiropractic website, today we're going to talk about making back-ups of what you have online.

There are sometimes server meltdowns, hackers, and simple technical mistakes that can lead to part or all of your website being wiped out. If you don't have anything saved off your site, then you may be starting from square one.

At the very least, have a copy of your current chiropractic website content on your hard drive. If your hosting provider creates automatic back-ups, this is a good thing to take advantage of as well.

We talked about the importance of having your phone number on the homepage of your chiropractic website the past week.

Today we're going to take it a step further, and talk about including a call to action. You may think that having a phone number there is enough to get a willing patient to sign up, but you need to take the extra step and actually direct your web visitor to book an appointment.

In ChiroMatrix websites we let clients customize their sidebars with a "Request an Appointment" button. Whatever you do for your chiropractic website, remember that everything should lead to new appointments.

You may have noticed that on this blog, we advocate taking advantage of free resources for your chiropractic website as much as possible, including the great Google Analytics and Website Optimizer.

Today we're going to take an about-face and tell you a free Google product you should avoid: Blogspot. It can be attractive to register a free blog at blogger.com, but here are three reasons why you should avoid it.

1)    Unlike free analytics and webmaster tools, Blogspot makes it visible to your patients that you're using a free blogging platform, which can make you look unsophisticated or unsuccessful.
2)    There is a "Report Abuse" link right at the top, which lets either competitors or chiropractic haters to jeopardize your site for no reason.
3)    There are links to leave your blog and browse other Blogspot pages. This can't help you, as you want your patients to stay in your chiropractic universe.

Chiromatrix has its own iBlog feature to let you get all of the benefits of a blog for your chiropractic website, without having any of these problems. Talk to your Customer Support Coach about this to get started.

In our talks about chiropractic website best practices, this week, we've mostly been talking about design and marketing strategies that can range from an intermediate to advanced level. Today we wanted to bring up something very simple that too many chiropractors ignore.

Do you have your phone number on the front page of your website?

You'd be surprised how many brilliant chiropractors make their contact information extremely hard to find. Your new patients will likely not go through the effort of clicking around to find your number. Have your contact information front and center so even a five-year old could find your phone number on your chiropractic website by looking at the page.

During your chiropractic marketing initiatives, you will have times where you don't agree with an idea that either your staff member or marketing consultant has.

There's an easy 2-part solution to this:

A)    If you have the budget, test both options.
B)    If you don't have the budget, err on standard best practices.

It's really that simple. Ideally, you'd have an unlimited budget where you can test any disagreement. This is unrealistic, especially if you're just starting out, so your time is better spent researching what the experts say. Do a search on Google or trusted internet marketing sites on the issue, and see what they say. Most of the time, you'll find a relatively strong agreement among the experts. Even if you do have a budget to test, it might make sense to listen.

Remember that you don't get paid for creativity in marketing your chiropractic website. You only get paid for patients coming in the door.

When marketing your chiropractic website, you come into "rules" you hear about how your web marketing should be. At the same time, you might have a gut feeling that you have a better way of doing things.

A favorite quote of mine is that in marketing, there are best practices, but there are no sacred cows. For example, it's been proven time and time again that having white text on a black background is not a good idea for websites. They're hard to read and result in a high bounce rate.

However, for sites that advertise energy drinks or nightclubs, the white-on-black seems to have a good effect. You wouldn't know until you test it.

For your chiropractic website, your best approach is to know the best practices, and if you want to try something different, test the difference. It's ok to go against best practices as long as you KNOW you're violating them and are consciously testing to see if your hunch is right about the situation.

In general, however, the safest, most low-maintenance approach is to go by what's been proven to work again and again.

When creating ads for your chiropractic website, it's best to take advantage of all targeting options. One place that is often overlooked is the "Connections on Facebook" section. Under "Advanced Connection Targeting," you can specify to show your ads to people who already "Like" your page, or to exclude those people so you only get "fresh faces."

Some ads will work for either category, so consider both options to decide what's best for your chiropractic website.

To improve the performance of your chiropractic website, you'll have to be continuously making adjustments in both how your site works and your traffic sources. Google Analytics is a great tool to keep track of how visitors get to your site and what they do once they get there.

Today I'm going to show you another tool that will help you understand your traffic sources better. It's called Google URL Builder and is at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578.

