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With the rise of social media and online review sites, word of mouth is becoming more important to dentists and dental business owners than ever. It used to be that an angry patient could tell their friends and family that they didn't like your business, 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 walking through your door.

Bad reviews happen to every business, but as the owner of a dental clinic, you can actually harness the power of these bad reviews and turn angry patients into your biggest advocates. The idea behind this technique is twofold. You want to make things right for the patient who felt wronged, but you also want to publicly show others that your dental clinic takes the satisfaction of their patients seriously. 

Even if you are treating your patients right and following up with patients after every visit, there is still a chance that someone will leave a bad review about your clinic. Fortunately, the following steps will walk you through what you need to do to turn this negative situation into a positive one.

Here is how to turn bad reviews into positive marketing for your dental 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 any problems experienced by a patient, you are demonstrating that you listen to your patients and care about making things right for them. Some helpful services for monitoring what people are saying about you or your 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 dentist or staff member from the dental clinic and let the reviewer know that you value their opinion and are sorry to hear they had a bad experience. Most importantly, offer to give them something for free or at a deep discount to demonstrate that you will do what it takes to make things better. Look at this offering as an investment. Your quick response and willingness to make things right is a bit of marketing that will show other potential patients that your dental 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 with the patient again 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 anyone who sees the exchange, including the original reviewer but also potential future patients.

This three prong approach will turn any patient from a complainer into a brand advocate for your dental clini. Instead of publicly putting your business under fire, they will be bragging to all their friends and family about what a great dentist 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 dental care they need.

Ok, now that you have responded to any bad reviews, the next step is to start generating new, positive reviews and comments about your clinic. There is a simple technique that will both prevent bad reviews and encourage patients to leave good reviews. All you need to do is first make it easy for your patients to leave reviews, and then start reminding them about leaving reviews while your services are fresh in their mind. For example, you might follow up with patients by email after each dental visit, asking for them to leave a review and making sure to provide them with quick links to your business profile at online review sites, such as your Yelp or Facebook profile.

Would you like to start getting reviews but are overwhelmed with all the different review websites and social services? Want help linking your website up with places your patients can leave reviews? At DentalMatrix, our Premium and Elite marketing packages are specifically designed to help dentists market their business effectively and our marketing specialists 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 dental clinic. Interested? Contact DentalMatrix today!

You may remember when marketing your dental office or clinic 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 dental 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 dentist's office with a sizable marketing budget may have been able to crush their smaller competitors with their marketing efforts alone. Today, smaller dental clinics can aggressively compete against larger competitors simply by offering a great dental experience and above average customer service. A small dental office 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 business? The answer lies in getting patients to talk about your business online. Social media services like Facebook provide dentists 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 dental office? You don't need to suffer in silence, it's 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 keeping 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 dental clinic'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 Dental SEO Guide by DentalMatrix and learn how to market your dental clinic online effectively and get new patients. This exclusive SEO Guide was written specifically for dentists by our marketing experts and will walk you through several free and cheap ways to spread the word about your business online. DentalMatrix also offers "Starter" marketing packages to get dentists 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 DentalMatrix for a free web marketing consultation today!

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 dental 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 dentists, 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 dentist 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 dental website show up higher in Google search results is a big deal for web marketing, since this is a brand new way to improve a website's Google search rankings. Some SEO experts even feel that dentists 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 dentist? 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 dental 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 dental website, don't hesitate to contact DentalMatrix today!

If you are a time-crunched dentist and business owner, you probably want to concentrate on only the most impactful online marketing tools for your dental website. In order to effectively market your business online, you will need to know how new patients are finding dentists on the internet. One of the most common ways that patients are locating new dentists is through internet searches on search engines like Google.com, Bing.com, and Yahoo.com. But what must a dentist 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 dentist, the first step to generating new patients from the internet is to obtain a search engine friendly and user optimized dental website. For dentists 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 dental clinics that are located in competitive markets, however, the first step should be a dentist-optimized search engine marketing strategy. If you are a dentist who needs help getting started with your own search engine marketing strategy, don't hesitate to refer to our free dental SEO Guide which has been specifically created to help dentists market themselves online effectively without breaking their budget.

Because search engine optimization is so important to what we do at DentalMatrix, we stay on top of new developments regarding successful web marketing and SEO strategies for dentists. 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 dental website successful in the search engines, we help our DentalMatrix website owners outrank their competition and turn their website into a new patient magnet.

Want to learn more about online marketing for dentists? Come back tomorrow to learn about how Facebook and up-and-coming Google+ can be used to generate new patients for your business.

Maybe you'd rather have someone else do all the legwork for you so you can focus on running your dental office or clinic. DentalMatrix is a leader in dental marketing and can help you create a world-class website as well as provide you with a fully managed marketing plan where we tale care of everything needed to market your website and business. If you would rather leave the online marketing work to the SEO experts, while you focus on the stream of new patients coming into your business, don't hesitate to contact DentalMatrix and get started today!

We all wanted to give you a quick "thank you" for you continued support of DentalMatrix and wish you a happy and healthy 4th of July weekend.

We are all very lucky to be in a nation where we are free to do business as dentists and web marketers to serve our communities.

Have a wonderful and safe Independence Day.

--The DentalMatrix Team

A theme you see come up in a lot of self-help books and audios is the idea that you are either pulled up or held down by the people you socialize with.

Some even have an equation where they say if you average the incomes of your five closest friends together, you'll have the number for your annual income, five years from now.

You don't have to believe in that exact figure, but it's still essential to keep people near you that are achieving the goals you're striving for.

Ask yourself how many dentists you spend time with who are making a lot more money than you.  If you're the top producer of your peers, chances are you need to mix it up so you can move higher in your practice.  

Here's recent development for dentists who have been thinking about using Facebook Ads for their web marketing initiatives.

Two new things have happened with Facebook:

1)    Facebook is issuing credits of $50 in free ads for new advertisers.  You may get a notice like this in an email or postal letter.
2)    Facebook account reps are now reaching out to new advertisers to offer expertise.  A client of ours recently was contacted despite not having paid any money for ads yet. (He just used the coupon).

It looks like this is a great time to get going with Facebook Ads.

I had a very interesting mini-metaphor happen in the DentalMatrix office today, concerning wealth and prosperity.

The vending machine in the building tends to hold onto coins, so you have to shake it a bit to get your change.  After getting a soda, I rocked the machine a little bit and a penny from on top of the machine came down and fell on the floor.  I said to the Customer Support Coach in line behind me, "See? When you take action for money, it comes from unexpected places."

This fundamental principle applies to your dental practice and web marketing.  The times you take action to raise your income will often indirectly bring you that prosperity you're looking for.  A patient you send a birthday card to might not need a dentist but may refer you to a lucrative new patient.  A poster you put up in a town nearby might not get you patients but instead get a journalist interested in interviewing you.  There is much power in continuous action.  

Lately, the webinar has become a very popular marketing tool for small businesses, including in the healthcare industry.  Webinars are similar to teleconferences, but have the presentation made online so someone can see a visual representation of what's being talked about.

Something odd I've seen in these webinars is that speakers often set themselves loose of responsibility in these situations.  In a webinar this morning, a speaker said "Can someone turn their sound on mute? I hear an echo."  In another webinar, the speaker actually cancelled the presentation because someone had music playing in the background and was unable or unwilling to shut it off.

Dentists and other business owners need to embrace the fact that you must take 100% responsibility for your patient's experience, even if there are outside forces at work.  This means that you don't let your patients be at the mercy of an inconsiderate music player online.  Instead, you build a plan that takes into account contingencies for these kinds of things, and you select providers that prevent problems like this.   There will be things that happen out of your control, and unanticipated, but you still have to own the event and take responsibility, as you adjust for next time. 

