The previous poll from Massage Magazine found on the front page of massagemag.com asks:
What is your most effective marketing approach?
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- Word-of-mouth 79.2%
- Print advertising 3.1%
- Doing demonstrations at events 7.3%
- Web site 9.4%
- Offering discounts 1.0%
Word of mouth comes up first which it usually does. I am surprised that more people don’t have effective websites.
Your website should be driving targeted clients to you every week. It should be on the first page of Google when someone searches for ‘massage, your city’. You can even find out how many people are searching for that to give you some ideas of how many clients you are missing out on using this free keyword search tool by Google.
Here are a few things to make your site work better for you:
- Sign up with Google Maps. When people search for massage, your city there usually is a section at the top of the page that says “local business results for massage near whatever city’. Click on that link and then scroll to the bottom of the page where it says “Information for Business Owners” and click on that and follow the steps and submit your site to the local business listings.
- Be sure to choose the domain name that is best for search engines. The best name uses the most searched for keywords. Most people search for massage therapists by putting in a combination of keywords such as ‘massage, your city’. Use those keywords in your domain name! Yes even if your business name is different than that.
- When you create a page on your website be sure to follow these easy formatting techniques that I have outlined on my site www.thebodyworker.com.
- Create a xml sitemap and submit it to Google and the other major search engines. Don’t worry if you don’t know what a xml sitemap is really. I actually don’t really understand the real details but you need to let Google (and the other major engines) know that you are out there. Here is more on how to do it.
- Find affiliate programs like amazon.com that you can sign up to promote their products or ebooks on health or related topics and make additional money for your masage business. You can also use Google Adsense which is a program that allows you to put Google Ads on your website. When people click on the links you get paid. If you are adding them to your massage website you might want to wait until you are getting 100 people a day to your website and also write about 30 pages of short articles on massage and health to put the ads on. Since not everyone finding your site will become a customer, you can still make money from the visitors.
