The modern search engine algorithm acts more like a human being than a computer at first glance. This means that it can get bored with your webpage just as easily as a human can. You must constantly keep its attention with fresh new content.Fresh new content can be defined as many things.

Fresh new content can be as simple as placing a link to your page up to your local medical marketing Association. It can also be as complex as starting a new blog about your medical specialty and posting content to that every week or so. No matter what you do offline, you must constantly be updating your presence online.

Updating your presence online does not have to be a chore. You are simply informing the public about things that happen in your practice normally. You just cannot forget to post these updates online in the same way that you would tell your customers about it offline. Think of your online presence as an extension of your off-line practice.

The great thing about keeping your content fresh is that most of the major social media networks connect to each other very easily.

• generate more referrals,
• establish ourselves as leaders for our professional niche, or
• leverage the power of online marketing and social media.

To address these issues, the Power Practice Network has been designed to provide professional service providers, small business owners, solo entrepreneurs and practice marketing professionals with effective solutions for our most common challenges. At present, members of our network receive support through three online programs:

• Our Success Tools newsletter: Featuring the most relevant developments in practice marketing for solo and small business professionals culled from the over 50 leading RSS feeds we provide to readers at SuccessTools.com.
• Our Marketing Jump Start program: Give your solo or small practice the jump start it needs with just-in-time tips, primers and refreshers pertaining to generating referrals, local search marketing, social media marketing and education-based marketing.
• Our Web Jump Start system: When you’re ready to put your online marketing campaign into overdrive, the Power Practice Network will complete a comprehensive audit of your practice’s website. We will then provide you with a detailed report featuring actionable analytical intelligence and advice on how to start creating a more effective online presence immediately.

Thanks to the dozens of news feeds that we follow at Medical Practice Marketing News and our sister site SuccessTools.org, we’re able to keep our finger on the pulse of the practice marketing industry. From the latest online marketing tips and tricks to top notch advice on generating more referrals and building your practice, you can rely on our Success Tools newsletter to provide you with the just-in-time information that you need in an easy-to-read format.

To sign up now, simply enter your email address in the field provided to the right. Stay informed about the latest developments in medical practice marketing by subscribing to our free Success Tools newsletter today!

The Healthcare Marketing Association has partnered together with Soloville to help small entrepreneurs like you. Whether you’ve been in private practice for years or are just venturing out on your own, Soloville can give you the marketing tools and resources you need to power up your campaign.Soloville also gives its members the support of a community, a welcome break for providers used to marketing a medical practice on their own. Although Soloville is presently in its beta stage, the Healthcare Marketing Association has designed the service with these key qualities:

• Our Soloville Library—featuring up-to-the-minute articles and reports directly targeted to the small solo practice.
• Our Soloville News Service—giving you streaming news feeds from some of the premier experts in marketing small and sole-proprietor businesses.
• Our Success Tools Newsletter—equipping you with practical marketing tools and tips to launch your campaign.

Visit Soloville to see how we can rev up your medical practice marketing campaign. If you like what we have to offer, subscribe to our Soloville RSS Feed. Soloville is also on Facebook and Twitter, so join us.

Sales leads are the very lifeblood of many types of businesses and are the primary purpose of nearly all marketing campaigns. Most businesses obtain their sales leads from a wide variety of sources, such as advertising, customer inquiries and targeted sales lists. While standard leads eventually provide a business with a reasonable volume of new clients, salespeople often find that the leads that they obtain from many types of marketing campaigns are so unqualified that they are barely more effective than cold calling. The truth of the matter is that a mountain sales leads is not a whole lot if it is for people who do not need your services and do not know who you are.

Although a referral can technically be considered a type of a sales lead, there are a few special things about referrals that make them particularly valuable. When one of your current clients refers one of his colleagues to your business, he is essentially vouching for both you and your services. This means that the leads that you receive as business referrals are guaranteed to be much more willing to give your services a try, resulting in very high closing ratio. At the same time, you will find that new clients will be constantly be streaming in once you have put a good referral engine into place, which means that you will be able to spend less time on the phone generating sales and more time focusing on your actual services.

