Monthly Archives: December 2011

Defensive Registrations – Should Veterinarians worry about .xxx?

Posted by on December 13, 2011 No comments

When building a brand, it is often recommended to protect your business by registering negative domain names. For example, Microsoft owns MicrosoftSucks.com. This is called a defensive registration. The idea is simple, beat your competition or unhappy clients to the punch so they cant put up negative websites. This isnt a common practice for Veterinarians, but I am starting to see it a little bit more than I used to. The question has been coming up, should we be worried about the new .xxx domain names.

The answer is No. Right now a .xxx domain registration costs about $100 per year. The odds of someone else registering it are pretty slim as a Veterinary practice. In addition, it is barely widespread that anyone would look for or type in .xxx into their browsers. For the time being, I am recommending holding off on registering any .xxx and take a wait and see approach.

What Veterinarians should avoid in 2012

Posted by on December 7, 2011 2 comments
Stop

When we come to the end of a year, we start to get the New Years Resolutions. This year, we are going to redo this, complete this, or update this. Its a time to reflect on what you have done and where you want to go. In this post, I would like to make some suggestions on things you may be thinking about doing, but probably shouldnt.

1. Online Pharmacy / Shopping cart for profit

I talk to Veterinarians all day long and I can tell you with 100% conviction that 99.9% of practices I speak with that have an online pharmacy, do very little business with it. The companies and distributors that push this concept are the only ones who make money. As a practice, the only advantage is being able to sell something that you dont carry. Besides that – dont invest too much time, energy, or money.

2. Yellow Books

Much like Dinosaurs, those Yellow books were once kings of their domain. Today, they are simply doing everything they can to stay relevent. They will tell you that they are still a great source to generate business and that their web platforms are cutting edge- but the bottom line is that they dont produce like they used to. They are an archaic way of doing things in a very digital world. Cut back your spending if you still are investing heavily into this form of advertising.

3.  Hits

Stop measuring your websites success with “Hits”. You need to start measuring success by how many unique and new visitors your website generates. One user can generate multiple hits and even existing clients can generate more and more hits. If an advertiser starts talking about all the hits they are going to get your website, run away. Hits are quite simply put the worst way to measure a websites success in the Veterinary sector.

4. Surgical Pictures

Stop posting pictures of surgeries on your website and Facebook pages. Your clients love their animals, most don’t want to see the inner-workings. You can really turn off a potential client if they are repulsed by the front page of your website. Make sure your website draws in the attention of the masses, not the interest of a few.