When you're creating an ad or traffic campaign, you would use a special URL that would specify the source, the type campaign, and the content. For example, if you are running a Facebook ad campaign in which you offered free consultations, you might put "facebook" as your source, "cpc" (cost per click) as your medium, and "freeconsultation" as your campaign name. If your site was ChiroKing.com, you might end up with an URL like http://chiroking.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=freeconsultation

The URL builder takes care of all the tech work for you, so everything you need to know will be put in Google Analytics. Try this with your chiropractic website and see how much easier tracking gets.

One of our favorite readers recently wrote in and brought up the point about whether paid search is enough, or if your chiropractic website should also be optimized for organic search as well.

The truth is, you should ideally have both bases covered.  Generally, organic search results are trusted more and get more click-throughs.  Also, once you're actually in the top spots, all the clicks are basically free.

The benefit from paid search comes from getting traffic and patients from Google RIGHT NOW instead of waiting.  Also, having your practice on both sides of the web page helps boost credibility.

This is why ChiroMatrix works hard to optimize BOTH paid and organic search to give our clients the maximum benefit for their chiropractic websites.  We can't do this for all clients, but on a case by case basis, make arrangements for chiropractors dedicated to growing their businesses.

While watching the Super Bowl, I saw a powerful example of how advertising should be for your chiropractic website.

"What is GoDaddy?" a friend asked me during the Super Bowl.

"Exactly!" I exclaimed.

She'd proven my thought, that GoDaddy.com had wasted an awful lot of money on a Super Bowl advertisement.

GoDaddy is a hosting and domain name provider. This means they can let you choose a domain name and rent you physical space on the internet to put a website up. That's about it.

So the first mistake GoDaddy made was choosing to advertise on the Super Bowl in the first place. There is no audience more untargeted than a mass-watched TV event that "everyone" is supposed to tune into. This leads to spending an enormous amount of money selling to people who either can't or won't order your service.

The second mistake was in the design of the ad. It featured a number of attractive women parading around wearing GoDaddy shirts, with little to no indication of what the company actually did. So even if there were future website owners watching the ad, they would not be inspired to visit GoDaddy.com. Instead, the only action-takers that might be inspired would be guys who wanted to see more women in that clothing... not the right customer.

How does this apply to your chiropractic website? For one thing, it illustrates how much more expensive advertising can be to reach a mass audience. This is why you would have a radio ad for an area close to you, but not blasting across the entire state. Secondly, this is an example of how you need to be direct and explain what you do. Don't try to be cutesy or funny at the expense of miscommunicating your service. Remember that your ads are created to sell, not to entertain.

In the last post, we talked about directly investing dollars into traffic for your chiropractic website. The idea that you should spend $1000 to get one patient, who over maybe five years will pay you $2500, does not make everyone feel comfortable. You want your money now and you don't want to give up today's pay and watch tomorrow's profit come at a snail's pace.

The irony is that to any investor, doubling your money (plus half) within five years sounds like a great investment. That's a 20.12% return rate, unheard of on the market except in really risky stocks.

The difference is that when you're a small time chiropractor (or any entrepreneur), you're in a "hunter/gatherer" mindset. This is how humanity kept alive in the early days. Go hunt for food, pick wild berries, and repeat it again the next day. If the bison migrate, you go hungry. Too many chiropractors operate this way and because of this, they do not accumulate wealth.

Instead you have to switch to an "agricultural" mindset . You buy the right seeds, plant, irrigate, and wait. If we didn't switch to this type of thinking, we'd still be out hunting or food today (like some cultures are still doing). The only way you can do this is by putting together an aggressive savings program for your business so you have the capital to not shiver when the opportunity comes up to tie up your money for a few years.  It'll be worth it for the freedom to choose really profitable investments.

Try this way of thinking with your chiropractic website and see what you can do. 

There will be times where you have to spend money on advertising for your chiropractic website and wonder if it's worth it. Suppose you spent $1000 on Facebook ads, and got one patient. Was it a waste?

Maybe, maybe not.

When you advertise, you are essentially investing. You're buying patients, and hoping that you get more money from treating them than you spent getting them in the door. The way you tell if you're getting a good deal is by establishing a lifetime customer value, which in your case, is how much money a patient will spend with you for as long as you know each other.

