I’ll admit, I’ve gotten lucky with my own small business and I’m booked solid with clients and projects. The downside is that I find myself turning down a lot of requests from other small business owners. So, this blog post is for them - for those small business owners, nonprofits and solo healthcare providers who might be able to do some of their own marketing work. Hopefully it’s helpful advice and my own recommendations for tools and tips that I’ve learned throughout the past 15+ years consulting with other small business owners  and nonprofits. 
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Put One Foot in Front of the Other.
In the words of Kris Kringle advising the Warlock, just get started walking forward. Commit to doing one thing to help your business each week or each month - whether it’s writing a blog post (see what I did there), organizing your email contacts, or crafting your own social media posts regularly, you can start the ball rolling on your own marketing.

Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

​SEO is simply the art of improving your rankings with websites like Google. We don’t know the secret recipe to Google’s algorithm but we can play their game and set websites up for success by doing the basics.

Google Ads are somehow still mysterious to many small business owners so I thought it might be useful to give a top level mini-overview via my oh so awesome blog. 

On a very basic level, running ads on Google means that when someone searches for something on the internet, an Ad you create appears. It's noted with the word 'Ad' in front of it and is typically at the top of the page. Ads appear when the keywords we choose match a person's search online. So, if you're a Chiropractor, we add that word (and dozens of others) to a list of words or phrases people might type into Google when looking for a healthcare practice like yours. 

There are many ways to advertise using Google's Ad platform and the search method mentioned above is just one of them. Google also has partnerships with many websites that also show their ads. So, after someone does an online search, these ads will begin to appear on other websites that person/computer visits. A third way that ads are delivered to people is by matching the Advertiser's keywords with a news article or blog post's keywords. So, a person could be reading an article about back pain, for example, and Google would be showing ads for local Chiropractors on that page even though the reader might not have conducted a search yet for one.

Negative Keywords
In addition to creating keywords, I also recommend adding negative keywords. For example, if you're a Psychotherapist, we would add the keyword 'therapist' to your ad campaign. Meanwhile we would also add the word 'massage' as a negative keyword so that anytime a search term includes massage (i.e. massage therapist), the ads would not appear.

​In the world of advertising and marketing, there's one thing I often tell my clients: It's not brain surgery. I'm not saving any lives but I do try to respect my client's budgets. It may look difficult to some, but at the end of the day, your business (especially if you're a health practitioner) is probably way more difficult than mine!
 
That said - online ads aren't easy for everyone. Below is a common mistake in advertising and advice for folks who've tried it or are considering trying online ads.