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.

Your website may give you a new patient here or there but this is not getting the most out of your site. If you fail to choose a good marketing plan, your website will end up being only a way for existing patients to get your phone number or address. You have a well-designed website. Why not maximize the number of times it will be seen? If you do not, it will stagnate on the Internet and be overlooked by prospective patients who, instead see another competitively marketed dental website.

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.

It’s obvious that a less expensive marketing method would be a better choice. Paying for “click” ads can really add up, and the troubling fact about these ads is that anyone who feels that they are competing with your practice for business can click on your add and run up a large advertising bill for you practice. Underhanded, I know, but this has happened. Equally troubling is the fact that the percentage of advertising money spent is not always worth it when you consider that if one click-through ad to a new patient costs you $5 and the rest of the clicks are lost on people who don’t come to your office, that one new patient is all you get when you still have to pay close to $200 in advertising. As you can see, this is not an effective way of getting the biggest bang for your marketing buck.

There is a better time- and cost-effective way for a dental practice to advertize online. Some dentists have started asking the patients that are happy with their experiences to go to a third-party site like Yelp to post a review of their practice. This is extremely effective in getting good information in circulation on the Internet because when someone searches for a dentist they find favorable reviews about the dentist’s practice. This works well to bring in new patients. Although these dentists are getting good reviews posted from their patients, there is the problem that not every patient is pleased with their experience with the dentist even though the dentist thinks they are. This patient then will go to the site and post a questionable, or a negative review that is damaging to the dentist’s online reputation and does exactly the opposite of what the advertizing was supposed to do. Instead of finding purely favorable reviews during a search, a potential new patient could find something negative, and this is clearly not the goal.

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.