I received this inquiry recently about branding and how to name a medical practice. Since it is a good question, and one that many of you may have, I decided to respond via a blog post.

“What if you’re branding a physicians group where the brand must supersede the individual physician names?

In my area, physicians are known for being in Premier Radiology, Tennessee Orthopedic Alliance, Vanderbilt Medical Group.

Any thoughts on the pluses and minuses of brand versus individual physician name?”

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An excellent summary article on how to optimize your website for the search engines , that was published on American Express’s Open Forum in late June this year, highlights why paying attention to certain details in the set up and content of your medical practice website will produce a big payoff.

But first, what is SEM (search engine marketing)?

The article defines Search Engine Marketing as

…a complex topic that focuses on search engine optimization (SEO), but also includes the use of paid advertising and contextual advertisements in order to bring a website’s articles or product pages to the top of search engine result pages (SERPs)

Which leads us to the next question – what is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

In a nutshell, the article’s top 5 tips for you to produce great SEM results include:

1. Get to know what SEO is, and what is needed to optimize your website.  This is not as hard as knowing all the current best drugs for disease conditions! There’s a link to a great free e-book, and you can learn more by signing up for your freebies at Physician Website Secrets
2. Figure out your website’s grade – the article explains how!
3. Fix the little things quickly. Give your webmaster a list of the things you want attended to ASAP. Which things? you ask. The ones the free book and the Physician Website Secrets  program will teach you about!
4. Use plug-ins that do the work for you. The article mentions a couple. The one I use (am using this as I write right now!) is called SEO Scribe (A) – super easy and very educational!
5. Get inbound links – these are links coming to your website. They can come from others writing about or quoting you and linking to your website, your comments on other blogs in which you “leave” your website’s URL on another site, writing a review on a site such as Amazon once you have created a profile with your own URL.

What few tweaks can you make to your medical practice website to show up on page 1 of the search engine results?

We’ve come to the end of the week and I’m dishing out the final part of my week-long mini-series, how to create a medical practice website that invites your visitor to linger longer because you’ve made it super “sticky“!

It may seem duh-obvious to be writing about this final topic, but Content is King!

No matter how pretty your website looks, or how many fancy bells and whistles (please, NO flash, I beg of you!!), no self-respecting busy person is going to stick around if your website is full of boring drivel.

Remember — you have just 1/20th of a second to get the attention and create a positive impression in the eyes of a visitor to your medical practice website or physician business website. That’s about as fast as an eye blink.

Yes, design matters. Color is important.

But what really holds the visitor’s attention is the immediate message your website conveys.

And what keeps them coming back for more is a website message that “speaks directly to the reader’s listening” — addresses their needs, their frustrations, their desires, their immediate sense that you understand and can potentially offer the solution they’re seeking.

Maybe it’s:

• the easy-to-obtain online appointment in the morning for their screaming infant that they can generate from your medical practice website at 2:00 AM
• the last minute directions to your office (plus map) with clear parking instructions and prices, and local less expensive parking options
• a short video on how to read nutrition labels at the supermarket or how to prepare for a colonscopy/mammogram/prostate biopsy etc
• a checklist of questions your patient might want to ask the doctor at his next physical
• an updated list of adult vaccines and when they should be given
• the latest information on allergy testing and treatment, or breast cancer treatment guidelines
• condensed patient-friendly articles from your specialty’s most recent journal
• an audio, with you welcoming the patient to your medical practice website (and by extension your medical practice!), telling what to expect at their first visit –  what to bring, who will greet them, what your payment policies are, etc.

As you can see, the list is endless, and there is one theme throughout:

This is patient-centric content.

It’s NOT about how fabulous you are (let your testimonials do that work for you).

It’s about how welcome and well-served your patients feel, both online via your medical practice website, and offline in your lovely medical practice office space!

I hope you’ve found this series helpful – for the earlier articles, check out e-books, e-courses, video and blogs.

When you’re ready, discover more Physician Website Secrets here.

So you have your good-looking medical practice website. Now, what can you do to make people come back to it over and over, for fresh information?

Remember – this is what we call “stickiness”.

A blog is a terrific tool to add to your medical practice website, to invite these return visits.

For those of you who haven’t quite figured out what a blog (short for “weblog”) is, it’s an online platform or  journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.

