Fishing for Internet Treatment Center Admissions Part II
If you had the chance to read last weeks’ article I wanted to prove a point that if we hire local knowledge and experience we will see the results a lot faster in almost everything we do, especially in addiction treatment leads and admissions. I used the analogy of comparing a professional internet marketing consultant for addiction treatment center leads and admissions to using an experienced professional fishing guide in the Adirondacks for catching fish.
I have come back from my 7 day journey “off the grid” and have some results to share with you. But first a little bit about the journey or the experience. My son and I met a prep school classmate of mine and his brother at the historic Saratoga battle ground from the Revolutionary War. My classmate Peter is an avid fly fisherman and was our “team leader” on this camping adventure, however Peter lives in Virginia not the Adirondacks.
We drove from Saratoga to Lake Durant in the Adirondacks and camped out for two nights. On the second night it began to rain early in the morning. The tents and sleeping bags got wet, but our spirits were high because we were going fishing. Peter hauled his boat up from Virginia to fish with his brother John and I hired a guide to take my son and me out for some “catching.”
We met our guide, Jake of Outback Outfitters at the one and only gas station for 10 miles (in the middle of the 6 million acre Adirondack Park) on Monday morning. Meanwhile the rain was really starting to come down. I followed Jake to our fishing hole in my Jeep. My son rode with Jake so he could share some stories with him. They had just become instant friends. Meanwhile our fishing destination was at least 25 miles away and it was really starting to pour. The rain came down in sheets. I could not see 50 feet in front of me while I was following Jake at 50 miles per hour, I had to slow down, and after a several miles of dirt roads we finally made it.
When we got to our destination the rain slowed to a drizzle and finally stopped. Perfect fishing conditions and the sun was starting to come out and the day was partly overcast at the same time. I got in the (Fishing guide furnished vessel) kayak and Jake and my son Christopher got in his canoe. We paddled and fished together for while then Jake split us up. The next thing I know my son screamed with delight that he had caught a fish! I came up to them and we passed the camera around and snapped the Adirondack Fishing Guide photos that you see on Flickr.
He eventually rubbed it in that he caught about 3-4 more fish to my none. But fortunately for me the tide did change. I went off to another part of the lake and into the weeds and hooked the biggest largemouth bass I had ever caught. He was wrapped up in the weeds pretty well, so I didn’t get too much of a fight. When I landed the fish we removed a #1 hook he was passing, this is a fish that got away from another angler! Jake said that the hook was from an ice fishing line based on the line and the hook. We snapped a few photos and then released the fish.
So what is the point to this long winded story? We hired local knowledge and experience. We hired a professional. We saved a ton of time. We made some great memories and we have the proof. The same can be true in navigating the internet for drug addiction treatment internet leads and admissions. Find an internet marketing consultant or an ad agency that is having results in this addiction treatment field specifically, it should improve your odds.
I think you will find the results that you are looking for and save the time from testing a bunch of stuff that may or may not work. The same can be said for the addict looking for treatment, i.e. if they are a chronic relapse person then they really need to seek out the best center(s) that specialize in relapsing, in other words hire professionals with knowledge and experience and the odds are that your results will be positive ones quickly.
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There are some parallels in addiction treatment recovery and in internet marketing in the addiction treatment space. When an addict or a drug abuser enters treatment for let’s say 90 days for the first time they are provided with information, knowledge and tools on how to cope with addiction. Upon the completion of addiction treatment they are clean and sober if their treatment has been a success.
Once they begin to resume their life they have to do so without drinking or drugs. This takes work as we all know, whether it be going to meetings, changing people, places, things, etc. learning and doing self study to be able to capture the triggers and so that the mechanism is not looking for a drink or a drug, when they feel like it, it is a choice to “do the right thing” instead.
In marketing your business there are similarities. One of the services I provide to my clients is custom web site design and development. (I’ve probably built or managed over 300+ web sites over the years and I see recurring client patterns). Once we build a site and it typically takes about a month or two we then find ways to tell people about it. We drive traffic to the web site, we use Google Adwords, we deploy SEO techniques (this takes time i.e. 6 -12 months to see results that can make a difference) we buy banners, we take out ads on the radio, billboards, direct mail, social media, etc. and much more.
This tends to do well for the first couple of months, then we start to see the results from the different forms of media we drive to the web site. Some of the media does better than others. I’m partial to SEO since I feel it offers the most bang for your buck and you can easily measure it, however there is also a downside to SEO, it requires work, just like drug addiction treatment after one has completed the 90 day program. Think about building a web site and driving traffic as a “90 program for addiction treatment marketing” for a second, think about the parallel to a 90 drug addiction treatment program.
If you stop “doing the work” after the 90 day programs in each case what happens? The addict tends to lean towards relapse and the treatment center web site languishes and traffic falls off and the phone calls don’t come in as frequently.
