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Use a Top Story and Tie it into Your Site

The following is Part #4 of a 4 part audio transcribing (part #1 is here, part #2, and part #3) of an interview with Michael Dorausch, founder of Planet Chiropractic. The audio was transcribed from a phone interview which focused on marketing and tips for building traffic to one’s website.

Andrew: Okay, can you tell me some of your success stories. Let’s start with the one about Van Halen that Brian Deagan was talking about.

The Right Digital TouchMike: Okay, Van Halen was nice. And again this is an example of how easy all of this can happen. So I’m a big Van Halen fan, big rock and roll fan. And I’ve actually worked with quite a few people in the rock and roll industry as a chiropractor, and it’s not uncommon for a band to need a chiropractor at, like the Staples Center or something like that. So it’s not uncommon in our industry that somebody will call and say “hey can we get a chiropractor for this concert, we’re going to be in town for three days.” So my industry knows that.  Well what happened back last year is there were rumors that there was going to be a Van Halen reunion tour. First of all being a fan of the band, I was paying attention to the news and I thought “wow this would make a good story.” And I also saw that obviously there were some other people interested in this as well.

So on February 3rd, 2007, I wrote an article entitled, Chiropractors prepare for 2007 Van Halen tour with David Lee Roth. So that’s really long and very keyword heavy. You can look at it and go “huh”, but it covers the key things I was looking for which was chiropractors, Van Halen, and David Lee Roth. Now the average consumer is not concerned about the chiropractors. They’re just concerned about Van Halen and David Lee Roth. Because this wasn’t just Van Halen. The big news was that David Lee Roth was back with the band. And what we did was we covered the news like anybody else would. We covered the rumors that Van Halen would be reunited, we gave the link to their site, we talked about the official announcement that came out the day prior, it was the 2007 North American tour. And we basically went into that just like any other journalist would. We talked about the band and their history. And it wasn’t until the last paragraph that we talked about the idea that there should be chiropractors present to support this band.

And so, the interesting thing here, Andrew, was this wasn’t something that I got on the phone with their management or they got on the phone with me, this was pure opportunity. This was saying, you know this would be a great opportunity, the chiropractor profession could support this, get behind this band, and volunteer to have somebody available at each of the forty cities. And Planet Chiropractic would be happy to organize that. And so the interesting thing that happened was, we didn’t end up doing it, we weren’t contacted by Van Halen. I don’t know how many people worked with them, but we didn’t organize a big event. But the point was we got traffic. And we got a significant amount of traffic. We were getting as many as 4000 people a day visiting the page just for the Van Halen information throughout the month of February.

Andrew: Just because you included Van Halen, and because it was a hot story at the time.

Mike: Right, just because it was a hot story, and because there wasn’t anything fresh out there.

Andrew: What about for your readers though. They’re coming in and they’re not looking for Van Halen stories, they’re coming to you because they want information about Chiropractors.

Mike: Yes! Our readers were actually very excited about it. Our readers were emailing us saying”we’re in! I’m volunteering.”  I had chiropractors in the state starting to line up saying I’m in, I’m located near the theater in Colorado, I’m located near Madison Square Garden in New York City and if this comes together, I’m in. And what’s nice is we now have even more news. So now we have another follow-up article we can write about the chiropractors who have lined up for this event, so let’s make this happen.

Andrew: Do you have another example of how you were able to use a top story and tie it into your site?

Mike: Superbowl. We did the Superbowl this year and I’ve gotten good at this. You have to remember it’s been about ten years we’ve been using a method like this. It really is just understanding what people are doing. So, we did two things this year for the Superbowl. I paid attention starting on Thursday to see what people were looking for. And it’s amazing when you start studying how basic it is, right?

So here’s Superbowl weekend February 2008, and it’s Friday. Now, on Friday, people were looking for Superbowl commercials because they wanted to find them online. So that was the first thing, I found people were looking for superbowl commercials. But here’s the interesting thing, Andrew, there was something that caught my attention. There were people searching Superbowl location. So I thought wow, America doesn’t know where the Superbowl is. They don’t know if it’s in Florida or if it’s in Los Angeles. And it turns out it was in Phoenix in a brand new stadium in Glendale Arizona. So I went, well they’re looking for where it is, they’re also looking for commercials. And then you had the gamblers, what’s the spread. They were doing searches for what the spread was. And then you had moms going, well, what am I going to cook this weekend? So, they were typing in things like chicken recipes, quesadilla recipes, fajita recipes, burger, barbecue, things like that.

