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.

Well the sad truth is that, if you don’t have an Internet marketing program for your dental practice, that your site will have minimal to no traffic. In fact, it will serve as nothing more than a reference for people who were already planning to visit you to look up your address and/or phone number so as to coordinate their visit. The time period when you could simply put up a dental web site and expect that to generate traffic is long gone.

There are two kinds of marketing programs for dentists-the effective kind that doesn’t cost much but rewards you with your goal of lots of new patients, and the other kind that costs lots of money and gives you limited to no results from your efforts. In-depth research of Internet marketing for dental practices has taught me the difference between the two, and I would like to tell you about both kinds, including the not-so-effective kind to save you the trouble of repeating the mistakes of others.

First, the marketing plans that pay off but take incredible amounts of time to implement. You may already be familiar with Yahoo! Answers, which is a forum designed specifically to answer the questions of the people who post there. As a member, you would have the opportunity to field questions concerning dental services via email. For a dentist, this is not an effective way to get the most out of your time marketing, because you will have to wait for the questions to come in and then wait again for a possible new patient from the contact at the forum.

One more method that has yielded some success to dentists is to start a dental blog. There are several drawbacks to marketing using a blog, however. The first drawback is the fact that each time you post to your blog it is a time consuming process. Even after you post, you need to continue posting constantly to keep new information flowing about the services you have performed and offer. Along with all that time spent writing; there is the problem of anonymity because you will not want to post your name or pertinent contact information on your blog. Some dentists choose to use a less time consuming method of advertising such as Google Adwords, however, this is extremely costly and you will still have to pick your own keywords and keyphrases, such as family dental, or teeth whitening, so that search engines have a way to find your practice.

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.

Now that we’ve reviewed the methods that will not be to your advantage, let’s talk about the best effective way to market your dental practice online. Many dentists ask their satisfied patients to write an online review of their experience at their dental practice. These reviews become a great tool when posted on a third-party site such as Citisearch. Prospective patients who are looking for a new dentist in your community will easily see the reviews of your practice online because when someone uses a search such as Google, that search engine will index available information on the Internet and pull up your reviews. This will translate into new patients for your practice-unless one of the reviews was posted by a patient who is frustrated by his experience with your practice.

Search engines index whatever information is available, be it a stellar review or a really bad one. The obvious best scenario here would be to have only favorable information available for the search engines to pull from. If a search turns up information on a third party site like Citisearch the dentist has no control over what reviews have been posted there, nor does that dentist have a way of collecting the reviews himself. This makes the dentist powerless to control his online reputation.

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.