So if we were going to pursue a long term SEO strategy since we feel it gives us the most bang for our buck there are two things that we must do:
1) We must continually add great content to our site
2) We must continually add great incoming links to our site
OK, now that we know this, just like a person in recovery knows they must take it one day at a time we have to execute SEO and marketing strategies every day. Same goes true for the drug addiction treatment marketing for the treatment center, if they want to really succeed on this game they don’t have to take it one day at a time, but they have to add content and incoming links basically every day. He or she who continually adds new incoming links and posts new articles on their web site tend to rank the highest in the Google search results pages. (There are other factors involved but this is often the case in my experience).
So the point of this article is only one simple point, don’t stop doing the marketing work and you will begin to see the results on a daily basis.
Don’t miss any of my future articles! Subscribe to this blog by RSS or by e-mail. Let’s also get acquainted on my About and Contact pages.Marketing Psychology 101 – Pain of Discipline or the Pain of Regret?
This principle could be applied in almost anything in life. The pain of getting an education early in life or the regret later in life of not getting an education, the pain of staying clean and sober or the regret of being addicted or in our case the pain of addiction treatment marketing the regret of having to “double down” on a marketing effort to fill the beds back up.
When you were in high school or college did you ever wait until the last minute to study for the exam? I know I did many times. The pain of discipline of studying a few weeks in advance for the exam was too much to bear, so what did we do? We waited until the night before, talk about the pain of regret! I was the classic student of using this failed strategy year in and year out.
We are now in the 2010 summer and the “party” is on, (addicts are using) meaning treatment center web traffic slows down as it does in December, I know this because I review scores of industry web site analytics every day. While I was at the NAATP annual conference and the West Coast Symposium a couple of months ago business was fairly brisk for many treatment centers even in a very tough economy and this was great to see.
I had several conversations with clients and recommend to them to continue their marketing (pain of discipline) during the flush times to keep the pipeline full. (Better yet create a waiting list). Now, two months later I’m getting stressed clients looking for leads to fill their beds, in some cases it is pure panic. When the beds are empty it becomes even more uncomfortable to spend the money to develop the inquiries that was when thing were flush. This becomes a classic case of pain of regret. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.
So instead of waiting until you have beds to fill to do something it is much more effective to put a plan in place and execute on it on a monthly basis. At least 10-20% of your annual revenue MUST go into marketing, online and offline.
For the Pain of Regret Folks – Fastest Immediate Results in Addiction Marketing
Here is the recipe of getting inquiries into beds immediately.
This is might be a little uncomfortable:
Step # 1 Crack open the wallet
Step # 2 Prepare your admissions staff for “incoming”
Step # 3 Set up Google PPC and run ads on Google Adwords (You want traffic, Google has it but it ain’t cheap and it requires professional skills to get it right, while you can get the traffic immediately sometimes it takes months to fine tune PPC campaigns)
Step # 4 Send out an e-mail to your list (if you don’t have a list talk to Josie Ramirez-Herndon of Recovery View who seems to have the addiction treatment’s largest e-mail list of well over 100,000 names) one of the most important marketing concepts you can do is build a list of prospective clients as well as past alumni and target mailings to each. (More on that in another blog post).
Step #5 Get a featured listing on 11,000 + pages of TreatmentCenters .Net and About Drug Rehab (These are addiction treatment pages that are the most relevant to your business)
Step # 6 Buy banner ads on Sober Recovery (probably the most heavily trafficked site in addiction treatment)
Step # 7 Buy Traffic on Google’s Content Network (You can see an example of this on the Google Ads on Treatment Centers.Net .
Step # 8 Call people in your rolodex
Step # 9 Write for Addiction Treatment Publications like http://www.behavioralhealthcentral.com/ and Recovery View to boost your visibility among professionals for possible referrals
There are several more ways to market immediately however these are the first few that come to mind and you can get some immediate results/inquiries over the next 24-72 hours.
In a perfect world we would like a steady flow of clients coming into the treatment center and better yet a waiting list. The way to do this is to build a strong foundation first. I talk about a lot of these techniques in my blog on click the link below in my bio. If you are still stuck in generating leads give me a call and we can come up with ideas together that might fit for your situation. So, I guess the pain of marketing discipline is what needs to be considered so that we have the steady results. Another way to look at it is the more people we can assist in recovery the more people we are actually helping and making the world a better place as well and helping our businesses grow.
Here is a short video from a regular automobile professional guy, Jim Kristoff talking about the Pain of Discipline and the Pain of Regret. A quote from the infamous Jim Rohn, “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.”
Don’t miss any of my future articles! Subscribe to this blog by RSS or by e-mail. Let’s also get acquainted on my About and Contact pages.My Bad Experience in Marketing – Hire Professionals
In addiction treatment marketing it is all about testing. Do what works and do more of it, and do it better than you have before. If it does not work, do less of it or cut it all together, or make some major changes so you can test and track it. The name of the marketing game is testing and tracking. If you aren’t able to measure what you are doing, get help fast, really fast.
