In this article, dental practice consultant Ed O’ Keefe will share to you what Dentist Profits and his coaching club can do for you in your dental practice. The dental practice consultant will tell you the benefits that you can get by joining his club. The dental practice consultant will also share to you how you can achieve success in your dental practice by joining him in his coaching club. And this is something they focus specifically at their dental practice website!

Here’s what the dental practice consultant is going tell you about Dental Profits and His Coaching Club:

People ask me: “With your coaching club Ed, do you train my staff, and do you train like anybody in my staff to do the marketing?” And my answer to that is “YES!”. We hold fast start trainings, which is for the team; for your hygienists, for your assistants, and also for yourself. And we also have Wendy Briggs ( president of Hygiene Diamonds, and creator of “Whitening for Life”, and she’s one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet ), who gets your hygienists and your assistants helping sell a lot more dentistry for you in your dental practice. And you get that free by being a new member with us! And as a dental practice consultant, we do that because we know that your dental practice and your marketing will be ten times more effective, if your staff is on board, and is buying into what you’re trying to accomplish… and so we do that training for you! We hold two seminars a year, and if you want to get into our Gold membership, we do 4 of those trainings a year; which is great! And those guys and gals really love masterminding together. It’s really an elite group of dentists who are doing just fantastic and fabulous things.

Now, what’s your risk? Now, I hold a 30-day free trial for you to let you “test-drive” my system, and also “test-drive” my coaching club. Get it aggregated into the culture and just dive in… and see if it fits you! If it doesn’t, well it doesn’t fit you. We part ways… and that’s okay. But if it does fit you, well, the better it is! I’ll tell you, as a dental practice consultant, I’m getting testimonials and success stories all the time! And these testimonials and success stories come from successful doctors who are just doing great things in their office! I see people who were two weeks away from bankruptcy and who turned it around! I see people who were doing $40,000 a month, and are now doing $120,000 a month! I see people who were doing $120,000 a month, now doing $250,000 a month! And most importantly, what I see is just a lot of the lifestyle and the choices, meaning, that these people get to do what they want, with the people they want to work with.. so in the process they get to experience a lot of true autonomy… and that’s really what running a successful business allows you to do!

We also have tons of customer service.You can call our office just by any day of the week, and people will be there to answer your questions and support you! And also, people ask me this question as well: “With the marketing, can you guys just do it for me?”. Well, we have some brand new services available; we have a couple of brand new services for online marketing that are now available for you. And we’ve also had direct mail services for a long time. So we get to send out direct mail pieces, new mover programs, birthday mailings ( where we can actually market to people in your area with birthdays, and it’s just another great strategy!). It’s a strategy that a lot of really smart direct response companies utilize, and a lot of people just tend to overlook it. So, as a dental practice consultant, we have all these great ideas and strategies that will really benefit you in your dental practice! So, if you’re interested in our Coaching Club and in our free trial, just go to our dental practice website, and just go ahead and click on there and you’ll get all the details.

Dental phobia and dental fear are issues that most experienced hypnotherapists treat on a regular basis. Following treatment, patients are often amazed at how easy it really was for them to free themselves from this really powerful and incapacitating fear.

After brief hypno-psychotherapy, they can at last visit the dentist and begin the process of restoring their dental health in a calm and relaxed manner, without the heart-palpitating, terrible feelings of anxiety and panic that they had previously experienced when thinking about, or actually visiting the dentist.

When it comes to dental phobia and fear of dental procedures, research has shown that it is a surprisingly common condition. Indeed, according to a really comprehensive survey conducted by the British Dental Association, a full 25% of the general population actually have a fear of the dentist and a fear of dental procedures.

In cases of really severe dental phobia, the mere sight of a dental practice, or even a toothpaste commercial can provoke feelings of anxiety.

Very often, by the time the individual with a dentist phobia or fear of the dentist actually arrives at the hypnotherapy office, they have already allowed their teeth, gums and general oral health to reach such a poor state that they really have no choice but to take action.

