Tag Archives: Drug Addiction Treatment

Drug Addiction Treatment Article Marketing

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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

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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.

Facebook

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.