Discovering Internet Marketing

A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To Bankruptcy...

My name is George Best and I've been a small business owner since 1992. Specifically, I have been a chiropractor and holistic health practitioner, but with regards to what I'm about to share with you, the type of business is really not that important, because the same issues come into play in almost any type of business.

Anyway, a few years ago my practice was quite busy and I was specializing in a treatment called spinal decompression, which uses some very expensive equipment to treat bulging and degenerated spinal discs. I had 3 full-time assistants and a second doctor working for me. To keep my practice that busy, I was spending quite a bit of money on advertising.

When I first started providing spinal decompression treatment, there were only a couple of other competitors, and none who were doing any significant amount of advertising. As time went on though, competition increased dramatically, and my need to advertise increased. Advertising costs became a bigger and bigger part of my overhead. In addition to increasing numbers of competitors, the widespread financial downturn resulted in fewer people who had the means to pay for my services.

I very quickly found myself in a situation where I was spending more money on advertising alone (never mind the rest of my overhead) than I was bringing in from my services.

Hoping that this was a temporary set-back, I decided to hang in there and try to turn things around. I increased my advertising expenses even more. And I continued to lose money, only much faster. I still clung to the hope that things would turn around soon, and continued to pour money into advertising. Out of loyalty to my staff, I delayed making any layoffs. By the time I finally had no choice but to begin slashing my overhead, the damage had been done to my finances. My savings were gone, my credit was maxed out, I was up to my eyeballs in debt (much of it at high interest rates) and I was behind on my payments to all of my creditors.

With no other options, I laid off my whole staff, cut my expenses as much as I could, and ran what was left of my practice by myself. Even with such drastic measures, for a while I barely got by. I remember using my accumulated pocket change to buy groceries on a few particularly bad weeks.

I realized that I was going to have to find a way to supplement the meager income I was making from my practice. But what could I do? I needed to continue my practice, slow as things were, because I had fixed monthly expenses that I could not cut any further and that would limit my part-time job options. The job market was pretty bad, so my money making prospects were not great from a second job anyway. I was broke and my credit was ruined. Bankruptcy was looming, so my options for new business ventures were pretty limited.

I decided to try my hand at making money on the internet.

I didn't really know anything about making money online, so I learned what I could from free resources and bought a couple of inexpensive programs that promised to teach me how to be an online millionaire in no time. At first, the main things I learned were that there is a lot of misinformation (some use the term "lies") about how to make money online, and that there were an awful lot of people who were willing to take what little money I had to teach me that lesson (how nice of them!). But I stuck with it, partially because I figured if other people were making money online, I'd eventually figure it out, and partially because I didn't know what else to do.

Eventually I did learn enough to start making a little money, and my income from my online businesses has grown gradually ever since. But all of that is just the background for what I want to share with you.

Along the way of learning how to make money online, I stumbled onto a way to grow my “offline” business.

For several years, I had been using an acupuncture-based treatment for allergies. I had tried some advertising for it in the past, but the cost of the ads was so high for the relatively small amount of business they produced, I stopped advertising it and dedicated my advertising budget to more lucrative niches like patients with bulging discs.

As I learned more about online marketing, it occurred to me to experiment with a website for my allergy treatment.

So I put up a very basic website (at that time, my web page design skills were still very rudimentary) and employed a few simple online promotion techniques. I really didn't have a specific plan for what I was doing and just wanted to see what would come of it.

What came of it was that I had stumbled onto a marketing goldmine! My number of new allergy patients quadrupled in a matter of a couple of months. I was particularly happy with the fact that what had always been my slowest time of the year (late November through early January) corresponded with the mountain cedar allergy season. Since putting up my allergy website, what was the slowest time of year became my busiest time of year in my practice.

After all my years struggling to make a living with conventional types of advertising and promotion, I had finally discovered an effective and highly profitable way to market my services!

My online allergy marketing only took a few hours to set up and the costs were minimal compared to any other type of advertising I could do. How minimal? Well, currently my site costs less than $90 per year to run. That's the total cost per YEAR, including my initial set-up costs (since I produced my own website and promotional materials for free). During mountain cedar season alone, which is about 3 months out of the year, my online marketing for my allergy services produces an average of an additional $3000 per month.

The total increase in revenue that has resulted from my online allergy marketing is approximately $18,000 per year. At $90 per year to run it, that's a 200:1 return on investment!

Needless to say, I started working on online promotion for my other services.

Now, the title of this article is “A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To Bankruptcy”. It probably should actually be “A Couple Of Funny Things Happened On My Way To Bankruptcy”.

As I said, after the success of my online allergy promotion, I started working on promoting my other services, but something was wrong. I was kind of dragging my feet on the work. I couldn't really get excited about doing the work. But why? Did I have doubts it would be successful? No, I was pretty certain it would work. In fact, the second site that I finally got myself to finish to promote my chiropractic services was working well and had approximately doubled my new chiropractic patients. What was the problem?

I finally realized that I didn't really enjoy being a chiropractor all that much. I had dedicated myself to it for nearly half my life, I had sacrificed my financial well being for it, and I had invested a lot of time and money on training to be really good at it, but I really didn't LIKE it. Yes, there were certain patients I liked working with and I definitely did get satisfaction from helping people, but the fact was, I didn't want my practice to grow any bigger than it was.

Growing bigger meant having more of what I didn't like. I didn't want to be busier because that would make it even harder to take time off – I had only taken 6 weeks of vacation in 17 years as it was! I certainly didn't want to go back to having multiple employees – I HATED managing staff! I much preferred running the practice all by myself, even if it got to be a bit hectic at times.

About the same time that I made this realization, a friend and colleague who was also specializing in spinal decompression was trying to expand his practice and asked me if I would write a full-page newspaper ad for him, because he wasn't really sure where to start in writing an ad that big. In addition to writing the ad, I wound up doing internet marketing for him as well.

I quickly realized that not only was my internet marketing knowledge something I could convert into a second career, but it was work that I really enjoyed.

At that point, I decided to develop my marketing business and gradually reduce my time in my chiropractic practice. And that's exactly what I'm doing.

So that's how I got started doing marketing for other businesses. In addition to doing internet marketing and ad copyrighting, I also work with business owners to help them discover if what they think they want to happen in their business is what they actually want. I spent 17 years struggling to build a business I didn't want. If it hadn't been for the total financial devastation of my business that forced me to look at other options, I probably would have spent the rest of my life struggling to build a business I didn't actually want. So in addition to helping other business owners market their products and services in effective and profitable ways, I also want to help them know what they actually want for their businesses and to help them get it.

If you would like to see if can help you develop the business you really want, please contact me for a personal no-cost, no-obligation consultation.

George Best

Phone: (210) 535-4388

E-mail: George@BestMarketingProfits.com