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On the Finding of Help and the Getting of Answers

As we recently posted, FeedBurner's integration into Google is moving along. We've got our coding hats on and are hard at work to get the essential product pieces where they need to be.

However, one somewhat-below-the-radar part of FeedBurner's integration that is already showing up as part of google.com is our new Help Center. (Well, "new" as of late 2007. We admit to being a touch slow on the draw with the PR on this one.) We point this out to show that migrating to a Googley-er tomorrow isn't strictly tied to FeedBurner charts 'n graphs 'n numbers. It used be difficult to find answers; a popup window here, a Forums post there, a blog post over yonder. The Help Center brings sorely needed structure (and searchability) to a bunch of resources that were largely scattered about before. You can now find topics like "What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?", and "Is there a feed file size limit?" in just one place. (We've still got nothing for you on "How can I avoid jury duty selection?") The Help Center will soon introduce new troubleshooting topics and contact options as well.

Speaking of the Forums: they are overdue for the Google treatment, too. We've provided them since shortly after FeedBurner launched as an essential, community-powered companion to the service itself. In the next few weeks, the Forums will move to a new Google Group, with the following benefits:

• Much less spam
• Improved [BUY CH3AP STUFF ONL1NE] search for old topics and conversations
• New email notification options when new topics are posted
• Much, much [FREE V!AGRA NOW] less spam

We also want to point out that FeedBurner Japan is also going to benefit from these Help Center and Groups changes, too. But what about the many other languages FeedBurner publishers use? Google strongly believes in making products accessible to the widest global audience; efforts to formally localize FeedBurner for the most popular and requested languages are under way, going well beyond the options we currently offer.

And, finally: Leap Year post!

Are You Hunting or Farming for Patients?

A few weeks ago we talked about how to increase professional referrals to your practice. Developing this referral source is essentially a networking exercise, but the point of the post was to provide a framework in which to do it without feeling weird, creepy, or uncomfortable.

I know there are a lot of alternative and complementary practitioners who are involved with networking groups like BNI. While I don’t generally promote those groups a great deal, I read a fantastic tidbit from Ivan Misener, the founder and CEO of BNI, in a piece on Entrepreneur.com:

3. Word-of-mouth is more about farming than it is about hunting.

Building your business through word-of-mouth is about cultivating relationships with people who get to know you and trust you. People do business with people they have confidence in. One of the most important things I’ve learned in the past two decades is this: It’s not what you know, or who you know, it’s how well you know them that counts. [emphasis mine]

It’s a great metaphor for the development of your professional referral base. The approach we recommend - of slowly gathering background and connections before you approach someone - is aboutchoosing to farm relationships. Nurture them gradually in the form of inquiry, research and contemplation. Plant them, water them, and watch them grow, but don’t harvest them until they’re ready.

And whatever you do, don’t hunt them. That’s what everyone else is doing because they haven’t yet realized that you can only eat prey once, but you can harvest a garden forever.

Related posts:

1. New Patient Referrals: The 5 P’s

Hello? Hellooooo?

Hi there. You may be looking in your feed reader every day and thinking "Another no-news-'bout-FeedBurner day." You may be starting to think, "Are they still in there? In the FeedBurner bubble, burning the feeds? Did somebody maybe shut off their connection to the Tubes?" You may be thinking that or worse. We have some good news, and some just newsy news.

First, the good news. We are totally still here, burning the feeds, writing the checks (that's some sweet cursive Giuliana's wielding), and analyzing the analytics.

Next, the newsy news, aka "what we did over summer and winter and spring vacation." If you are looking for juicy announcements, this section is NOT for you. This is more like the academic paper section of the post, except for the fact it lacks erudition and other big vocabulary words. We have been and are busy integrating FeedBurner into a more Googley way of life. This Googley way of life is very different on the backend architecture side, so the team has been busy both scaling and maintaining the existing environment, while simultaneously rewriting the system to act like one of the cool kids in the more Googley (Googly? Can we get a ruling on this one?) architecture world.

So, if you're a publisher, a good next question is "Um, why are you doing this again?" The answers are numerous, so let's itemize a few of them:

• Full integration with Google. Integration makes it possible to connect with other Google offerings. For example, only a fraction of our publishers have had the opportunity to participate in the FeedBurner Ad Network to date. We would like to offer this capability to an order of magnitude more publishers, and full integration into Google architecture will make this not just a possibility but a likelihood (more on this in the next couple months).
• More and better services. As any Mies Van der Rohe fan will tell you, "more is more." By getting our systems fully integrated into a Google architecture, it will be easier for us to provide some services we've long envisioned but have never really been able to provide because of scale challenges. These include but are not limited to parameterized feeds (e.g., think feeds of query results), a wider variety of email services (those of you wishing to import legitimate-yet-massive email lists know what we mean), and other stuff. And by "stuff," we mean "things."
• Easier to scale as load on the system increases. As more feeds are burned and are hit by more kinds of feed reading bots and readers and API's and crawlers, even feeds that don't have new subscribers see increased activity. Full integration into Google will mean an easier time working through performance and scalability bottlenecks, which means the engineering resources now hard at work on scaling can move on to enhancing services.

