When someone visits your Website or calls you for the first time, they are prospects searching for information. The success of a marketing system lies in transforming the prospect into a patient and a patient into a referral source.

It is possible to drive patients through an initial funnel where they visit your Website or call you to a productive patient relationship that can be worth several thousand dollars over the course of a lifetime. Think of it this way. How much is the patient worth to you over the course of his lifetime? Chances are that the single patient relationship can be worth $500 minimum. In some cases, repeat visits from the patient and/or referrals initiated by the patient to increase the lifetime value of the patient to several thousand dollars.

Keeping this in mind, ask yourself "How much am I willing to pay to acquire a new patient?"

Keep in mind that buying or acquiring a list of names and e-mail addresses of individuals (even if they happen to be local residents interested in physical therapy) is unlikely to yield results. Most people respond to individuals whom they have a prior business or personal connection with. Besides, sending unsolicited e-mails to individuals with a marketing intent is considered spamming.

With the advent of pay per click advertising and lead generation pages on the Internet, it is possible to drive specific, targeted visitors to your Website and start collecting names and e-mail addresses of prospects within hours. In many cases, you may pay less than two dollars a prospect and accumulate a high quality list of patients fairly quickly.

Pay per click advertising is offered by most major online search providers like Google, Yahoo and MSN. The way it works is that you sign up for an account and 'bid' for certain key words that your patients are searching for.

Depending on your practice niche and your location, the "keywords" may look something like this:

• Low back pain New York City
• Shoulder pain New Jersey
• Boston physical therapist
• Pain relief in Denver

Based on these keywords, you can set up an advertising account. Depending on the amount of competition for your keywords and your bid amount, your ad can show up on page one of all major search engines within hours, allowing you to position yourself in front of your target audience quickly.

Each time someone clicks on your advertisement, your account gets charged. You can set daily limits for your account, so that you ads turned off once your account threshold is reached.

The big advantage with this kind of advertising is the ability to track results. You can check exactly how many people clicked on your advertisement and measure your cost per click.

The Opt-In
Getting a patient to visit your Website is only half the battle. Your Website must be designed in such a way that it provides the patient with such a significant amount of valuable information that you are able to extract their name and e-mail address in order to deliver them even more targeted information.

For example, a patient looking for information on low back pain arrives at your Website. You provide them with a free downloadable book on "Low back pain prevention 101."

However, in order to get access to this information, the patient must jump through a hoop by entering some data in a sign up form. This is called a successful 'opt-in'

With a very well-designed Website, your opt-in ratio should exceed 30 percent of your Website visitors. If you spent two dollars per click and three out of every 10 patients to visit your Website becomes a prospect, you could be spending between six and seven dollars per prospect.

The patient has to enter their name and e-mail address in a form and click 'submit.' At this point you've successfully captured the name and e-mail address of the patient and can follow up with them in the future.

Why get the patient to 'jump through the hoop'? The goal is to 'prequalify/legitimate prospects and separate them from the rest of the pack, namely the individuals seeking free information only, but unlikely to be patient or referral sources.

At the very least, your sign-up form should ask for an e-mail address. The more information you ask for in your sign up form, the less likely it is that people will opt in.

The good news is that this strategy will increase the quality of the list significantly. Patients who take the trouble to enter all their contact information on your Website (name, address, e-mail, phone) in order to get access to your content are the best, most reliable leads for your private practice.

The quality of the list and your relationship with the patients is infinitely more important than its size. A small list of 200 patients who know you, like you and trust you will do more for your practice the list of two thousand patients that do not remember you or perceive your practice as a profit driven corporate identity that probably does not care about them.

When you combine a strong pay per click strategy designed to drive patients to your website and an irresistible offer of a patient to opt-in, you will build a high-quality, reliable list of prospects and patients.

Nitin Chhoda PT, DPT has a physical therapy marketing book available for download at www.physicaltherapywebsite.com and a blog on physical therapy marketing at www.nitin360.com