Investor's Business Daily, August 17th, 2007
What does crunching bones have to do with rock bands?
A Google search for "Van Halen tour 2007" isn't the kind of event that seemingly calls up a story written for a chiropractic-themed Web site.
But on Feb. 3, a day after word came that the Van Halen rock group would be going on tour, Michael Dorausch, a certified chiropractic in Venice, Calif., posted a story on his PlanetChiropractic Web site with this headline: "Chiropractors prepare for 2007 Van Halen tour with David Lee Roth."
Dorausch's odd move is the nub of an idea that can help other small businesses harness the power of the Web to build a bigger profile with consumers. It involves finding ways to tie his business specialty to the most searched-for Web subjects of the day.
Most of Dorausch's 600-word story dealt with the upcoming tour and Van Halen's history. It was information that clearly appealed to die-hard fans hunting for any morsel of information they could find about the performers.
It wasn't until the second to last paragraph that Dorausch tied in the business of chiropractics, promoting the idea that free services ought to be offered to the group in every city they toured.
In a direct appeal to chiropractics he said, "I'm sure we can locate at least one in each of the 40 cities that would volunteer to be on hand to ensure Van Halen is in top condition for each performance."
Page Views Soar
The story has been read thousands of times on www.planetchiropractic.com since February. It's still popular when doing a Van Halen search, coming up in the 8th and 15th place of stories posted on Yahoo YHOO and Google GOOG, respectively, early this month.
The key to the article's success was simple. Dorausch realized that Van Halen would be a highly rated search term. By getting Van Halen into the headline -- with millions of Web users searching the term -- that increased the odds his story would get a view.
It's one reason why page views at his Web site have risen 300% in the past year.
Not only is the Web site a profitable operation, but it's been instrumental in bringing new customers to his business, ADIO Chiropractic, located in a mini mall. Dorausch no longer advertises in the Yellow Pages, nor does he pay for Web ads.
Tactic Can Be Copied
The tactics he's used to boost his business could be copied and applied to just about any business owner.
"You could duplicate this model to any business -- a florist, a dentist, or orthopedic surgeon, and have the same kind of success I have had," said Dorausch.
PlanetChiropractic received 56,000 visitors in July, up 17% from the month before, and up 35% since January, according to a statistical printout he provided.
"One of the common questions I get is 'How do you do this?' People think I have this large organization behind me."
But PlanetChiropractic is a one-man operation. At his home office, Dorausch has three Web servers that connect to a 15-gigabit broadband connection. He has two more computers and terminals where he researches and writes stories, looks for leads and monitors his network.
He writes most of the stories on the site, though more than 100 people in the chiropractic field have authored some stories -- averaging about 12 a month. They write them for free but get something in return.
"All of them have received new business from those articles," Dorausch said.
The key to driving viewers to PlanetChiropractic is posting articles with headlines that tap into key search words. Each day Dorausch goes to Google Trends where the top 100 search terms of the day are listed. He looks for terms that he can tap into with a chiropractic theme.
He did it with the recent X Games in Los Angeles -- an annual competition between skateboarders and bikers. Six of the X Games contestants were his clients. That got him access to the event and an inside look of what was happening, with photos. He posted the story a day before the X Games started -- in advance of when most people would be searching for that term. That day his story placed near the top of Google searches for X Games and remained near the top during the next 24 hours, alongside stories from major news organizations (Dorausch has screen grabs from those days as evidence).
When pop singer Beyonce -- another popular search term -- tumbled down a flight of stars during a concert in July, Dorausch wrote an article about the fall. He then tied that into the fact that such an accident can cause back injuries that a chiropractor can fix, and included tips on how to find a good one.
Though the site has a chiropractic theme to it, the number of visitors to the site clearly suggests PlanetChiropractic is reaching far beyond the chiropractic community. It's reaching the consumer.
"He's become an online publisher," said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, a Web monitoring firm.
"He's also discovered something that a lot of larger publishers know about: writing timely content with key search terms. He's shown he can play in the same league as the large publisher."
Tancer noted, however, that some articles on the site only have a "tenuous connection" between the key search term and its relationship to the business of chiropractics.
"A number of people practice this, posting stories that have a way of bubbling up to the top based on organic search results," he said.
Relevance Is Key
The trick is to provide relevance to the story. Any tie-ins must have serious content.
"If you don't then people will quickly learn it's an advertorial and may not come back," he said.
Also important to the success of PlanetChiropractic is its strong ties to Google. Three months after the launch of Google News, Dorausch persuaded them to include stories from PlanetChiropractic as one of Google's 4,500 news sources. He also participates in Google's AdSense, a money-sharing ad-serving program that results in Dorausch getting a regular royalty check. Chiropractors also pay him a monthly fee to post listings.
To build the Web site operation, Dorausch used industry standard open source software -- Linux, MySQL, Word Press, Apache, Pearl and PHP. The software is free, thus keeping overhead costs down. He also employs real simple syndication or RSS and tagging -- common Web practices that help drive Web traffic.
"They're powerful software tools at no cost, except for implementation," he said.
As to why he's willing to share his secret to success, it stems from his philosophy that you always get back more than you give. About half of his work time is spent developing stories and managing his Web site. In addition to PlanetChiropractic, Dorausch also has his business Web site for ADIO Chiropractic, a blog site, and another, Chiropractichomepage.com, where he shares ideas on creating Web sites.
"You have to think completely outside the box," he said.