Over the years we all have probably had a few bad experiences in marketing. I’ve got a story that is about 20 years old so I feel OK about publishing it now. When I was a print broker (I bought and sold large printing contracts in my own company, Peake Graphics, Inc.) I had several large clients one of which was a large pharmaceutical client, household name. They gave me an order of 72 Million coupons to print for them, or 36 million each of 2 versions.
The client and I flew out to the Midwest printing plant and did the press check which was standard operating procedure. I “managed the client” and the printer “managed the press run.” Needless to say this was a lot of paper, more than you can fit into a single 18 wheeler tractor trailer. The client was focused on “print quality” things like color and registration. I was focused on things like getting the client signature and flying back home to New York.
The printer furnished us the “blue line” which is a technical term for “this is what you are going to get before we print it do you want it?” (Once a client sign’s off on this, they own it). Sure thing, the client signed off on it and I was half to way planning my next flight home. The client was so focused on the color (which really didn’t matter because this was nothing but junk mail and not an annual report) he forgot to take a look at the “whole coupon” and actually cut it out of the sheet (and so did I) and was not focused on the “other side of the sheet or the coupon” that he approved the blue line. Long story short, the one version of the 36 Million coupons did not back up correctly the artwork was flopped, hence we created another 36 Million $0.35 coupons unbeknownst to us. But we got the color approved and flew home, meanwhile the presses were running at 1,800 feet per minute. So we had 108 Million coupons being run instead of 72 Million.
For me as the print broker I had only run about 100 jobs before this so I was not the most experienced, but I had all the right intentions, get the client to sign and I was going to see a pay day.
Back in New York, I got the call the next day. “Jim, are the presses still running!?” Yes they were, 24/7 these big web presses never stop unless there is a web break, many of the plants I ran in were 365 day per year shops, forget about seeing your family on Christmas Day. He shouted to me “stop the presses!” (He never used foul language, I definitely would have). I called the plant and told them the problem. But it was too late. 85% of the job was run and in the bindery being cut and ready for shipping to the fulfillment house. Meaning, what the client signed off on was now owned by him. We now have a huge headache on our hands managing the coupon clearing houses in El Paso, Texas some coupons with barcodes and others without and politics of the client and not to mention the $100’s of thousands in dollars lost. (BTW, I still kept the client after this project).
I bet many of us can relate to a similar SNAFU probably just not to the same magnitude, please share some of your own stories in the comments below. In 2006 as I was building my own internet publishing business called My Success Gateway I made many similar mistakes but this time as the client. I wanted PPC for my web products; I wanted SEO traffic for my web site, etc. I hired 3 firms and each time it was a total disaster, I mean financial disaster. I’ve made all of the mistakes that I still see clients making every day, I’ve been there and done that and watched Google vacuum out as much as $4,000 in one day on a single PPC campaign which netted me nothing but a goose egg. The numbers actually get worse but I really don’t feel like going there, I think I’ve made the point.
The Secret of Letting Go
I had to let go of the past. Do you see any parallels here to drug addiction treatment? (Guy Finley, my mentor wrote a book called “The Secret of Letting Go” a fantastic read). I finally figured out that if I was going to hire someone I was going to have to know what the heck I was doing and know what were the right questions to ask. I had to learn this business for survival, because I was not about to enter the oil business, as I had an opportunity to do so and live the rest of my adult life on the road. One of the things I realized was, many of the vendors I found didn’t know what they were doing, however they believed that they did now what they were doing. So they weren’t really trying to dupe me, they were just as clueless as I was which was a really bad combination.
I’m an experiential learner so sitting in a classroom was not going to do it for me. I had to learn from people who actually knew how to do SEO. I stopped doing PPC because it was just too tedious and I had a couple of friends who were masters at it and I’d just use them because for their monthly fee to manage the campaigns it was much safer and cheaper. My point here is I took the time to learn SEO and to be totally honest it is not that difficult. I can teach someone the full basics of SEO in an afternoon.
So in my Internet Journey I’ve had to really learn how to master Internet Marketing, I have spent a lot of time and worked with the very best to master my craft. As a client, I had to learn it or else I was screwed. I realized this as a consultant. My clients must be coachable and trainable and learn how to do this as well, if they are going to get the optimal results. My whole premise is that I must be able to “teach” my clients to fish for themselves. If I do my job right they will become better at this than I and hopefully refer a few new clients along the way.
Do Your Homework and Hire Professionals
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On the flip side there are just some either lazy or unscrupulous folks out there who are looking to make a fast buck. I found a company the other day that was marketing themselves as a “Google Certified Company.” I asked my friends at Google, “is there such a thing?” Answer, NOPE. |
They can rest assured they might contacted by Google about this “certified company” practice because there is no such certification, usually it is a death sentence in Internet Speak. I can also tell you that every day I am still learning, no one knows it all. What I can tell you is that if I don’t have an answer for it I probably know where to go get the answer, we all have that ability.
