Adjust Your Marketing for Your Practice
Posted on May 4, 2007 - Filed Under General |
I run several websites online. The Acupuncture Marketing Blog is probably my most “traditional” blog. I have a blog written from the point of view of my siamese, Cheysuli on, appropriately enough, My Siamese. I also have the blog on my personal site, a blog on a blogspot about another cat, and for awhile I wrote a blog on skiing. As an avid blogger, I read a lot about marketing blogs.
Most blogs on marketing your blog focus on the blog that has information that other people want. This blog fits that category. Well, all my blogs potentially fit that category. However, the pool of people who are interested in marketing an acupuncture practice is smaller than those people who want to “make money online free,” or “loose weight fast.” I can use many of the same techniques that other bloggers use, but I might have to work harder for my audience and expect that I’ll have a smaller readership.
The site I write from the point of view of my cat needs to have certain techniques adjusted. While my cat and I write informative posts from time to time, we mostly write to entertain. I have another idea about blog that’s fiction. In these cases, many of the traditional techniques of online marketing don’t work. In the case of my cat, I can still work with articles and keywords to try and drive traffic there but with a fiction blog even those techniques won’t work. After all, with fiction, there are no particular keywords to market to. Yet that’s what everyone thinks of for online marketing. I don’t see a lot of information about marketing what I have come to see as “soft” blogs. Even asking the internet marketing ‘experts’ that I know hasn’t offered any suggestions on marketing the fiction blog.
This doesn’t mean I’m on my own. I just have to figure out what works. I can adapt most traditional techniques to get readers for my cat blog. I make sure to read other blogs that are about or by cats and comment on them. I have it in directories under blogs about pets. There are directories that even allow me to have my blog listed under cat blogs. How cool is that?
With my fiction blog, I have to adapt farther. I understand the principles of getting people to a blog site. I can learn how fiction is sold (or not) offline. I can work on adapting these hooks to the fiction blog and see what happens. I’m sure there will be a lot of false starts but eventually I’ll pick up a regular readership.
You might be wondering why I’ve given these long involved examples. It’s something I’ve been working on online lately. I realized that in many ways I’ve had to do the same thing with my acupuncture practice. I can’t market it as if I’m a florist. I am most closely related to other small healthcare businesses, but those things that might work for a chiropractor might not be available or work for an acupuncturist. For instance, some there are some great visual tools chiropractors can use at a healthfair, allowing them to give a diagnosis about what needs to be done to your back in just a few minutes. Acupuncturists have no such visuals. We can use tongue and pulse diagnosis to ask people questions about their health, which they may or may not want to address in the setting. We can do mini treatments, although for liability reasons this isn’t always recommended. In essense, we have to find our own way.
Marketing advice is wonderful. We need to take whatever advice we can and adapt it to the practice we have. We must also adapt to our area. In my area, I get patients when I advertise in the local paper. In SW Washington, the newspaper ads brought me nothing. Different marketing practices work for different practitioners. It’s important to have enough information about how to market your practice that you can pick and choose what works for you.
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