Yes, you will probably always rely to some extent on traditional methods like advertising and other marketing campaigns for a significant percentage of your business, but you will be much better off by viewing business referrals as the cream of the crop. By making referral development the central focus of your marketing efforts, you will be building the foundation for a reliable source on potential new clients for many years to come.

This article is a brief abstract from a core learning module included in a Marketing Jump Start program provided to our association and Power Practice Network members. As a member, you will gain access to our four key courses and Success Tools Pro, which provides a constant update of tools and resources for building your practice.

• Marketing Materials
• Reports
• Email Messages
• Case Studies
• Newsletters
• Forum Discussions
• Presentations

Provided that you have been working in your industry for some time, it is easy to see that there is no need to invest a ton of time or money in starting your content marketing from scratch. However, it is important to remember not to include any materials that may have already been posted elsewhere online without rewriting them first. Otherwise, the major search engines will overlook your content and not consider any new backlinks that you’ve created for you search engine result placement.

Depending on your content management strategy, you may want to consider using products or reports that you typically only offer to paying clients. For example, many professional service businesses have managed to establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry niches by releasing free white papers and presentations that they once charged a premium for. Larger reports like these can also be divided into shorter articles that can be used for blog posts, free trade publications, podcasts and much more. With a little bit of creativity, you can easily take a single report and repurpose your content across a multitude of media platforms and maximize the impact of your content marketing strategy.

This article is a brief abstract from a core learning module included in a Marketing Jump Start program provided to our association and Power Practice Network members. As a member, you will gain access to our four key courses and Success Tools Pro, which provides a constant update of tools and resources for building your practice.

Promote your health care practice using local search marketing techniques.

While promoting your practice’s site directly with the Google, Bing and Yahoo is the primary focus of the Local Search Jump Start program, it is worthwhile to start off on your home turf to make sure that your website is as friendly to local search traffic as possible. In most cases, this is a fairly simple project that requires a minimal amount of research and a little bit of tweaking to the content of your site. The three main areas that we will be focusing on in this module include:

• Researching Geographically Optimized Long Tail Keywords
• Implementing These Keywords in Your Site’s Content and Metadata
• Building a Network of Local Inbound Links

Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that typically consist of three to five words that target internet users who are searching for very specific information or services. Long tail keywords may not attract the same volume of traffic as a broader keyword campaign, but they are much more effective at bringing in traffic from visitors who are likely to respond to your site’s call to action. At the same time, long tail keywords are typically far less competitive than the general keyword phrases associated with most professional services.

The easiest way to find the right long tail keywords for your local search marketing campaign is to spend a little bit of time using a keyword research tool like Google Adwords, WordTracker or WordStream. Begin by entering some of the most common keywords associated with your profession along with the name of your city, county or region. The long tail keywords that appear in your results may be wide open or fairly competitive depending on your location and your practice’s niche. Either way, try to find a couple of relevant local keyword phrases that receive a promising amount of monthly traffic and are not already dominated your competition.

Next, review your practice’s website and look for opportunities to incorporate these keywords into your content and metadata. The best place to begin is by inserting your most promising long tail keyword in the meta description of your site itself. The meta description is the short introduction that appears beneath your link in search results, and search engines give a great deal of priority over the keyword terms that appear in this field. Your long tail keywords should also be included in the content of your homepage and the description of your actual services. These keywords do not need to appear more than one or two times per page, and it is important to try to use them as naturally as possible.

Although link building is an aspect of local search marketing that many SEO consultants overlook, having a few inbound links from respected local websites is an excellent way to improve your site’s ranking. A good place to start is to find out what types of hyper-local websites cover businesses and services in your area. Search for queries like “(city/county) blog” or “(city/county) news” and see what pops up. If you strike gold, try to figure out how you can earn a direct link from their site.

Along a similar note, make sure that your practice is listed properly on major review sites like Yelp and CitySearch. Even if your business has already been listed and reviewed on these sites, it’s likely that you will need to update the listing with a direct listing to your website. This is also a good opportunity to include other content such as photos and directions that will help you stand out when potential clients are using these sites to research local businesses.

This article is a brief abstract from a core learning module included in a Marketing Jump Start program provided to our association and Power Practice Network members. As a member, you will gain access to our four key courses and Success Tools Pro, which provides a constant update of tools and resources for building your practice.