Blogs are defined by their format: a series of entries posted to a single page in reverse-chronological order. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or reflect the purpose of the Web site that hosts the blog. Topics sometimes include brief philosophical musings, commentary on Internet and other social issues, and links to other sites the author favors, especially those that support a point being made on a post. (emphasis mine)

Blogs allow you to:

• show the personality of you and/or your medical practice
• showcase your expertise and special interests
• be found more easily in the search engines as they are very search-engine friendly from a technological point of view
• create a back-and-forth interactivity through comments that others can make on your “posts” and that you can respond to
• give you insights into what your prospective or current patients are seeking information on, based on their comments and the popularity of your posts (there are tools such as Google Analytics to help you figure this out very easily)

In case you aren’t persuaded about the value of a blog for your medical practice website, here are some fairly recent stats:

*  More than 133,000,000 blogs have been indexed by Technorati since 2002
*  77% of Internet users read blogs according to Universal McCann
* 75% of bloggers have college degrees and 40% have graduate degrees
*  70% of all respondents say that personal satisfaction is a way they measure the success of their blog
* 72% say they blog in order to share their expertise.
* 61% say they blog in order to supplement their income.
* 53% of professional bloggers are interested in attracting new clients from blogging.
* 72% of those who are self-employed and blogging are interested in attracting new clients.
* 57% say that their future plans include blogging even more (including 74% of 18-24 year olds).
* The most common rate of updating is 2-3 times per week.
* 56% say that their blog has helped their company establish a positioning as a thought leader within the industry.
* 58% say that they are better-known in their industry because of their blog

Let’s imagine you’ve decided to add a blog to your medical practice website. How do you go about it?

The most popular and reliable blogging platform seems to be the one I am using for this Physician Website Secrets Blog – WordPress. It’s free and highly customizable. Blogger is another popular free platform.

Here is an excellent article on how to start a blog, that you can adapt for your medical practice website, to help get you started.

To learn more about the 4 main kinds of websites, including Blogs, go to Physician Website Secrets. The course also contains resources and referrals to some excellent web designers and webmasters who can help you set up a blog.

And you can catch up on the earlier part of this week-long series by reading about the three other tools to increase your medical practice website’s stickiness: e-books, e-courses, and video.

Okay, so we’ve covered e-books and e-courses to increase your medical practice website “stickiness” (remember what that is?)

Now let’s talk about video.

The stats on the use of video and the end-users experience are impressive!

• Nearly 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month of December 2009. Viewing continued to reach record levels in December, with 33.2 billion videos viewed during the month (reference).
• Seven in ten adult internet users (69%) have used the internet to watch or download video. That represents 52% of all adults in the United States (reference)
• Educational videos, have risen in viewership from 22% in 2007 to 38% of adult internet users in 2010
• ideal video length is 2.5 to 4 minutes (reference)
• As more people turn to the Internet to catch movies, TV shows, and other content, 77 percent of all Internet users in the U.S. will watch videos online by 2014, according to information released Wednesday by eMarketer (reference)

What this means is that, while most people will not read online content completely or in detail, the majority will watch an appropriate length of video to completion — you tend to have their full attention!

What does this mean for your medical practice website or physician practice website?

• imagine your visitors being greeted by a thirty second video of you welcoming them to your medical practice website and guiding them around the site, much like you might take them on a tour of your office
• now imagine each of your staff members greeting your prospective patients and briefly describing what their role is in your medical practice
• what if you had an “library” with a collection of short narrated power points making valuable teaching points?
• what if you regularly used videos available from public domains such as YouTube on your block, for educational and occasionally entertainment purposes?

Do you see how powerful this could be for your medical practice website?

While it may seem overwhelming to imagine how you can produce a video, the technology has become very simple. You can:

• sit in front of your computer with a webcam
• ask someone to the film you with a Flip Video camera
• hire a professional to film you ( I recently hired a freelance videographer on Craigslist and had three videos made and edited for $400)
• create a simple PowerPoint presentation with photographs on the slides, and create a video that you narrate using a screen-capture technology such as JingProject or Camtasia.

Your teenage child or neighbor can do this for you!

Give it some thought — how can you add video to liven up your medical practice website or physician business website and make your visitor want to come back, or better still, call for an appointment!?

Discover more about Physician Website Secrets here.

Yesterday I wrote about using e-books as a marketing tool to get visitors who stop by your medical practice website or physician business website to hang around and perhaps even build a relationship with you.

Today, our topic to help you increase your medical practice website “stickiness” is the e-course.

Ever had that experience of receiving an e-mail from someone whose name or company you don’t recognize, and yet they seem to be following up on some action that you undertook?

I have. And it can feel quite intrusive.

Yet, it has been shown that it takes 5 to 7 contacts with a prospective customer for them to register who you are, and what it is you have to offer.

What better way to do it this with visitors to your medical practice website, than an e-course? A serialized piece of training or education devoted to a specific topic of interest to your target market, that is presented as a sequence of emails over a couple of weeks.