So where do we go from here? We chalk up all of our bad experiences to our “informal education.” Probably more expensive than a Harvard Education, but hey, at least we now know what NOT to do. Here is a good question to ask your internet marketing vendors if you are seeking to grow your business. “How many leads in the drug addiction treatment space did you generate last month?” Ask to see some of them. If you like their answers hire them, if not keep searching for the right folks otherwise you will be paying for their education and yours. If they change the subject or go off on another tangent bring them back to this question if you are looking for results, do not let them off the hook.
Finally, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes. “If you think it is expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.” Red Adair
Don’t miss any of my future articles! Subscribe to this blog by RSS or by e-mail. Let’s also get acquainted on my About and Contact pages.Addiction Treatment Referral’s Lead Generation Holy Grail?
Quick, what the hottest form of lead generation in the addiction treatment marketing space? Word of Mouth? Internet? TV? Social Media? E-mail? Pay Per Click Advertising? While I don’t have the exact answers for you and it is different for each treatment center and the one common method I keep hearing over and over again is REFERRALS.
Referrals come in many different forms and sizes. They can be word of mouth and Internet and all of the above, but they are referrals nonetheless. Remember back to your first few dates? The dates that were introductions were probably more successful than the picks up’s at the local watering hole, or for Jim Peake, I even picked up a gal on the New Jersey Turnpike Toll Plaza coming back from a weekend at the beach. (It did not work out for very long, that was 20 years ago). I think that because of the “accountability factor” and referred date tended to be a little more responsible.
And in the drug addiction treatment field it is no different than the dating arena, there are stakes involved, big stakes for both the referrer and the referee. So if the stakes in referrals are high why not learn from someone who wrote the book on it and pick up on the nuances so that we can get better at it? I read John Jantsch Duct Tape Marketing for Small Businesses a few years ago and he recently came out with The Referral Engine, Teaching Your Business to Market Itself.
I decided to investigate the book to see if there might be any possible fits in the treatment center arena and Jantsch did not disappoint. At the same time his advice is also relevant to my own consulting business in the treatment center space.
Referrals are the Life Blood of Treatment Centers
To quote John Jantsch in Chapter 1, “There is a tiny part of the brain, the hypothalamus, that – among other things – helps regulate sexual urges, thirst and hunger, maternal behavior, aggression, pleasure, and, to some degree your propensity to refer. The hypothalamus likes validation – it registers pleasure in doing good and being recognized for it, and it is home to the need to belong to something greater than ourselves. This is the social drive for making referrals.” Does this sound familiar?
In my time in working in the addiction treatment field I have noticed that the referrals practice is alive and well in recovery as it is in addiction. (Remember we all knew who had the good weed?) I am seeing referral everywhere for example; therapists referring to treatment centers, on ground marketers sending in leads to treatment centers, treatment centers referring to other treatment centers, Google referring PPC ads, Directories referring leads etc.
Referral leads tend to be much better qualified than cold leads coming in off Yellow Pages or the Internet or anywhere else for that matter. On a side note, if you take for example a keyword search on the phrase “drug rehab” which is searched on 1,138 times per day and “Georgia drug rehab” which is searched on 42 times per day which one do you think will refer and convert a higher quality Internet lead/person to the treatment center in Georgia? So even internet referral leads have different quality scores and admission rates and so too the warm hand off between individuals.
Referrals as a Form of Survival?
Like the keyword example above the same goes true in all the other facets in marketing to treatment centers. So if not all of these referral sources are created equal would it not make sense to treat them differently so that we can obtain the optimal results from each? That is what this Referral Engine book is all about, putting referral systems in place. It is about taking referrals and systematizing them so that the maximum results are gained. With that said, there are time and money resources that are involved in making these referrals easy for the referrers, the easier they are the more we will get.
Why do we do referrals? What are the referrers looking for? In some cases some people want nothing other than a warm thank you. In other cases they have a strong desire to help people especially the ones with the addiction. They want a sense of community, a sense of belonging. Others want money which opens up an ethical can of worms. “Some people just make referrals because they need to and others refer as a form of survival. “ (Page 4)
What?! Holy Toledo! Referrals as a form of survival? Really? I don’t believe it, or I can’t believe it but I continued to read on. Jantsch does seem to support this pretty well throughout the book. He also says that “we refer to connect with other people and to build our own form of social currency.” That seems pretty straight forward and logical and I can get my head around that.
What systems do “we” have in place to manage addiction treatment referrals?
