Donkey God

Health care marketing and strategic positioning are not an activities that manipulate the intrinsic properties of a product or service. Instead, positioning is a process by which you influence a consumer’s opinion of the value of a product or service relative to its competition. The main goal of strategic positioning is to differentiate an organization from other similar organizations within the market. Then the organization must monopolize on those differences to gain a competitive advantage over others.

Deciding on a positioning strategy for a health care organization requires that administration:

From there, we can begin to understand the possibilities for changing customer perceptions of an organization in order to improve customer loyalty and probability that a customer will utilize an organization’s services.

Corporate branding is a method health care organizations can use to differentiate themselves from competitors. The branding process is more that selecting corporate names, logos or advertising tag lines. Instead, it is structured business process that is planned, strategically focused and integrated throughout the organization.

At its very heart, the branding process is designed to create an emotional, rational and community image of an organization within the mind of the consumer that allows him or her to rank the value of an organization and their services against those of competitors.

We know that insurance contracts are important to a healthcare organization, but ultimately it is the patient that must be convinced to choose a service provider. What is important to them? A provider that cares and who well versed in the “Art of Medicine”. Also they want to be cared for by organizations/people who practice the best, research supported, cutting-edge medicine.

While the informal and personal tone of the blogosphere, to date, has been identified as a risk of a healthcare organization starting a blog, there is the very real possibility that these very traits of blogs could play well into marketing and branding endeavors. What’s the harm in letting patients know a little bit more about you as long as it is presented professionally?

Author’s Bio: Carol is the Vice President of The Promedica Research Center. She has a masters degree from Mercer University in Health Policy and Administration and currently teaches a master’s level course on Health Care Organizations for the University of Phoenix (Online), College of Health Sciences.

In October 2005, Carol started a blog for her continuing education company to help to provide a value added resource to the programs her company provides. Starting in December 2005, she began consulting with physicians help them determine a blog strategy for their businesses. In the future, she hopes to use her knowledge about adult, professional, and patient education to promote and implement new blogs as customer-oriented marketing tools for the healthcare industry. For more information visit her blog: http://www.drivingintraffic.com

Well we have all heard about Blogs by now and if you are serious about developing your business you should have set up several in different niches, not because the more Blogs you have the more you will earn, although that could be a possibility given time.

Quite the contrary; it is a lot of hard work maintaining the flow of content to your Blogs but who said Life (or Blogging )was going to be an easy ride? It is however, probably the least costly way of creating an image for yourself as an expert in your field and is guaranteed to bring results in the way of increased traffic to your web site in a few months. O.K that’s a pretty bold statement coming from a newbie blogger, incidentally when does one cease to be a Newbie? Now there’s an interesting thought! Here’s another thought…what if you don’t have a web site yet? Phew that’s another day’s work …did I actually say a day? I really meant a year!

The message is coming through loud and clear…and that is get Blogging right away because the sooner you start, the sooner you will see some results and the quicker you will leave Newbie status firmly in the past. The first faltering steps on the blog road can be interesting to say the least. You spend so much time creating your content aka posts, that you tend to forget that even when you have been at it for a week or two, posting every day, nobody probably has even seen your work at this stage! Or have they?

That’s the next hurdle which is very reminiscent of the New Web Site owner who sits back with great sighs of relief at having the creation on-line until he or she realises that what has just been achieved is actually the easy part and the real work now has to begin in earnest. What is the real work? Well first of all you must set up a routine to collate material to provide your inspiration for your posts and then you gotta keep up the posting momentum. Some experts say that you should post three times a day in the first few weeks or even months and some say you should post at least three times a week. Either way you should decide on a number and stick to it. Easier said than done!

One statement that I came across in the first couple of weeks, and bear in mind the euphoria still had a long life ahead of it yet, was on the lines of “don’t expect to see any real traffic for six months”. Now with all the publicity and mass hysteria surrounding Blogs you could perhaps have been forgiven for thinking that you would become celebrated overnight. Six months… Wow… that’s a lifetime on the Internet with things changing so rapidly. Why isn’t it all going to happen tomorrow?

Well, just like most things in life, time plays a major role in events and even with all the technology at our disposal we have to put a great deal of effort in before we see a return. No such thing as a free Blog, sorry Lunch! That’s a topic that deserves some separate comments outside of this article.
We left the first of all, several paragraphs back, so it’s time for second of all which is finding some, or rather many …as many as possible, Directories to list your Blog. What a chore but necessary. Here is where I reward the reader for getting this far and not switching off long ago.

Wait for it…are you surfing/reading/ snoozing comfortably? Just discovered a wonderful resource that will save hours and hours of research but will require hours and hours of submissions and it’s the incredibly named RSS Top 55 which actually boasts 160 RSS sites and Blog Directories. The author is none other than Robin Good not to be confused with the Outlaw of Sherwood Forest Fame, in those heady pre Internet days when life really was simple (but still not easy!)By the way what on earth is RSS? Come back next week and with a bit of Luck something else will be flavour of the month and you won’t have to worry about it any more!

Actually the authors real name is Luigi Canali de Rossi who must I guess be of Motorcycle or Formula One extraction. Hence the confusion between the numbers. I have still to work out how 55 makes 160! Though on reflection, if you add a couple of noughts to each of these you are probably close enough to first and sixth gears! So he must have been working on his RPM stats at the time!

Why he should want to change his name is beyond me since this must be the best resource going for a Directory non stop shop. Want the link? Go to the end of the article like all good freebie- hunters and beg!

The listing is on Luigi’s Blog at Master…New…Media; wow I nearly slipped in a “Bie” there by mistake since it is now the most frequented word in my vocabulary. This listing does everything but make the coffee for you…get to it and get Blogging. Don’t you just love it when Bloggers play dirty? Here is the url… w w w.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55

Robin Piggott is about to leave his Newbie status behind although that could be open to conjecture! In his spare time(which is zero) he operates a Professional Driving School in Limerick Ireland and provides current insider, under the radar help, tips and information for would- be Drivers through his Web site and would be Bloggers through his…yes you’ve guessed it… Blogs!
http://www.astralmotoring.ie
http://NetNewbieProfits.blogspot.com

Paris Hilton has consistently stayed at the very top of search engine searches for months and many a self publisher has cashed in on her name to win huge chunks of traffic to their sites via search engines.

There are many other beautiful young ladies in the world but this particular one has managed the feat of staying on people’s minds for a long time.

What this proves is that all a self publisher needs to be able to draw huge traffic online, is a carefully crafted PR or image strategy. In the old offline days this meant distributing news releases to the media or drawing media attention in a certain direction of interest. In today’s wonderful world of blogs, the blog itself is a powerful media for communicating any message you want to get across.

What would usually take ages to painstakingly build in the offline world of newspaper editors and TV news anchors who have to be persuaded or cajoled into using a news release, takes a few hours or a few days at the most to accomplish, online. All a self publisher really needs are a few posts at their own blog and even at somebody else’s.

Focusing on creating the right image that will drive loads of traffic to your blog and get other bloggers to link to your posts like crazy is an objective that will pay off big for any self publisher. It is certainly well worth the effort of learning the basics of PR and image creation. This is the sort of learning from experts that can easily be done online for free.

Christopher Kyalo is a successful online self publisher. Visit his Self Publisher blog to read the other parts of this article and for other amazing success tips. Subscribe to his free email newsletter to discover all the secrets of an amazing online publishing company that generates 100 million dollars a year. Send a blank email now to InternetinfoPublishsecrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com