Misconceptions About Collecting Payment From Patients

Misconception 1: If Patients are making payments you cannot sue them to collect

Whether or not to take a patient to small claims court or send the patients account to a collection agency depends on the amount outstanding and the person's likely ability to pay. If a patient is making regular payments on the account that has been agreed upon in writing, then you cannot sue for payment. If the patient is not meeting those requirements then you have the right to sue for payment.

Misconception 2: When you mail statements makes a difference

Statements should be mailed out to insure arrival on the first of the month. This is not a good idea. So many companies follow that rule so what happens is the patient receives multiple bills on the same day and most likely your bill will be ignored over their car or mortgage payment. Sending out statements the second week of the month and mid-week is a good time because most bills are sent during this time and will stand out amongst all other mail. Sending a statement in a colored envelope such as beige or gray will also draw attention to it.

Misconception 3: Legal restrictions make collecting harder

Most state laws prohibit unreasonably harassing debtors by calling their workplace, at night or on weekends. With that said, the laws are not really that restrictive. Calling people at home or at work is not harassment until they tell you to stop, and maybe not even then if you are reasonable about it. However, if personal calls can jeopardize their jobs then that would not be ethical and will not help for you to collect money that is owed to you.

Misconception 4: It's so hard to reach patients at home

Good collectors try every phone number they can find. Some offices complain and say that the patients are never home so they don't even bother calling. Some offices stay open after five, usually when people are coming home from work, this would be a good time to call. Also some offices start early in the morning. Try calling then when possibly their getting ready for work or making breakfast. A quick brief call is all that needs to be made. You don't want to make the patient upset which could cause them to never pay you.

Misconception 5: Sending patients to a collection agency is bad business

Some physicians are afraid of sending patients to collections due to them telling other potential patients or the referring doctor. Instead, when the collection process is polite and reasonable, the doctor will gain more respect from the patient and no one will value the services you provide more that you do yourself.

Making RSS Feeds Available

Whether you have set up a blog for your website, a content management system, a forum, or any other site with RSS capabilities, providing feeds to your regular subscribers and occasional surfers is a way to attract and retain their attention over the actual and newly created content.

Syndication is a powerful tool that can be enhanced when you draw a plan to get the most from it. Most web software can generate RSS feeds automatically and without needing the site's owner intervention. Content is pulled into the feed with a native formatting that allow readers to retrieve and display such information in a simple manner, trimming other elements that surfer can see when they are browsing on-site.

Nevertheless, with RSS, it is necessary give every new content a descriptive and yet accurate text that reflects what the content is about. The perfect title should include one or more keywords, which should be repeated within the text itself. Nonetheless, avoid keyword stuffing as it is penalized by search engines and your potential readers can assume your content might be somewhat spammy.

Talking about spam, while it is a good idea provide a subscription form to receive email updates in a form of a newsletter, keep in mind that RSS feeds are delivered as soon as the content is posted or modified, while emails delay to arrive to the addressee when they are based on a certain scheduled time, being twice the work if sent manually otherwise.

What has make RSS popular is the approach to easy accessibility so do not bother your readers trying to get them sign up for a newsletter and focus in providing them with clearly defined links to your feeds. After all, do not forget that most modern email clients and web-based services may stop your newsletter if it contains any element that triggers their spam filtering.

In addition, you may write a special post or featured article explaining people what RSS feeds are and the convenience to subscribe to this service, providing also links or reviews on popular aggregators they can use for easy news retrieving. Aggregators are useful readers that allow individual sort entries, classified them, and even combine different sources into a single view for easy reading.

Do not wait RSS do the magic alone, despite it can do, but lend it a helping hand by implementing some of these tips to make available your content through syndication.

Product Launch Tips - Have You Considered Handling Refunds?

This is probably a topic that many marketers haven't really considered. Let's face it. Most of us spend our time focusing on making sales right?

The truth of the matter is that once you launch your first information product and begin to make sales there will be a certain percentage of that will ask for a refund.

That is assuming that you're offering a refund for your product in the first place. If you're not, you are at a huge disadvantage in competitive niches. Nearly all products sold online offer a refund of some sort on product purchases.