Jantsch did an informal survey with several thousand small businesses and found that 63.4% of them got their business through referrals! Wow, this number goes back to my instinct in the beginning of the article that referrals were big in the treatment business but this is the small business sector. (Slightly different) I would think that the addiction treatment business the 63.4% number is probably much higher just because of the nature of the business and most of us are small businesses to boot.
What was even a bigger glaring statistic (page 11) that 79.9% of the small businesses “readily admitted they had no system of any kind to generate referrals.” I’ve got to admit, that I too don’t have a “system” either for my consulting business. I don’t get my leads from SEO or the internet; I get them from word of mouth. So I too have warm hand off’s from the referrer to client and myself.
So I too need to take some of John’s advice and put my referral systems in place. While The Referral Engine is not a unique book in its topic, it is up-to-date (2010) and can serve as a perfect blueprint for helping treatment centers manage our referrals and improving the lives of many addicts.
Don’t miss any of my future articles! Subscribe to this blog by RSS or by e-mail. Let’s also get acquainted on my About and Contact pages.Adwords Blame Game
After coming back from the West Coast Symposium and NAATP one of the things that came to light was the blame game. Treatment Centers blaming other treatment centers for their internet practices like buying keywords on their branded names, which is legal according to Google. I can buy a Google Adwords keyphrase that has the name of another treatment center. What I can’t do is use their NAME in my Google Adwords Ad. (In most cases)
So let’s set the record straight. Stop blaming and start learning. I picked two keywords “beachside” and “mountainside” since they are both descriptive and could both appeal to a treatment center customer. When I punch them into Google you will notice Promises.com comes up first on the example below.
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| Why? Because they bought the keyphrase Treatment Center. They did not buy the name Beachside Treatment Center. Notice how Google highlights the two words Treatment Center. If you don’t like this practice call Google and complain to them and stop blaming and accusing. They set the rules, Promises or any other paid Google Adwords treatment center does not. |
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Now if you really want to have some fun type into Google Jo Blow Treatment Center, or better yet Cancer Treatment Center. What do you get? Do you get SOMEONE trying to rippoff their names? Hell no! |
Adding a Treatment Center to a Directory
Here is it is from Matt Cutts of Google. What is the value of adding your site to a directory listing? How to choose a directory to add your listing to.
A couple of directories to consider in the Addiction Treatment Center Space are:
Treatment-Centers.net
About Drug Rehab
Sober Recovery
What is Addiction Recovery? An Unknown Thank You!
This past week I was fortunate enough to attend the West Coast Symposium in Addictive Disorders hosted by C4 and Recovery View. The conference went extremely well in my opinion and it was a huge success for their first symposium on the West Coast with about 75 exhibitors and close to 400 people. This will now be the annual sister symposium to the Cape Cod Symposium.
While I’m not a clinical person or a therapist I thought I would share this little experience with the folks who actually do the real work in drug addiction treatment and recovery. A lot of times one might ask “what is addiction recovery?” Well I think I have a really good example of what addiction recovery is.
While spending my final night at The La Quinta Resort in Palm Springs something interesting happened to me. I was having dinner by myself at the Adobe Grill Mexican Restaurant. There at the bar I had bumped into a couple of guys I also ran into at the pool. We had a good conversation that led into many topics including golf, oil, politics and addiction and the usage here in the USA. These two middle aged men were well educated golfers who came to La Quinta for their annual guys trip (about 80 guys) from all over the USA.
The conversation ended, they walked out, I was finishing up my dinner. The one guy walked back in about 45 seconds later to thank me. (I did not get his name and I will most likely never see him again). I asked him why was he thanking me? He said because I like what you are doing, some people in the addiction recovery business had touched someone in his life that was near and dear to him and helped them successfully recover. He then gave me a heartfelt hug, never met this guy before, don’t know his name but I can tell you for sure that the folks in our business ARE making a big difference in many people’s lives. I happened to be on the receiving end of the hug, but really the big hugs go out to those who are making the real difference, thanks for everything that you do!
Don’t miss any of my future articles! Subscribe to this blog by RSS or by e-mail. Let’s also get acquainted on my About and Contact pages.Drug Addiction Treatment Article Marketing
As with any internet marketing for drug addiction treatment centers, therapists and behavioral health counselors or any other industry, it is all incremental. There is no one silver bullet, except maybe Oprah, and that only lasts a day unless you can find a another way to get some more mileage out of it. So, if there is no one silver bullet, we want to look at several methods in getting qualified traffic to our site.
One of the most cost effective ways to do this is with Article Marketing. Article Marketing allows you get essentially “free” targeted traffic to your web site by writing articles and uploading them to article directories.