Anyone who signs up for your  e-course is giving you permission (this is that permission marketing again) to show up regularly in their Inbox with helpful, non-pushy information!

Here then are tips to create an e-course that is valued and appreciated by those who stop by your medical practice website or your physician business website and want to learn something from you:

• divide your content into bite-size chunks, each chunk containing one key learning point
• keep each chunk brief (under five minutes to read and absorb)
• deliver each chunk every 3 to 4 days. More often than that, and your subscriber is likely to get irritated or overwhelmed with too much information!
• set up your series of e-mails in an auto responder to automate your e-mail delivery
• use simple language
• use storytelling wherever possible
• use video and/or audio ( no longer than 3 to 4 minutes) to enhance the “stickiness” of your email sequence
• invite your reader to submit questions to you, and make it easy by linking to your contact form page in the e-mail or including your e-mail address
• always include a call to action. This may be as simple as “check your inbox in three days for part two, part three, part four, etc”. your final e-mail in the sequence should be have a stronger call to action such as “to learn more about ABC Medical Practice / XYZ Physician Business, and to get your free consultation / cholesterol test / blood pressure check / eye exam / allergy test etc., contact us here (include a link to your contact page form)”

I love learning, and when it’s made digestible for me, I am much more likely to be persuaded that the person offering this to me is reliable and to be trusted as an authority. It’s just one of those crazy psychological things!

Here is part 1 of this series on “How can you entice visitors to stay longer on your medical practice website”, in case you missed it.

And when you are ready to learn more about effective medical practice websites, you can get more information at Physician Website Secrets.

Let’s take a little trip this week.

Over the next five days, I’ll share tips and ideas for increasing your website stickiness (its ability to get your medical practice website’s visitors to hang around longer and even give you their contact email information).

Today, we’ll start with the e-book freebie.

What is behind this strategy?

Business thrives when relationships and trust are built.

One way to begin building these relationships is to offer a valuable freebie (valuable as defined in the eyes of the beholder, not just your mind) in exchange for a name and an email address. At the time of offering your freebie, you can inform the visitor that they will also be receiving your monthly newsletter filled with tips and advice (relating to your specialty).

You are on your way to building your treasured List.

It’s important, at this time, to remind your visitors who are opting-in that they are free to unsubscribe any time they no longer want to receive your newsletter (or tip sheet, or whatever you are choosing to keep in touch and build the relationship of trust!) No spamming allowed here!

Once the visitor downloads the freebie, you now have their permission to embark on ongoing helpful communication, adding value to your list members’ lives. This is what Seth Godin has called “permission marketing“.

Back to the e-book — what is it?

An e-book is a digitally-delivered book or document (usually a PDF) that is written with the reader in mind to educate, teach, enlighten or entertain.

As a physician, you are probably educating patients all day long.

What are some of the topics that are most misunderstood by your patients?
Which questions do they ask most frequently?
Which take the longest to answer?

To create your first e-book, all you have to do is write down the questions and responses (or, if you don’t have the time to write, then record and transcribe then instead) to some of the above.

A few tips:

• make the e-book at least 12-15 pages long so that it doesn’t appear to be too skimpy
• don’t preach
• engage through interaction (make it more of a workbook to record their responses or even their questions)
• write simply – no medicalese, short sentences, plain English
• write as if you are talking directly to your audience member
• get your document edited and formatted before creating the PDF e-book
• pay the few dollars it costs to get a “book cover” created
• add a brief bio that speaks more to your passions and interests than all your wonderful degrees and papers you have presented
• make sure your contact info is on every page
• encourage them to return to your website — they are likely to print out the book and you want to have your website URL handy to get them to go back (I often forget where I downloaded stuff – don’t you?)

Your web master will help you set up the web form that is needed to capture the names and email addresses and deliver the e-book. These steps can all be automated so that once it is set up, the e-book delivery happens without you having to do anything more!

Don’t forget to let people know your ebook is available — email patients, add the link to the sign-up page to your email signature, let patients know at the front desk as they check out, use Twitter, LinkedIn, your Facebook Page etc.

And voila – you are on your way to building your List and those incredibly valuable relationships through your medical practice website that will ultimately enrich your medical practice and your own life.

BTW – there is a very cool little product designed to help you create a “Sticky E-Book”. It’s called “The Sticky E-book Formula”, from Kelly Kingman.
Click here to view more details (A)

And to learn more about how to put your own medical practice website to work (and earn its keep!), check out Physician Website Secrets.

A recent post on Better Health, 4 Reasons Why Doctors Don’t Use LinkedIn and the subsequent comments, got me thinking about how to use the power of the Internet to the best advantage for your medical practice promotion.