Here's a way to find a rough number of this. Take all of your revenue, and divide it by the number of patients that contributed to this revenue. Suppose it turns out that your average patient ends up paying $2500 over time.  If you have enough appointment space available, then effectively paying $1000 per patient is not a bad deal at all. You can still work to get costs down, but as long as you have a threshold for more patients, then it doesn't make sense to limit volume until you have the cost dialed down.

See how this perspective affects how you market your chiropractic website.  If this blog post was a little uncomfortable, stay tuned for next week where we'll explain how you can adopt this mindset more easily.

If you've been struggling making headway with your chiropractic website, then there is a strong possibility that you've been allowing yourself to get clouded with voluntary distractions, or "escapes." I wish I could give you an exhaustive list, but it's different for everyone. Potential offenders include TV, movies, alcohol/drugs, blog reading and Facebook/Twitter.  These can sometimes be time wasters, as well as energy suckers, meaning that after the activity, you lose either motivation or energy and alertness required for productivity.

If this idea resonates with you, then the best thing you can do is take a set period of time to cut yourself from some or all of your escapes. For example, you may decide that for 30 days, you will not watch TV or drink alcohol. Two things happen when you do this. First of all, you find that time is freed up for you to work on your chiropractic website marketing. Secondly, you'll find a charge within you to be productive, as the energy inside needs an outlet. If your mind can't escape in front of the TV, then it would rather come up with some marketing initiatives than stay idle.

You'll have to make a judgment call on how much to cut out. If you cut out only one or two escapes, there's a possibility that another one will take its place. If you cut out ALL escapes, then it can be extremely uncomfortable. However, if you find the right balance, you'll find that for at least that time period, your productivity with your chiropractic website marketing will significantly increase.

When you're marketing your chiropractic website, you may find that some ideas seem good to you, but are too close to what some unsavory characters are currently doing.

The best example was a recent email from Tony Robbins for a business seminar.  The subject of the email was "We guarantee you 1 million dollars but you must act now."

I wasn't sure if our favorite success guru's email was hacked or if he started outsourcing his email marketing to Nigeria.  Either way, the title was strikingly close to what a scammer would say.  Even if your patient knows who you are, having a similar message can make you look less credible.

Most of you won't make a mistake this  bad with your chiropractic website marketing, but it's a concept to keep in mind

When you buy traffic for your chiropractic website, you sometimes run into the option of choosing either a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) plan.

As you might guess, the difference is that with CPC you pay ONLY when a prospect clicks to go to your page, while with CPM, you pay when your ad is shown 1000 times, no matter what happens. There are pros and cons to both.

In terms of outside forces meddling with your budget, CPC leaves you more open to click fraud, while CPM gives your paid traffic provider an incentive to show your ads as many times as possible. Neither of these phenomena should be feared, but they do happen enough to make considerations. To help save budget with CPM, you need to make sure you are laser-focused in targeting what audience your ad is being shown to, down to the location, demographic, and even time of day.  All it takes is forgetting to check off one little box and your ad may be showing hundreds of thousands of times in Nigeria.  As an example, if your practice can only really serve a 25 mile radius, hone that in as exactly as possible. 

However, if you do lockdown CPM, then you're effectively getting a flat rate for traffic, no matter how many clicks you can get.  If you can write a dynamite ad for your chiropractic website, and control all the variables for your ad audience, than CPM may be your best choice. Just make sure you test both before making a final decision.

One of the easiest ways to start getting traffic for your chiropractic website is to use paid search traffic, also known as PPC (pay per click), and sponsored search. The benefit of this is that no matter how new your website is, you can start getting traffic right away.

Some people are hesitant or even resentful about paid search. It may feel like you shouldn't have to pay to get visitors to your website. They should just be able to find you, right? Know that even the largest Fortune 500 companies are paying for traffic off Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other major websites.

The reason for this that the bigger companies understand that if web traffic converts to sales, it's worth paying for. If you have a large enough budget, it makes sense to buy a lot of visitors, even if the profit margin is low. As a small business owner, it still makes sense to use these traffic sources, but you have to watch your profit margin a lot more closely, or you'll run out of funds very quickly.

We'll go into the strategies for paid traffic in future posts, but for now, consider what kind of budget you might have for sending paid traffic to your chiropractic website.

