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27 Ways: Part 5
Creating a Referral Program
We are switching gears from our website here and turning our attention to
referrals. You have heard it a thousand times in our practice and in all sorts
of businesses, the best type of new business is referral business. For this
reason, we highly recommend that you establish your own referral engine or
system.
The system we use is essentially free, in the sense that we only “pay” if a
new patient actually physically visits your practice. These are generally
some of the best patients you can get because they already know about you
and because of the referral they have from someone, they come in the door
already liking you. 85% of your work is already done as a great deal of that
trust is already built before they even drive into your parking lot.
The most important aspect of this idea, however, is pulling together a system
where you ask all of your patients when they come into your practice
for referrals. You would not believe how many people fail to ask for
referrals. You would also not believe how many people LOVE to send people
our way, just because we asked!
Your referral program needs to be something that goes beyond just
getting new patients verbally. You also need to print out a brightly colored
card with your contact information on it so that the patient can take it with
them to give to a person, or at the very least, it will serve as a reminder for
them to send someone else your way.
We have had patients that have sent as many as 10 of their friends and
family in to the practice and if you figure that the lifetime value of a patient
is probably somewhere around $3000 or more, this is a great deal of “free”
business for your practice. And to think you might not have ever asked!
If your current patients leave and are excited, it’s better than paying
someone to hand those cards out. For that reason, if their friend uses the
card, we have a spot for the referring patients’ name on there and they all
say, ”We’ll put $50 credit onto your account with us or we will give you a $25
gas card.” We have also tried other incentives like gift certificates, etc.
The account credit and the gas cards are the two that have worked best for
us, but the important thing is just that you create or have a program in
place. It can really become a great source of new patients and it’s extremely
low cost. If you are from a state that does not allow you to reward patients
for referrals, we recommend that you call it customer appreciation, but be
sure and check with your attorney to ensure that this is not a violation with
your board.

27 Ways: Part 4
Creating a linking strategy
We are still living on your website here, so refer back to our first
recommendation. In other words, if you are still struggling to get your site
out of the last decade, go back and start over. Your linking strategy, in the
most simplistic terms, is the set of links that come in and out of your
website. In the good ole days of search, a good rule of thumb was the more
the merrier. In other words, the more links you had coming in and out of
your site, the better the results of your search engine placement would be.
Unfortunately, such is not the case any more.
Companies like Google use complex algorithms to figure out how to place you
in the search rankings. There are people out there who have made it their
life’s work to figure these complex algorithms out. Given that Google is a
smart company that doesn’t like sharing their secrets, they change them
often. For this reason, we recommend that you work with a professional on
your linking strategy.
This person will help you identify which links coming in to your site could
benefit your searchability most, as well as which links going out of your site
should benefit you most. There is also benefit that comes from those links
that both come in and go out, called reciprocal links. Again, an expert in this
area can help you analyze which should be which, and leave you to the
business of your business.
Links are great for SEO, and a well-crafted strategy can really increase your
website ranking. After it’s up and working, it’s just one more way to
get free traffic on your site. Initially you might have to pay a professional to
do it, but it will be well worth your investment down the road. In the end,
this will help to get more patients in your door.

27 Ways: Part 3
Articles
You can probably imagine that the possibilities are endless if you can create
and place good articles abut your practice, procedures, new techniques or
anything to buoy your credibility with potential patients.
For starters, you can use articles on your website. The article can either be
written by you or you can hire someone to write an article for you. Once you
have it, reuse it. Publish it in the newspaper, in a magazine or online in a
blog, on your website, or contribute to someone else’s website and then add
it to your own website. If it has great keywords included in it, then it can do
well for your search engine optimization (SEO). The more places it appears,
the better your search engine placement will be, or the closer to the top your
practice will appear when someone searches for the key words contained in
that article.
You can also place these articles on sites like About.com. They’re always
looking for great content. There are multiple sites out there that are
constantly looking for content. We recommend About.com but there are
others that have tens of thousands of readers and are also great and
specialized.
You can also post articles or even comments on sites like Yahoo! or on
bulletin boards about health and wellness and dental questions. Always
remember to include a link (url) back to your practice with your name.
The key with articles or posting is you should seek to answer the types
of questions that patients are asking you, or questions about procedures that
are hot. Always strive to make your posts and articles relevant to topics that
you are wanting to do more of in your practice, such as Invisalign, implants
or sedation. If you place these articles on your site and link them, your
website traffic will increase. This will help with conversions and your
authority.