Often, their dentist will have referred them so that they can free themselves of this very real – yet totally unnecessary and incapacitating – fear.

Not infrequently, individuals with this fear will suffer tremendous discomfort and real pain rather than seek out proper, effective dental care.

The simple truth is that their dental fear has somehow been more powerful than the real pain and unsightliness of their decaying teeth and painful gums.

The origins of dental phobia very often lie in previous negative or painful experiences that the individual has undergone at some time in the past when visiting the dentist. Sometimes, such fear can be passed on from a parent, or it can even be caused by unhelpful comments made by a dentist or dental nurse during previous dental procedures.

Additionally, feelings of vulnerability and loss of control, perhaps combined with an underlying fear of the unknown, can be set in motion by the very thought of being in the dentist’s chair. With today’s advances in modern dentistry, combined with modern pain control techniques, there really is no reason why a visit to the dentist need be a painful or fearful experience. Sparkling teeth and healthy gums can be yours — without any unnecessary discomfort or pain.

Perhaps you already know this. Perhaps you are already aware that your dental phobia and fear of dental treatment is unrealistic and largely irrational. But knowing this and being empowered to conquer it are, of course, different things.

The good news is that no-one is born with this fear and, since dental phobia and dentist fear – in common with all phobias – is a learned behaviour, it can indeed be ‘unlearned’. And this is where advanced transformational hypnotherapy is of such enormous help.

In most instances, it is a fear that can be completely neutralized in just two sessions of effective hypnotherapy.

Through the medium of advanced hypnotherapy, correctly applied, you truly can free yourself from any unnecessary fear of the dentist or fear of dental procedures. It really is possible for you to put an end to your dental phobia and fear of the dentist.

When you are aware that modern dentistry can indeed provide effective yet pain-free treatment, it makes sense to let go of this very real block to dental health.

If you or someone you care about suffers from dental phobia or fear of the dentist, seek out a fully trained and experienced transformational hypnotherapist and put the smile back on your face!

In this article, dental town adviser Ed O’ Keefe will give you an update on what’s happening in the dental profession today that’s new, that’s hot, that is making practices more successful than ever. The dental town adviser will share to you the reason why now is the best time to be in a dental practice. And the dental town adviser will also share to you how to systemize your practice so that you can gain more patients. And this is something they focus specifically at their dental practice website!

Here’s what’s Ed is going to share with you:

Now with the talk of the economy and everything that’s going on, the reality is that there has never been a better time to be a dentist, or to be a marketer of the dental practice right now! And that’s what I have realized as a dental town adviser. With the “baby boomer” explosion that’s occuring right now and seniors living longer than ever before, there’s never been a better time to reposition and start sub-niching dental practices. Repositioning is about making the practice something for a particular demographic group where they have a great deal of discussion to spend whether they have good coverages, and they have problems like, for example, how to market dental implants. I always think like dental implants is the easiest thing to make big money quickly in dentistry, because you have frustrated patients, people out there with dentures and partials/missing teeth who have serious health problems if they don’t have natural teeth or strong teeth, even if they’re fake. Those are real concerns out there, and since people are living longer they want to have the stronger, healthier, more durable teeth. So to market to that kind of population is really simple because they have those kind of dental problems. For example, here’s a person who have bad dentures and partials for years, and there would be a $36,000-dental care required for her to go to the dentist and have the problem taken cared of… plus there would be an additional cosmetic work of course, because once you start to fix the function, you would want to fix the appearance! So marketing your services to this person would be a very good idea, because it would solve the dental problem that she has!