If you're hiking a trail in the wilderness, things might not always go according to plan.  It may have rained so the rocks might be slippery.  Maybe the water isn't clean enough, or mosquitoes hide underneath the rocks.  

When these things happen, you can easily launch into a tirade about how the natural environment isn't fair to you and that things should be different.  However, you probably wouldn't engage in this thinking because you understand that it's worthless to scream against the clouds or the rocks.

You don't judge the terrain.

It's the same with everything involved in your dental web marketing and practice management in general.  There will be patient issues, Google algorithm changes, and economic ups and downs all the time.  Judging and complaining will not change anything, so it makes no sense to judge the terrain here either.  You'll still do what you can to work within the environment, or even alter it as necessarily.  You plan your SEO, and talk to difficult patients to straighten things out.  You may even write a letter to your congressperson over the new IRS bill.  However, you don't rebel internally against the business environment as unfair.  You just do the best with what you have.  

Last week, there was a very interesting post on Dan Kennedy's blog.  Dan Kennedy has built a large reputation helping dentists with practice management.  Here's the quote:

"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 office may be full of awesome hard workers, but think about this for a moment.  Do you have a star employee who gets stuck with a disproportionate amount of work?  Something to consider.  

http://dentalmatrix.com/blog/b_7196_evading_the_dark_seduction_of_ratios.htmlA lot of great things can come from being a "stats junkie" and progressively improving your conversion rates and ratios for your dental web marketing.   You may be regularly checking out your traffic stats, your newsletter signups, and what percentage you get into the door.

While helpful, there are some very real drawbacks to this mindset.  Once you latch onto a really good rate, (i.e. having 20% of visitors join your newsletter), the temptation is to preserve that ratio at all costs.  You'll know, on some level, that that number will go down drastically as you get more traffic from alternative sources, so that can be a source of discouragement to expand your reach.

Make sure you always remember your top priority is to bring in more business and not have impressive numbers.  It's great to constantly improve numbers as you can, but never sacrifice something that could bring in more cashflow for your practice. 

Here is a tip that many dentists miss, even though on the face of it, it should be very obvious.

When a patient refers someone new to your office, it is essential that you promptly thank the original referring patient.  Do not delay past the first referred appointment.

People expect and enjoy appreciation for their deeds on your behalf, and will continue to provide these types of favors if rewarded with acknowledgement.  They also are discouraged by lack of appreciation.  Keep this in mind to build your practice.  

Sometimes no matter what great service you provide your patients, bad reviews can come up at online review sites.  A patient might have unrealistic celebrity-smile expectations from your work, or the person might just be vicious at heart.

When you get a bad review, don't argue or try to discredit the person in a response.  This will just make you look worse.

Instead, if you can reply to the review, publicly offer to help resolve the situation.  Invite the person to come to your office or to call so you can discuss the issue.  Let them know you're willing to help correct any misunderstandings.  You don't have to agree that you made a mistake, but if you are professional and respectful, this will make you look very good to other readers and possibly compel the person to remove the review. 

It can be astounding how often the best marketing practices go against common expectations.  Longer sales copy results in more sales, simple graphics often work better than complex graphics, and here's a new one:

If you send your prospects emails more frequently, you will get less unsubscribers and spam complaints. Some internet marketers attribute this to the idea that it's a bit of a jarring effect to get an email from someone you haven't heard from in a while.  No matter what the explanation is, here are the stats for you.

This past week, some of the Dental Matrix team went to a pizza joint on a lunch break.  We were dismayed that the pizzeria was not only closed, but had a sign with the words, "Due to events beyond our control, we are closed for today."

The problem wasn't that they were closed, as much as how they relayed the message.  Because they said the closing was beyond their control, it felt like a weak excuse that a late employee in a traffic jam might make.  

It turned out that the place was closed because of a gas leak, which really was beyond their control.  However, the message would be better received if the pizzeria said "Closed - Our Apologies," or simply just "Closed" with no explanation.  At least then we would see the pizzeria in a position of strength, even if they weren't acting in a way we agreed with.

In your dental practice, know that you gain no points for shifting responsibility off yourself, even when things happen that you couldn't have prepared for.  If you take 100% responsibility for your patient's experience, you will always have their respect, even when you or circumstances fall short of satisfaction.   

On Tuesday, we happily moved to our new building in the Mira Mesa area of San Diego.  Here are some pictures from the opening ceremony:

Today is our first day in our new building.  We've moved to a bigger office with nicer desks, beautiful lighting, and much more space to build our growing team of internet marketers for dentists.  This is a great milestone for our company.  

We had a spectacular ribbon cutting ceremony today as the new building was unveiled to the entire staff.  If your dental practice is in the San Diego area, feel free to come take a look yourself.

Here's to new beginnings!

Here's another idea for how you can grow your dental marketing.

Contrary to what you might think, adding more links to your email communications raises the chances of someone clicking through and scheduling an appointment. This is best when the links go to the same webpage on your dental website.

This surprisingly does not affect your unsubscribe rate. Instead, it lowers how many people unsubscribe to each email. Think about this as you plan your next email campaign.

When you're marketing your dental website through email, a great way to increase the amount of subscribers who click links and visit your office is to talk about some current truths in your community.  

Some people try to do this through talking about world news events and politics but this is unnecessary.  

All you really need to do is mention the tiny details involved, such as the day of the week, and some surrounding seasons or holidays.  Mentioning things like this help engage your reader, so start experimenting with this.  

As a business professional with a dental website, you'll often here reports and rumors about Google changes, economic events, and tips on how to manage your website marketing.

While some of these reports can prove valid, you should think about Ben Franklin's quote: "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see."

Franklin wasn't saying that you should assume everyone's lying.  What he meant was that you should put everything you hear up for evaluation.  People often either misunderstand data before reporting it or accidently or intentionally miscommunicate that data.

Even our own eyes can deceive us because we see events and analytics through a lens of past experiences and current beliefs.  Because of this, it's always good to keep an open mind when marketing and researching for your dental website.  

If Facebook Ads is part of your arsenal for your dental website marketing, then there are some new changes to look at.

Now advertisers can use broad-targeting "multiple choice" options so you can select possible interests instead of just thinking of what they may be.

If you've noticed patterns in what your patients are interested in, then this is a great opportunity to focus on that for your ad targeting.  Visit http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/04/27/broad-category-family-status-targeting/ for more information on this change

This past Saturday, I was watching an old episode of the Sopranos. It was from the year 2000, but the themes seemed very relevant to the recent economy troubles and how major players were not taking accountability for mistakes.

In the episode, a sports store owner named David approaches the mafia boss about getting in a poker game. The mafia runs some high-priced poker game that is very attractive to a gambling addict like him. David is discouraged from entering and told he'll be in over his head. Instead of listening, he tracks down the location of the game, begs to be let in, borrows $10,000 to play, then borrows another $10,000 after losing, and winds up being $45,000 in debt. This starts jeopardizing his business ownership, his son going to college, and his marriage. As the mob boss is slapping him around, he has the nerve to plead, "Please cut me a break! I've been unlucky!"

It's startling to hear someone take zero responsibility for a very self-created predicament, but this is very common to some extent in all of us. As a dentist, you are a full business owner and have to take credit when your practice goes well and when it doesn't. Any time you attribute success for failure to luck, you're taking away your sense of control over the situation. Keep positive when things go bad, but always remember you're in the driver's seat.

Recently, a friend showed me a picture of a humongous mansion owned by a local billionaire.  She said, "I'm glad I don't have that much money.  If you get into the billions, your head gets screwed up."  She gave examples of millionaires and billionaires with neurotic behavior.