Why not build new services and integrate at the same time? There are lots of opinions about the best way to go through integrations. Our perspective is that the time you lose trying to continuously merge an updated legacy codebase with a new rewrite causes you be in a world of never actually getting the integration done because you're constantly working on merge problems, which gives you less time to add new features OR get the new backend integration done, and eventually you kind of grind to a halt, much like Achilles trying to catch the Tortoise in Zeno's paradox. We're confident, in fact, that Zeno would have used software integration to illustrate his paradox had he lived in less pre-Socratic times. Anyhoo, we decided to bite the bullet and go full-on integration (while maintaining the existing environment) as much as possible, knowing that it would mean few new features or capabilities while we went on our backend integration journey. So, while we have continued to add hundreds of thousands of new publishers and feeds, you haven't heard a lot from us despite a lot of hard work. It's not really that exciting to post "Soon, you will have everything you used to have, only it will look different to the people working on it here!"

There are lots of lots of product integration points that we know people would like to see, and we are looking forward to those as well. These opportunities are not lost on some of the brighter students at Google, and believe me, there are some real brainiacs around here. We keep whispering to each other in the hallways, "What if they find out we're stupid?"

On the customer side, we have been signing up new publishers right and left (or left and right, depending on whether you live in the northern or southern hemisphere), and in fact, our publisher services team is busier than ever. We used to announce all of these new publishers, but it's a bit less exciting to announce customers that are already customers of other parts of the company without feeling like the kids in school who are the last ones to do everything. (Simulated conversation. FeedBurner: "Hey, we just burned our millionth feed!" Search: "It's cute how they still get excited about numbers in the millions.")

The Best Acupuncture Practice Management Resources on The Web

Here are our favorite acupuncture-specific online resources for practice growth and management, in no particular order. Have we missed any? Let us know in the comments.

Acupuncture Business School

• Workshops, coaching, teleconferences, books, distance learning…ABS just about has it all. In the words of founder Andy Rosenfarb: “ABS is a developing resource for L.Ac.’s who want to better their situation in clinical practice. We want to provide real methods that work, rather than just a lot of fancy marketing talk. There are quite a few practitioners who are doing well and ABS was created to start to get these acupuncturists out of the woodwork and share what they are doing and what’s working for them. ” That sounds pretty darn fine to me.

Insights for Acupuncturists

• Lisa Hanfileti is a working acupuncturist who’s not only dedicated to helping other practitioners, she’s plenty nice too. Her site has a lot to offer, particularly for practitioners interested in passive income, and using the internet to market their practice. She’s also got a great list of online resources.

Community Acupuncture Network

• Community Acupuncture Network (CAN) is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to make acupuncture more affordable and accessible. The members are lively and active. You might also do yourself a favor and check out founder Lisa Rohleder’s book The Remedy, and her fantastic (and free) little ebook Love Your Microbusiness.

Build Your Dream Practice

• Kevin Doherty offers coaching, and a couple of great books. The first is Build Your Dream Practice, a beautifully put together ebook on practice management, filled with some great wisdom and advice. Kevin’s latest project, allows to co-author your own customized version of How to Thrive in the Modern World: A Layperson’s Guide to Chinese Medicine, for educating your patients and prospects. You can see samples of both books on the site.

Acupuncture Clinic Marketing

• Burton Kent’s blog is relatively new, but his new book Never Market Again has got some great business advice, and is on sale until Feb 14th at 50% off.

The Acupuncture Marketing Blog

• Bonnie’s blog is a great source of insight into marketing ideas and online resources circulating through the internet. There’s well over a year’s worth of blog posts - lots to keep you busy for a while.

Acupuncture Media Works

• Acupuncture Media Works is best known for their broad range of promotional print and office materials - everything from business cards and brochures, to charts and displays. What gets them on this list, though, is the remarkable quantity of stuff available in the “Tips/Free Stuff” section - a huge array of letters, forms, info sheets and more, all free for the taking.

Acufinder

• Acufinder acupuncture referral services has a solid list of practice management articles in their Learning Center.

The Acupreneur

• Dr. Eric Schneider provides some free articles on the site, but a quick signup will also get you a free copy of the ebook 52 Integrity Based Ways to Fill Your Acupuncture Practice. The book’s nicely arranged, and there are some real gems in the 52.

Other Resources:

• The forums at gancao.net
• The forums at TCM Student
  
• The TCM Practice Survival Guide on YouTube

Any Suggestions?

I know there are lots of resources out there - if you’ve got a favorite that we’ve missed, do tell. Don’t be shy!

Related posts:

1. Acupuncture Practice Growth Resources
2. Acupuncture Marketing Blog Roundup
3. Affordable Acupuncture - Charge Less, Earn More?
4. More Acupuncture Pricing Debate
5. CAM Information Resources

Weekend Inspiration: Do The Unthinkable

I was recently interviewed about our book Escape 101 by Mark Hayward of MyTropicalEscape.com, who’s a consummate escape artist himself.

You can check out the interview here, but what I really want to draw your attention to is his interview with Scott Rigsby, who became the first double amputee in the world to finish an Ironman distance triathlon.

Rigsby used “swim legs” to navigate the difficult 2.4 mile ocean swim, “bike legs” to cycle 112 miles through the heat and gusting winds of the Big Island lava fields on a standard road bike, and “run legs” to complete the marathon segment in darkness and intense pain.

It’s a great piece of inspiration to share with your colleagues and patients, and a heck of a fine way to start off a weekend. Check it out: Do the Unthinkable - The Scott Rigsby Interview.

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