So what I did, a very nice compiled article which became our guide to the 2008 NFL Superbowl. And we covered the schedule, so what time it’s gonna be, what channel it’s gonna be on, where it’s gonna be located, the name of the stadium, kickoff starts at 6:18 pm, we went into the location. We gave links to the websites that had commercials. You know, because we studied that and we found out well, where are all of the commercials going to be hosted after – where will they be on Monday? So we gave a nice list of about a dozen sites that had all of the commercials. Then we had another section that covered the spread and we gave a link to different gambling type sites that covered the spread. And we were very clear to say this isn’t something we’re doing but this is what you guys are looking for, so we’re giving you a resource. And then we covered recipes, and we gave links to places like Frank’s Red Hot, and things like that. Things we figured would be popular. Hot Sauce and Buffalo Wings and things like that.

So a very nice thing, and again the same thing we did in the Van Halen article. We really scored on this one, because one, we’d gotten a quote from one of the players on the New York Giants. So we got a quote from a football player on the value of getting chiropractic care.

Andrew: You found that online or you got it?

Mike: We got that from his chiropractor. We started working on that on Thursday and we said, who’s working on him and can we get something? So we got a quote from a player. We also have been doing this for years, so we already had previous years. We had an article on Emmitt Smith on previous stuff. We had an article with LaDainian Tomlinson from the San Diego Chargers. So of course we’re going to link to all that.

So we built in those links at the end of our article and said hey, do you remember when we covered stories with Emmitt Smith? Do you remember when we covered stories with LT? Do you remember when we, you know, we have as far back, and this wasn’t the internet but we still wrote about chiropractors being seen during the super bowl, because chiropractors on the sidelines were adjusting players. So, you know, we have that history, so we mentioned that.

And the result of this was that this article was huge. It hit the top of Google News by Saturday morning, with the title Guide to 2008 NFL Super Bowl. And it was in national search, people searching anything schedule, location, commercials, and it was also hitting the top of the News Page. So we were sitting on top of Google News home page and providing a great resource for the weekend. You know, like a map that you could print out and go, man I got everything I need for the weekend right in this one article. So that one I was really proud of because that one was great.

Andrew: And that all originated because you looked at Google trends, and you saw this is what people were looking for, they’re not finding it, I’m going to put together a webpage that has all of the stuff that they’re looking for around the Super Bowl and I’m going to tie it in with my website Planet Chiropractic, am I right?

Mike: Right, because if you talk to a Google engineer, if you talk to somebody who works at Google, and they’re humans and they’re going to look at pages and they don’t want you being spammy. They don’t want you gaming search engines. So if I just made this obviously spammy, they would go man, this isn’t of any value. But they would look at this article and go “man this guy did research. He’s covered everything. He gave a lot of good information. Well, so what if he’s a chiropractor, give him credit.” I mean that’s what the internet is all about, it’s the great leveler. You know, it doesn’t matter that I’m not the New York Times.

Andrew: What about for your readers? Your readers aren’t coming to your site looking for football, they’re coming there looking for chiropractic care.

Mike: Exactly, our readers look at that, and they’re chiropractors. Who wins from this Andrew? If more consumers know about chiropractic care?

Andrew: I see, so they know that you’re doing this for the internet as a whole.

Mike: Our readers look at this and they go wow this guys getting traffic and at the end of the thing we link to chiropractors. So we said you know, if you’re looking for a chiropractor, we’ve got links to offices. And so we have a directory of chiropractors throughout the United States so we don’t get any chiropractors really complaining. And if they do that’s their personal issue. I’m more for marketing the industry. Part of my whole philosophy is to promote the industry as a whole. You want to promote the industry as a whole and put a strong presence and branding on the industry. So that everybody can grow. This isn’t about my personal office getting new clients. This is about can we get 5000 new clients this weekend as an industry?

This is the end of Part #4. Part #1 is here, Part #2, and Part #3

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