Some time ago, I launched my Physicians Website Secrets Program. Some of you took a brief look at it (or maybe even spent a moment or two thinking about it), but for many of you, either it didn’t register at the time, or you had no need for it.

As with anything on the Internet, there is a learning curve and a certain amount of experimentation to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

I discovered that asking you to fork over $5.00 for a CD containing secrets to creating an effective medical practice or physician business website wasn’t worth it to many of you. It meant you had to go to your wallet, haul out your credit card, and fill in all those  fields, all for a lousy $5 payment. I suspect it wasn’t the cost as much as the EFFORT involved in exchange for something that you didn’t know yet might (or might not) be worth your time.

Because I was asking you to trust me with your credit card information BEFORE you’d had an opportunity to evaluate what the program could do for you, the program didn’t do as well as I hoped it would.

Mistake.

This time round, I want to do something different. I still want to share my Number One Secret about websites with you, because I passionately believe in this, and I really want you to avoid the errors made by so many early physician entrepreneurs or even seasoned medical practice owners (and that I made when I was getting going with my physician coaching business). So I AM asking you to enter your name and e-mail address, just this once, to get access to that secret.

But once you’ve gotten my Number One Secret (you may find this one surprising, as it’s not what most of you DO!!), you’ll hopefully discover that I’ve made you more valuable offer. One that will not cost you a penny, and that will give you the chance to test drive the Physicians Website Secrets Program by accessing the first Module in its entirety!

And I’m adding some bonuses, so that even if you decide that this program isn’t for you, you’ll walk away with some really solid information to help you prop up an ailing website, or start afresh with one that’s truly healthy and vibrant

If you’re curious, if the time feels right, go to Physicians Website Secrets, enter your name and e-mail, and you’ll be given immediate access to the link that will permit you to sample this treasure trove of insights and learning I’ve distilled down into the Physicians Website Secrets Program.

I look forward to being as helpful as I possibly can – I really want you to enjoy some of the “Internet success” that I have in my business!

During the planning stage of your copywriting for your medical practice website or your physician business website, you need to understand exactly what it is you hope your website to accomplish.

• Do you want the visitor to contact you to learn about becoming a patient, or a client?
• Do you want to sell something?
• Or invite your visitors to become members of something?
• Or download something of value to them so that they begin to perceive your medical practice or physician business as their solution?

Perhaps you have already determined that you need to build a subscriber base, circulate information, increase practice revenues by growing your numbers of patients.  But in order to accomplish these differing (and not mutually exclusive!) goals, you must make sure that your web copy will support your efforts.

1. Decide who your ideal customers are and what they really want.  Then find and craft the words that will most effectively bring these people to your site.  Include your best keywords and keyword phrases.

2. Create a plan. Without a detailed plan, it will become impossible to know whom you are targeting.  Without a target, you are likely to miss out on those people who are willing and eager to pay for your help and expertise.

3. Realize that your target audience is typically smarter and more knowledgeable than the average visitor to a website. Now that you have started planning, you need to start looking at whom to target.

Targeting is used to figure out what group of customers will have the problems that can be solved by using your particular service or product.  It is therefore vital that you become an expert in not only your target market, but also in knowing every single benefit that your service or product offers.

Once you determine whom you need to target, you can begin to search them out.  Build a profile of those people who will benefit from your help the most.  Once you know who they are and what problems they want solved or desires they need satisfied, then address your writing directly to them, using the most magnetic of the benefits your service or product can offer as “bait”. To discover what these Benefits are, ask your current happy patients or clients. They’ll tell you!

What do you value most/love best about our medical practice?
What made you choose me/us as your XYZ person?
What keeps you coming back?

At last, you have found your target audience, and now you must develop a strategy for writing your copy.  In order to do this, the best way is to do the following:

1.    Write about what the customer wants to hear – answer their – use  WIIFM question (What’s In It For Me?).
2.    Create the tone that is inviting to those you’re targeting, using their language.
3.    Present your idea(s) simply and concisely.

Get writing!

Related articles

• 5 ways to improve your medical practice in 2011 (kevinmd.com)
• Is Web Copy Ruining Your Design? (sixrevisions.com)

Many a medical practice website should be retired to website heaven.

Why?

Because they are completely ineffective at doing what you, the physician business owner are paying for your website to do — invite more business to your medical practice! And thereby boost your bottom line.

And one of the biggest culprits is lousy copy. (That’s the fancy term for all that writing on your website).

It is vitally important to know that people do not read a website in the same way that they would read printed material.  In fact, there are three characteristics which affect how a web user will react to the online content of a site.