The article directories serve as a couple of different functions:
1) Distribution/Syndication: Many article directories rank well and since they have search engine visibility it is very possible your article will get the same visibility and therefore end up ranking naturally in Google’s organic results.
a. Anchor Text Links: Article directories allow you to place 1-4 hyperlinks in the articles and the value of these links is what you are receiving for the article directory receiving your free content
2) Sites Seeking Relevant Content: Other webmasters look to article directories for relevant articles to use as content on their own web sites.
a. Other web masters are supposed to give you credit for your article and a link back, but often times this is not the case… if they do it can be very helpful from an SEO standpoint as you will get “free” links.
In order to understand why article marketing is so effective we need to understand a little bit about SEO. What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Using both on and off-page SEO, you can increase your organic placement and therefore traffic volumes from the search engine result pages.
Ideally with more traffic coming into your site the greater chance you have more a significant increase in conversions. The first order of business is becoming more familiar with some of the “on page” items that the search engines care about, such as:
1. Title Tag Usage –This is code and it shows up in the Google Search Results
2. Body Text – Text of the article
3. H1 tags – Headline on the Web page
4. Domain Names – AmericaInRehab.com is a domain name
5. Meta Usage – Title, Description, Keyword, Alt, Image tags etc.
6. etc
These bullets above are all contributing factors for ranking and are being factored by the search engines “on-page.” Since on-page and content are almost exactly the same, what is going to be the deciding factor for the search engines to rank one listing over the other? What drives organic web site rank in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages)? Google is looking at who is the most referenced, and who has the most incoming links, particularly via relevant content. Writing great articles and content can attract more people who in turn may naturally link to you. Once a site achieves more inbound links, it will naturally get pushed up the Google search ranks. But where? The site who has the most links and highest quality links wins.
Let’s take a look at this in more detail. SEO has to be structured around keywords, i.e. keyword specific links. But Just having links is not enough. Google also looks at the following attributes in a sites link portfolio:
1. Link popularity (The popularity of the hosting site)
2. Link age (Links age with time, older is better as it shows more trust)
3. Link Topic i.e. Article Marketing Drug Addiction Treatment (Relevancy has a lot of weight)
4. Link Authority (Is the hosting site ranking, how many incoming links do they have, etc)
5. Link Reputation (Is the hosting site trusted in Google)
6. Link Growth Rates (You want a natural trend for quicker trust)
7. Linking with a community on niche (this is absolutely critical)
8. Link Anchor Text – Keyword specific (See below for the code example and an actual clickable link)
Internet Marketing Consultant (This would be considered an example as clickable anchor text/link text)
Google looks at these links and how the hosting sites are looking at you. It`s who has the most anchor text keywords and the absolute best incoming links that stands the best chance to rank for those keywords. If you want to Rank for “Pet Friendly Women Only Drug Addiction Treatment in Florida” you will have a much easier time of it than if you are trying to rank for “Drug Rehab in Florida”.
What topics to write about in Drug Addiction Treatment?
One way to really get to the customer answers is to record your admissions phone calls. You will begin to see a pattern of similar questions being asked by clients before they even consider entering a treatment center. Chose a popular question as the topic of an article. Make sure you really are as thorough as possible in answering ALL of their questions surrounding this one particular topic when writing your piece . For example, if you chose “What is your aftercare program like after I leave the treatment center?” What you need to do is twist that question into a generic topic for an article like: “What are the best drug addiction treatment center aftercare programs like?” Remember you are NOT advertising your treatment center in article marketing you are only providing information and a reference source.
Look closely at the leaders in your niche, visit their websites and Twitter profiles. Find out what people are asking them. You will begin to see patterns. Make sure that you are covering some of those same topics and do it more thoroughly. It makes sense you will be viewed more of as an authority and the expert the more you write.
Give it all away!
Yes, give the readers your absolute best information. You can’t give away a lifetime of professional work in 1 article or 100 articles. Instead, if you do give the user your best information you might be perceived as the industry expert since many others are just giving away superfluous and redundant generic information.
Syndication of Drug Addiction Treatment Article’s
Not only is using article marketing directories a great place to distribute your information, also try the following… Connect with aggregators like FriendFeed.com and Ping.fm to distribute your content to many of the social media sites all simultaneously. This saves a lot of time in manual distribution. You can also use article syndication tools, like iSnare.com.
Google doesn’t actually tell us, but many authority SEO`s think Google`s algorithm determines organic placement by 20-30% on-page factors (metas, content, etc) and 70-80% off page factors (links!)…meaning: LINKS MATTER MORE! Your links will determine how successful your rankings are.
In order to get your articles distributed, article marketing directories are the best place to start. A site like Ezine Articles gets some 15 Million readers per month. Just make sure that if you are using article directories (especially if you are manually submitting the content) that they are passing Page Rank. Don`t know how to check? Just use the list below and add at least 1 article to 4 or 5 of the article directories every week, if possible.