Plus, you'll make only a fraction of the sales when you don't offer a refund for online purchases. After put yourself in the customer's shoes. You're asking them to buy something when they've only seen a picture or video describing it. On top of that there are still many consumers who are skeptical to buy online. A refund policy reassures them that they are safe when they buy from your website.

Handling Refunds For Physical Products:

With a physical product you'll have a distribution center that handles the product delivery as well as the product refunds and returns. The sad reality is that if a product is returned it is often damaged. So, you're losing money on the deal. And that is on top of the actual money you refunded the customer for his purchase. Also, your distributor will charge you a fee for handling the returns and repackaging the product for resale if possible.

While you will be losing money by refunding physical products, the huge increase in overall sales should more than cover these small losses.

You will pay for the distribution center to handle the refunds and product returns, but on your end it is a fairly simple process. You essentially are outsourcing the job to them.

Handling Digital Product Refunds:

With digital products there is almost always a 100% money back guarantee involved. By the way, this is a huge selling point that increases your sales.

Why?

It's simple. You can just let them keep the digital product if it's an eBook or something they've downloaded. Likewise, if it's a membership site, you can block them from further access after the refund has been issued. You as the business owner did lose the sale, but at least you didn't lose more than that.

Issuing refunds for digitally formatted products is far easier than handling physical product refunds.

Typically, online marketers who sell digital products allow the customer to keep the product and simply refund the purchase price electronically to their credit card.

All of this can be done automatically using credit card processing and shopping cart applications. It can be managed by the individual seller, or he may elect to have the task outsourced to his VA.

For membership sites, marketers sometimes elect to issue a refund for the last subscription payment made. However, many times, there is no actual refund, but a cancellation instead.

For example, if you paid for this month's membership on the 10th of the month, you would have access to the member's area until the 10th of next month. At that time you would automatically be billed the subscription amount to pay for the next month's membership. If you decided to cancel your subscription on the 28th of the month, you would not get a refund, but you would still have access until the 10th of next month. Then you would no longer be billed.

The great thing is that all of this can be automated with membership site software.

Product Launch Tips - Have You Considered Handling Refunds?

This is probably a topic that many marketers haven't really considered. Let's face it. Most of us spend our time focusing on making sales right?

The truth of the matter is that once you launch your first information product and begin to make sales there will be a certain percentage of that will ask for a refund.

That is assuming that you're offering a refund for your product in the first place. If you're not, you are at a huge disadvantage in competitive niches. Nearly all products sold online offer a refund of some sort on product purchases.

Plus, you'll make only a fraction of the sales when you don't offer a refund for online purchases. After put yourself in the customer's shoes. You're asking them to buy something when they've only seen a picture or video describing it. On top of that there are still many consumers who are skeptical to buy online. A refund policy reassures them that they are safe when they buy from your website.

Handling Refunds For Physical Products:

With a physical product you'll have a distribution center that handles the product delivery as well as the product refunds and returns. The sad reality is that if a product is returned it is often damaged. So, you're losing money on the deal. And that is on top of the actual money you refunded the customer for his purchase. Also, your distributor will charge you a fee for handling the returns and repackaging the product for resale if possible.

While you will be losing money by refunding physical products, the huge increase in overall sales should more than cover these small losses.

You will pay for the distribution center to handle the refunds and product returns, but on your end it is a fairly simple process. You essentially are outsourcing the job to them.

Handling Digital Product Refunds:

With digital products there is almost always a 100% money back guarantee involved. By the way, this is a huge selling point that increases your sales.

Why?

It's simple. You can just let them keep the digital product if it's an eBook or something they've downloaded. Likewise, if it's a membership site, you can block them from further access after the refund has been issued. You as the business owner did lose the sale, but at least you didn't lose more than that.

Issuing refunds for digitally formatted products is far easier than handling physical product refunds.

Typically, online marketers who sell digital products allow the customer to keep the product and simply refund the purchase price electronically to their credit card.

All of this can be done automatically using credit card processing and shopping cart applications. It can be managed by the individual seller, or he may elect to have the task outsourced to his VA.

For membership sites, marketers sometimes elect to issue a refund for the last subscription payment made. However, many times, there is no actual refund, but a cancellation instead.

