With all the tech related conferences I’ve been attending (and speaking at) these past few months, I’d begin to think that the smarts and energy of people like Chris Winfield at 10e20.com would begin rubbing off on me.

When your efforts begin manifesting themselves physically it’s a pretty neat feeling. Things begin to feel as if they are following along a well developed plan rather than a mumble jumble of organized chaos.

Thanks to Chris, there will be some upcoming news about this chiropractor, appearing in a print newspaper (and online) in the next week or so.

I’m not yet mentioning the name of the publication, but that shouldn’t be too tough for you to figure out. There is a number of people I hang out with that have been talking a considerable amount about getting press in the media, and they’ve been extremely helpful in assisting me whenever they can.

Just in the past month I’ve gotten ideas from or assistance from Nicole Jordan of the Rubicon Project, Neil Patel of Quick Sprout consulting and branding service, Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com, Elmer Thomas of thinkingserious.com, Brent Csutoras (thanks for the awesome steaks in Long Beach), and a number of others.

It’s great having friends that are so positive in their nature, all openly helping each other to move forward and succeed. Thanks everyone and expect to see a boat load of twitters from me, IMs from me, and e-mails from me, during the next week or two. Going to be a story to promote.

]]> http://blog.planetc1.com/2008/05/09/going-to-be-more-press-in-upcoming-weeks/feed/ http://blog.planetc1.com/2008/05/07/mixed-martial-arts-and-running-5k-events/ http://blog.planetc1.com/2008/05/07/mixed-martial-arts-and-running-5k-events/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 04:37:02 +0000 admin http://blog.planetc1.com/?p=545 by Michael Dorausch, DC

I was doing some preparation on a news article that posted today regarding a Las Vegas 5K running event put on by Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) superstar and five-time UFC Champion Randy Couture. I knew Planet Chiropractic had posted running related articles in the past (not running ones practice) but I hadn’t realized there had been so many.

There is a charity 5K being held in Las Vegas on Saturday, May 17, 2008. The event is intended to raise funds and awareness for US servicemen and women who have received injuries while serving their country. More details are available here… Mixed Martial Arts Champion To Host Las Vegas 5K

On the topic of running, I found previously posted articles related to chiropractic and the Los Angeles marathon, Nike women’s marathon San Francisco, and the 2007 New York City marathon. I also located an earlier post authored by myself with my thoughts on chiropractic care and marathons and found some other related articles.

It’s no secret that I am a big fan of running. Living in Venice beach, I have the freedom to run the sand in Marina del Rey, Venice, and Santa Monica, on a four-day a week schedule. I’ve written about Dolphins in the Marina, GPS fitness trainers (I still use a Garmin), running to reduce writer’s block, and getting blue balls when running on the beach.

I also came across an orthotic foot scanning post involving Adidas locations across the United States. I don’t know if the locations still offer these scans, I was hoping to see one set up in the Las Vegas facility on the strip, but there was not at that location (I was last there in April 2008).

I also found a related post regarding traveling to San Francisco and Oakland for the Nike marathon (and an Oakland Raiders game the next day). I suspect there is even more articles related to running buried in the chiropractic news archives but I was delighted to find those that I did. Here is to hitting the beach and getting some exercise this summer!

Chiropractors… This Post is All About You!

This past weekend I collected more than 100 chiropractic business cards while attending the DCS Jam event in Southern California. Many chiropractors that handed me cards mentioned they had address changes, phone number changes, or other changes, some of which differed from information listed on the Local Chiropractor pages.

It has been a week since the continuing education event and there are currently 3 stacks of business cards from chiropractors (with practices in numerous states) sitting on my desk. Neither my staff or myself have much time set aside to add new business listings and update the information we currently have displayed in chiropractic directory databases. I want this information available to the public as much as you do.

Planet Chiropractic receives e-mails every day from people seeking chiropractors in different parts of the world, and also receive requests by telephone and e-mail, in my LA chiropractic office. I know that hundreds of chiropractors also get requests from existing patients to help find a chiropractor in a specific area. I figured if we’re working together on this, we can get all of those 100 chiropractic locations (and potentially many more) added to the address databases in a shorter duration of time.

It’s real simple to participate. All it will take is for you to add your chiropractic office information to the comments below. You don’t have to create an account. You don’t have the register. All you have to do is add the name of your chiropractic practice, your name, your business address, business telephone, website URL (if you have one), and possibly a brief description about your office (that will be optional).

