FON: THE BUSINESS OF INTEGRATIVE HEALTH & MEDICINE

Search engine optimization (SEO) remains critical to driving traffic to your website to engage prospective patients and clients. However, fast-paced technology may have overtaken you. Your current efforts may be for naught, mistakenly based on outdated practices. Over the last few years much has changed in terms of the algorithms Google uses to reward or penalize sites. If you’re not staying on top of this stuff, you’re likely falling short

Protecting and promoting your personal brand, to better your position as a thought leader, is critical. It requires proactivity, with ongoing monitoring of your good name and reputation—you must always have your ear to the ground. Essentially, to ensure your information and content is in all the right places you need to employ the most appropriate tools to efficiently and consistently get the job done. As the old saw goes,

Establishing thought leadership is not very complex once you’ve built a solid platform from which to operate. Once you have identified your personal brand, created a powerful baseline platform, and differentiated the unique niche in which to position yourself professionally, the next step is content creation and its distribution. For centuries, medical practitioners and scientific thought leaders have used various forms of content to establish and extend their positions. The

Now that we have identified and examined the core elements for creating your integrative health personal brand and platform, it’s time to take the next step to differentiate your unique position and value proposition. Your niche is the space into which you must direct your expertise with laser-like focus to break through the clutter of consumer (or medical professional) information overload. Find Your Niche to ‘Own’ Your Unique Positioning Are

When most people think about a brand, they think about a name and a logo. While these labels and graphics that establish your ‘look and feel’ are important, a personal brand—when thoughtfully developed—encompasses considerably more. Your personal brand is who you are, representing your life, work, and purpose, therefore it ultimately influences all those around you—essentially your personal brand impacts how others feel. Candid and comprehensive answers to these often

Many professionals within the vibrant integrative health space possess masterful clinical abilities, significant scientific subject-matter expertise, and entrepreneurial business savvy. However, too few have consistently leveraged their significant attributes in the effort to become true thought leaders—key opinion leaders—in the field. Does this describe you? Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of organizations and individuals within the integrative health and medicine community to develop,

In 2012, I wrote a piece describing the integrative health community as being one camp comprising many tents. The article discussed the various sub-groups within the field, including: integrative medicine, functional medicine, holistic medicine, restorative medicine, and lifestyle medicine. I posited then, with numerous ‘tents’ falling under the integrative health camp, that newbie (integrative) health consumers often have difficulty clearly differentiating between numerous names and the nomenclature, thus creating a