Dentist to Dentist Marketing - Part II
from the original thread -- "
This one is where I'm having the most trouble with mailing lists and integrating my websites and I don't know what to do. Here's where I am (and this is why I asked for help in the first place):
1. Short Hills Design, LLC --- www.shorthillsdesign.com (SHD for short). This is my company site for web development, seo and consulting. Only in the last year did it hit me to market to dentists and I have a few dental clients -- these have all been word of mouth or "connections" which is fine with me. I don't compete on price and I'm not into "gimmicky" sales. My fees are what they are and that's it. So I'd rather have 10-20 more really good, high end clients that pay than 50 clients who haggle about price and make me nuts.
Note have a small clientele and I don't do email marketing with them. I'm close enough to each client that I don't need to send them blasts or special offers. They generally want to be left alone (IMHO) and it's worked fine as a business model for me. My current clients call me when they have more projects and it's been fine so far. So SHD doesn't have a mailing list.
2. HelpSpa.com --- www.helpspa.com -- (THS for short) this is my technology blog that started off as an offshoot of Short Hills Design, where I could answer the questions that people asked me every day over and over again. As I added more articles, the site started to gain some small attention. I'm not sure why but the daily visitors was hovering at 40-50/day, and now it's up to 90-100. Not sure why but I'm not complaining. HelpSpa.com (THS) does have a mailing list I just started. Using advice here, I wrote a little eBook about "Organzing your Digital Photography Collection" and basically I'm using the "signup for the mailing list and get the super-awesome eBook for free" model. So far I've had only a few signups so it's been disappointing -- it's good little writeup (thank you very much) so I thought I'd get more signups than I did. And that's why I didn't make the SEO guide require a signup first. Until I can prove to myself that THS can have success wth that model, I don't want to push away any very valuable dental clients by making them signup.
Add the fact that I am a full-time dentist and I have SHD, I was even considering getting a partner for THS or getting someone to manage it for me -- or even offloading it somehow. I don't know if there's any potential with that site but I just haven't had the real time to focus on it. So it's really become an experimental hobby site for me.
The gist of this:
So THS has a mailing list and SHD doesn't and I don't know how to/if I should integrate them:
1. If I required that the dentists (or anyone) to signup for the mailing list to get to the SEO guide/eBook, they'd be signing up for the THS mailing list and possibly getting confused about why there are getting the THS mailer and not SHD -- even though I'm clear that THS is the "official blog of SHD".
2. Duplicate content. I write for THS because I enjoy it. If I make a few bucks -- fine. But dentists who signup for my SEO book don't want to be burdened with my weekly newsletter highlighting my posts about how I found a way to "revert the mySQL admin password back to blank" or "how I forgot and rediscovered the url for new accounts in cPanel". This stuff is exciting to me, but not to busy dentists.
I do write some digital photography (just started that) and SEO and web articles that WOULD be of service and interest to dentists, but if I started a separate SHD blog or even a separate list, there'd be a ton of overlap.
For example, the "Why you need SEO" article is tailored for the "SEO" section of THS. But it's also a good article for dentists to see. I really thought that having THS as a blog for SHD would be great to keep everything clean, but now I'm afraid that it's going to be confusing for people. So revert to the problem above -- if the dentists get the SEO content in the newsletter, they're also going to get the "I'm a cPanel geek" stuff too.
Hence I decided to give out the SEO book for free. Each client that I get for SEO is a very large ROI for me -- so even if I get a 1% return, I still make out well.
So THAT's why I'm confused, excited and frustrated all at the same time.
You guys on this forum are awesome, and thank you sooo much for continuing to help me out with this.
| Lastly, I would strongly recommend collecting people's names & email addresses before giving out your free report. |
1. Short Hills Design, LLC --- www.shorthillsdesign.com (SHD for short). This is my company site for web development, seo and consulting. Only in the last year did it hit me to market to dentists and I have a few dental clients -- these have all been word of mouth or "connections" which is fine with me. I don't compete on price and I'm not into "gimmicky" sales. My fees are what they are and that's it. So I'd rather have 10-20 more really good, high end clients that pay than 50 clients who haggle about price and make me nuts.
Note have a small clientele and I don't do email marketing with them. I'm close enough to each client that I don't need to send them blasts or special offers. They generally want to be left alone (IMHO) and it's worked fine as a business model for me. My current clients call me when they have more projects and it's been fine so far. So SHD doesn't have a mailing list.
2. HelpSpa.com --- www.helpspa.com -- (THS for short) this is my technology blog that started off as an offshoot of Short Hills Design, where I could answer the questions that people asked me every day over and over again. As I added more articles, the site started to gain some small attention. I'm not sure why but the daily visitors was hovering at 40-50/day, and now it's up to 90-100. Not sure why but I'm not complaining. HelpSpa.com (THS) does have a mailing list I just started. Using advice here, I wrote a little eBook about "Organzing your Digital Photography Collection" and basically I'm using the "signup for the mailing list and get the super-awesome eBook for free" model. So far I've had only a few signups so it's been disappointing -- it's good little writeup (thank you very much) so I thought I'd get more signups than I did. And that's why I didn't make the SEO guide require a signup first. Until I can prove to myself that THS can have success wth that model, I don't want to push away any very valuable dental clients by making them signup.
Add the fact that I am a full-time dentist and I have SHD, I was even considering getting a partner for THS or getting someone to manage it for me -- or even offloading it somehow. I don't know if there's any potential with that site but I just haven't had the real time to focus on it. So it's really become an experimental hobby site for me.
The gist of this:
So THS has a mailing list and SHD doesn't and I don't know how to/if I should integrate them:
1. If I required that the dentists (or anyone) to signup for the mailing list to get to the SEO guide/eBook, they'd be signing up for the THS mailing list and possibly getting confused about why there are getting the THS mailer and not SHD -- even though I'm clear that THS is the "official blog of SHD".
2. Duplicate content. I write for THS because I enjoy it. If I make a few bucks -- fine. But dentists who signup for my SEO book don't want to be burdened with my weekly newsletter highlighting my posts about how I found a way to "revert the mySQL admin password back to blank" or "how I forgot and rediscovered the url for new accounts in cPanel". This stuff is exciting to me, but not to busy dentists.
I do write some digital photography (just started that) and SEO and web articles that WOULD be of service and interest to dentists, but if I started a separate SHD blog or even a separate list, there'd be a ton of overlap.
For example, the "Why you need SEO" article is tailored for the "SEO" section of THS. But it's also a good article for dentists to see. I really thought that having THS as a blog for SHD would be great to keep everything clean, but now I'm afraid that it's going to be confusing for people. So revert to the problem above -- if the dentists get the SEO content in the newsletter, they're also going to get the "I'm a cPanel geek" stuff too.
Hence I decided to give out the SEO book for free. Each client that I get for SEO is a very large ROI for me -- so even if I get a 1% return, I still make out well.
So THAT's why I'm confused, excited and frustrated all at the same time.
You guys on this forum are awesome, and thank you sooo much for continuing to help me out with this.