So perhaps you’re a dentist who’s recently created a beautiful new web site. What you want to accomplish is a high flow of traffic to your new dental web site of patients within your vicinity who are interested in visiting your office for the dental services you provide, whether those dental services are orthodontics or teeth whitening or some form of cosmetic dentistry to even general dentistry.

Well the sad truth is that, if you don’t have an Internet marketing program for your dental practice, that your site will have minimal to no traffic. In fact, it will serve as nothing more than a reference for people who were already planning to visit you to look up your address and/or phone number so as to coordinate their visit. The time period when you could simply put up a dental web site and expect that to generate traffic is long gone.

There are two kinds of marketing programs for dentists-the effective kind that doesn’t cost much but rewards you with your goal of lots of new patients, and the other kind that costs lots of money and gives you limited to no results from your efforts. In-depth research of Internet marketing for dental practices has taught me the difference between the two, and I would like to tell you about both kinds, including the not-so-effective kind to save you the trouble of repeating the mistakes of others.

Let me start off by discussing things that may work but are extraordinarily time-consuming. Yahoo! Answers is an example of a channel that you can use to build traffic to your site. Yahoo! Answers is a forum that you can get to off of Yahoo.com where people randomly post questions about various topics. You can set yourself up so that you get notifications about people who have dental service-related questions, and once you see these, by email notification you can respond. You’ll quickly be recognized as a leader in that area, and eventually, that has the potential to generate traffic. This unfortunately has the problem of waiting around for other people to write questions that you’re going to answer and also has the drawback of requiring a significant time commitment, so that you respond to questions as soon as they are presented and think about them thoroughly. It’s a time-consuming process which certainly is not the ideal marketing strategy for most dentists.

Another channel which some dentists have used with moderate success is to create a dental blog. With a dental blog, you can make entries regarding the different kinds of experiences you’ve had creating certain dental conditions. Clearly, you want to make these anonymous. However, this also has the major drawback of requiring a significant amount of time, and the problem is is that that time commitment is an ongoing, a longstanding process. That takes time away from your family, and it takes time away from being a dentist which is what you want to focus on when you’re at work. Some dentists go with the channel that doesn’t require a lot of time, and that’s to pay for quick advertising on something like Google AdWords or on the Yahoo! network. That is certainly something that doesn’t require a lot of time, outside of picking the key word, such as dentist or dental, that you want to target for people who are searching online. However, that is an extraordinarily costly way to advertise.

Something you want to accomplish in any Internet marketing program for your dental practice is something that’s low cost. If something winds up costing you $200.00 to $500.00 every month, that adds up to more than $2,000.00 to $5,000.00 a year. The other drawback with using click-through advertising is that you can have competitors click on your ads and wind up costing you significant amounts of money. Also, when people come and click on your ads, there’s no guarantee they’re going to wind up in your office. The actual conversion rate for click-through ads for many different services is less than one to two percent. Can you imagine paying $5.00 for a click-through, and then of those people that are clicking the actual cost of someone who walks through your door is more than $200.00? You barely break even on it.

There is one channel that has the potential to be tremendously successful and is not very time-consuming. Dentists are just starting to begin to use this channel, and I’ve spoken with several who use patient reviews as a mechanism to leverage their practice and increase the number of patients they have. What most of these dentists do is ask patients who are clearly impressed with the practice to go to some third-party web site, such as Citysearch or Yelp, and write a review about the practice there. This certainly is a good channel.

Search engines index whatever information is available, be it a stellar review or a really bad one. The obvious best scenario here would be to have only favorable information available for the search engines to pull from. If a search turns up information on a third party site like Citisearch the dentist has no control over what reviews have been posted there, nor does that dentist have a way of collecting the reviews himself. This makes the dentist powerless to control his online reputation.

The best way to address this is to have your own review site with your own brand, your own logo, with your own web address. With such a site, you can have patients go there and write reviews. You can collect reviews from virtually every patient who walks through your doors, whether it’s positive or negative. In a matter of no time, you’ll be able to collect more than 20 to 30 reviews, and the best thing about having your own review site is you control what gets published onto the Internet and pushed out to search engines like Google and Yahoo! That means that you will have the most favorable reviews in your community because you have complete control over what you publish online. What this ultimately translates into is a highly leveraged way to do Internet marketing which requires hardly any of your time and is extraordinarily cost effective. Essentially, what you’re doing is having your happy patients do all the work of typing in content for the promotion of your practice, and with one simple click of a button, you decide what gets pushed out on the Internet.