It’s not good enough to have a website - people must be able to FIND you online. Otherwise your site is wasted.
The main way your site is found is through search engines. Getting to the top of the search engine results is called “Search Engine Optimization”, or SEO. It’s not unusual [...]

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Seth Godin is a brilliant marketer, and inspired much of what’s behind Never Market Again. In fact, I credit him in the book:
Speaking of ideas, I realized lately much of this book is inspired by the writings of Seth Godin. Especially his book, Unleashing the Ideavirus. I doubt I would have uncovered this system without [...]

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If you have a website, does it get more patients for you?  Do you have any thoughts about how well yours works for you?
I ask because I realized something over the weekend. Most practitioners tell me they get at least two patients a month from their website.  At the same time, it takes just 1-2 [...]

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By a quality problem, I mean a good problem to have.  Frank Caruso (located in Avon, Ohio) wrote to me:
My schedule has been full now this entire year. I used to start a week with a 10 patient waiting list for both new and return patients, now I have gotten that list down to maybe [...]

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Send Out Cards is a great way to stay in touch with acupuncture patients. It helps with relationship marketing and serves as a reminder that you’re there for them. However, Send Out Cards has a requirement that videos not be available to the general public.  That’s why I have to password protect the [...]

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A couple months ago, I had lunch with Frank G., a local acupuncturist.  After lunch we visited his clinic, where he walked me through his intake procedures. (I don’t want to give away his secrets if a patient googles him, so I’m withholding his last name.)
Frank has a fantastic intake procedure that builds his credibility.  [...]

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I’ve been violating my own rules lately and neglecting my marketing!  It started out because I was too busy to write… then because I wasn’t motivated (what does one more week matter?)… then to see what would happen.
It reminds me of a story about William Wrigley, of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum fame.  He told a [...]

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Kevin Doherty and Dominic Sembello are now running a coaching website. If you sign up, you’ll have access to many resources (both written and audio) for learning to build your practice. Since they charge a lot of money for coaching, the $19.95 a month they’re charging seems dirt cheap.
They’re going to [...]

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Every once in awhile, someone asks me about how to ask for a referral in a certain situation. Or how to educate patients. Or how to word something they’re thinking about putting in a letter. This happens even with acupuncturists who own a copy of Never Market Again. They see the [...]

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A lot of people worry about the cost of marketing their acupuncture clinic. It’s the single most common question I get: “What’s the most cost-effective way of marketing?”
Fact is, marketing is free when it’s done right. It pays for itself - otherwise why in the world would you do it? Your website [...]

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I haven’t yet run an acupuncture clinic myself. Still, I get asked a lot about how to set up the business procedures/processes for running a clinic.
The best book I’ve seen on running a business is The E-Myth Revisited. Bad title, great book. It’s actually easy to read, makes a lot [...]

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For those of you who don’t know Dr. Tan, he’s got an amazing system of acupuncture called the Balance method. It pretty much uses only distal points (points on the limbs or head, not the body) so that no disrobing is needed. From what I can tell, practitioners use a needle on every [...]

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Someone emailed me:
“People who are in the holistic health business should be as aggressive as pharmaceutical companies when it comes to marketing their services.”
They aren’t kidding. The most profitable businesses in the world (as determined by profit margin) are drug companies. What’s worse is they’re devastatingly effective at what they do. The [...]

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You’ve heard of acufinder, and they cost something like $179 a year or $219 for two years (if I remember correctly. They may be well worth it, because each new patient is worth at least $150 (probably closer to twice that). So just one new patient pays for the ad. Every patient [...]

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In the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, there’s a story about an experiment. Subjects were giving songs to tap out by hand, such as “Happy Birthday” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” It’s somewhat like playing a piano when the piano doesn’t make noise.
The subjects thought the guessers would get [...]

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