Thinking about very rich people this way creates a ceiling which insulates you against that kind of success, and very likely any success close to it.  If you're worried you'll go from kind, gentle dentist to evil deranged dentist from becoming a millionaire, then you'll probably semi-intentionally cut yourself off from success.

Also, this mindset is likely to not even be true.  While people can stick out if they're rich and weird, there are also countless people who are poor and act strangely.  If you see someone very grouchy in line at Starbucks, you could assume "She's used to always getting her way because she's rich," or "She's mad she's about to miss her bus, because she can't afford a car."

We tend to drastically overestimate how good we are at linking cause and effect.  To make yourself the most receptive to wealth, give rich people the benefit of the doubt as much as possible.

A very tricky concept for small business owners to understand is that you can never stay in one spot in your business success. Your practice and dental website will always either be improving or getting worse, depending on your actions and mindset.

This applies to everything in life, including health and relationships. Similar to a bicycle, you can't stay on the same part of the ground more than a second or you'll fall down, you always have to be moving. This can get annoying because it would be nice if you were simply "DONE" once you had your SEO taken care of for your site.

Your options are either to keep aggressively building your business yourself, or to hire someone else to take that role over for you. There's a real power in having a hired gun that gets you on the top of the search results for Google and Bing and doesn't stop working to get you even more business. Consider how you can apply this to your practice.

When you're promoting your dental website and dental practice, you will find yourself in situations that make you more than a little afraid. Maybe you want to start advertising for a competitive procedure, submit press releases that make your name more well known, or start speaking at dental seminars.

All ambitious dentists and entrepreneurs go through challenges like this and the ones who are the most successful are the dentists who lean into their fears instead of curling away from them. You don't have to bust through terrifying situations with all guns blazing, but when you feel that discomfort in your stomach, it's crucial to keep moving forward. The better you get at the semi-fearful situations, the easier the big ones will get in time.

It is beneficial to understand that some discomfort is common with growth, and that mistakes along the way are to be expected and accepted. There are some risky ideas that shouldn't be undertaken, so have some common sense. The way to tell is to ask yourself if you're avoiding an initiative mainly out of fear, and then strive forward if that is the case.

The great marketing copywriter John Carlton has a mantra to live by 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."

This may seem obvious, but it's neglected by so-called "professionals" in every industry, including dentistry.  People who go to dental offices half-expect to be stuck in the waiting room for twenty-five minutes or to have their insurance processed the wrong way.  

In the rest of life, people are regularly late to social appointments if they even show up at all.

If you can be one of the few rock-solid professionals and simply pick up the slack where everyone else is screwing up, you'll be way ahead of the competition.

The concept that "you are not your customer" has been around in business for a long time.  When we operate under the assumption that the patient, client, or customer thinks or acts like we do, we take a large risk of miscommunication.

An eloquent and striking illustration of this comes from the movie "Under Siege 2: Dark Territory."  A recurring line from the crime boss hijacking the train is "Assumption is the mother of all f--- ups."  The hero in the movie keeps surviving because of thugs erroneously assuming he's dead.

A less violent example of this happened yesterday when I had a phone meeting scheduled with an advertising provider.  I called her office phone at the appointed time while she was in another part of the building waiting for my call on a special line included in an Outlook invite.

Her assumptions were that I was familiar with Outlook invitations and that I would be used to the idea of using conference call lines for one-on one calls.

My assumptions were that unless stated otherwise in our email correspondence, I would call her office line, and that the worst case scenario would be that I would be able to at least connect with her on that line since she'd be in her office.

There were assumptions for both of us in this case that didn't turn out well.  In life, there's always some degree of assumption that needs to be made so you're not stuck in indecision.  However, it's necessary to stay alert and flexible for situations where people don't see the world the same as you do.  This is especially relevant in today's changing technological world, where people don't share the same proficiency with common online tools.  

In an earlier post, we talked about the pitfalls of blindly copying your competitor's dental website. Even if the other dentist is very successful, he or she could be succeeding in spite of the marketing choice or simply doing a marketing experiment just when you start imitating.

Today I want to talk about another issue, using the same providers as a competing dentist. It can seem safe to assume that if a dentist is performing well, he must be hiring and buying from the right people for web hosting, accounting, and other services.

However, it's very likely that in that very office, there's a murmur of disgruntled employees about the decision. The dentist could have been hoodwinked and locked in a contract or hired based on a friend's poor recommendation.

Always make sure you do your own research before choosing a provider. Even the best dental marketers make mistakes so never follow blindly.

In the acclaimed book "Psycho-Cybernetics," Maxwell Maltz introduces the concept of seeing your subconscious mind like a guided missile. Just like a missile locks on a target, your subconscious success mechanism is given a goal and continuously makes corrections to achieve it.

If during a missile's course, it moves too far to the left, it corrects by steering right. If the missile overcompensates by turning too far right, it makes another correction. For 99% of the journey, it's a constant zig-zag with barely any time spent perfectly aimed in the right direction.

As a dentist, you may take too long to bill a patient and have trouble collecting. Then for the next patient, you might push too hard for payment but wreck the relationship so he chooses another dentist. These are not failures, but merely mistakes that help calibrate your internal guidance system to get you to your goal.

An advantage the missile has over people like us is that there's no point where the missile makes a mistake and then beats itself up over the error. If a missile functioned like we do, it would drop to the ground and forget about the goal after the first two or three zig-zags. This is why movie characters like the Terminator and the sociopath stalker from "No Country for Old Men" are so chilling in their effectiveness.

However, there's no need to build a wall around your heart in order to swiftly reach your goals. You just have to make a commitment to embrace your mistakes as feedback instead of punish yourself for them. The mistakes are necessary for your internal success mechanism to get to the right direction towards your goal. You don't even need to analyze and interpret your mistakes. Just acknowledge them and move on.

These days, products and services let us down more than at any time in history. It's not necessarily that they are bad, but because technology speeds at such a rate that new products get rolled out before they're fully tested. When this happens, we get errors, bugs, and more.

It can be angering when this happens, especially when you have hard earned money at stake with your dental website.

However, turn this around and ask "Is this something bad or an imperfection in something great?"

Something like Facebook tends to rile a lot of us up. We discover we have less privacy in our account than we thought, or they change our settings without our permission. However, we have value from Facebook that has never existed in history. The only social media service that fits all our desires is an imaginary one that has never existed.

On the other hand, maybe your email service tends to delete emails without your permission and crashes randomly. In that case, there probably really is something wrong and you should change providers. If there are no comparable providers, then that's a sign that you really do have something special on your hands with a few quirks.

It's all in the perspective.

In the fall, we talked about how using visualization can help you expand your practice and achieve your goals.  Today we have a new technique to use visualization tools to bring you to success in your profession.

All you require is a quiet place where you can sit and a pen and paper to write with.  Think of a goal you want to achieve with your dental website or practice.  Perhaps you want to profit $1 million this year from your work.

There are self-help experts who will say it's best to vividly imagine yourself with a wealthy practice.  This is all fine and good, but the technique we're sharing today is a little different.

Consider your goal and write this down:  "What kind of person makes $1 million profit as a dentist?" Think this over and write down the qualities that come up.  Visualize yourself with these qualities.  Some possible ones might be "hard-working," "positive-minded," "high energy," "great networker."  Put together an avatar of this perfect dentist and step into it.  Don't worry about how you'll make this happen in real life.  Just take this moment to experience having these qualities.

If you do this for even for thirty minutes a day, you'll see big changes very quickly.  This works for any goal you have, whether personal or professional.  