27 Ways: Part 2
Google AdWords
Take no offense when we say that if your website stinks, you really should
just stop right here and go back to number one. Let’s face it, no one wants
to waste money, and for that reason, we cannot in good faith, recommend
that you spend a whole bunch of your hard earned money on a solid and
working Google AdWords campaign if your website is not any good. So be
careful.
Well, we can about hear you now… how do you know if your website isn’ t
any good? Well, let’s be cup half full people here and say that if your website
is GOOD and functioning properly, you are loading it with lots of relevant,
fresh content. You will also see in your Google analytics (which are free and
available to anyone) how your site ranks in both Google searches and in
other searches.
From here, you can set up Google AdWords and begin with a budget and
specific terms and search phrases to drive traffic directly to your site. The
tool is easy to use and it’s also fun, as you can control how much money you
spend, and you can change it however often you want to coincide with your
successes or failures.
We cannot stress to you enough though, do not waste your money or your
time on PayPerClick advertising if your website is in shambles. In a lot of
cases, a few quick changes to copy can make all the difference in the world.
Ask for help. We can help, we can refer you to others who can help.
You don’t have time to waste! This is really a no brainer, and yet there are a
whole lot of dentists who are not doing this. It can give your practice a
HUGE advantage. Plus, it’s actually fun. AdWords are run with a neat tool
and they are among the cheapest and best ways to get new patients into
your practice. Just remember, your AdWords will not work if you do not
have the right dynamic content driving your website

27 Ways: Part 1
Making Your Website Relevant
Welcome back to part one of our series, 27 Ways to Get New Patients, Keep
Your Existing Patients and Grow Your Practice. Now that you’re familiar with
what we’re doing here, we will begin calling this The GKG Method.
We know you’re anxious to get started. The first, and arguably most
important element of the 27 ways (especially if you ask our marketing
expert) is the creation and maintenance of a website that accurately
reflects your practice.
If you are like us, you can probably rattle off 10 or 15 websites that are both
aesthetically pleasing that also work for you in one way or another. Perhaps
it is that you can always seem to find what you are looking for with a
minimal level of frustration, perhaps it is that the site seems to read your
mind by suggesting alternate purchases.
Allow us to let you in on a secret. Your website is not worth a hill of beans,
until you determine your sites’ specific purpose. In the case of your practice,
you should prioritize what this is and have no more than 3 puposes. For
example, your purposes might be in this order:
1. Attracting New Patients
2. Keeping Existing Patients
3. Growing Overall Practice
If these are your site purposes, you should be able to define, under each of
these specific areas, how your site navigation, structure and verbaige help
you to accomplish these three things. You have likely heard some of the
marketing jargon related to websites, such as search engine optimization,
key word placement, etc. We understand all of these. We can also assure
you that there is no sense in even beginning to go down the path of
understanding ANY of these if you cannot define your purpose. Allow us to
give you a couple scenarios.
Let’s say you have a niche site that talks specifically about an aspect of
your business that you have an interest in growing. This is going to show up
very well when it comes to search engine optimization for whatever it is that
you are trying to promote.

So let’s say that you really want to do more implants. You could build a
micro site that is completely about dental implants, use key words that
people search for when they research dental implants and then update and
refresh your content about dental implants regularly and include helpful
tidbits and related information.
Essentially, the goal here is to crawl inside peoples’ heads and figure
out exactly what they want to know about implants. Chances are, you are
your own best expert. What kinds of questions do people ask you at cocktail
parties? What types of questions do your patients have? What are their
fears? What are the procedures they might have had in the past instead of
implants? How does this procedure compare to another procedure?
You will be floored to learn how much people search online about implants.
Put something about cost on your website and thoroughly explain it. The
more you can make your users or potential new patients feel at ease, and
the more you can provide content that speaks to their questions, or what
they are typing into google or some other search engine, the better your site
will fare.
We recommend having multiple micro sites that feed into or off of your main
site that tells about your practice. This way, you can keep your purposes
clean, concise, and well-defined. Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it may
sound. For example, you might have your main site that provides your
location, hours, staff, and general information about your practice. You
might also have different micro sites that are going to be able to target
those implant patients we just talked about, or Invisalign patients or
whomever it is you might be trying to target.
Certainly, you should put some time into mapping financially which of the
services it makes the most sense to market, but at the same time, you need
to lead your patients in to your practice with what they are researching and
wanting to learn about. We cannot stress this enough. You can create the
most beautiful, award winning site in the universe, but if that site is filled
with irrelevant content, who really cares?
We can tell you. Nobody cares.
We could go on and on about website marketing. There is a great reason it
is number one and that is because it is the most important of the 27 Ways.
We have an expert on staff who has built multi-lingual websites for billion
dollar companies. All that said, if you only take ONE thing from our 27 Ways,
take our number one way: Website…we suggest that you start with your site
purpose and content.

Make it relevant!

