So today I got a great series of questions from Ed, a dentist in California. Ed asks me to name the directories my dental blogsites are featured in, and asks about how backlinks are built, and further, how I incentivize people to get onto an email list so that I can email them on your behalf and convert them into patients.

Thanks Ed! Here hopefully are some answers to these great questions.

When I promote blogsites, I do so in three ways:

• Build quality backlinks, these are links that are from quality sites, that link deeply into your blog. See Dental website marketing backlinks for more. Backlinks increase rankings on Google and other search engines.
• Generate traffic through social media sites
• Distribute new dental blog articles through RSS feeds, getting the word out all over the web

I post about 18 times per month and ping about 40 different directories and search engines with every post.

If you are doing your own blog, you want to post almost every weekday. I find that if I don't post for a few days, traffic drops pretty dramatically. It will drop to a baseline level often 30% or 40% of the level it was at before I stopped making new articles.

That's why I post 18 times per month approximately.

The key is consistency. How do you build your dental blog for more dental patients? Be consistent…

And a big part of the secret today to get rankings and traffic is forming a long tail of search terms so each new article promotes a narrow bunch of search terms.  See Dental Google Advertising for more about the long tail.

When I create a keyword optimized article, I use search term that always include dental terms plus geography.

When dental patients look for a new dentist, they will often search with full sentences and phrases rather than simple keyword combos. When they are in a shopping mode, that is, when they are serious about finding a new dentist, they will enter geography as well, so they find results that are local.

With the long tail, when a dental patient searches using keywords and geography, their search will often turn up high on Google and Yahoo and MSN Live rankings. Plus we pick up direct traffic from social media sites as well as rankings.

Email optins for dental patients

As far as opt ins — I never use coreg or third parties for this. I never pay a dime for opt ins. But I might do it in the future. And it would only be after a lot of testing. It isn't in the plan right now.

I know I get traffic on blogsites. Now my work is focused on increasing conversions that result in patients.

When someone opts in to your list, I run an email sequence that convinces them to become your patient, hopefully. This is something I am working a lot on now. I expect some major breakthroughs in this area.

And if you want to get in on doing your own dental blog, or get some good dental marketing ideas, make sure you get my $59.95 book on case acceptance and dental practice marketing, the all time bestseller. I never share your email or name with anyone and you can opt out anytime.