So perhaps you’re a dentist who’s recently created a beautiful new web site. What you want to accomplish is a high flow of traffic to your new dental web site of patients within your vicinity who are interested in visiting your office for the dental services you provide, whether those dental services are orthodontics or teeth whitening or some form of cosmetic dentistry to even general dentistry.

With so many sites offering dental services these days, you need to have a good Internet marketing plan to get the most out of your website. Lots of traffic to your site is key, if you don’t get much traffic, your site will only be good to remind people who need to find you of you’re office’s whereabouts. There is just too much competition out there to expect your website to be competitive without marketing online.

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching Internet dental marketing and different online tactics and strategies which dentists have used successfully and which they have used with not such good results. And it’s the tactics that both work and the tactics that don’t work that I want to share with you so you don’t make the same mistakes that others have made, and then you could build on the work that other dentists have done to improve their online marketing program.

Let me start off by discussing things that may work but are extraordinarily time-consuming. Yahoo! Answers is an example of a channel that you can use to build traffic to your site. Yahoo! Answers is a forum that you can get to off of Yahoo.com where people randomly post questions about various topics. You can set yourself up so that you get notifications about people who have dental service-related questions, and once you see these, by email notification you can respond. You’ll quickly be recognized as a leader in that area, and eventually, that has the potential to generate traffic. This unfortunately has the problem of waiting around for other people to write questions that you’re going to answer and also has the drawback of requiring a significant time commitment, so that you respond to questions as soon as they are presented and think about them thoroughly. It’s a time-consuming process which certainly is not the ideal marketing strategy for most dentists.

Another channel which some dentists have used with moderate success is to create a dental blog. With a dental blog, you can make entries regarding the different kinds of experiences you’ve had creating certain dental conditions. Clearly, you want to make these anonymous. However, this also has the major drawback of requiring a significant amount of time, and the problem is is that that time commitment is an ongoing, a longstanding process. That takes time away from your family, and it takes time away from being a dentist which is what you want to focus on when you’re at work. Some dentists go with the channel that doesn’t require a lot of time, and that’s to pay for quick advertising on something like Google AdWords or on the Yahoo! network. That is certainly something that doesn’t require a lot of time, outside of picking the key word, such as dentist or dental, that you want to target for people who are searching online. However, that is an extraordinarily costly way to advertise.

A main objective in marketing your dental practice online is finding low cost advertizing. Choosing an expensive marketing tool that works well to bring in more patients is only successful in getting people in the door; because what you earn from providing services to them will be gobbled up by your large advertizing bill. This type of advertizing is called “click-through” advertizing. Prospective patients can click on your ad when they find it on the Internet. A drawback here is that anyone can click on your ad and this costs money every time. Say, for instance, a competing dental practice wants to run up your advertizing bill so they click on your ad repeatedly during a month. Sometime during the month a person who is looking for the dental services you offer clicks on your ad and comes in for an office visit. Your advertizing bill for that time period could be astronomical but only resulting in one new patient. This is clearly not a cost effective advertizing method because even though someone may click your ad while they are looking for a dental practice, it does not always mean they will actually come to your office.

There is one channel that has the potential to be tremendously successful and is not very time-consuming. Dentists are just starting to begin to use this channel, and I’ve spoken with several who use patient reviews as a mechanism to leverage their practice and increase the number of patients they have. What most of these dentists do is ask patients who are clearly impressed with the practice to go to some third-party web site, such as Citysearch or Yelp, and write a review about the practice there. This certainly is a good channel.

As you well could guess, if someone is looking online for a new dentist and they find a negative review of your practice they will not be walking in your office door anytime soon. The perfect tool for this situation would be a marketing tool that will let you sort the good and the bad feedback, and then let you publish what you choose on the Internet to advertize your dental practice. It is very important to have this kind of control over what prospective patients are reading about your practice because even an “okay” review is not as favorable for you as a “great” review.

There is now a way for dentists to have control over all their reviews and effectively market a practice online without breaking their advertizing budgets. Creating your own site for your patients to post their reviews will put you in control. Your review site will be complete with your contact information, your logo and large amounts of positive feedback written by your happy patients. This cuts out all the time it takes to write your own Web content, and it has a low cost compared to the other Internet advertizing tools I’ve discussed. Your patients will be happy knowing that you have created a place just for them to write their reviews of their experiences so you will have plenty of information to work with-both good and bad. You are bound to have at least a few unfavorable reviews and these can be used to make changes to create a better experience for your patients while at your office. The good review can easily be pushed out onto the Internet to be indexed by search engines, which will drive new patients to your practice. Planning a review site is clearly a great way to utilize your patients review to generate positive feedback for your practice on the Internet, something that translates into new patients easily finding nothing but good things about you when they look for a dentist in your community.