There’s no way to tell how many of these are being run by chiropractors and other natural health care practitioners, but Googling Chiropractor OR Chiropractic results in some 16 million hits. Add the word “blog” to your search words and you still get 1,810,000 results. Obviously, a lot of people are talking about chiropractic — and a lot of chiropractors are talking to people via the pages of a website or blog.

But can having a blog really attract new patients and build a more success practice?

Of course. ANYTHING you do that helps gets the chiropractic message out to people in your area, and gets your NAME in front of them, can increase patient volume and retention. If you stand on the street corner in a clown suit handing out business cards, eventually you’ll hand one to someone who’ll end up being a patient. If you print up 10,000 flyers and superglue them on every car windshield in the entire shopping mall parking lot, you’ll get a new patient or two out of it.

The question isn’t whether a particular marketing strategy will bring in new patients. It’s whether that marketing strategy is worth the time, money and effort it takes, and if the ultimate result will be more patients. The clown suit trick will get you a new patient — but probably lose you 20 current patients who see you and decide not to return. The superglue tactic will get you a new patient but it’ll be the most expensive patient you ever attracted (especially after you figure in the lawsuits for ruining people’s windshields).

Blogs CAN bring in new patients, because they give you an opportunity to put a human face on your office, to communicate regularly with both current and potential patients, to tell the chiropractic story (however you feel it should be told), show off new staff or equipment in a non-advertising manner, and position yourself as a caring and active member of your community.

Health care consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for help in making their health decisions, including which practitioner to go to. It’s not the ONLY factor in their decision, but it’s a major one. According to the latest report from Manhattan Research — a health care market research company — the Internet now has far more influence over consumer health decisions and actions than traditional channels like print, TV, and radio (“Health Influence Mapping: Benchmarking the Influence of Various Sources on Consumer Health Actions,” Feb. 2010)

So, being on the Internet is almost a must today. But blogging is something different. It’s far more time consuming than many people realize, since content has to be added frequently (at least once a week). The content also has to be “fresh” and personal. And it has to be written carefully so that you don’t say something that will get you in trouble with your board. Sloppiness in spelling and grammar or even the formatting of your page can turn potential patients away. After all, if you aren’t careful about your own blog, will you be careful with their health?

You’ll also need to either turn the “comments” function off or monitor comments carefully. Robot spammers WILL get to your site within weeks of it going live and you need to make sure that your blog doesn’t get cluttered with crap.

You also have to make a long-term commitment to keeping the blog. If someone goes to your blog and it’s either no longer there or hasn’t been updated in several months, the natural assumption is that you’ve closed your office. Click. They’re on to the next hit on the list. Same thing if your site doesn’t load properly or if it’s hard to navigate. Click.

Luckily, blogs are pretty inexpensive and, with blogging software like WordPress, they’re far easier to use than “real” sites. (TIP: Host your blog on your own web hosting company. To be successful, you have to appear successful to the world and having a “freebie” blog on the wordpress or blogger.com servers looks amateurish to many.)

Before you begin, make sure you understand what’s really involved. If it’s something you might really enjoy doing (or have a talented staff member who can do it for you), it might be worth a try. Just don’t go into it thinking your blog will “go viral” and you’ll attract new patients by the hundreds.

This is an important question because chiropractic isn’t just about getting sick people well. It goes far beyond the traditional ideas of health and actually has a powerful impact on the personal total well-being: physical, mental and emotional — all the elements that go into “performance.”

Parker College President Fabrizio Mancini gave the near-perfect answer when he stated: “One of the things that appeals to me about our profession is that it deals with function, which is a very similar word to performance. The reason why so many high executives, celebrities, and sports people use chiropractic is because they recognize that they do perform better. For the last 20 years, I always get adjusted before I give a speech. I never know in advance what I’m going to say and I believe I perform better when I’m adjusted. I get adjusted once or twice a week because of my travel experience and physical activities.”

It’s easy to sell “performance” to athletes because, in the chiropractic context, we tend to associate the word with some kind of physical feat. There’s even some research to support the benefits of chiropractic for athletes, such as the study published last year in the Journal of Chiropractic Medicine. Researchers studied 43 golfers and those who received chiropractic care hit their balls farther. In another study, 50 athletes were tested and the group that received chiropractic adjustments showed significant improvement in all 11 tests used to measure athletic ability, including agility, balance, kinesthetic perception, power, and reaction time. A study in the Feb. 2006 issue of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapy showed a significant improvement in quadriceps muscle strength in subjects receiving chiropractic care (good news for those athletes needing to lift large objects like opposing players).

Okay, so none of these studies are going to win the Nobel prize in medicine, but they confirm what we’ve seen in chiropractic offices for more than a century — chiropractic is great for both professional and weekend athletes.

But, as Dr. Mancini pointed out, athletes aren’t the only ones who “perform.” Executives have to hit a homerun at board meetings; mothers need to make a slam dunk every time the kids call for help; taxi drivers have to have the quick reflexes and stamina of an Indy 500 driver; computer operators require the concentration of a gymnast (and knowing how they hunch over their computers, most of them probably pull more muscles than a linebacker). Even giving a speech, as Dr. Mancini notes, is a performance that can be enhanced by chiropractic.

