Generating revenue from a website is not a strange concept. Unless of course, you are a doctor. Some of the best thinkers on healthcare say doctors earn less than everyone else and might want to reconsider their career choices.
Generating revenue from a website is not a strange concept. Unless of course, you are a doctor. Some of the best thinkers on healthcare say doctors earn less than everyone else and might want to reconsider their career choices.
Most medical professionals consider their websites as information portals with nothing to do with e-commerce, but as the money dries up with the actual practice of medicine, you need to consider some alternatives to bolster falling revenues.
Most doctors are very smart and highly trained in their given field of knowledge, but haven’t thought of alternative ways to leverage their knowledge to generate income.
What could go wrong?
They know very little about the marketing process or the actual mechanics of getting something tangible on a website. Then comes the challenge of hooking up all the moving parts to get the money into your bank account. What could go wrong?
Think of the possibility of actually generating money directly deposited into your bank account 24/7 while you sleep, work or while you are on vacation. Up till now, the possibility of generating income while you are on vacation has been a pipe dream for the typical practitioner.
What could actually be better than selling something that your particular patient profile could really benefit from in terms of a physical product, information product, or hosted community site? The fact is that the items that you could sell from your site are only limited by your imagination.
Think about creating something once and then letting it sell from your website without having to change it again. Unlike your normal practice of medicine where you repeat the same process over and over (and get paid less and less), you just take the time to create something of extraordinary value once. This creation can be anything from audio, video, text, or actual physical product.
These possibilities have really come into being and broad use in the past 10 years and were something that I became exposed to in the past 5 years, so it was new for me too. Can you do this? I believe so.
About 5 years ago, I woke up at the age of 58 and something told me to get up and get learning about the Internet. Up till then, the Internet was something very foreign to me and something that I didn’t want much to do with. The Internet, with all the high tech language, really made me feel my age. But it wasn’t really the Internet that was so fascinating, but rather what you could do with it as a platform.
A platform was a term that I didn’t really understand at first either. With all the buzz about the Internet, I didn’t really see it for what it was. It was a platform, like TV, radio, newspapers and magazines are platforms. They are the traditional platforms that shared something in common.
The thing they shared in common was that the information on the platform usually went just one way. In other words, it is not very interactive. If you read a newspaper, watch TV or listen to the radio, the information is almost always going in one direction, from the platform to you.
There are many interesting aspects of the Internet, but the one that is so different than the other platforms is that it is so interactive. You can direct inquiries to it and then the Internet can respond back to you. This is the real power of the Internet, you are in charge of directing the “search”. In turn, you will probably receive hundreds of thousands of possible answers to your question.
It depends on the nature and complexity of your question of course, but chances are that someone has tried to discuss or answer it before. If you are able to deliver a high quality educational piece in a concise way, you may have something that you can sell.
You are a “credible authority”
The most obvious example of this is a book sold from your website. If you write a book, you are automatically a “credible authority” on that topic. A book is a great way to cover a topic and package it for sale. A book could be sold from your website in a few different ways. To make the most profit, someone pays for the book with Paypal or with a credit card and shopping cart and you take charge of delivering the book. Delivering the book is also referred to as “fulfillment”.
The easy way to sell the book is to put it up on Amazon and although they will take 50% of the sale price, they will print the book on demand, figure out any taxes that have to be paid, and ship it for you. Amazon also has Kindle versions often available. Making a workbook makes for another piece to be sold.
The book, in this example, can be sold directly from your medical website. The book should have its own webpage (recommended). Once the icon on your medical website is clicked, it directs the interested party to your dedicated page. You can also advertise your book better with its own page.
This is one small example of a way to make money from your website when you are sleeping or on vacation. You might say that there isn’t that much financial potential with a book and perhaps that is true in the medical world, but you will never know unless you try. It also does a world of good with defining yourself as an expert to potential patients.
In upcoming posts, we will talk about other things that can be sold from a medical website that can generate some serious monies.
Feel free to ask questions and give me any feedback.
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