Now, the biggest problems that a lot of doctors have in general is that they get more education, more clinical training, and they think that that’s going to fix their income. But the reality is that the answer lies in the marketing of their services. It’s like your “backdooring” it instead of trying to tell everybody that you’re the best dentist there is (while anyone can say that and everybody’s saying that!). So as a dental town adviser, what we do differently than just about anybody else is we just teach them how to sub-niche and that’s really going to be where the future of the next level of marketing of dentistry is! It’s really like having 2, or 3, or 4 mini practices in one practice! One of the things that we did is in the area of Invisalign. Invisalign is very well known and so I know that a lot of my doctors were promoting Invisalign, and they were struggling with it. They went out and got trained, spent all weekend, and so some of them have tested and tried the Open House. Well, we know how to run seminars so we just shifted the gears, we told them how to run Open House and seminars. And if you do an Open House correctly using marketing, you can’t just throw it out to the open house because you have nobody showing up, but if you do multi-seminar marketing, do it the right way like we teach! We had guys do $100,000 in one day in their dental practices and just recently, one of our implant clients did a workshop for niche-marketing, targeted-marketing, and they went to a little area that’s outside where it’s like a retirement community of people. And within 45 minutes, 20 implant cases came from it and referrals were coming from it. And it went over $200,000 of revenue in the first month and a half. So it’s just kind of like shifting having to do with the thinking of how you’re going with your business, we could do 1 or 2 of these every quarter and sell more dentistry than doing mailers all day long. You see, it’s all about the fact that the dentist has to be willing to change this whole thinking about price, about markets, and about marketing!

As a dental town adviser, what I’m doing is making them very efficient, so really, one of the doctors that I’m best suited for is the guy who’s like actually marketing a verse, who finds it painful, who finds it troublesome, who only likes to do it under a desperate circumstances. It’s because I can actually systemize it in a way that he doesn’t have to pay attention to it everyday, he doesn’t have to be involved in it all the time! You can have periodic events that feed the whole practice. And that’s very cool! In addition to this, one thing we’ve realized especially with dental practices is that the previous scale are continuing to grow and getting off the “dental treadmill” or the “rollercoaster income” kind of analogies. Now, we’re training the staff to run all the marketing for the doctors! So even if it’s a different language to them, we got systems that would teach the staff member or team member, and we do these trainings all the time. So if you hire somebody new, we’ll train them and turn them into a little mini-marketing expert in your office, and that’s the way they should run it, and it creates that ideal lifestyle that we teach our doctors as well. The keyword there is “system”. You should know that all of the wealthy people in America is traced to such systems, and that’s the “make-a-break” difference in businesses, and every dentist should find out about them and investigate them!

Most dental marketers have this answer­ to the what-should-you-do question––what “we” specialize in. There is quite a bit of conflict of interest in this response, but often they are correct by default. Doing “something” — even their thing — can work. However, the results these one-legged solutions create are often short-lived.

The market changes, consumers evolve, and competitors compete. Therefore, the second stage Top FAQ becomes: What do I do now? A question I hear a lot more frequently.

When I started, some dentists were marketing outside of the Yellow Pages, but few were doing anything else consistently. In the intervening 10 years, more and more dentists have been proactively getting their message out. While the level of “direct dentist competitor marketing” is still not overwhelming, if one or two dentists in the general area have been getting their message out in some way, your local market gets squeezed.

Your “new” entry into the market is then going to compete with that pressure. Added to this is the price pressure your competitors have created by presenting the concepts of FREE and discounted dental services. With the value of dentistry already greatly influenced by insurance reliance and general oral health ignorance, price marketing makes anything beyond the basic dental services seem outlandish.

Consumers do not want to pay a lot for anything. Once your competitor says they can pay less (which suggests they were paying too much before), you seem to be put in a position only to compete on lower price. The other extreme that was the dream 10 years ago, which has been largely dismissed, is the high-end cosmetic practice. In a tough economy, this concept is severely pinched and probably not viable in more than a dozen markets. Department stores have dropped significantly in their popularity and the “dental-mart” concept is also hitting its height of effectiveness.

These consumer and market pressures and realities restrict the value of any one dental marketing strategy. Everything that once worked great now has limitations. Here are a few trends I have noticed from “inside” the dental marketing industry…

New Marketing Concepts Often Have a Great but Short Half-life

1. Email was going to make marketing free and almost effortless. Now the effects of spam and email overload greatly limit its original value. About eight years ago when my former employer did their first email campaign we received 20 calls from dentists within the first few days and that was sent to about 900 dentist emails. Within about a year, it took 30,000 emails to create a few phone calls over many weeks. Back then just having a website meant we were going to get one client a week. Now only having a website means you… have a website.