1. Immediately obvious benefit. It is important to remember that web users are active, not passive.  If they can’t find a compelling reason for staying on a site (the answer to their search query!), then they will leave it.  Sometimes a person will leave in less than 3 seconds after they have arrived on the page.

2. Concise evocative language. If your paragraphs are too long, or your words are too dense, the visitor is less likely to read it.

3. Believability. So much of the web visitor’s experience is characterized by overstated claims and “hype”. If you want a web user to believe what you have to say, you must be able to back up your claims, with testimonials, case studies and anecdotes.

One of the most important reasons why copywriting for the web is different is the different mindset of the web page visitor.

Internet Copywriting vs. Traditional Copywriting

More often than not, web pages will be found via a search engine.  This is very significant, as it means that the person landing on your website has been looking either for you or for someone like you.  That puts the visitor in control – they are focused on finding a particular product, service or piece of information.

Anyone visiting your site for the first time, who has found it via a search engine, will have a few questions in mind.
“Have I come to the right place?”
“Will I find what I’m looking for at this page or site?”
“Can I can complete my task at this point?”

You need to answer these questions in both your headline or title, and any sub-headlines or sub-titles on the page.  You need to be able to secure a response from this first time visitor immediately.

Your writing must provide reassurance that the visitor is going to find exactly what they are looking for. Your web copy should encourage your visitors that they are have come to the right place, and that they should continue to read on.

In order for any web copy to be effective, it must take into account the three characteristics mentioned above.

Now, go back to your website and take a long, hard look!

Will yours pass the 3-second blink test??

Related articles

• Online Business Promotion That Works: SEO, Copywriting and Social Media (searchenginejournal.com)
• A few Quick Tips in SEO Copywriting (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Scott Meis: SEO 101: Choosing good keywords (websitehelpers.com)

Is your medical practice website or physician business website performing well?

How would you know?

Until a few years ago, my response to this question would have been “huh?” I had no idea what a website should and could do, other than that it should have some information about my business, so that anyone who wanted to surreptitiously check me out could do so. And my website was supposed to make my visitor want to sign up right away as a client. “Yay – this is just what I was looking for!”

Somewhere along the way, as I was trying to learn more about marketing my entrepreneurial physician business (that’s another story – what a whole new set of “aha’s” that opened up for me!), I became aware of what websites are supposed to do for businesses.

Bring in MORE BUSINESS!

Mine wasn’t there just to reassure folks who already knew about me, that I was a physician coach and could lay claim to some training. It was to allow me to be discovered by someone who didn’t have a clue that I or my physician coaching business existed and who happened to be in front of a computer at 2 AM looking for something. A solution to a pressing problem. The chance to scratch an itch that had been plaguing them. Some needed information on a topic of interest.

My physician business website needed to provide the inviting “Open Door” to a relationship that my business could create with that curious “Seeker” of information and solutions. I shouldn’t imagine selling my wares immediately. Instead, I should become a useful resource and “friend” to my prospective clients, by using the Internet and the power of automation to cultivate and nurture relationships that could eventually pay off.

This huge insight led me to redesign not only my website but my whole approach to the business and and marketing of my physician coaching practice.

And if I dare to imagine life as a family physician had I remained in practice and used what I now know about medical practice websites, I picture a very different experience as a physician business owner. I picture myself with a website that speaks clearly to my intended patients, revealing who I am in a video, making my philosophy clear, articulating my Unique Selling Proposition (a fancy marketing term for answering the question  – “Why should I be itnersted in your practice or business?”), using the website as a teaching tool, and leveraging the Internet to perform some of my practice’s essential operations, thereby freeing up employee time, or even cutting labor costs!

It’s what lots of other savvy businesses do. Why shouldn’t your medical practice or physician business be creative and do the same?

Which brings up my question for you:

What is your number one question about getting your medical practice website or physician business website to perform better (i.e. bring in more business and/or generate more revenue)?

If you’ll answer this in the comments section below, I promise to provide as many answers as I can!

Want to make sure that your medical practice website shows up on the first page of Google?

This three-minute video direct from the mouth of the Google-god is an excellent overview of what you need to pay attention to in order to ensure that your medical practice website gets indexed by the search engines. This, in turn, means that your website will be presented to the searcher on the first page, if you’ve paid attention to details such as:

• your choice of keywords and keyword phrases
  
• where you’ve placed those keywords on the pages
• your URL
• your “page rank” or “authority” (as determined by algorithm) based on the numbers of links back to your site from other authoritative sites.

Not sure what this all means and how to apply it to your medical practice website?

Try the Physicians Websites Secrets program here.

Related articles

• Are you keeping up with Google? (searchengineguide.com)
• New Local Opportunities: How To Rank Higher In Google Place Search (searchengineland.com)

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.