Start writing for other Web sites and Blogs
Writing for the article directories is one way to get out there. However, there are many other ways to get your messages out there. I would focus on the drug treatment industry publishers in order to get relevant, powerful backlinks from trusted web sites. Take, for instance, this article on Behavioral Health Central. By writing here on BHC, this article not only winds up in the Google news, it also gets picked up by other web sites and repurposed. You can also write for other drug addiction treatment topics on sites like Treatment-Centers.net, RecoveryView.com and many others. Just contact the publisher, learn about their guidelines and see if your expertise is required.
Show me the money! Or where’s the beef?!
The beef is in the links of the articles. So what is the best way to go about getting these inbound links to your site? Just building content is not enough… it is a failed strategy.
Reciprocal links are not good enough and actually don`t hold much weight unless they are in your own niche. So if you have a drug addiction treatment center and you have incoming reciprocal links with a rental car company, for example, Google does not care too much about that link(s).
Here are a few ways to get incoming links:
1. Make sales calls to get links
2. Write for other publishers
3. Press releases
4. Paid links and advertisements
5. Blog commenting “with follow links”
6. Blog writing
7. Use Authority Directory submissions listings
a. Treatment-centers.net (industry relevancy first)
b. Business.com
c. Yahoo.com
d. samhsa.gov
e. Best of the web
8. Q&A sites, like Yahoo Answers
9. Social media sites, like LinkedIn, Twitter etc.
Drug Addiction Treatment Article Components
1. Title should include your keyphrase
2. Body 400- 600 words max
3. Lots of easy reading. Allow the user to skip skim and scan.
4. Keyword focus and density
5. Author box, with links coming back to your site. Many times you can prepare multiple author profiles.
Hand submit to the article directories and remember, more is not always better. You want sites that are both SEO friendly (for the search engine value)and that also achieve high traffic volumes (for potential direct clicks). Your site has a set link build rate according to Google. They know if you got 2 links per week for the last year. To make your efforts appear natural, you want to vary your anchor text and your destination pages. You don`t want to always link to the home page. This looks unnatural. Do not over optimize one keyword or one page. Products like SEO Elite will help you with back link anchor text.
As far as we know in the SEO space, duplicate content filters do not exist for articles. Competition is what separates the wheat from the chafe. While several sites might republish the same article, Google will analyze which is the best optimized page and which is the best hosting site. Google will then remove the article on lower valued site(s) from their index.
A short list of benefits with article marketing
Keep a daily look out in your Google Analytics of where your referral sites are coming in from. You should begin to see some patterns. You can even have these reports automated to you and sent in an e-mail(Google alerts). With very little effort, you can get some serious benefits from article marketing.
1) Articles get your name and business “syndication”
2) Articles run in the background and work for you while you are sleeping
3) Articles do not require ongoing administration
4) Article marketing is scalable
5) Article marketing is trackable
6) Article marketing is not advertising, it is information distribution
7) ***You can embed up to as many as 1-4 links per article for links back to your web site(s)
In summary, if you aren‘t doing article marketing right now, you need to be. It should be a key component of your off-page SEO strategy to help generate organic traffic to your website. You can either do it yourself by following some of the guidelines above, or hire an Internet Marketing Consultant to do this for you. You might want to consider drug addiction treatment article marketing as 10-25% of your SEO strategy….because it works!
Social Media and Drug Addiction Treatment – Professionals & Addicts
Since the advent of social media (as we know it today) which began probably back in 1997 with the online web event grandmaster chess player Garry Kasparov vs. IBM’s Deep Blue Super Computer (yes we did have live chat and bulletin boards back in those days) however it has not been until the past 3-4 years has it become a daily “thing” and almost a regular part of our lives. I do think that we are all spending more time online instead of in front of the TV, which is probably a really good thing.
Social media is *free* and it sure seems like the masses of eyeballs are there and it probably should not be ignored. If you are a CEO, executive director or a therapist or person of influence you might want to consider sharing your insights and thoughts and connecting with others, social media does a couple of things for you:
1) It shows you are approachable (people do business with people they know like and trust)
2) It can show you as a thought leader
3) It shows some of the folks you are connected to
We are living in a networked economy. It is really easy to track down people and check them out from a due diligence standpoint, both the good stuff and bad stuff (black PR) can come up. So as people and centers refer clients to us they want to be able to connect to us, social media makes this extremely accessible. The downside is that it is time consuming and typically does not pay huge dividends. If there are some addiction treatment professionals getting admissions using social media they are pretty quiet about it and they should keep quiet too. It is like fishing, if you find a good spot you don’t want to get on the radio and tell all the other boats that “THIS IS THE HOT SPOT COME ON OVER!”