We can’t put a sign on our door saying we help improve public speaking skills, but in our patient and public education information we can make sure we explain that chiropractic does far beyond what we normally think of as “therapy” or “medicine” (despite the titles of our research journals). Nobody needs to be sick or in pain or exhibit a list of symptoms to be relieved. Healthy, active people who want to perform better in all aspects of their lives can benefit from chiropractic. You just have to make sure they know it!

Those percentages get eaten up very quickly, given the cost of the almost obligatory (though of questionable value) Yellow Page ads; print or broadcast media ads; promotional and marketing material including flyers, mailings, brochures, etc.; and the marketing of open houses, health fair booths, and other activities and events.

That helps explain why many wellness professionals turn to the internet. Look at some of the press releases posted by chiropractic offices online at 1888 Press Release and PR.com. They announce almost everything — changes in staff health, health lectures, new equipment or services, notable events, etc.

Press releases can (and probably should) be posted on press release distribution websites, but to take full advantage of free publicity, they should also be sent to newspapers in your area — along with high-quality photos showing your office in action or a professional portrait shot of the person highlighted in the release.

While press releases should be a primary part of your marketing campaign, you don’t want to submit material that sounds like an advertisement.

Examples:

“The Acme Chiropractic Clinic will hold a public educational forum this Sunday on how a balanced diet and chiropractic care affect your immune system and may help prevent colds and flu this season.” Here we have true press release material. It serves the purpose of publicizing your practice and offers a needed service as well.

Then there’s this: “Say well with Acme! This Sunday, the doctors at Acme Chiropractic Clinic will tell you all you need to know about how coming to us can boost your immune system — and keep you from getting colds and flu this season.” This belongs in an advertising section. An internet site where you pay to have your press release posted might accept it, but most print publication editors will reject it as being too promotional for editorial copy.

Also, be careful how you word your press release so it doesn’t violate any of your state’s regulations. Thankfully, chiropractors have fewer limitations on advertising than medical doctors do, but press releases could be classified as “marketing and advertising” by state boards, and be subject to the same restrictions.

You can write your own press releases if you have the time and talent. Still, it might be best to engage the services of a professional marketing company that can coordinate the releases as part of your overall message. If you decide to go that direction, be sure to choose one that’s thoroughly familiar with your particular health care approach. A company that really doesn’t understand what you do will obviously have difficulty trying to explaining it to the public.

For more information on writing press releases, see PRWeb and WikiHow.

There’s an aura about wellness providers, some indescribable sense that they’re morally and ethically superior to medical doctors. Frankly, I agree! But I think sometimes we take that image of altruism too far when we shy away from having (or admitting to have) a profit motive in our practice.

Jasson Urbach, speaking of South Africa’s enormously popular Vitality program, noted: “Innovative wellness programmes, such as Vitality, that are driven, not by altruism, but by the profit motive, are an important method of tackling the increasing burden of chronic disease across the globe.”

There’s nothing wrong with making a good income by helping people reach new heights of health and wellness, and it’s time we stopped thinking of profit as something that sullies our image. If you want to be totally altruistic, open up a free clinic and give your services away for free. If you’re independently wealthy or have a spouse to support you and your family, that might be an option. Otherwise, we have to charge for what we provide.

The problem isn’t with profit. It’s with making patient and client health care decisions BASED only (or even primarily) on profit.

Should a doctor of chiropractic recommend weekly visits only because he or she wants to buy a new car and needs the extra income, that’s WRONG. It’s exactly the same as surgeons performing unnecessary procedures just to pad their checkbook.

But if those weekly visits are honestly going to help the patient, then it’s the RIGHT recommendation, regardless of how much or how little the doctor charges for those visits.

The same goes for other products and services provided in your office. Do you REALLY believe in the efficacy of the vitamin supplements you’re selling, or are you doing it just for the money they bring in? Have you personally tested the pillows and mattresses you’re recommending or are you selling them because you get a nice fat commission?

If you can honestly say that you recommend and/or sell ONLY those services and products you feel are beneficial, then why be ashamed to make a profit on them? Can your patients get the same thing for free elsewhere?

Making money from health care has gotten a bad rap thanks to the obscene profits being made by drug makers and some medical providers. Yet, when you really examine the issues, the fact that they make profits isn’t the real problem. It’s the fact that they put profits before the welfare of the public. They make billions of dollars selling overpriced and dangerous pills that don’t cure anything, performing unnecessary surgical procedures, and recommending and administering useless (and even harmful) vaccines.

Do you really think you’re in the same category because you charge a fee for your services, or give patients the opportunity to purchase helpful products in your office? How many of your patients work eight hours a day for free?

You have two choices:

1) Embrace the profit motive and build a high-volume, successful and prosperous practice that can provide wellness care to THOUSANDS of people.

2) Go broke, close your doors, and be unable to help anyone.

By choosing a wellness practice, you’ve already proven that you aren’t in it solely for the money (a successful drug sales rep can easily make more money than a doctor of chiropractic, acupuncturist, or other non-medical health care provider!). So, hold your head up high and make your practice a super success!

Some points/comments. NeuroInfiniti has:

• “completely changed my practice” …
• … “rekindled my love for chiropractic” …
• … “enabled me to show patients the root cause of their symptoms” … and
• … “increased patient visits.”

Powerful stuff! Well worth watching if you can spare 10 minutes.  Bottom line, we need to remember that every symptom/disease stems from the nervous system. This system is right in line with chiropratic’s ability to put bodies back into healthy balance so they can heal themselves.