I have been writing everything I know about creating websites. I think it is the one most important tool to having a successful massage business. A website for your massage business is the most efficient targeted marketing tool you will ever need. It takes a lot to really understand websites and get them to get the results that you want -a steady stream of clients (no matter what the economy is doing) But it is worth the time and effort. For most massage therapists who hate to sell it is an ideal way to connect with clients without having to do much of anything really – just talk to the client when they call.
So from figuring out your keywords, choosing your ideal domain name and learning how to write content for your massage website that builds trust with potential readers – the 1 most important page on your website is your xml sitemap. Hugh? Yes you probably thought I was going to say your sales page or your services page or the 30 different articles that you have written and the many articles that you will continue to write. Or if you have hired a designer or one of the many website hosting systems geared directly towards massage therapists and are still wondering why you aren’t getting 3-5 clients a week and also having your website bring in additional income for you while you do massage.
It is most likely that you don’t have an xml sitemap. To tell you the truth I don’t even know exactly what it is. As far as I know it is a specially coded webpage that is a collection of all of the pages on your website but with the most recent pages that you created somehow marked as new content. The xml sitemap is a page that readers don’t see but the Search engines do.
When you are first starting out you need to submit your xml site map to search engines and verify your site. Doing this will also protect you if your site gets highjacked (and it will if you are using a regular hosting service).
If you don’t have an xml sitemap on your website you can create one using one of the free xml sitemap creators such as the one from www.auditmypc.com Once you get it made then you just upload it to your website. It is also known as the feed for your website. People can follow your feed (like on this blog and others) by subscribing to your feed which allows people to see your latest posts or pages. They can choose to read it or not which gives them the power of the delete button.
Everytime you change a page or add a page you need to update your xml site map by going through the whole process again.
Or if you are using Site Build it! you don’t have to do anything. An xml sitemap is built into the website. You can see it in action on my other site at www.massage-career-guides.com If you look at that link it won’t really make any sense.
What I can tell you is that this is the driving force of your website. All of the pages of your site are useless if they don’t get found by the search engines. This little tool keeps the search engines informed of your site. While it doesn’t guarantee that you will get found or listed where you want to (on the first position on the first page of Google) it does increase your chances significantly.
So if you aren’t using the xml sitemap protocol you can today when you start your Site Build it! website.
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I would love it if you could look at my website and give me feedback (anyone and everyone) I have found that most all of my clients have come from word of mouth. I have had exactly 3 clients from the hundreds of dollars I spent on advertising. I wanted to build a website that would promote massage therapists in a word of mouth fashion of course it would be free to therapists and like everyone else I would like to support it with ads. So many of you sound like you have great ideas and I would love to hear them. All comments welcome.
Have a wonderful day
Joan
Advertising doesn’t work as you just found out the hard way. If you are just advertising to hundreds and thousands of people without a target market or niche in mind it is usually a waste. You need to target people who want and need massage. You need a website that gets found for ‘massage, your city’ and half your marketing problem is over.
Your website is sort of a good idea for massage therapists but you need to really work to get more massage therapists to sign up for it and also get people who are looking for a massage to it. You should have a link system set up for massage therapists who do sign up to put it on their website so their clients can print out the coupons. A good way to do that is to start writing about massage for the search engines – benefits of massage, massage and research, massage and various conditions and as much as you can or get people to write for you. Use things like Facebook to connect to massage therapists and promote your site.
You won’t really want to put ads on this site because it will take visitors away from your site especially since you don’t have much content. Adsense works best on a content drive site.
You might really want to look at Site Build it! for both your clinic and free massage coupon site.
Julie
Is this the Site Build It by Ken Evoy?
Yes it is – the one and only.
Julie
Having built a website that has a number 2 google ranking for our geographic location, I can share that the best way to get results is to target customers looking in your area for services. We use keyrds that include our suburb, that way our paid clicks are geniunely interested in services at our location.
It takes a lot of patience to build a website and have it generate revenue for you. I started mine 3 years ago, and it wasn’t until this year that it started helping my business grow. My private sales grew 600% this year.
It takes time, patience, effort and a genuine interest in developing real content. But other than that, it takes some tech savvy like you are saying. It seems that every week or month I am learning something more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Sitemaps, keyword tagging, choosing good title/description keywords, linking, backward linking, alt text, etc…. it goes on and on. If you enjoy the teckie stuff like me, it can be a really interesting learning experience.
If you use Site Build it! you don’t really have to know any of the techie stuff. They have a lot that is done for you and they teach you everything you need to know. They walk you through building the metatags and even analyze your pages for you and tell you what you need to do to improve them and get better results. You can have a site up and running and getting results within a month or two depending on how much you work on it and how many sites there are for massage therapists in your area. It is the best way of marketing your massage business because it gets highly targeted people who are already looking for massage.
You would also get better results with a better domain. Your domain should be what you do and where you do it – massage, your city or some variation of that. What keywords would someone be using to fine you? That is what your domain name should be. It is all explained when you use SBI!
Julie