Chiropractic Marketing – Top 10 Tips

How many referrals to you get each week from Google and Yahoo searches?

If you are not using the web as a new way to attract new patients to your practice, you are missing out on a huge chiropractic marketing opportunity. There are many resources available now to create a presence online that shows up when people search for local services on Google and Yahoo. Any in many cases they can be more effective than the print Yellow Pages at a fraction of the cost.

These tips are based on my experience working with chiropractic clients, but could be used for any small business with a physical office or storefront.

Here is my list of the top 10 things you can do as a chiropractor (or any small business owner) to promote your practice online:

1) Get a website with your own domain name

If you already have your own domain name and a website that you control, great. I only bring this up because many small business owners I talk to don’t have a website or their own [Read more]

New Chiropractic Economics Article – Should You Write A Book?

I recently ran across a new article in Chiropractic Economics called “10 Reasons Why You Should Write a Book.”

The author is Billy Sticker, he is a chiropractic marketing consultant who runs the website Chiropractic Marketing University.

In the article he shares tips for chiropractors and talks about how writing a book could be a very effective marketing tool for their practice. He also shares some insight on self-publishing; I didn’t realize that you can self-publish a high quality book for about $2-$3 each and retain all the rights. 

It’s a good read for the chiropractor who is looking at new marketing angles and opportunities. Head on over to read the article here.

New Hosting Option for Chiropractic Websites

I’ve provided tutorials on How To Install WordPress and How to Install the Chiropractor2Web WordPress Theme, and continue to add to these in the Tutorials section.

Many people who have downloaded the Chiropractor2Web WordPress Theme have asked for a simpler, turn-key way to get started with their new Chiropractic website.

I’m excited to say that I’ve worked out a new WordPress hosting option with Software-as-a-Service provider Etelos. Etelos now offers a hosting package for WordPress, with the Chiropractor2Web WordPress Theme pre-installed!

For $14.95/month, you will get a complete WordPress hosting package that is pre-configured with the Chiropractic WordPress Theme. All you have to do it add your business information and you’re up and running within minutes!

Chiropractor2Web Tutorial – Change The Navigation Menu

When you install the Chiropractor2Web WordPress theme, you will have five items on the navigation menu by default:

• Home – this is your home page that shows up first when somebody visits your website. You can edit the content of this page in the Chiropractor2Web Options panel in WordPress.
• About – this is a default page that WordPress adds to all new websites. You’ll want to either delete this page or change it. I usually change the title to “Meet The Doctor” and change the text to an introduction to the doctor(s) at the office, including a picture.
• Contact – This is a contact form that visitors can use to send you a message. The message will go to the email address you put in the Chiropractor2Web Options panel.
• Find Us – This is the map and directions page of your site. It also includes business hours. See this tutorial to add your own map for your business.
• Blog – This takes you to a page that lists all of the articles that you write on your website. You can remove this menu item (described below) if you do not plan to publish articles.

In addition to changing these menu items, you can easily add new items to your navigation menu. Any time you publish a new “Page” in WordPress, it will automatically be added to this menu. To publish a new page, log into WordPress, and go to the Write menu and select Page.

Whatever you put for the Title of this page will show up in the navigation menu of your site.

If you want to exclude certain pages from showing up in the navigation menu, you can do that from the Chiropractor2Web Options panel.

This is a list of all the Pages that you’ve published. You can select multiple pages to omit by holding down the shift key as you select each one.

Something we haven’t talked about yet is the difference between Pages and Posts in WordPress. Since WordPress is a platform for blogging, it gives you the ability to quickly and frequently publish content to your site.

WordPress Posts

When you write a blog entry, this is called a Post. Most blogs list the posts in reverse chronological order on the home page of the site, so that the latest ones are listed first.

In this theme, we’ve changed that so the home page is a static page that represents your business instead of a list of articles. We provide the “Blog” page in case you also want to publish articles for your visitors and patients.

WordPress Pages

In WordPress, Pages are for information that is more timeless, that you always want to display prominently on your site. In our case, examples of pages include the “Contact” form, the “Find Us” page or the “Meet the Doctor” page.

I suggest that you change the title of the “Blog” page to “Articles” and use that as an area to publish short and informative articles for your patients and visitors. You can include snippets from newsletters you may have published, or any advice or tips you are willing to share.

See the Chiropractor2Web demo for an example of a customized menu, and let me know if you have any questions in the comments below!

Announcing The Chiropractor2Web Support Forum

In addition to the Tutorials for installing and configuring the Chiropractor2Web WordPress Theme, we just turned on the Chiropractor2Web Support Forums.

Stop by to introduce yourself, discuss or ask your questions about the theme, WordPress or anything related to Chiropractic Website building!

Chiropractor2Web Tutorial – Sidebar Widgets

The Chiropractor2Web WordPress Theme is “widget enabled”, meaning that it supports WordPress widgets. Widgets can be easily added to the sidebar to add all kinds of functionality to your website.

We provide an example with the out of the box theme, and you’ll want to change it when you set it up for your practice.

To add a widget to your site, simply log into WordPress and go to the Design panel. From here, you’ll want to select the Widgets menu.

On the left of this screen you will see a whole list of Widgets available for you to add to your sidebar. You can add a calendar, links, recent posts, recent comments and many others. If you look to the right of this screen, you’ll see that there is already one widget added to the sidebar, titled “Text: Call Us Today!”

Let’s go and edit that Widget to say something about your business instead of something generic. Right now there is an image that you may want to either delete or replace with a link to your own image. And you’ll want to change the phone number and the other text in this widget. When you’re done click the “Change” button, and then “Save Changes.” The Widget on your site is now updated.

You can put any message you want in here and change it any time!

p.s. If you don’t want any widgets on your site you can click “Remove” and “Save Changes” to remove it.

Chiropractor2Web Tutorial – Feature Boxes

After installing the Chiropractor2Web WordPress Theme and entering your business information, the next thing you’ll want to do is customize the appearance of the home page.

At the bottom you’ll notice a section where you can feature pages on your site.

You’ll want to change these defaults and point them to other parts of your site like the Find Us page or a Meet The Doctor page.

To do that, log into your WordPress Admin panel, and go to the Chiropractor2Web Options page under Design.

Here, you can change the summary and the link for each of the feature boxes.

Just enter in a short summary that will pique the interest of your site visitors, and choose the page of your site that you would like to feature from the drop down.

That’s all there is to it! You can change which area of your site you want to feature at any time, by going back to the Chiropractor2Web Options panel in WordPress.

See the Chiropractor2Web Demo Site for a live example of how we customized the feature section, and let me know i fyou have any questions in the comments below!