I was a chiropractic student from 01/1992 to 12/1995. I was certain that with my magnetic personality, my doors would be flooded with new patients when I opened… as many as I could handle. I wouldn’t have to worry about finances, because if I served the people, the finances would take care of themselves. But I was in for a rude awakening.
You see, I found out that there were a lot of magnetic chiropractors out there. In fact, it seemed there were more magnets than patients wearing metallic suits. And although I learned plenty about chiropractic, I learned very little about business and marketing my business. But there was a local group of chiropractors that I could hang out with and learn from… right? Maybe if I just went to the monthly local “DE” like meetings, everything would be OK. And we had a very inspiring club. They kept me focused on correcting the vertebral subluxation complex to restore life and raise the dead. But, like most of those that attended, my business wasn’t any better than the next chiropractor down to street. You see, inspiration didn’t bring in the patients.
So groups of us would get together and have massive spinal screening events that signed up 30 to 50 new patients per doctor for the following week. We could get almost anybody to stand on two scales with strings on a frame to show them how out of balanced and crooked they were. Getting them to sign up for a free appointment was just as easy. But less than half of them would show up for the free visit. And much fewer of them would return and actually be paying customers. Some even had a friend or relative that they could get “free” adjustments from anyway.
Then I learned what my marketing problem was. I was trying to convince people that didn’t know they had a problem that they actually did. It was like trying to sell roller blades to a paraplegic. I then realized it was much easier to convert a potential patient who knew they had problems and were actively searching for a chiropractor. And if they were actively searching, they probably didn’t have an uncle that would treat them for free. Not only that, but they would even pay full fees for their first visit.
But yellow page ads were expensive and nobody really uses the yellow pages anymore… right? So I turned to the internet. I hired a company that made promises of patients that would pay for the program in no time. They guaranteed “front page listings”. But they never delivered – well, not for relevant keywords anyway. So I hired another company. I also bought an expensive website with monthly fees that was sure to bring patients in. Months later and still after no results, they explained that I had to “optimize” my $79.00 per month chiropractic website. Optimization was not something that came with it, but rather a feature that I could do if I had the know how. And if I did it, I would no longer have the exact same website as the guy down the street that bought one from the same company! (It was not exactly the same… they had a program that inserted my name, my company name, address, and phone number in several fields on the site to differentiate it from the guy next door).
That was a major turning point for me. If I had to optimize it myself, I thought I might as well do it all myself. Doing so would save me about a thousand dollars per year for my website, and much more on internet marketing programs. But most importantly, it would GET RESULTS! And if it didn’t, it was MY FAULT.
So that is exactly what I did. I got a book and learned how to build my own website. It really wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. And as time went on, free programs were developed that wrote the coding for you!
If I were to do it all over again with hindsight… they say hindsight is 20/20… I would have started this process WHILE I WAS STILL IN SCHOOL. Especially now, because getting a good listing takes time. There is much more competition on the internet than there was when I started. Search engines like Google seem to give preference to the sites that have been established longer. So to beat them, you have to have a well optimized site and a well promoted site. This takes time. But you can start branding yourself online long before going into business. Once you open up, you simply add the necessary details to change from an informative blog to a business location. This is like the sniper attack on the competition. You are nowhere in the search results as a chiropractor, for instance, in a certain city. But your site filled with chiropractic information is well known by Google. Then, when you add the city name to the page, BaBoom! Google ranks you for the search “chiropractor city name” (for me, it is “chiropractor pompano beach).
So where do you go from here? I have created a free 30 day course that teaches you step-by-step how to do exactly what I did – create an interactive website that gets search engine rankings. So let’s get the basics started. After you sign up, check your email and complete the opt-in process. You will receive your first lesson immediately. I have structured the free course to be delivered to you in 10 to 20 minute lessons each day, 6 days per week for about a month.
Also, my email and phone lines are open. If at any time you have questions, feel free to contact me.
Yours for an Awesome Internet Presence,
Dr. Michael Haley