Yes, medical practices are “hyperlocal” and yes, most practices have traditionally grown through word of mouth and referral from colleagues.

However, I believe that by not participating in sites like LinkedIn, the physician business owner who wants to grow a medical practice is missing an excellent marketing opportunity.

Here’s why.

Your presence on LinkedIn isn’t only to woo prospective patients or even physician referrers who may possibly choose to search LinkedIn for your services. In fact, I feel confident that this doesn’t happen much.

Instead, the greatest value of a LinkedIn profile (or a practice-specific Facebook Page for that matter) might be to woo the Google and MSN and Yahoo search engines and the likes.

When you carefully select and use keyword phrases that match your specialty and your local geography (e.g. Manhattan Upper Eastside internist, Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Kalamazoo urologist etc.), you are more likely to show up on page 1 of Google for that prospective patient who’s looking frantically on the Internet for services like yours in your neighborhood at 3 AM.

The reason why this happens is this.

Both LinkedIn and Facebook are so hugely popular and trafficked that the search engines hold in higher esteem their results than the URL for your own practice website. In turn, your LinkedIn profile or Facebook Page (take note – this is NOT the same as your Facebook Profile) should be set up to direct the searcher to your medical practice or physician business website.

For the small amount of effort it takes to create a readable, intriguing online presence with these highly-trafficked social media sites, in which you provide more detail about your current practice and its location than you do about your past jobs (along with your practice philosophy, and hopefully a cool 2 minute video of you talking and welcoming the visitor to your site!), these basically free social media marketing tools may yield some surprising results for your medical practice promotion strategies.

If this information about medical practice marketing is useful, you might want to get more free information here — my secrets to using the Internet to generate revenues for your medical practice or physician business.

As someone who has had success with social media marketing as a big component of my physician coaching business’s marketing plan, I was intrigued to receive a complimentary copy of Shama Hyder Kabani’s book “The Zen of Social Media Marketing” (affiliate link) to review.

Billed as “the last social media guide you’ll ever need”, this eagerly-awaited book from my friend and colleague Shama, had to meet some pretty high expectations (friendship notwithstanding!)

For the uninitiated, social media marketing refers to:

• blogging, with comments enabled
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Sermo etc….

… and the many other networking arenas that encourage thinking out loud, dialog, commentary and feedback.

I am happy to endorse the book not only for it’s lucid conversational writing but also for its encouragement and “take-you-by-the-hand” approach to guiding and teaching.

And since social media marketing is an ever-evolving area, owners of the book get password-protected access to updates.

For the social media marketing novice, it’s a gift.

If you have heard of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but not dared to dip a toe in the water yet (or not deemed it important to your medical practice or physician business), I strongly recommend the book as your personal coach to getting immersed. And you can download a personal workbook from the companion website to prompt your planning.

For the marketer with some or plenty of experience, you’ll discover there is room for improvement — I found myself tweaking the different components of my social media marketing strategy as I dug into each chapter.

I have also attached a quick document I created some time ago when I started teaching the topic — feel free to download “What IS Social Media Marketing” and share it.

I’m inclined to believe that this book may be the last social media guide you’ll ever need, as long as we can hold the delightful Shama to her promise to keep us updated online!

Happy reading and toe-dipping!

Duct Tape Marketing is a marvelous resource for all things related to small business marketing, and yes, your medical practice is a small business that needs promotion like all others businesses! I encourage you to tap into the vast treasury that is their content, and sign up for their useful blog post updates.

Likewise, I believe that Facebook is soon-to-be indispensable tool to help communicate and market your philosophy as a medical practitioner, along with your medical practice. It provides an alternative Internet presence to your website that can have the following big benefits:

1. Facebook is so popular that its pages rank higher often than even your own website (I put this The Entrepreneurial MD Facebook Page up and 3 days later, it ranked almost as high as my actual website).
2. Your Facebook Page (different from your Facebook Profile) enhances your medical practice branding efforts.
3. Your Facebook Page offers your “fans” (patients? potential patients?) the opportunity to interact with your practice online through comments, sharing, “liking” and questions.

At times, two great resources come together, as in this video. It’s an excellent discussion from Duct Tape Marketing on Facebook for Business, with three experts.

While this video is intended for general audiences, it is not difficult to see how the knowledge can be adapted to your own physician business — practice or even non-clinical venture.

Remember to check out all the resources mentioned on their post here if you want to go into the subject in greater depth (as I am, at present!)

If you’re getting ready to beef up your  medical practice website for better practice promotion, be sure to first discover my Number 1 Secret to creating a revenue-generating medical practice website here. You’ll be surprised by it!