When you're marketing yourself through your chiropractic website, you can be tempted to model yourself after a competitor, especially if he seems to be very successful. This can be helpful, but also dangerous. Here are some reasons why it might not pay to copy him:

1)    He might be very good at traditional grassroots marketing and succeeding in spite of his flawed online marketing efforts.
2)    He might be successful online, but "testing" a new approach to see how it works. The version of the site you see might be the experimental version.
3)    He might have succeeded in the past, but has switched to a poor marketing team and hasn't realized it yet.

There might be some very good reasons to learn from a competing chiropractic website, but you should always be able to articulate why something seems to be working before applying it to your own site. Blindly copying is never a good plan.

Two months ago, while talking about chiropractic website promotion, we gave some advice on how you can make your patients feel more special on their birthdays. We mentioned e-cards, postcards, and phone calls, but somehow didn't mention one of the simplest tricks of all.

If you have your patients connected to your Facebook page (as you should), then you will get a notice when a patients' birthday comes up. You can also put these all in your Google calendar to set up reminders. This is important because Facebook doesn't let you set up automatic reminders when a birthday comes.

Write "Happy Birthday," or some nice words on your patients' Facebook wall on that day, and it will be really appreciated. Plus, other people who look on your comment may click to check out your chiropractic website. 

Hope you all had a great weekend. When looking at the stats for your chiropractic website, you may sometimes wonder, "When is the real money going to come in?" Do you have what it takes to become a millionaire chiropractor?

The truth is simple. There are really only two types of chiropractors who become millionaires with their practices.  No exceptions.

The first is the type who is obsessively driven to build his or her business to its maximum level. She will be blogging at night and not notice it's 2am. Who needs sleep anyway? When her fellow chiropractic alumni are meeting for a happy hour, she has to be dragged kicking and screaming from writing her new video script for her chiropractic website.

The second type understands that without regular goals, deadlines, and habits, he or she will NEVER build a million dollar practice. Instead of being dragged kicking and screaming TO the happy hour, she has to drag herself kicking and screaming FROM the happy hour to put together her webinar. She sets objectives every week to complete, and keeps her goals within sight of her desk at all times.

If you're the first type, you'd know it by now. You'd be able to run completely on autopilot and make money effortlessly. Chances are, you're not; and that's ok. It's like this with every field or endeavor, be it writing, athletics, and entrepreneurship. Accept that there is a scattered beast in you that needs to be tamed and you will move much farther with your practice and chiropractic website. 

Yesterday we went over a free tool to help avoid spam flagging for your chiropractic website domain. You may have noticed there was a difference in the value of a .com and a .biz

These are called TLD's or domain extensions.  Today, I'll give you some guidelines to picking a good one.

First of all, always go with a .com if you can. This is the gold standard and helps with both client credibility and SEO. If you have a .com, especially for a competitive phrase, it means you either have had the website for a while, or the bankroll and motivation to buy it. Either reason is respected by Google.

Next best is .org. It can even arguably be better to have a .org, because that implies non-profit or "public good" to a lot of people.

After those two, it all falls down considerably. The best of the "lower" TLD's is .net, but you're better off taking a modified domain name with a .com. One of the bigger issues with the lower TLD's is that someone might type in the .com equivalent instead and not find you.

Last but not least, if there's any possible way to register a .gov or .mil (reserved for government & military), then you'll have an enormous advantage, but chances are slim that this would ever happen. Stick to .com for your chiropractic website.

When you're picking a domain name for your chiropractic website, you want to be cognizant of how Google will treat what you come up with. Google is on guard against web spammers and scammers, so they have a system to determine how trustworthy your site is.

SEOmoz came up with a great tool to help predict whether your domain name will be penalized by Google. The URL is seomoz.org/labs_tools/spam-detection/index.php. The lower the spam score, the better, with 1.0 being the "danger" point

A URL like "bigcitychiropractic.com" gets a score of 0.393

On the other hand, "instant-back-healing-miracle-69.biz" gets a gnarly score of 1.185.

A great thing about the tool is that it gives you a breakdown on what parts of your domain will be raising flags. You'll find it helpful to run your chiropractic website domain through this before choosing anything.

As your practice and chiropractic website becomes more successful, there will be an increase in how much time you are unavailable to field calls, questions, and even complaints. You may be away from the office, and your receptionist or assistant may be running the ship without you.

