• The rates are more affordable. But be sure you are comparing apples to apples. You may get a 3X3 add in the daily paper for $100 for one day only. That same ad in a monthly publication may be $200, but the publication is on the stands longer. If you ran the newspaper every day for a month, you would pay thousands of dollars.
• You can purchase column space or perhaps have your column included for free. Daily newspapers are sometimes reluctant to give away editorial space. Smaller publications are often in need of great copy.
• If you are reading these publications, most likely your friends and neighbors are too.

When looking for a smaller publication, you may find one that focuses on health care. This is an excellent opportunity for you to target your advertising dollars.

• Market yourself as an expert. This will get you booked on talk shows, which is free publicity. To do this, send out press releases that are newsworthy. Talk about the latest chiropractic technique or a new innovation in your office.
• You can buy air time in 30 or 60 second spots. These can be expensive and sometimes you have no control over when they run. Wait for special deals and give the station a test run before signing a long term commitment.
• Host your own radio show. You can purchase an hour of air time and host your own information piece. The benefit is you will have total control over the content of this hour. You can also take callers and answer questions live.

Most radio stations are streamed live on the Internet, giving you a worldwide audience. And if you don’t want to commit to a station, consider online radio. This is another way to give you worldwide exposure.

• Make a donation. This doesn’t have to be money. In fact, donating goods or services is a better option. Think of giving away the big door prize at a huge fund raiser.
• Volunteer with your staff on “Make a Difference Day.” This is usually held in October but many communities host similar events throughout the year. Close the office for a day and help!
• Offer free exams to children, seniors or low income families for a day.
• Sponsor a local sports team. Most sponsorships include an ad in all the programs and a banner on the field or in the gym. If you are the exclusive sponsor, you will have your name on all the athletes’ shirts.

To some, using charities and causes for marketing exposure may seem shallow. But look at it this way, you would have donated anyway. Getting the good public relations is just a bonus!

Don’t. Just don’t. And here’s why:

First, unless you have permission, it’s theft of intellectual property. You certainly wouldn’t want to spend a ton of time creating content for your site and have it taken from you, so don’t do it to others.

You can also get into big trouble. We’ve heard of doctors getting bills in excess of $2,000 for “borrowing” an image from one of the stock photo sites. You can find plenty of inexpensive images on sites like istockphoto that cost you about a dollar per image, so it’s not expensive to do the right thing.

It’s important to remember that everything published is copyrighted automatically. You don’t have to have the © symbol attached to something to make it copyrighted.

Besides the legal and ethical issues, it’s not going to help your website to reuse content; in fact, it will actually hurt your search rankings.

We heard of one doctor who took every page of his site from somewhere else, and his site dropped to page 20 in the Google rankings. Why? Because of duplicate content penalties.

Google indexes billions of web pages, and it knows when something is a duplicate of other, existing web content. It takes those duplicate pages and drops them way down in the search rankings, as Google realizes that the original article is the important one. If y0ur site is full of duplicate content, your entire site will suffer.

Options for Original Content

OK, so we know that you can’t steal content. But content is time-consuming to create. So what are you supposed to do?

First, you an blog. Blog posts are short and easy to add to your site with our easy chiropractic blog editor. You can spend about five minutes a day writing up short posts on current news items or things that you happen to think about during the day.

If you really don’t have even the time to blog, you can always hire people to write original content for your site. Sites like Elance.com and Craigslist have plenty of eager, talented writers looking for work. Make sure that you see samples of their work first, and you might want to have them start with one or two articles to see if they work out.

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment on this article or give us a call at (800) 295-3346.

Because you have so little time, it’s important to tell the site visitor EXACTLY and CLEARLY how you can help him or her improve her health.

This is where your Unique Value Proposition comes in. A Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a one sentence blurb about what your service can do for your patients.

On the home page: State what you do and how you can help. For instance, if you work mostly with families, this would be a good UVP:

“Keep your family healthy - naturally - with Smith Chiropractic!”

or:

“Natural, effective chiropractic care for your whole family!”

If you work mostly with back pain patients, try this:

“We provide natural, effective solutions for your back pain.”

The key is this: Don’t make your site visitor try to find out what you do. Tell them! Because if they have to figure it out, they’ll just find another doctor who WILL tell them what they do.

Tell me what you think by leaving a comment or contact me at mike@chirohosting.

Mike Melton