When you're adding new posts and content to your dental website, you may feel the temptation to save on expenses whenever possible.  Maybe you think, "No one will notice if I swipe this image from Google or a competitor."

Be careful to get all of your images legally.  It's a very small price to pay, and if you don't follow the rules on this one, you can wind up with a cease and desist letter, a fine, or worse.  It can also be very embarrassing if It gets out that your website is loaded with copyright violations.  Best to stay clean on this one.  

As your market your dental website, you will see many possibilities for advertising. An expanding trend is the ability to auto-populate your advertisements with demographic information.

This week, I saw an ad that took this a bit too far. It said "California: Is it a scam?"

This is a formatted headline that has worked with product names, such as "Weight Loss Pills: Is it a scam?" or "Tummy-tuck: Is it a scam?"

While questioning whether the entire state of California is a scam may make a lot of people laugh, it's not very funny to whomever is paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to show the ad.

Be very careful when using auto-generated ad text, or avoid it altogether.

The question below came from a real newspaper advice column:

"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 read things like this, our first instinct is to laugh out loud, followed by a second instinct of sharing the fun with someone else. By posting this, I've satisfied both urges.

But what do you do when a paying patient gives you a ridiculous question to answer? Suppose you have a patient that asks "I saw that Arm & Hammer has baking soda toothpaste. Does that mean that sodas like Coke and Pepsi are good for your teeth again?"

When this happens, it's hard to pass on the opportunity of laughing or shaking your head in disbelief. However, there are great rewards for calmly explaining to your patient the difference between baking soda and soda pop. People are often afraid of embarrassment when asking questions, and if you can be a "safe" dentist that will never judge a question, then you will be positioning yourself well above the competing dentists in your area.

People feel significantly more comfortable in an office where they won't be judged, so this leads to more visits and more referrals. Take the high road whenever possible.

It is helpful to both your readership numbers and your Google rankings to have ongoing content posted to your dental website. There are times when this is difficult, because you feel you're out of material or running out of time to put a post up.

If this happens, a good solution is to find an article related to dentistry and share it on your blog. Share the link and give a few sentences of your opinions.

Make sure that you only link to sites that are informational or to dentists in other states. It is always a risk to link to your local competition.

Earlier today, I called some printing firms to find pricing for a brochure we'll be sending out in the near future. These printing companies often don't have pricing on their sites, so you have to call for a quote. One of the companies I called had a lady take down my project specifications and then said "Thank you for the quote request, we'll email you pricing in a few minutes."

I was amazed that this company ran things the way it did. You don't get a better opportunity than an inbound call who wants to buy. Not only was I not given pricing or directed to purchase, but I wasn't even asked for my phone number for them to call later.

By closing the conversation with only my email, she left me no other option then to call other companies on my list. I ended up choosing one that gave me clear pricing on the spot.

When you have someone on the line who is considering becoming your patient, do whatever is necessary to schedule an appointment. If you can't do that, at least get a contact number so you can call another time. You can't trust that the new patient will reach out to you again.

One thing you can do to become more efficient in dental marketing is to find and complete microtasks.

A "microtask" is a small objective you can take care of in under two minutes. You've probably put a lot of these off, with problematic results.

There might be, for example, a large UPS box that you should have thrown out weeks ago. That box will suck your mental energy and efficiency because you'll constantly look at it and think "I need to throw that out when I get a chance." In 30 seconds, it could be gone. Other microtasks include a phone call, an email, or putting together a quick billing statement.

See what kinds of microtasks you could take care of so your mind is free up to handle other things.

In your adventures promoting your dental website, it's a "must have" to get verification of the results of your marketing labors. Maybe marketing firms make big claims abut it's not clear how they're really helping.

This is why DentalMatrix has call tracking.

When a client has a Premium or Elite package, we can put a special phone number on your website or online advertisement. This lets you track the calls that come in and the new patients that result from the promotion. This is very helpful to see how things are performing.

Think about your checks and balances for seeing how your dental website profits.

This week, SEOmoz had an impressive April Fool's joke that even I fell for. They introduced a program, "FutureRank BETA," which was promised to give an accurate prediction of what your site's keyword ranking would be in a week, month, or year, assuming you were continuing your current SEO activities.

This proved to be a clever joke, but it got me pondering. Suppose you had taken positive actions for your dental website, and continued those actions at the same rate for 12 months in a row. Can you imagine how much better your site would do on Google in 2012?

Think about what marketing promotions you can continue up for 2011 to put your growth on an exponential level.

Whether you have a dental website marketing service or not, you will have times when your site is being worked on and it will feel like there's productive you can do in the moment. Maybe you feel like your hands are tied.

"I can't write blog posts if my blog is locked for editing," or "I can't get links to help my SEO while my site is under construction."

If you want to have a break, then take one. There's nothing wrong with relaxation. However, this should be thought out and deliberate, not coming from a convenient excuse of your website being renovated. If your blog is locked, you can write posts in a Word document. If your site is not presentable for link requests, then you can make a spreadsheet of potential webmasters to ask the following week. Even if the internet isn't working nationwide, you can always call networking contacts for referrals.

There is ALWAYS something you can do.

Today we have another "break room food" inspired post.

Our DentalMatrix team hit a new milestone in business development, so we were treated to a pizza lunch. When the pizza was delivered, we had the glory of seeing a half-dozen types of pizza, and they were all very tasty.

At some point I was curious where the pizza came from, so I could order some on my own. I was amazed to find that there was nothing on the box but "From your neighborhood pizzeria."  There was no way to know which neighborhood pizzeria to call because there was no name or contact information on any of the boxes. Most customers will not go through the trouble to track down a company. It's been a couple hours since I had the pizza and I still haven't asked anyone where it came from. It's very possible that by tomorrow, I might have completely forgotten about it.

If you give or sell any products from your dental practice (maybe toothpaste, denture cleaners, floss samples), make sure that you have a label with your office contact information on it, at the very least. You never know who might need a dentist and picks up your sample toothbrush at the right time.

It's a great idea for business owners to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Some dentists like to position themselves based on their specialties, such as "oral health expert," or "dental surgeon."

This week there was a funny example of a billion dollar company taking this too far at this link.

A publicist for WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment, formerly known as WWF), requested that TV Week remove references to "wrestling" from a press release about a WWE event. Kellie, the WWE representative, said that WWE is now a "global entertainment" company and not associated with wrestling. TV Week's Chuck Ross called her to iron out this misunderstanding. This is part of the conversation:

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.

We all can see the absurdity from taking your positioning to the extreme. No matter what you want to call yourself, it never makes sense to adamantly fight off traditional references.

One savored tradition at DentalMatrix is honoring our team members' birthdays with a monthly cake and candles. We had an interesting experience today with the affair.

We ordered two cakes from the bakery, one Chocolate and one Raspberry Bavarian Cream. Both cakes had white frosting over them, but one had chocolate shavings on top to help us distinguish the two before cutting.

When we cut the cakes, the big shocker was that both cakes were Raspberry Bavarian Cream and that there would be no Chocolate today, despite the deceptive chocolate shavings on top.

The lesson of the day was that mistakes can't simply be dressed up and ignored. It was bad enough to have the wrong cake delivered, but having the chocolate shavings on top just added insult to injury. It was inevitable that we'd find out anyway, so there was really no benefit to the superficial presentation. In business, it's essential to own up to what you've promised to deliver.

One thing we like to do with our DentalMatrix blog is share tools that will help you make the most of your dental website. Today, SEOmoz had a great descriptive article about how Google Intelligence Alerts work.