There are two parts to maintaining a powerful support staff. The first is proper training. You can have a "handbook" or wiki for your staff to understand general guidelines and contingencies. They should know what to do if a patient tries to reschedule a half hour before his or her appointment and how to respond to a door-to-door solicitor.

However, there will always be times when an event happens which is not covered in training. This is where employee empowerment comes in. Get your support staff in the habit of making their own decisions without asking you for everything. The more they can do this with you around, the easier it will be when you're not around. Also, the more you convey trust that your staff can make the right decisions, the more they'll carry that belief themselves.

A caveat to this is that employee empowerment only works if you accept that mistakes happen, and are corrective but not berating if someone makes the wrong decision when you are unavailable. It requires discretion to tell if an error is "reasonable" or "unreasonable." As your practice grows from your chiropractic website marketing, you'll find your support staff naturally mastering this ability.

If you're using paid traffic sources for your chiropractic website, you may have ran into some interesting numbers to interpret, such as Click-through Rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per click (CPC), and cost per patient acquired.

When making decisions about your advertising and marketing, how do you make sense of all these numbers? It can be hard, for example, if you have a high conversion rate but a low amount of traffic. Do you sacrifice one aim for the other?

The easiest way to answer questions like these is to take the action that will lead to the most cash-in-hand at the end of the month. For example, if it currently costs you $30 in advertising to get you one patient, it's not such a bad thing to bump that number to $40 if you end up doubling the amount of patients you get. Once you're at capacity, then your number one goal will be to lower cost per patient, even if it means you lose a few in the process.

Keep in mind that all these numbers are relative to one another, and especially relative to the volume and finances of your practice and chiropractic website. This is something ChiroMatrix can help you with.

A common saying in business and entertainment is "There's no such thing as bad press."

As a health professional with a chiropractic website, you know that it's essential that you protect your reputation.

However, it does make sense to look at the difference between "good bad press" and "bad bad press."

Here's the distinction:

Bad bad press is when the person involved does something which bothers the fan or customer. An example would be a comedian making racist jokes and alienating his or her audience. Bad bad press for a chiropractor would be taking unnecessary x-rays to bump up fees.

Good bad press is when the person does something which annoys anyone besides the fan or customer. It's amplified when fan or customer benefits from the "offense."  An example of this would be a rock star breaking his record label agreement by doing a free show outside of his contract. For a chiropractor, it could be be a patient's boxing opponent publicly demanding the chiropractor be barred from the event because the chiropractic adjustments before the match were giving the patient an "unfair advantage."

Obviously, any of the above actions can have their own consequences, so don't go intentionally looking for trouble. However, it's always good to understand how reputation truly works when promoting yourself with your chiropractic website.

Sometimes, your chiropractic website blog can seem like it's stagnating in its rise up the Google rankings. It can feel like Google forgot about you.

Here is something to help grab Google's attention again.

Go to http://pingomatic.com and put in the URL for your chiropractic website. Check off all the boxes, except maybe the audio ones.

This website sends a signal for the robot crawlers of the internet to pay more attention to your blog. Do this whenever there's been some time without your site getting attention.

One of the deceptively simple concepts of business is that there are really only a few fundamentals you need to take care of for your practice and chiropractic website. There are four elements to any entrepreneur's success, which I'll describe for you here.

Product/Service: This area is covered already by you studying to be a chiropractor and getting certified. You know how to heal people and this is something your patients need.

Traffic: You need to get people to your chiropractic website, and more importantly, into your office to meet you. This is where your promotional efforts on Google come in, as well as simple things like posting flyers in the right areas.

Conversion: You need to be able to take people who hear about you and turn them into patients. This comes through explaining the benefits of your services on your site and your own sales presentation.

Retention: You take care of this through giving excellent service and following up regularly. Tools like your blog and email newsletters can contribute to this.

These four elements have existed since the beginning of time, though the vehicles for them continually change. Depending on your business, you may not need all four. If you're working in a tourist location, retention might not be an issue. If you're a famous chiropractor with a book on the New York Times Bestseller list, then you probably will have conversion taken care of for you. Just know that if you have issues with your practice and chiropractic website, it means that one or more of these four elements is off. No exceptions.

For New Year's week, we've been going over goal statements and how to make them stick. Today I want to discuss an often overlooked part of goal setting for your practice and chiropractic website: making it measurable.

