Web Site Tips

Web Site Design and Marketing Tips

A website is the best way to attract new clients to your business. Now the power of using SiteBuildIt!, google adsense program and google adwords, there is no way you can not succeed. Learn how I did it with my websites.

A website is another tool you can use to educate your clients and assist them in their healing process. Here are some things you may want to include on your site.

KISS - Yes Keep it Simple!   People are usually looking for information and with limited time in our hectic lives, most people don't have the patience for a flash movie of a massage.

Build Quality Content - This is the basis of the Sitebuildit! Motto. Building content to attract clients is the key to building traffic, trust and clients! Learn to write for the web and other marketing materials with the free Netwriting Masters Course and the Service Sellers Masters Course

Sitebuildit! comes with an amazing newsletter set up. It also tracks the number of newsletters that are sent successfully and the number of newsletters that are actually read!! No other hosting site has that!

A FAQ page- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about your massage practice and treatments. People want to know what is going to happen to them. Do they have to take all their clothes off? What can they expect from a treatment, How long will a treatment take? What will happen after a session? I had a guy come in once who had never had a massage. His girlfriend had given him a gift certificate. He brought a book with him because he thought he would have time to read it during the session.

What kind of sessions do you specialize in? Injury, relaxation, sports? People don't realize everything that massage can be used for. Write about how massage can be applied to the many situations to educate your clients.
Expand on the how and why massage works in these different applications - not just the standard benefits list that massage school teaches. Writing a website filled with great content is essential in building a successful practice.

You can sell gift certificates through the website and take appointments. Put your website address on all promotional material: business cards, stationery, flyers and brochures. You can make flyers or brochures directed toward a certain group as in business people under stress or athletes and refer them to the website for more information.

Find affiliate (associate) programs that may further support your work such as www.amazon.com -selling books and music. There may be other massage tools, lotions, oils, herbs etc. that may be appropriate to your practice. Affiliate programs give you a percentage of the sale when you refer the person to their site.

Get specific about what bodywork/massage can do for the client. Just listing the benefits such as "increases circulation" don't mean much to most people. You have to let the client know why they would want to increase their circulation. Tell them how it can help their carpal tunnel, plantar fasciaitis or thoracic outlet syndrome.

Make a list of the different types of bodywork/massage to keep clients informed.

List your network of practitioners that you recommend for other treatments: Acupuncturists, Naturopaths, other therapists.

Put your forms on the website that you use in business. Intake forms, referral forms etc. can be downloaded prior to the appointment and filled out to save time.

Educate you clients through your website. Put pictures or diagrams of your recommended stretches that they can download and put as their wallpaper on their desktop.

List your credentials and classes that you have taken along with other facts about yourself. How long have you been in business? How long have you been practicing certain techniques?

Submitting your site to search engines is also necessary. Some search engines are charging to be listed in their directories. www.searchenginewatch.com has a list of search engine and how they work. You need to submit every month or so and check to see if you can find your site. This is not a guaranteed way to find practitioners. It is actually more like a finding a needle in the haystack, but a few may find their way to you through search engines. With SBI, you don't have to worry about any of this. They do all of the work for you and let you know what other things you can do.

Some things not to do on a website:

Don't Play Music- This is one of my peeves. I absolutely resent people who put music playing on the homepage of their website and it is further annoying if they don't have a control switch so I can turn it off immediately. I am usually looking for information and have 10 or more windows open to let pages download. If I get to a page with music playing, I immediately start clicking to close pages and get back to my peace and quiet. (if people want to hear music they can turn the radio on)

Don't use flash or animated objects or cartoons. Sure it's neat that we can do such things with computers. It is really a waste of bandwidth and won't make the difference in getting a client.

Be selective with your link building. Even though having many links is supposedly supposed to help build traffic, I think they should be sites that you know and trust.   If you don't know who they are, what kind of work they are doing or if they are reputable people you may give the impression that you lack integrity. Building traffic can be done in so many other more efficient ways. I have created the ultimate massage link directory to provide a method of linking everyone together.

17. Did you know that:

Websites come with programs that analyze traffic. They can tell what country people are from, what browser they are using, what pages they are viewing, how many people are visiting and when, what IP address they are visiting from and much, much more!