Creating \"Lift\" With Your Internal Dental Marketing

Marketing to your current patients is not a new dental marketing idea. There are, and continue to be many different strategies and programs that allow you to increase your referrals and retention.

One of the concepts you won't hear very much is the concept of "lift" as it applies to your internal dental marketing. When it comes to marketing for new patients, the best place to start is inside your practice.

Lift is a term that is often you in the aerospace industry. The term applies in much the same way in your dental practice.

As an analogy, let's take the example of an airplane wing. The airplane wing without movement creates no lift, and will not cause the airplane to fly.

In this same way, your patient (the wing) will not create this lift for your practice (the airplane), unless given information (movement) to allow them to talk about your practice everyday. This information is important.

Many dental marketing consultants out there will tell you the easiest way to get referrals is to ask. But nobody likes to sit face to face with a patient and ask them to send their friends.

With the concept of lift, a dentist only needs to convey to the patient a way to spread the word about the practice, and let the patients everyday conversations take care of the rest. When a patient has new information that pertains directly to the patient as a person, they now have the ammunition to talk to their friends, and mention you.

Lift is not telling your patients to talk about your practice, it is giving them a way to talk about your practice. You are helping them refer their friends to you without actually asking.

Let me give an example: If you spread news about your practice to your patients, something like your wife is having a baby. This news will create some conversational pieces about your practice that a patient can use in everyday life.

Now, when that patient is talking to their friend who happens to be pregnant, they can say "Oh, that's funny, my dentist's wife is pregnant."

This is a simple example, but the more information you can give about yourself that will tie into everyday conversations, the better. Your patients will now be able to convey the benefits of your practice more times, and you in return create more buzz and get more referrals.

How you create this lift is by sharing with people news about yourself and your staff. A normal patient cannot relate to you as a dentist, but can relate to you as a person.

Here are a few simple things that you can discuss that will help to create lift:

- You, or a staff member buying a new car
- You or your staff getting a new dog
- You, your staff, or a relative getting married or being pregnant
- Telling stories from your latest vacation

You don't have to do anything crazy, or even newsworthy. Just portray yourself to your patients as a person. If you went to Chicago for a dental conference, don't tell them much about the conference, but tell them about Chicago being a beautiful place, or the deep dish pizza you ate.

Remember, the concept of lift is not to tell patients to talk about your practice, the concept is telling patients how to talk about your practice.

About the Author

James Erickson is the President of EMC Dental Marketing which gives Dentists a resource for turn-key dental marketing programs and dental practice marketing education including new patient attraction, and internal marketing systems. Visit www.EMCdental.com and get a free practice
building kit sent directly to your home or office.<

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Tips on Promoting Your Garage Sale

Begin your enterprise by cleaning out your own attic, closets and basement or garage. Talk with your relatives and friends; tell them what you're doing, and ask for donations (or at least consignments) of unwanted items. It's here that you'll get your first experience in negotiating, and you'll usually get enthusiastic cooperation. You'll find people explaining that they really don't have a use for a specific item, don't want to keep on storing it, but for sentimental or other reasons, they have just hung on to it.

Once you have a little bit of experience, you'll be able to advertise in the newspaper that you purchase garage sale items, or take them on consignment for a percentage of the final sale price.

Its best that the wife or woman of the house handles the garage sale itself - that is, let a woman be the one who greets the potential customers, shows them around, and generally engages them in conversation. If it's a woman staging the garage sale, then arrangements should be made for a second one to 'mind the store' while she's out digging up more items for display and sale, If you are running a really big sale, a second or third per son can be very useful in selling, and just generally keeping an eye on things.

The advertising angle is really quite simple, and shouldn't cost you very much, either. Check area newspapers, and select the one that carries the most ads for garage sales. You shouldn't concern yourself too much with competition from other ads. People who go to garage sales either go to all of them they can locate, or else only to those within a 3-to-5 mile radius of their homes.

You should run a small classified ad in the newspaper of your choice for about three days in advance, and up through the day of your sale. Once you're operating on a full-time, every-day-of-the-week schedule, you'll want to change your ad schedule and the style of your advertising. But in getting started, stay with small classified ads simply announcing the fact that you're holding a garage sale, emphasizing that you've got everything from A to Z - something of interest to everyone. Such an ad might read:

Big Garage Sale! Hundreds of interesting items.
Through Saturday, July 16th. (address)

To get ideas on how to write your ad, check your newspapers for a week or two. Cut out all the garage sale ads you can find. Paste them up onto a piece of paper - then with a bit of critical analysis, you will be able to write a good ad of your own from identifying the good and bad features of the ads you've collected. Keep in mind that the bigger and better your sale, the bigger and better you're 'getting started' ads should be. Always remember that in order to increase your profits in any business, you must increase rather than decrease your advertising. At the bottom line, you'll find that the greatest single reason for a garage sale failing to turn a profit is the lack of promotion and advertising used to publicize it.