If you set a goal for "I will blog regularly for my chiropractic website," how will you know when it's completed? Is regularly once a week, once a day, or once a month? Are you going to blog regularly for three months, or for the rest of your life?

The more vague the goal is, the less motivation you have to complete it. There needs to be a light at the end of the tunnel when you can pat yourself on the back for achievement. It can be tempting to make your goals vague if you don't set criteria for success, it makes it easier to not acknowledge it if you fail. You become like the Little League baseball team who after a loss says, "Well, we weren't really trying, so it doesn't count."

Instead, if you want to get busy blogging, have a statement like: "I will blog on my chiropractic website once a week for six months." If six months feels too short, then set a new goal after you reach that benchmark. There's no such thing as a permanent goal, because your aim is infinitely out of reach once you start making promises that last forever. Set the baseline so a year from now you'll know without a shadow of a doubt if you succeeded.

Yesterday we talked about goal statements and the pitfalls of saying you would "try" to accomplish something with your chiropractic website. There's another distinction with goal-setting to keep in mind: whether your goal statement is based on action or results.

An example of an action goal is "I will create five videos for my website by June 2011."

A results goal would be "I will have a weekly income of $4,000 by June 2011."

I would say most people are better off starting off with action goals. As long as you are realistic with what you can manage and leave enough of a timeline to deal with unexpected obstacles, you will predictably and consistently achieve your goals.

Having an amorphous goal of making a lot of money, or even getting a lot of patients, will cause more tension and confusion because you are always faced with the question "How am I going to do this?"

However, it is still essential to have your eye on the prize in terms of what results you want. It's perfectly fine to focus on a weekly income of $4,000. I just would not suggest making a personal commitment to a monetary goal that could vary based on outside forces. Instead, commit yourself firmly to your action goals, while letting your results goal be your ongoing motivation for your action. This will take your practice and chiropractic website further than you could have ever imagined.

There's a very good chance that you've set a number of resolutions for yourself and your chiropractic website.  You want to get visitors to your website and bring them into your office.  How come most people don't succeed with their resolutions?

This past week, I asked a friend what her resolution was for this year.  She said, "I am going to try to lose fifteen pounds."

There are a number of things wrong with stating your goal this way.  To begin, let me quote one of the great intellectual masters who lived long before Buddha and Socrates.

"Do or do not.  There is no try." - Yoda

When you declare you will "try" to do something, you're telling yourself and the world that it's not likely to happen.  With that level of confidence, how can you succeed at any goal? 

If you were interviewing receptionists and one said, "I'll try to get to work on time every day," you probably wouldn't hire him or her.  Hold yourself to the same standard with your own chiropractic website goals for 2011.

In every profession and walk of life, there is joy in creativity. Whether in school or at work, our most rewarding projects come from when we can do things our own way. Now that you're a chiropractor with your own business, you may feel like this is a great time to put your creative mind to work in marketing your practice and chiropractic website.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but today I'm going to explain a business problem that results from over-creativity. I call it "trailblazing," which is when a business owner decides to market his or her services in a way completely new to the industry. The business people who trailblaze can sometimes go down in history as the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, but 99.99% of the time, the venture does not work.

The best way to predictably market you chiropractic website and services is to follow what's tried and true and then put your own unique spin on it. Instead of blazing a trail, you're making the current trail a little wider. You won't be featured in business magazines most likely, but you will make great money with less risk. Even Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, designed his business similar to how MySpace and Friendster had worked in the past, and added his own variation.

So stick to the strategies advocated in this blog and from our Customer Support Coach team. You add your own ideas to the mix as well, but stay grounded in a foundation that's already proved itself.

Yesterday we talked about link-building on forums for your chiropractic website. I want to introduce to you a concept called "anchor text variety." When you get a link back from another website, you often can choose "anchor text," which is the word or phrase that someone would click on to go to your site.

If you've done some keyword research, you may have a key phrase you want to target, such as "Houston chiropractor." While you may want to use that phrase for many of your anchors, you will want to switch it up so it looks more natural to Google. It's good to have variety such as "chiropractors in Houston," "Texas chiropractors" and "Houston back health." You'll also want some simple links with your chiropractic website URL as your anchor text, but that will usually be covered on its own.

Always keep in mind that the more natural the distribution appears, the better.