Are You Fully Ready for Online Marketing?

Do you have a website? Does it do a good job of attracting clients to your door?

Are you giving away free help on the site, and making more help available in exchange for collecting email addresses?

Is your site a central place for potential, current, and former clients to return for ongoing additional or updated information that will directly benefit them?

If you don't have a website, or if your website doesn't do these basic things, any online profile in a locator service you might have a much harder time converting prospects to clients for you.

I'm constantly surprised when looking at online marketing forums how many therapists and naturopathic doctors post profiles but don't appear fully ready to "complete the sale" by sending people from their profile to their website. This is a big mistake, and one that may be costing you a lot in lost clients.

Marketing online is no field of dreams -- if you build it, they won't necessarily come. You have to build it right, which means, you have to be client-focused in the content of your profile and your website for those two marketing tools to work well for you.

At minimum, here's what's needed in both profiles and websites:

• speak directly to a target client type
• speak about their experience of their problem
  
• speak about what it prevents them from doing or having
• use words that have strong emotional impact -- name their pain
  
• make your profile be 80% about your potential clients, and only 20% about you
• make your website be 60% about your potential clients, 30% for your current clients, 10% about you (remember that on a website that 10% is a whole page or two, not just a sentence or two as in a 200 word profile)
  
• give the propsective client content on your website that is immediately helpful and directly meaningful to them -- put yourself in their shoes, what would you feel desperate to know or get from a website in the middle of the night when you just can't stand the problem one more second?