 Google Intelligence Alerts let you know when something "big" happens with your website in either direction. If your tracking suddenly stops, it will send you an email (if you choose that alert). You can also set up alerts for when your traffic spikes up or dramatically slows down. Here's an example of one that would email you when traffic goes down by 50%.

There are plenty other alerts you can sign up for as well. See which ones fit your dental website goals the most.

This past Monday, we explored what time of day had the best response rate for patient emails and newsletters.  Today we're going to look at blogging: specifically what days are ideal.

Blogging is different from emailing in that the time of day is not so important, but the day of the week is pretty crucial.  The things to keep in mind are consistency and regularity.

Whether you post two, three, or eight times a month, it's not as important as keeping the days of the week consistent.  Even if you post once a month, you should nail it down to a certain day, such as the first Wednesday or last Thursday of the month.  The actual day and time is not so crucial, though mornings are ideal.  This means if you have a choice between 4 posts in a month that are regular, or 6 posts that are irregular, go with the lower number. 

Sometimes a question comes of what the best time is to send emails out for your dental website. If you're sending a newsletter or an appointment reminder out, this is something very important to know.

A thorough examination of email data showed that the best window of time to send an email out is 6am to 7am. This fits into the behavior of people having a morning ritual of reading email.

When your emails are scheduled to go out at this time, watch to see how your email opening and clickthrough rates improve.

When marketing your dental website online, you may have tried to see what kind of ROI you are getting from social media. It's only natural to want to track the fruits of your labors and financial investments. With social media, as well as search optimization and email marketing, it may not be clear how much money is coming back from your efforts.

Some of the costs associated with social media can include advertising to get your friends base larger, or paying an assistant to help take care of some of the busywork for you. Most of this work is done long before you'll see a return.

Some of the things you can track will be how many patients come into your office after hearing about you through Twitter or Facebook. You can have a simple survey when they walk in to help figure this out. However, it's very difficult to measure how much social media is affecting repeat visitors. Just do the best you can.

Sometimes we get the question of how capitalization of words affects your SEO. In this post, we'll explore the effects of capitalizing your URL's and capitalizing your keywords on your own page.

How you capitalize your on-site keywords and content has no effect on your search engine power. This is also the case with how your backlinks from other websites look. However, you will of course want to keep your capitalization as user-friendly as possible.

In terms of SEO, your URLs are also unaffected by capitalization. However, your site's usability can be tremendously impacted by capital letters in your URL. While the domain name auto-corrects to lowercase, the rest of the URL is very case-sensitive. Only capitalize letters in the URL when you have a reason to limit the people who end up on your site.

If you've been marketing your dental website for any length of time, you've probably thought about submitting your site to directories.

You can gain a lot of link value, especially in the beginning, by using directories. However, it pays to be careful about what sites you submit to. Some websites are called "link farms" because they are directories of tens of thousands of sites without really giving any value. Google can sometimes penalize websites for doing this.

If you're not having DentalMatrix do your SEO, then make sure that you submit to relevant directories related to health, dentistry, orthodontics, etc. This will help keep your site healthier in terms of its backlinks.

With the creation of your dental website, you can decide how your linking structure is set up. There are generally two types of linking structures you can have.

Flat architecture is when any page on your site can be reached in a few clicks. If you have a powerful menu system from Dental Matrix, this can be automatically taken care of.

Tall architecture is when you have a relatively large amount of clicks between your home page and some of your sub pages. This can take away from the SEO power of the smaller pages.

It's best to keep your dental website's link architecture as flat as you can.

When you market your dental website, you must keep in mind that it's essential for you to project a professional image at all times. This is a big reason for maintaining an attractive website.

You'll also want your email address to look professional. Whatever you use when contacting your friends and family, you'll want a separate email when writing to a patient. Using AOL or Hotmail will not look good.

This is a major reason why we create several email address for clients, based on their domain name. When you email a client, you will have more credibility, doing it this way.

The first thing you want covered with your dental website is to make sure that everyone unequivocally knows you run a dental practice. This may seem obvious to you, but your web visitors do not have your perspective and might not automatically understand.

Before I was at DentalMatrix, I was doing some freelance web marketing. One practice I came up with to make sure a client's message was coming through was the "coffee shop test." What I would do is have the website open on a laptop and show the site to random customers in the coffee shop to see if they understood what the website was about. If they knew right away, then we were on the right track. If their eyes glazed over and they got confused, then we knew there were major changes that had to be made.

Never discount the power of a third party view of your dental website. Even if the person looking at it is not your ideal patient, you still want to be sure that he or she understands what you're promoting.

If you're taking advantage of the "Request an Appointment" feature on your Dental Website, you may be unsure about when you should pick up the phone and talk a new prospect. If someone opts in at 9pm on Sunday, should you wait until Monday?

If you can, follow up as soon as possible. Many of these potential new patients will want an appointment right away, and will even book that day if you let them. They may have also requested an appointment from several other dentists, so you reaching out will put you ahead of the game.

Of course, respect sleeping hours. Also, depending on your community, it might be a faux pas to call on Sunday. If it's not the right time to phone, email them instead and invite them to schedule an appointment over email. You can still call them the next business day to follow up. This is the best way to follow up leads from your dental website.

As you optimize your dental website for the search engines, you may realize there are other things that contribute to your search traffic besides ranking well for keywords. There is a more multi-dimensional quality to the search results page lately.

If you're ranking well for your dental keywords, you can still get bumped farther down the page by Google Places results and map illustrations.

Make sure that your dental website is registered on Google Places and have your patients write reviews for you. This will help a great deal in improving your traffic from search engines.

Earlier this month we have talked about some simple but missed parts of having a dental website. Today we'll explore something not so related to marketing but absolutely essential.

Every website is vulnerable to server meltdowns, hackers and simple computer bugs that can cause some or all of your website to be corrupted and erased. This is something that can happen to any business, from a tiny blog to Macys.com. If you don't have backups, then you have to start over from scratch.

At least have your dental website content saved on your hard drive. If your hosting service makes automatic backups, that's even better.

This past week, we covered the importance of having your phone number very visible on your dental website.

Today we're going to explore this more deeply and talk about having a call to action. You might assume that it's enough to have a phone number where someone can call, but you often need to unequivocally direct your prospect to pick up the phone and call.

DentalMatrix makes it possible for clients to customize their sidebars to have a "Request an Appointment" button for their dental websites. Remember that the most important thing you do with your website is get that prospect in the door. 

In the past, we've given recommendations to use free Google tools for your dental website, including Google Analytics and Website Optimizer.

Today, we're going to share a free Google tool you should avoid instead: Blogspot. This is a popular blogging platform that can be attractive if you're on a budget, but here are some reasons why this is a bad idea:

1)    This is one of the few free web products where everyone knows that it's free. The knowledge that your patients could set up a blog as easily as you will make you look either cheap or broke.
2)    Visitors can get your blog in hot water by hitting the "Report Abuse" link. I don't know any dentists who have lost their blog over this, but it doesn't look good to show the world that you report to someone else for your blog content.
3)    There are links to take potential patients away from your site, such as the "Next Blog" link. Visitors have enough ADD that you don't need to give them any more reasons to step away.

DentalMatrix has its own iBlog feature to give you all the dental website blogging benefits you could want, without the drawbacks. Contact your Customer Support Coach to get started with this.

Recently, we've talked about best practices for your dental website, mostly in reference to more advanced marketing strategies. Today we're going to go into something a lot more basic.

Is your phone number visible on your website?

Many amazingly talented dentists neglect this very simple detail. You have to make your contact information easy to find because potential patients will not be bothered to hunt and click to find it. Make it so stupid-easy to find your number that even a five-year old can do it.