2. Three years ago when I started PPC advertising on two services (Google and Yahoo) I received 25 emails a month from prospective dentists. Now I am also on a third PPC service run by MSN (they were linked with Yahoo originally) and get less than half the responses while spending 5 times what I did that first year. While it is still viable for me to do PPC, it will never give me the type of advantage it did that first year.

3. You might remember that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was all the rage before PPC. Search engine gurus were all over the Internet. They could provide you will top ten results – guaranteed!!! My site is search engine optimized and I now get top ten results for “almost” everything dental marketing. However, this is not easy to accomplish (and hold on to) and there are various “trapdoors”.

First, it takes constant effort and some SEO companies are more into “tricks and scams” than building real value. Second, my web guy always used to comment that these same SEO gurus were often NOT in the top search engine position themselves. The competition squeeze is a force of marketing nature–even they cannot escape.

Finally, without a niche–within a niche–you will not be successful long-term. From my perspective, I cannot compete directly against website companies in PPC or SEO rankings. This is because everybody and his brother thinks they can create a dentist website so there are 5,000 “dental website” companies battling in that keyword arena. Therefore, dental websites is NOT a niche, which is a big trapdoor for me to avoid.

Going directly against competitors can be very wrong even though others have been very successful. Just because Wal-mart is making billions does not mean Target wants to go there. Microsoft makes billions but selling iPods seems to do well for Apple.

If dental websites are all my competition does and they have a big corporate advertising budget, they can out buy me on the PPC stage. These crank tons of generic website corporations also can greatly improve THEIR search engine visibility because they are able to “link” back to them. If I try to compete with them head on–a trapdoor opens for me.

Conversely, Niche Dental does not have links on our client sites because we are about building your value first not ours. We want to build YOUR search engine ranking and bluntly if SEO is not viable for you — or even a website – we are not going to try and sell you those concepts. Something else might work better first! Like in-practice marketing or a direct mailing campaign.

You Can Do It Yourself: Dental Marketing

One of the first dentists I worked with as a dental consultant back in 1998 called us because of his marketing effort that died a quick death. He sent out three letters. The first one got two patients. The second one attracted 10 patients and the third one was a “failure”. His small direct mailing campaign–about 2-3,000 prospective households–had basically the same message each time.

Ironically, his dental marketing was very successful. But this dentist was very frustrated — his marketing did not KEEP working well. He wanted to know what he was doing wrong. If you refer to my examples above, you will see that he did nothing wrong except he stopped–in two ways. He not only just stopped sending letters; he did not realize that he had never sent letters before.

The keys to dental marketing success are to “keep doing” what you did before with a variation on the theme (different presentation/message/etc.) and then add something “new” to the mix. New does not necessarily mean the latest technology – but to find arenas where the public has not seen your message.

I also recommend sticking with high value presentations. This is not about “boutique esthetic” dental practices or extreme makeover concepts — it is about presenting the dental consumer with “more” than they thought was possible. Offering promotional incentives and dental service discounts can be beneficial, but if a dentist in your area already has that niche or no one does – the high value strategy could provide you with more options. Going the price route is very difficult to pull out from once you get into it.

My Best Marketing Recommendation

My recommendation has always been to utilize at least three proactive dental marketing strategies. One will work well, one will be a work in progress, and the third will be changed within the first six to nine months of the year. Either start all at once or develop your three-pronged campaign in stages, but do not end any of them until all three have worked together simultaneously for at least four-six months. They will often work off of each other.

For example, one might build your credibility. The other might inform and one might encourage consumers to act. As you see what they are doing, you can decide if one needs to be dropped and/or if another one should be activated to keep the momentum going. While saturation is possible, completely closing a valve to patients that had worked before is not always the best decision.