So let’s cover some “fishing holes”
There are two kinds of social media fishing holes for drug addiction treatment:
1) Where the professionals hang out
2) Where the addicts hang out
Five places where I know the professionals hang out are:
1) Twitter
2) Linked In
3) Youtube
4) Blogs
5) Facebook
I particularly like Twitter and have set up a few different Twitter Profiles with one of them Impairment dealing only with posts concerning drug addiction treatment and everything related. As far as Twitter is concerned the more influence you wield is often measured by the number of your “followers.” So if you want to find more followers start by following more people. Check out some of the people I’m following and follow them. If you see others that are interesting check out who they are following and follow them. Spend a couple of hours to do this to get started, you will find that people will follow you back especially if you are following like minded folks in the addiction treatment field. Just make sure that your profile links back to your treatment center site or other professional profile.
Linked In
This is undoubtedly the most powerful of professional networks. Start connecting with others, expand your network. You also want to go to the Linked In Groups and type in addiction treatment and join a couple of the popular Linked In groups. Make sure you allow the group to send you updates on a daily basis. You will see others asking questions. Answer some of the questions if you feel qualified to do so, add value….this is “social media.” Also go over to the Answers section of Linked In and find a couple of categories where you have experience and answer some questions, even if it was in a different field from what you are in now. Give back and add value.
YouTube
I love videos and provide online video syndication services as well as video production. But where this can get really interesting is when the users type into Google and type in Drug Addiction Treatment in LA and there is a little video search result on page one of Google Web results. I believe that if a user has a choice between a video and a text link they will pick a video. If you like the video this one or any other you might want to comment on it because it will give you a link to your profile and to your profile will be a link back to your site. Type drug addiction treatment into YouTube and see what comes up, if you like the video “subscribe” to it. YouTube will send you weekly updates of the videos you subscribe to.
Blogs
So what is so “social” in media about blogs? Blogs are great places to hang out. As a matter of fact I read a couple of hundred blogs weekly. I use Google Reader to do this. If you like a blog post on Drug Addiction Treatment or even a article about Drugs and Alcohol (See the NYT they have a section for this) make sure you leave a comment and in your profile make sure you have a link going back to your site! This will connect you to more people, professionals and sometimes addicts. Sometimes those blog links coming back to your site can help boost your SEO rankings provided the web page is important to Google and there is not a “No Follow” tag in the code.
In this recently published article in Adweek, “ViTrue a social media firm has determined that, on average, a fan base (on Facebook) of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.” While in addiction treatment we are not likely to see these kinds of numbers there is always value in reaching potential customers or referral partners. Building lists is one of the single most important disciplines that we all can do. We then need to segment the lists by interests and other attributes to best leverage the relationships. Social Media is a great way to help build your list(s).
Where the Drug Addicted Addicts?
I have found three sites and each has something unique to offer the addicts. Once thing I have noticed is that I do not see the addicts publically portraying themselves as addicts on Twitter or MySpace or Facebook and certainly not Linked In.
1. SoberRecovery.com
2. Heroin-Detox.com
3. Treatment-Centers.net
Sober Recovery.com has some of the most active forums in the drug addiction treatment space. The sheer volume in here is impressive and they have forum topics including Books and Movies to Mental Health to Quitting Smoking. You will find hundreds of thousands of posts here, it does not get more “social” than that.
Heroin-Detox.com is a much smaller community however they are extremely focused. In reading a few of their posts in this forum I find them to be better written than most. So here is a great example of heroin and social media and addicts helping each other in their journey.
Treatment-Centers.Net probably has the best social media component of all of the sites I visited. Not only do they have forums and blogs they have real time chat rooms enabled as well as a directory where addicts and families and participate in commenting on their experiences with the particular addiction treatment facilities. You can also upload and “Tag” your videos on this site which is a huge advantage. The value of adding your videos here is that the potential for them to “rank” is very good especially if you tag them correctly. There is a lot of potential here to become a Facebook of social media for addicts.
In the final analysis I still would not put a lot of resources towards social media just yet but I would not ignore it either. Figure out a way to be engaged and stay engaged and it should pay dividends for you in the long run. Probably the best advice I can provide is to repurpose any and all of your content into the social media and blogosphere space it can only help you distribute your message and brand. The next big thing coming down the pike is social media combined with mobile, as a matter of fact it is already here.
If you want more detailed information on Social Media I would download the recent 2010 Social Media Industry Report from the Social Media Examiner. While many of the respondents in the report said that they got more eyeballs using social media I can tell you that many of the search engines love the social media sites too. Search engines like to see incoming links to your site from YouTube videos and other social media sites like blogs, this can add SEO link juice to your site. Typically the more comments on a blog page and on a video tend to add more “link value.” The reverse is true as well. The more incoming links you have going to your YouTube Videos and blog posts tend to rank in the search results pages. Many people are solely focused on ranking their web site(s) but you might also want to look at optimizing your videos and blogs as well.
Jim Peake is an internet marketing consultant with special focus on the behavioral health and addiction treatment industry. He helps treatment centers improve their web presence and in lead generation online as well as offline. He uses advanced SEO and PPC direct response advertising for addiction treatment search engine marketing.
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