When you're putting together a plan of attack for your dental marketing website, you will find that you sometimes differ with your staff or marketing consultant on what to do.

There's an easy solution to this.

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

This is all very simple. Even if you had unlimited funds, you could test everything. However, this is not the most realistic or profitable approach. The good news is you do a Google search or go to your favorite marketing blog to find some answers. Most of the time, you'll find a rough agreement between the experts on what you should do.

Remember that you only get paid for patient appointments from your dental website, not for creative ways of getting them in.

With your dental website, you may hear some rules about how web marketing should be. Sometimes these rules match your common sense and other times, you feel like you have a better plan.

My view on this is there are best practices, but there are no sacred cows. This means that there are marketing procedures that are proven to work, but everything is open for a testing challenge. One famous best practice is having dark text on a light background. However, if you're marketing an energy drink or nightclub, then white text on a black background can have a stylish effect.

Your dental website should stick closely to the recommended best practices of your customer support coach. If you want to test things, it's fine, but it's essential to be consciously aware that you're violating a best practice as an experiment, instead of just assuming that your intuition supersedes what has worked in the past. Always be ready to go back to the beaten path if your idea doesn't work.

When you create ad campaigns for your dental website, make sure you look over all targeting possibilities. One you might have missed is the "Connections on Facebook" area. Go to "Advanced Connection Targeting" and you can choose to either display ads to people who "Like" your page, or if you only want new people, to exclude those fans from seeing your page.

There isn't a hard and fast rule of who to show your ads to, so consider both choices for your dental website.

To get the best results from your dental website, you'll have to keep track of where your visitors come from and what they do once they get to your site. Google Analytics is a huge asset in getting this done.

An additional tool which makes this even easier is Google URL Builder, at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578.

When you have a specific campaign in mind, you would enter the variables on the page to create a unique URL. For example, suppose you have an AdWords campaign which talks about teeth whitening. You would then put "adwords" as your source, "ppc" (pay per click) as your medium, and "whiteteeth" as your campaign name. If your site was DentalDivinity.com, you might end up with an URL like: http://dentaldivinity.com/?utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=whiteteeth.

This may look long and technical, but your Google Analytics account will figure out what means what, and make your data reading a lot easier. See how this helps you improve your dental website performance.

An especially astute reader of ours recently made a comment on our post about paid search for your dental website.  She said that many more people would click on a natural search result over a paid ad.

If you could only have one, I'd say natural search is definitely better.  It's got a better clickthrough rate, and costs a lot less once the front end work is done.  However, it's better to have both bases covered.

With paid search, a huge benefit is that you get clicks and patients right away.  Natural search takes some time to build.  Also, having your dental office show on both sides of the Google page will lend you additional credibility.

Because of this, DentalMatrix ideally handles both paid search and natural search, so our clients' dental websites will get the maximum power from Google. We don't do this for everyone, but for dedicated clients, we can put together a supreme package like this.

During the Super Bowl, we got a great example of how ads should and shouldn't be for your dental website.

"What is GoDaddy?" someone asked, while we were watching.

"Exactly!" I exclaimed.

She had confirmed what I had been thinking all along, that GoDaddy had wasted a ton of money on their Super Bowl ad.

GoDaddy is a web hosting and domain name provider. This means they can physically hold the web space your site takes up, and grant you a domain name. That's about it.

This makes you wonder why in the world they would advertise their service on the #1 watched TV Program all year. With a range of infants to 102-year-olds watching, it doesn't make sense to pay this much money to promote a product so few will respond to.

Beyond that, the ad didn't even describe the service. It was some odd storyline about a contract that resulted in attractive women parading around in GoDaddy shirts. Even if you desperately needed a website hosting provider, this ad would not convince you to sign up with GoDaddy… because you wouldn't know that's what GoDaddy provided.

This applies to your dental website in two ways. First of all, you must target your audience appropriately. If you know that your potential patients are in a small area, you would pick a local radio station to advertise your office, instead of a state-wide station. Also, you have to make sure your ad actually communicates what you provide for your patients. Forget about entertaining and amusing. People have to know you're a dentist and why you're the best one for them. That's what advertising is really about.

In our last post we talked about the idea of investing in your dental website's traffic, even if it is expensive. If spending $2,500 on traffic to get a single patient who pays $5000 over five years sounds uncomfortable, you're not alone. You want to make your money back right away, and not wait years to have a real profit.

The irony is that to any investor, doubling your money in five years is a great investment. That's about a 15% annual return, which is found with only very high risk stocks.

People who can't think like investors are stuck in the "hunter/gatherer" mindset. A long time ago, we hunted buffalo with spears. For fruit, we went into the bushes to find wild berries. This had to happen every single day or we'd go hungry. If you're running your dental practice like this, you will never reach a real level of wealth.

The "agricultural" mindset, however, is profoundly different. You plant good seeds, water them, and watch them grow over time.  You harvest later on. This is how the investor thinks, and it makes even the lowest returns on investment comfortable if there's enough capital saved up for living expenses and operations. Having an aggressive savings plan is a crucial part of this strategy. You can't think about long term profits if you're concerned about making rent.

See how you can apply this mindset to your dental website marketing.

Sometimes you'll be buying ads to send traffic to your dental website and you'll wonder if you're really getting your money's worth. For example, you might spend $2500 on a directory listing and get one patient all year. Was that a waste?

It could be, or maybe you should spend even more money in that directory for a premium listing.

Any time you pay for traffic, you are being an investor.  You buy new patients and hope to bring in more money from treating them than you spent.  The secret to knowing how you're doing with this is to find your lifetime patient value, which is how much each patient spends with you during your entire professional relationship.

Here is a way to roughly find that number. Put together all your revenue and divide it by the number of patients that contributed to that revenue. Suppose the "average" patient spend $5000 with you over time. If this is the case, than you're getting a very significant return on your investment from that directory and it would make sense to buy more listings if you have the availability in your schedule. All things being equal, it makes sense to lower your cost per patient, but this is secondary to getting a positive cash flow by maximizing the volume that you're getting from your proven profitable patients.

See if this perspective makes you think a little differently in how you should market your dental website.  If this sounded uncomfortable, wait until next week where we'll show you how to adopt this mindset.

If you have felt a personal roadblock in your dental website marketing, then there is a strong possibility that you are letting distractions or "escape" activities get in the way of your productivity. These can include TV/movies, alcohol, Facebooking, and many other things. There are actually too many to mention and these are different for everyone. Beyond just taking time out of your day, they can also suck your energy out so that even an hour after watching your TV show, you feel sluggish and unmotivated to work.  You have to identify which ones affect you.

The solution to this is to set a temporary time period where you decide not to engage in those escape activities. For example, you may decide that for the next 5 weeks, you won't watch TV or drink alcohol. When you remove a personal escape, two very big things happen. For one, you have more time available to work on your dental marketing. Secondly, you have a lot more energy freed up. Without the escapes you'll find there's a spark inside of you that needs an outlet, and this will be channeled through your business.

You'll have to make a personal decision on whether to cut a couple or all of your escapes. If you only cut out one or two, you risk that another escape will take their place. If you cut out all of them, then you are asking for a very challenging strain on your willpower. If you find the right balance, you'll see dental website marketing become very powerful during this period of time. 

When you're creating communications for your dental website, some ideas for headlines and email messages may seem like a good plan at first, but are too similar to what some shady online characters are doing.

A recent example was Tony Robbins advertising his upcoming business seminar.  The subject of the email he sent out was "We guarantee you 1 million dollars but you must act now."

I wasn't sure if the self-improvement master had his email account taken over by Nigerian scammers, or simply outsourced his marketing to them.  Either way, it brought up all the wrong associations, and that affected credibility. 