We will pull the address and phone number information from the comments and have them added to the directory pages (which are receiving a lot of search traffic), which will be easier on my staff than manually adding information from business cards.

You’ll get a link to your web site in the comments section, you’ll get a link to your web site on the directory pages, and your office address and phone number information will be displayed as well. There’s no marketing involved. I’m not going to try and sell you anything. I just figure working as a group we can get a lot more information added (a lot faster) than if the task was left to just myself or my staff. Sound good?

Lets Make This Exciting!

Beginning on June 1, 2008, Planet Chiropractic will feature articles written about local chiropractors from all over the world, with featured offices being selected exclusively from the comments section of this blog post.

That’s right, myself, Planet Chiropractic staff, or hired writers will be contacting chiropractors that participate by adding their information, with questions and interviews about where you practice, how you practice, how long you have been in practice, what you love about being a chiropractor, the people being served in your community, and other information you’d like to share with people seeking chiropractic practitioners.

The plan is to feature a different chiropractor at least one time per week until we’ve gone through the entire list. Our chiropractic news articles are typically read by thousands and they provide an incredible opportunity for chiropractors all over the globe to share their stories about the wonders of chiropractic care.

Think you want to participate? Here is what I ask. Add your office information in the comments below. I’ll be adding my office first to provide an example of how to properly post a comment. If you post comment spam, expect to have your comment deleted and sent into akismet purgatory. One comment per chiropractic practitioner. If there is more than one chiropractor practicing in your office, I’d prefer to have the owner of the practice listed. Associates are welcome to participate as well.

If you are a chiropractic student or the patient, practice member, or client of a chiropractor, you may want to pass this information on to them. I greatly appreciate that and will be seeking out a way to reward you for doing so.

This post will be updated based on questions asked, so that we are providing the most relevant and up-to-date information.

Ready, set, post your comments!

Marketing materials sent to chiropractors by mail, fax, and e-mail continue to show up in my chiropractic office (and thousands of other chiropractic offices across North America). There appears to be a new trend in marketing materials arriving the past two months. Gone are the direct-mail campaigns for nonsurgical spinal decompression with offers to fly myself and my family to Hawaii or Florida to attend a sales presentation.

Now that chiropractors decompression units are appearing for sale on auction web sites and our chiropracticclassifieds pages, it’s becoming clear that those marketing to chiropractic offices have moved on from pushing decompression therapies and are now in the business of selling wellness.

So while various spam e-mails targeted at chiropractors continue to appear in our PC inboxes (woo hoo, the rate is going down) direct-mail pieces seem to predominately be focused on selling chiropractors on wellness based marketing tactics. I came home from BarCamp San Diego today to find a direct mail piece sent from a chiropractic marketing company in Florida that boldly states How to attract more women into your practice!

I did some research online to check what kind of terms were coming up when someone did a search for “wellness” with the image to the left showing the top eight results.

Turns out wellness is a brand of dog and cat food. Good to see people are also searching for “health and wellness” and other wellness related searches.

I wasn’t too impressed by the numbers and it has me thinking that perhaps people are searching for something else besides the general term.

Not to worry though, looks like 2008 is going to be a summer of marketing wellness to chiropractors, just like the summer of 2006 was for marketing spinal depression.

Do you want to put all your chiropractic marketing dollars in the wellness basket (so you can attract more women into your practice)? What about chiropractors that adjust children or focus on pediatrics? Is that wellness? How about those focused on sports performance, is that wellness based or injury based? Then there’s the manipulators, marketing manipulation under anesthesia, is that therapeutics or wellness? One thing is for sure, I’ve received no direct-mail, unsolicited e-mail, or faxes sent to my office, by people marketing the correction of vertebral subluxation as something chiropractors could be doing in their practice.

I’m looking forward to see what direct-mail marketing pieces I receive next, not. Hold the presses, I was about to close this post when I noticed another piece of mail from a different chiropractic marketing company based in Tustin, California. Maybe wellness isn’t the only thing we will be reading about, as the piece of mail talks about a recession in the United States.

Wellness Revolution or 2008 Recession, which topic do you think is going to be focused on more in materials being marketed to chiropractors this summer?

Taking a look at some of my notes here at the end of day one of Barcamp 3 in San Diego. We are in the Microsoft offices in La Jolla and the halls are full of sounds from people Wii bowling and playing Halo on Xbox 360 units. Rather odd being here inside a Microsoft Office with all the news going around tonight regarding Yahoo and the Microsofts backout of purchasing the company.