27 Ways: Part of GKG Method
Congratulations, you’ve taken the first brave step towards improving your
dental practice: 27 Ways to Get Quality New Patients, Keep the Patients You
Already Have and Grow Your Practice.
This is Dr. Steffany Mohan, and I want to welcome you and tell you how
exciting it is for me to share this with you. There are so many people that
are really needing those extra patients in their practice to fuel their bottom
line, or they are really needing some help with certain aspects of their
practice. This is why we are here. This is why we decided to do this. We
know it is possible to find great success with these methods, because we’ve
implemented them in our own practice time and time again.
We want to let you know first and foremost the reason we have 27 Ways.
You are probably thinking that there is no way you can do 27 things at once.
We realize this. While your successes will be quicker and greater if you do
implement all 27, sometimes other things take precedence, and for that
reason we have prioritized our listing. We also provide services to help you
implement ANY of the 27 ways that you cannot find time to implement or
maintain yourself.
We have tested each of these 27 ways in my practice, and I can personally
attest to the fact that they work. Certainly, in different areas of the country
markets are saturated in different ways, so there will be some small
differences from practice to practice, but we believe our system also
accounts for that.
So what can you expect? First and foremost, expect lots and lots of tips on
how you can implement each of these 27 ways. These 27 Ways will require
you to take a look at your business from the front end, to the back end,
including operations, office management, patient follow up and what you can
do with your marketing and marketing pieces.
It is really our goal to help you avoid some of the common pitfalls that
people tend to run into when they launch a concentrated marketing effort.
In fact, we have a marketing expert on our Practice Doctor team with more
than 15 years experience in the creation of customized, measurable
campaigns. Our belief is that if you cannot measure it you should not do it.
And for that reason, you’ll see that everything we do we track and we
monitor so that we can tweak our system to ensure your (and our) continued
success.
One of the things I hear all the time from our clients is, “I ran this and I
didn’t get anything, or I did that and I didn’t get anything.”

I get it. It’s incredibly frustrating. That is one of the primary reasons we are
doing this. So sit back and learn. We will post these 27 ways to you as a
series in several different parts. We hope you enjoy it and learn a few
things. We also hope that you’ll be in contact with us as you have questions
and need assistance in implementing some of these tactics.
We’d love to hear from you.

We have created a system to create a $35,000 day in your dental practice. There are simple steps that anyone can follow.

There are no special tricks, just caring for patients like we do every day!

There is a team approach like with everything that we do in our practices and training for our team.

Please contact me at thepracticedoctor@gmail.com for information about this fun and profitable system.

Here it is!  #7

Lack of Time -  Seriously!! (I love Grey’s Anatomy!) Let’s get real about this one, once and for all.  We know that we are all equal as far as time in each day.  The difference is about efficiency and priorities and focus.  Do you spend a lot of time each day doing unproductive tasks that you could delegate, automate or eliminate?  How are you consciously doing this?  How about “unwinding” with the TV?  I don’t actually watch TV for more than 2 hours.  Two hours each WEEK, at the very, very most.  The average person spends 35 hours a week – enough for most dentists to see their entire week’s schedule of patients.  I don’t play much golf, which is some sort of blasphemy coming from a dentist (and with my husband, AKA, the golf “addict”) – even though I have a fairly low handicap.  I would rather spend my time working on my practice.  I know, I need therapy, but I really do love it.  Notice, I said “ON” my practice.  The number of hours that I spend working ON my practice is entirely different than the number of hours I spend working “IN” my practice.  Once I decided to spend concentrated time every week working ON the practice, everything changed.  More on this topic in the very near future…

#6

Not Knowing How to Promote and Market your Practice -   If any business had all of the customers that it could feasibly handle, could they fail?  Possibly, but I doubt it.  What if GM had continued to sell more cars than their competitors?  Well, likely they still might have failed due to gross mismanagement, but most businesses, including dental practices would be fine if they simply had plenty of customers or patients.  Marketing and promoting a dental practice takes time, skill and lots of effort, but it can be learned.  It may be the one thing that you do that will give you the most possible security in your retirement.  Trust me, you will either pay someone else to market your practice or you can have the person that knows your practice the best do it – that should be you, by the way.

#5 of the Things Keeping You From Having the Practice of Your Dreams

#5

Mastery -   This might seem like an easy one.  This is the hardest one of all.  Mastery of dentistry is something that takes a long time, maybe even an entire career to achieve.  What is mastery?  Luckily for all of us that own practices, it is two distinct things.  Clinical mastery and practice management mastery are both included here.  If you are not actively working to gain both, you will likely be a very unhappy camper.  They are both essential for financial success.  Likely, clinical mastery could be easier than practice management.  It depends what is easier for you.  Both CAN be learned and it takes a different amount of time and effort for each individual.  Take the short cut, find a mentor or coach.  You owe it to yourself and your patients.  Otherwise, you risk a long career of frustration and set-backs.