This is a pretty extreme example, especially for a big name, and I doubt most of you would go this far.  However, it's always a good idea to keep this kind of thing in mind when marketing your dental website.  

When you are setting up a paid traffic source for your dental website, you sometime get to pick between CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for your plan.

Where these differ is that with CPC you pay only when someone clicks the ad and goes through to your website. With CPM, you pay when your ad is shown 1000 times, even if they ignore it. There are pluses and minuses to both.

CPC and CPM can both have some issues with being overcharged, in a sense. With CPC, you run the risk of click fraud, and with CPM, your advertising company has every incentive to show your ads to places that won't get clicks, just to maximize your spend. Neither of these should scare you away from paid traffic, but you should keep them in mind as ongoing issues.

Make sure that you only choose a CPM program if you have, under your control, which demographics, locations, and times for which the ad is shown. If you're not careful, you could be paying thousands to show your ad to Nigeria.  If your office can only serve a 15 mile radius, you should adjust your ad settings accordingly.

If you do have all of these things locked down, than CPM can be a great deal. If you have a dynamite ad, you can get a ton of bank for your buck, since you're not spending any more per click. Just make sure you test both before making a final decision for your dental website.

One of the most tried-and-true ways to get traffic to your dental website is to use paid search traffic, which is often referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC), or sponsored search.  This can be very beneficial because you get web visitors instantly instead of waiting for your SEO to pick up.

The idea of paying for clicks can feel uncomfortable or even unfair, at first. Isn't the whole point of Google that they bring searchers to your site? Know that even the most famous big companies use paid traffic to maximize their sales.

Fortune 500 companies know that if they make a profit off paid search, then it makes sense to use their huge budgets to bring in that volume, even if it's a low profit margin. As a small business owner, you have to be much more careful because of a limited budget.

We'll go through how to use PPC in future posts. For now, consider what kind of PPC budget you can set aside for your dental website.

While you progress in marketing your dental website, you may see a competitor's site and want to model it. This is a common temptation, especially if your competitor is successful. Sometimes this can pay off, but there are dangers to this mentality. Here are some reasons why it might not be helpful to model your marketing based on what another dentist does:

1.    He might be excellent with his offline marketing and succeeding in spite of a poor online marketing strategy.
2.    He might be making a lot of money online, but is now testing a new approach. The version of his dental website may be an experiment that has not resulted in any new patients.
3.    He may have done his web marketing perfectly in the past, but has switched to a poor marketing provider and hasn't realized it yet.

Now, there may actually be some great things to pick up from a competitor for your dental website, but you should always know why you want to copy them. It can't just be because he's successful in general. Keep this in mind during your competitive research.

Some months back, we talked about promoting your dental website through contacting your patients on their birthdays. We talked about postcards, ecards, and phone calls, but somehow did not mention one of the easiest ways to say "Happy birthday."

If you have a Facebook page with your patients added to it, then you should be getting notices of when client birthdays are coming up. You can put these all into Google calendar so you get reminders of the dates. This is very helpful because Facebook doesn't let you set up automatic daily notices when a birthday comes.

When you wish your patient a happy birthday on his or her wall, two things will happen. For one, your patient will appreciate the kind words. Secondly, your patient's Facebook friends may click to see your profile and end up on your dental website. Just 5 seconds a day can make a large difference in your marketing.

Hope you all had an outstanding weekend. When building up your dental website and practice, you may sometimes wonder what separates the super-successful dentists from the ordinary. Do you have what it takes to be a millionaire dentist?

Here's the truth of the matter. There are only two types of dentists that become millionaires.

The first type is naturally driven to take action for his dental website and business. You have to drag him kicking and screaming from his blog to go to a happy hour. He'd rather work on his video-script than attend his child's school play. He wakes up without an alarm clock because the business ideas naturally start hitting his brain at 5:00AM.

The second type is fully aware that he will NEVER get rich if he doesn't set regular objectives, benchmarks, and deadlines for himself. He has 2 alarms set for 5:00AM because he knows he'll sleep till noon without it. He has to drag himself kicking and screaming from a social time at the pub to work on his video script. He makes his child's school play and then rushes to finish his self-imposed blog post deadline.

If you're the first type, you would know it by now. It would be great if you had the natural inclination to work on your business and derived as much pleasure from your dental website marketing as you would having a beer with your friends, but most of us are not wired that way. You just have to accept that you need some artificial restrictions to keep yourself on course. Once you get in this kind of habit, you'll see a lot more success with your dental website marketing.

As we talk about domain names for your dental website, the question may have come for you, "What do I do if my perfect domain name is taken?" It's scary to think that your dental website would be born in the dreadful sadness of "settling" for an inferior domain name. It's even more infuriating when the offender taking your domain idea is just squatting on it without making use of it.

Yesterday, we took you through a tool that helps you pick domain names for your dental website that won't flag Google's spam sensors. You may have noticed that a .com is treated significantly better than a .bz.

These "dot ___'s" are known as TLD's or domain extensions. Here are some best practices for choosing one.

Hands down, the best is a .com. This is what most people think about when typing a website address. If your domain phrasing is competitive, then having a .com will signify you either have been around a while or that you had enough cash to shell out for a good domain name. This makes you a lot more respectable than someone who had to settle for a .me or .bz.

It's also very respectable to have a .org. Since people associate .org's with non-profit organizations and community groups, this may be even better.

After that, the rest of the TLD's aren't even worth looking at. Out of the alternatives, .net is a little bit better, but still far below a .com or .org. If you take a .net, you can count on a lot of your patients typing the .com equivalent in and not being able to find you.

The one exception is if you're well connected enough to have a .gov or .mil (reserved for government or military sites). This will put you leagues ahead of the competition, but you're extremely unlikely to be able to use one of these. Instead, stick to .com for your dental website.

When you first pick a domain name for your dental website, it pays to consider how Google will evaluate your choice. Google looks at each domain name and makes a determination for how scammy or spammy it sounds.

SEOmoz has an awesome tool to work with this by testing your domain name choice in advance. The URL for this tool is seomoz.org/labs_tools/spam-detection/index.php. It's best to have your score on the lower end, with 1.0 being a sign it's setting off too many alarms.

An URL like "yourchicagodentist.com" has a manageable score of 0.389.

However, "white-teeth-free-trial-69.bz" has an ungodly score of 1.157.

A great benefit of the tool is that it shows you what parts of the domain name are causing the flags. Use this before you decide on your dental website domain name.

As your practice and dental website marketing develops, you'll find that you will not be able to always field the common calls, questions, and complaints that will happen with your office. You will be dependent more on your hygienist and receptionist. You'll also be traveling at times and want to trust that things are being taken care of.

There are two areas you need to master in order to have a powerful support steam. The first is training. You can create a guidebook or wiki to help your team know how to handle common situations. Your team should know what to do if someone is 30 minutes late for an appointment or if a child protests that the Tooth Fairy won't honor her trade agreement if a tooth has a filling.

However, there will be less common situations that your manual or wiki will not cover. Your staff needs to feel empowered to make these decisions on their own, or there will be a paralysis of analysis when you're gone. The best way to help with this is to encourage them to make their own decisions while you're present. This will boost their confidence in how they manage the office. Their confidence is also boosted by you conveying that you trust their judgment.

A caveat to this is that you have to allow some room for error because your staff will not always get it right. There is a fuzzy line between reasonable and unreasonable error, and you'll have to use discretion to tell the difference.  You'll learn this with time as your practice grows with your dental website. 

When you start paid traffic campaigns for your dental website, you find yourself in front of a lot of new numbers. There's Cost per Click, Cost per Conversion, Conversion Rate, and many more. You'll have to make choices about where to put your money in, and how much traffic to buy.