It’s been quite a day so far. I had the opportunity to speak this morning in the large conference room located on the fourth floor of the building (will have photo updates later in the week). I spoke about Planet Chiropractic and the importance of chiropractic care for people in the tech industry (always evangelizing). I followed that up with a search marketing presentation (mostly sharing how we go about collecting and reporting on news content for the chiropractic industry) and discussed some search optimization techniques. I went off on a brief tangent about Google adsense programs and some other contextual advertising networks.

I had a bit of an embarrassing moment when my Dell XPS m1210 laptop (hard drive running XP) crashed on a blue screen of death in the middle of my presentation. It rebooted rather quickly and fortunately all my tabs were saved in Firefox (I had about 24 tabs open during the presentation).

I wasn’t expecting such a large number of SEO people that are active locally in San Diego. After the presentation was over, I spent the next two hours in a conference room with some of the folks I met, discussing several projects different shops were working on.

Something that was really cool was that a whole bunch of people introduced themselves and talked about their chiropractors. Somebody that goes to Dr. Erik Rosenbergs chiropractic office (San Diego Sport and Spine) could not stop saying good things about him. His office is on Linda Vista Rd (not sure how far it is from the office we’re at in La Jolla). I’ll be visiting to chiropractic offices tomorrow afterward done with the afternoon’s Barcamp festivities.

I plan to have some photos uploaded from this weekend’s events (the Internet access is restricted to port 80). It’s a different experience from Barcamp LA 5 but still lots of fun.

With today being the 2008 Kentucky Derby I thought I’d share some videos of chiropractors adjusting horses.

That may come as a surprise to some but chiropractors in the USA have been providing care to horses, dogs, and other animals for more than 100 years. While the first years of chiropractic were focused on care for humans, the popularity of adjusting animals has continued to grow.

There are continuing education and school programs for chiropractors seeking to provide care to animals, and you are welcome to post any related links (non spam) to the comments on this post. Licensing for providing care to animals varies from state to state with some states requiring joint veterinary licensure of the overseeing of chiropractic care by a licensed veterinarian.

I’ll embed some more horse chiropractic videos as I locate them.

I received a notice today from a corporation listing service that was reminding me to renew my domain name (in this case it was rssware.com - forgot I even owned it).

If you own a domain name you’ve probably received a letter similar to the one I received today. It looks like an invoice but it’s actually a solicitation for domain registrar services. If you take the time to read through the notice, you will see that the very bottom states “This is a solicitation for the order of goods or services, or both, and not a bill, invoice, or statement of account due.”

I wonder how many hundreds (or thousands) don’t realize this is not an invoice and send payment for at least $35. The back of the notice has directions on how to make a payment, and it looks very much like an invoice. There is a section that says Current Payment Details with an annual listing amount of $35. Reading through the entire notice, one can see that there is no “amount due” information listed anywhere. Domain owners are under no obligation to send money to this domain listing service.

I wrote about this same company (or one that appeared similar), back in the summer of 2007, when I received a domain name expiration notice. I mentioned back than that I prefer to use GoDaddy when registering and renewing domain names.

I’ve used Godaddy since weeks after the company launched, and of purchased hundreds of domains through them, and referred thousands of others for their numerous Web services. GoDaddy girl Candice Michelle and her husband are friends of mine, and I like the philosophy of Bob Parsons, the company’s founder.

You can typically registered domains from GoDaddy for under 10 bucks (which is $25 less per year than what was being offered in the mailing I received) and that’s super affordable (unless you have hundreds of thousands of domains and need a bulk solution).

Glad I Received the letter, it reminds me to check up on all my domains registered at GoDaddy, and get them renewed for at least the next year. I typically like to register domains for multiple years, so I’m not having to do renewals each year.

Do some searches online for coupons or discount codes or subscribe to GoDaddy e-mail newsletters and you’ll likely save yourself some bread when purchasing domains and other web site related services.

The search is on for chiropractors across the United States. There are stacks of business cards spread out across my desk. I’ve been taking calls and receiving e-mails from people either seeking out chiropractors or wanting to get chiropractic offices listed on a number of different Web properties owned or managed by Planet Chiropractic. After a long run on the beach in Marina del Rey today, I came home with an idea that will enable hundreds of chiropractors to participate in adding and updating address information on chiropractic pages displaying throughout the Internet. We will have news on that Monday, Cinco de Mayo, 2008.

