Looking for a few DCs 2BE

I started this blog to learn how to do marketing over the Internet, and I have been a slow learner indeed.  Yet it has not all been for naught.

The techniques I have been studying for online marketing are helping to put my day job website a bit higher on the Google charts–even made the top once for long enough to take a screen shot and email it to the college president. I think the site is working, as we put up a form for a special tour yesterday, and three or four people have already signed up. That means that they saw it and were interested.

My goal for my work is to attract 30 new students by May first, people who can enroll in June, people who have the grades for the proper coursework already completed.  Then I will work on attracting 30 more for Fall quarter in October, and another 30 for next January.

I had an interesting conversation with a marketing salesman who does not get the college model. He offered to cut his $4000 price to $2500 (was it worth $4000 to begin with?) and then to split it over 30 days.   I had to explain to him that we had just enrolled a smaller class than we hoped for,  were working on a budget that Ronco couldn’t slice any finer, and that we would not get any new students until June. It was not like we would be able to sell enough widgets over the 30 days to make up the difference.

He also kept telling me how he would put our ads on high traffic sites that would bring us targeted traffic. I wonder what sites he had in mind? Where do chiropractor wannabes hang out?

I have good traffic, over 7000 visits a month (down from November), and a very small but high ticket niche–people who want to be doctors of chiropractic. The price is more than $100k spread out over nearly four years. Nearly all the students have student loans. This is graduate school, and we re not looking for 5000 students a year, but only 500.

They don’t come just from the local area, but from 15 states and several other countries.  They are in their late 20s to early 40s, 60% male, 40% female,  equal mix of married and single, although the single ones often marry each other.

They have to like and be successful in  the sciences–biology, chemistry and physics–to learn the anatomy and physiology required to do chiropractic effectively, and they have to have an entrepreneurial mindset to be able to run their own practice or market themselves to sports teams, wellness clinics or other venues. They will always be educating their patients away from the pain relief model to wellness care, and to work against the prejudice that chiropractors are whack-em-crack-em quacks.

But I only need 500 a year, not 5000, and there are a lot of people on the Internet. We’re on youtube,  facebook and myspace, linked to a lot of our current students and alumni. We twitter and blog– even our president tweets now and again–and I’m starting some hubpages as soon as I get some picutures ready.

Seems doable.