Sometimes these choices get difficult. For example, you might have a very good conversion rate, but not be getting very much traffic. Would you sacrifice your conversion rate for getting more people in the door?

The answer to this varies, but an easy way to figure this out is to take the action that will result in the most money in your pocket at the end of the month. Having a great conversion rate and low cost per patient acquisition is great, but remember why you want these numbers in the first place: more money for your business. Do the math and see if the extra volume from less targeted traffic will raise your revenues. Once you have a greater amount of patients, it makes sense to see if you can lower your cost per acquisition.

Keep in mind that these numbers are always relative and always have to depend on where you are financially with your practice and dental website. This is something DentalMatrix can help you with.

We've all heard the phrase "there's no such thing as bad press."

As a health professional with a dental website, you know you don't have the luxury of letting your reputation go wild, but does that quote have any relevance to you?

Let's look at the difference between "good bad press" and "bad bad press."

Bad bad press is when a public figure does something that's annoying to fans or customers. This could include an actor breaking contract and leaving a blockbuster TV show mid-season. For a dentist it could mean adding unnecessary x-ray examinations as an excuse to charge more.

Good bad press is when a public figure does something annoying to anyone besides the fans or customers. An example of this would be a hip-hop star getting sued by his record label for uploading his album to his MySpace site for fans to download before the release date. For a dentist, it could mean getting sued by a health insurance carrier for violating his agreement in giving a free teeth whitening.

Obviously, the actions above can have their own consequences to your career. However, it's good to have an understanding of how your reputation affects your dental website marketing to patients.

Sometimes, it can feel like the blog for your dental website is getting ignored by Google, no matter how much work you do on it.

Here's a solution to get your site re-crawled and noticed by the search robots.

Go to http://pingomatic.com and put in your dental website URL. Check off every box except "audio."

Ping-o-matic will communicate to their greater network that your site has been updated and this will get Google to check out your blog again and hopefully raise rankings.  This is a great strategy to use whenever you want a quick "refresh."

It's mankind's nature to make things more complicated than they actually are. Business is no exception. When thinking about how to improve your business and dental website, it really only comes down to these four elements:

Product/Service: If you have graduated from dental school and are good at what you do, then this part is taken care of already. You can fix teeth and brighten smiles.

Traffic: This is you getting potential patients to hear about you and to check out your dental website. It can also include someone reading about your practice in an advertisement.

Conversion: This is you taking traffic and actually making money off it. You take visitors to your website and make them paying patients.

Retention: This is you taking a one-time appointment and turning him or her into a lifetime patient. This comes down to maintaining a good office environment and following up with patients.

You don't always need to focus on all four elements. If you've managed to rent an office right next to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, then traffic and conversion won't be much of an issue. If you are a traveling dentist, then retention is something you cannot think about so much. However, if you are struggling with your practice or dental website, it means at least one of the four elements is off. No exceptions.

On this blog, we cover big picture subjects, such as goal-setting and networking, as well as smaller details like specific local SEO tactics. Depending on where you with your dental website, some topics may be more interesting to you than others. Today I want to explain why we cover such a breadth, and where you should focus your attention.

Here is a relevant quote from the Tao te Ching:

"When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos."

To put into business terms, there is a rhythm and flow to quality, profitable business. When you are really in "the zone" with your dental website and practice, you can just follow your intuition and good decisions happen naturally.

Of course, you can't always be in "the zone." The next best thing is when you're coming from a place of giving value to your patients. You want to give health and wellness to as many patients as possible and that passion drives your practice.

However, sometimes you can't stay totally positive and 100% patient focused. You're thinking of your own needs, and that's where general business principles come in such as pricing correctly, marketing your dental website, and lowering costs.

When you're getting out of touch with good business principles, that's when the little details come in, such as wondering if you should blog once a day or once a week, or what percentage of keyword density you need.

Are the little details still important? Absolutely.

You need to have your SEO taken care of professionally, and you need a quality dental website to bring in new patients and money. However, all of these fall into place with ease and confidence when you're operating from a higher ground.

We share both the big picture concepts and little details so wherever you are on this scale, you'll be able to take your dental website to the next level.

For the first week of 2011, we've been going over goal strategies to help with your practice and dental website. Today we're going into the topic of making your goals measurable.

If you set a goal for "I will blog a lot more on my dental website," you're setting yourself up for failure. Goals like these are easy to make because the line between success and failure is so blurry that no one will point out you're not hitting your mark. Blogging "a lot" could mean every week or doing a twenty post splurge every few months.

Another reason why vague goals don't work is that you lose motivation very quickly. There's no light at the end of the tunnel because you don't know when you're finished. If your goal is worded so you have to blog every week for the rest of your life to meet the terms, then failure is inevitable. You need to have a time when you're "done" and can pat yourself on the back for good work.

Word your goal similar to "I will blog on my dental website once a week for four months." At the end of the four months, you can set a new goal to repeat it, or adjust for a higher or lower amount.  It's, of course, fine to set your blogging goal for once a day or once a month. Just make the numbers firm.

On Monday, we had a post about New Year's resolutions, and how people often start off on the wrong foot by using the word "try." Today we'll get into some more goal setting strategy to help you power up your practice and dental website.

There are basically two types of goals you can set: "action goals" and "results goals."

Action goals are statements like "I will submit my dental website to 25 directories."

Results goals are statements like "I will have 40 new patients on my schedule every month."

I would suggest you make most of your goals action-based because you more control over your behavior than anything else. As long as you're realistic about your time and energy available for the goal, you can confidently plan on taking an action and do it. The more you set action goals and achieve them, the more self-confidence and discipline you will develop.

As for results goals, it's better to keep them in mind but not make public declarations of them. You can never firmly make a "commitment" to a results based goal, but you can always commit to realistic action. Just keep your eye on the prize while taking action with your practice and dental website.

If you're like most people, there's a good chance that you have resolutions for 2011.  You want to turn up the juice in your business and bring in more new patients, as well as expand the marketing for your dental website.

Where most people fail in their New Year's resolutions is how they state their plan.

On New Year's Eve, a friend of mine said "I'm going to try to learn how to salsa dance."

A goal statement like this will not work for several reasons, but let's go to the most obvious one.  Long before Socrates, Buddha, and even the agricultural revolution, there was a great thinker whose wisdom changed the course of time.  His most famous declaration to his disciples was:

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

Trying is really planning to fail but wanting credit for making the effort.  Any time someone says "I tried," in the past tense, you know he or she did not succeed.  So whenever you say "I will try," you're sowing the seeds of failure.  If you were interviewing hygienists and one candidate said "I will try to come to work sober," you would likely not hire him or her.  

Instead of hedging your bets by "trying," just say what you're going to do for your dental website and go do it.

In any field or profession, we enjoy being able to express our creativity. In both school and work, the most rewarding projects are usually the ones where we can do things our own way. As a dentist, you may want to jump on an original idea you have to market your practice and dental website.

Today I'm going to talk about "trailblazing," which is when a business owner decides to boldly go where no entrepreneur has gone before. While this sounds like an exciting and romantic endeavor, this concept is really at trap. For every entrepreneur who is immortalized for his "out of the box" plan, there are literally thousands who never get mentioned because their businesses go under quietly.

This is why it's most profitable to follow the best practices that have worked for dentists and dental websites before you, while slightly adding your own twist. Even Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, based his multi-billion dollar company on what MySpace and Friendster had done before him.

To consistently make more money with less risk, follow what this blog and your Customer Support Coach recommends for your dental website. This is the fastest and most proven way to the cash.