You should also have an old-fashioned "sandwich board" type sign to display in front of your house when your garage sale is open for business. The purpose of course, is to call attention to the fact that you're holding a garage sale and are open for business. This will pull in your neighbours, if you haven't already informed them, and attract people driving by. Sandwich boards are also sometimes set out at key traffic intersections not far from the site of the garage sale. These will attract attention, and point the way. However, check your local ordinances to be sure that this sort of advertising is permitted.

Another 'sign idea' practiced by a few really sharp operators, is the old 'Burma Shave' type roadside pointers. Here, you simply make up a few cute sayings (verse or one-liners), write them on pieces of cardboard, tack them onto the power poles at about 200 yard intervals on the thoroughfare leading to your garage sale, and you're sure to create a lot of traffic for yourself. People are amused by, and drawn to people who do something a little different, unusual and creative in promoting a sale of any kind.

About the Author

Uchenna Ani-Okoye is an internet marketing advisor.

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3 Ways To Keep MS Word From Killing Your SEO Strategy

Most of us type our content in Microsoft Word before publishing our articles, blog posts, and web content.But did you know that Microsoft Word can actually hurt the SEO strategy of your site?

If Microsoft Word is set up incorrectly, it can cause major issues when transferring the content to the web.Before writing any document, it is important to make a few changes to your Word settings to eliminate these issues.

Smart Quotes, Apostrophes, and Dashes

Microsoft Word automatically converts straight quotation marks and apostrophes into "smart" quotes and apostrophes for a more pleasant look.

It will also automatically convert single and double dashes into an elongated dash.While these might look nice on the Microsoft Word document, these modified characters cause a lot of trouble on the web.If you've ever seen something on the web with "??" where quotes should be or strange jargon in place of a dash, you've seen the embarrassment these can cause.

The good news is that it only takes changing a few settings once to eliminate this problem for every future document you write.This is important because your SEO strategy is only good if your content is good as well.

1.Go the "Tools" menu and select "Auto Correct"
2.
Select the "Format as You Type" Tab.
3.Under the "Replace As You Type" heading uncheck: "Straight Quotes" with "Smart Quotes" and "Symbol Characters (--) with symbols"

Style Formatting

The style formatting toolbar looks innocent enough - but choosing certain settings here can cause hours of additional work over time for the person who is converting your text to the web.

Always choose NORMAL when using Word!

I've noticed that many freelance writers choose something other than normal - or add additional spaces after lines, or double spaces after single returns.While this might look good in Word, all of that formatting disappears once it is put into an HTML editor and then must be completely reformatted in order for your SEO strategy to be effective.If you highlight the text and see extra spaces around the line breaks, then there is something off with the settings.

To ensure that your document does not have any extra Word Doc formatting:
1.
Select "Format" and "Paragraph" from your toolbar:
2.
The "Indents and Spacing" tab should be set to single spacing with 0 spacing before and after lines.
3.The "Line and Page Breaks" tab should have nothing checked other than "window/orphan control"

Pasting Content into Your Website Software from Word

When pasting content into your website software such as Wordpress, Joomla, or other type of website software with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, it's important to paste the content into the HTML tab - NOT the visual editor.

The reason is that Microsoft Word adds a ton of HTML code "behind the scenes" when you paste directly into the editor.

Pasting into the HTML tab eliminates all of this sloppy extra code that can severely dilute your keyword density and make it more difficult for search engine spiders to crawl your content and decipher the primary topic of the article.And if the search engines cannot determine the focus of your content, your SEO strategy is not efficient.

Taking these few extra steps before you start typing, can eliminate hours of reformatting and ensure that your content is properly read and ranked by search engines.Creating an effective SEO marketing campaign means that you sometimes have to take into consideration all of the small changes you can make as well as the big ones -- every bit counts towards higher rankings!

About the Author

Christine O'Kelly is co-owner of SEO Content Solutions, a leading SEO copywriting firm.

The company provides SEO press releases, articles, blog content and web content to resellers and end users alike.

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