(photo: chiropractors Michael Dorausch, Dr. Cassell, Carolyn Griffin and Lawrence Clayman)

What’s great about large events like the DCS California Jam is that I get tons of chiropractic business cards and contact information for offices all over the country. There’s always that person that needs a chiropractor nearby, and my office has a ginormous amount of pages to update.

In the SoCal area, I have people actively seeking chiropractors in Artesia, Cerritos, La Palma, Cypress, Stanton, Hawaiian Gardens, Los Alamitos, Lakewood, Bellflower, Signal Hill, Westminster, Garden Grove, Anaheim, Fullerton, Orange, Hacienda Heights, Rosemead, El Segundo, Palos Verdes, and Rolling Hills (and that’s not even the first stack of cards).

I also had a lengthy discussion with three chiropractors from the Seattle, Washington area, and seven chiropractors from the San Diego area. Some work is underway to better organize pages so that numerous chiropractors appear for searches that are currently limited to displaying individual offices (such as San Diego Chiropractic and Encinitas Chiropractic). Dr. Darrel Crain is in San Diego, Dr. John Michals is in Encinitas (but so are Drs. John Paul, Jack Mawer, and Sondra Konigsfeld), and there are other chiropractors to list as well.

In some Metro areas (like Chiropractic Santa Monica) groups of three or more chiropractors have teamed up to create community-based web sites which provide multiple chiropractic listings.

I located a Tustin Chiropractor, had someone seeking a referral there earlier today. Numerous requests came in from the Livermore area (and this is awesome) for guys practicing Brazilian jujitsu mixed martial arts. Have no idea how they got my LA office phone number, but my staff hooked them up with a great chiropractor in that area.

Last call of the day was for someone in San Jose, my staff referred them to Gavin Carr, a spectacular chiropractor practicing in the Northern California area.

If all goes well, organizing this information will go far more smoothly, after some changes coming next week. Thanks for continuing to contact me for referral information in your area.

Grabbed this photo of a photo while at a Santa Monica venue attending the Growing Your Site’s Traffic event. It’s an outdoor advertisement for a movie theater featuring movie showtimes for Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Charlie Brown, and the Bad News Bear.

Pretty sure the original photo was taken in 1977. I remember seeing Star Wars in a Huntington in Long Island movie theater. I don’t remember seeing Saturday Night Fever as a kid, and may have seen it years later as a teenager or adult (guess it wasn’t that memorable for me). I do remember seeing the Bad News Bears at a movie theater in Woodland Hills, California on a really hot summer day (aren’t they all in that part of the valley). I’m pretty sure the Charlie Brown movie was Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, but I don’t recall seeing that movie during the summer of 1977.

For those of you in the local Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, and Venice beach areas, I will be speaking at an event Tuesday night, along with Elmer Thomas and Andy Sorcini, which will focus on using social media to get traffic to your web site.

(photo: Erica Campbell and Michael Dorausch at a search conference. Image added to see how many visitors are searching for Erica Campbell images)

OK, the event is titled… How to Grow Your Site’s Traffic and it’s being held in Santa Monica, California.

I’ll be there before 7pm and plan to stay late to talk with those that have questions. You can lave comments below if you have anything to discuss.

Date: Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Time: 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Location: Edgemar Center for the Arts
2437 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405

The format:
7:00 PM - meet and greet
7:30 PM - panel discussions
9:00 PM - OPEN BAR mixer (wine & beer)

At this event you’ll learn how to grow your site’s traffic. Mixergy is bringing in three panels of no-nonsense traffic wranglers (that’s me, Andy, and Elmer) to teach you how to grow your site’s audience. If you use what they show you, you’re guaranteed to grow your site’s traffic.

Andy Sorcini & Elmer Thomas will be speaking about Digg and StumbleUpon to get free traffic to your site. I will be speaking about improving your content and learning some simple techniques for producing more attractive content.

Bonus: Open Bar Mixer (Wine, Beer & Snacks)

This is where you get a chance to meet the experts and talk with them one-on-one about your site. This is also a great opportunity to get to know and exchnage ideas with other guests.

You can sign up for the event here. I’m looking forward to being on the platform with these two great local social media gurus.

See you in Santa Monica at 7 pm!