Though websites are an excellent way to market and promote your plastic surgery practice, they often need to be promoted themselves. There are millions upon millions of websites on the Internet. In fact, a simple search in Google for plastic surgeon’ produces 5,300,000 results. That’s a lot of competition and some efforts typically must be made to ensure that your site gets noticed.
Forums and message boards can be an excellent tool when it comes to your plastic surgeon website promotion. The idea is to visit relevant forums and respond to posts with helpful, expert advice. Though it seems simple, this is truly an excellent way to promote your website. You need not spend hours a day on the forum, in fact any amount of time that you spend, even ten minutes or a single post a week, will help. However, the more regularly you post, the more recognized you become as an expert within your field and the more people will find your site. There are however, a few things to keep in mind when posting on forums.
Getting started: You should start by visiting a few forums that are relevant to plastic surgery. Take your time browsing through these so that you can get a good feel for the forum. Ideally you want a forum that is getting a good amount of traffic with regular posts and is visited by people who are seriously considering plastic surgery. After spending some time on them, pick one or two good forums that you feel comfortable to visit and post on on a regular basis. Most forums have rules for participating in them and, in fact, some don’t allow self-promotion so be sure to carefully read the rules. Many forums will also require you to register before you can post.
Forum participation: Once you’ve chosen and, if necessary, registered in a few forums you can start participating in them and responding to others’ posts with helpful advice. As mentioned above, make sure that your activity follows the rules. Also be sure to respect your fellow posters by offering valuable information and always being polite. Avoid getting involved in heated arguments. You should also be sure to follow up on your posts and threads.
Promotion: The most important part of using forums as a means to promote your website is the signature file. Though there may be rules regarding signature files, nearly all forums allow them. A signature file is basically a line of text that shows up at the end of your posts. It’s often limited in space, usually less than four lines or around 250 characters or less. Make sure that it includes your full URL as well as a link to your website, and any additional space can highlight the free information, advice, tips and so on available on your site.