The three-pronged (or more) approach gives you a matrix of potential and improves the power of any one element. Conversely, spending your entire budget on one concept and then waiting for results is very risky. The SEO guru, the PPC concept, the emailing company, and the mass mailer group are often too inflexible to provide the comprehensive strategy you will need to have a long-term successful business.

Dental Marketing: Go it Alone, Maybe Not

Developing and implementing this strategy is something you can do on your own. Many dentists do fine without a dental marketing company. That is not all: I knew one dentist that did his own veneers (prep and all) looking in a mirror I guess.

However, even though I could get all the design software to create websites and marketing materials for my clients, I decided to run my business by having a person with this deep skill set do my dental designs. That is why Matt, a national dental design award winner, and owner of The Peripheral Vision, fills that role.

Because your local market and marketing is always evolving you might need someone on your side now (or in the future) to explain, develop, and/or implement your strategy. To have someone on your team that is flexible and not stuck in past or “caught up” in promoting the next best thing – call Niche Dental and you can talk directly to me (Dick Chwalek) about what is possible (and legitimate) for your dental practice.

What are all those Dental Tools?

Visiting a dentists office, at any age, may be a bit intimidating because of the various dental tools that are staring you in the face. This situation can make many people feel uncomfortable because we do not go to a class that teaches one about how innocent and harmless these helpful dental instruments really are. For example, some people become a little queasy by just viewing the tiny mirror that is used for examining the teeth and nothing else. One simple solution to overcoming your fear of the dentist, is by identifying the dental instruments that you may see while visiting the dentist. Here, you will learn about all of the distinct tools that are located on the dental table,

Examination Dental Instruments

Let’s start out simple. Most people have to visit the dentist for their oral hygiene check ups which should be done about two to four times a year. The examination tools that are used at the dentist’s office are used in order to view the teeth and gums by manipulating the tissue. The two main components in this category are the dental mirror and the probes. The mirror allows the dental professional to examine areas of the mouth which are not visible to the naked eye. The mirror can also be used to shine more light on a darker area of the mouth where the dentist needs to see better. There are two types of probes; the sickle probe and the periodontal probe. The sickle probe is a thin piece of metal, shaped like a hook, which is used to look at the tooth decay on the tooth and to scrap off the plaque that is too difficult to take off by just brushing. The periodontal probe also looks like a hook and is used to check the health of the gums and to measure the depths around each tooth of interest.

Restorative Dental Instruments

At times, your Warrior dentist will have to use his tools in order to restore certain problem areas in your teeth. The most common tool for him to use during restoring one’s teeth is the excavator. There are a few types of excavators which include the variety of chisels, the spoon excavator and the half hollenbach. The spoon excavator, for instance, is used to remove any soft decay that is located in the tooth.

Dental Drills

When the Warrior dentist in Alabama needs to drill, they have quite a collection. This collection of dental drills includes burs and operative burs. These dental burs are used to cut into the tooth surface and generally made out of a surgical hand piece with a friction grip and either a slow or high speed drill power driven by air force. The part which actually drills into the tooth can be made out of a variety of materials including stainless steel or diamond coated tips. The burs come in a variety of different sizes for the different size of the teeth and the type of job.

Extraction Dental Instruments

The final important category of dental instruments include the extraction dental tools which a dentist uses in order to remove the teeth. The most common extraction tool is the dental forceps. There are many dental forceps because they have a specific shape for the different types of teeth that need to be removed. Therefore, there are upper and lower universal forceps, upper right and left molar forceps, wisdom teeth forceps and more. Other dental tools used during extraction include elevators and chisels.

Other Dental Tools

Other dental tools which are commonly used by a Warrior dentist or any other dentist include retractors and local anesthesia. These are dental instruments which assist the other dental instruments while the dentist works on one’s mouth. The types of retractors include a cheek retractor, tongue retractor and a lip retractor. A dentist will use these retractors in conjunction with a dental mirror and a mouth prop. The local anesthesia includes the dental syringe to administer the anesthesia and the anesthesia itself, which is more commonly known as Novocain.