For example, if you paid for this month's membership on the 10th of the month, you would have access to the member's area until the 10th of next month. At that time you would automatically be billed the subscription amount to pay for the next month's membership. If you decided to cancel your subscription on the 28th of the month, you would not get a refund, but you would still have access until the 10th of next month. Then you would no longer be billed.

The great thing is that all of this can be automated with membership site software.

No More Pretense of Reality in the Stock Market

In early November of 2012, the stock market took a big hit right after President Obama was reelected. Many people thought he would be reelected, so most of this was already supposedly built in to the stock market prices. Nevertheless once he was reelected people realize that Obama Care was going to be an actual fact, and it would not get repealed. With the Democrats maintaining and even growing their strength in the Senate, and with Obama being reelected it is quite obvious that the last four years of Obama's economic strategy will only continue for the next four.

While the stock market was diving the day after his election news commentators were busy blaming Greece and earnings, some the coming fiscal cliff, but they wouldn't blame Obama's reelection. Look, the stock market doesn't drop 300+ points in one day because of a few companies posting earnings that didn't beat the street. Further, we've known Greece is an economic disaster, it's a socialist country that has run its course and now all can see yet another façade of socialism, so its challenges for the economy and Europe are already built in the stock prices.

You see, investors always vote with their wallet, and they are voting against President Obama and his administration. They don't feel he has been a good steward of our economy, and they are right. Consider if you will that the unemployment rate is at the same point it was when he took office, and he spent $5 trillion in deficit spending in the last four years. To use socialist buzzwords and phraseology; "that's simply unsustainable." Everyone knows it too, it's hardly a secret.

It's amazing that everyone in the media wants to protect this president. They practically got him reelected by refusing to talk about the issues, the fiscal cliff, or the huge debt he's racked up. Yes, I suppose that when you spend $1 billion in advertising, the media wants to treat you well, but it seems the media has been busy stirring up the pot of this populist message of class warfare, they've been allowing socialism to creep into our country, and enjoying every minute of sound and fury to receive an uptick in their ratings hoping to save their skins even as we enter the recession.

Well, all that money from the Obama campaign to keep his image polished, and his brand strong no longer will be running 24/7 and they are not going to be able to hide the truth about the Obama Administration's failed economic policy as we go back into recession. When the American people reelected President Obama they probably did more to hurt his presidential legacy and our country than they realize. This is going to end very badly, but then again most socialist regimes go down quite hard, because they "run out of other people's money to spend," right as they run out of other people to blame for their own economic failures. Please consider all this and think on it.

What Is Affiliate Marketing? A Simple Explanation

What is affiliate marketing? For those who ask, "What is affiliate marketing?" there are competing ways of explaining it. The simplest way to explain it is by defining it as a method of making money on the Internet that is characterized by rewards given in exchange for assisting a business with the promotion of their service, site or product.

There are different methods of this niche, but the most popular version will have you acting as a publisher who earns a commission when one of your site visitors clicks on a link within your blog, which then takes them to another site so they can purchase a product or a service. One different take on this is when a person earns a certain amount just for referring a site visitor who then takes a specific kind of action. This can be anything from just signing up for an offer to completing a survey and leaving their name and address.

How to Get Started

What does affiliate marketing mean to your audience? You only need to keep two things in mind: Locating the proper affiliate product and establishing a loyal audience that will buy what you promote. You need to put greater important on locating the right affiliate product, and one of the most proven ways of doing so is finding one that offers a benefit to your site's audience. For instance, if you own a blog on weight loss, then promoting a product on buying and selling stocks will be utterly out-of-place, resulting in absolutely no sales (or barely any).

You must promote a product that ties into the theme of your blog in some way. Further, it also cannot hurt if you first try out the product or service that you are promoting. That way, you can be reasonably sure that the product or service your readers will use is legitimate. If you write quality blog posts, you will soon develop a loyal audience to whom you can promote products or services. So what is affiliate marketing? It is about high quality products and services being promoted to a loyal audience.

Affiliate Programs and Blogs

So how does this type of marketing work with blogs? It is not the only way to help your blog earn, and it surely is not for every blogger. However, there are a couple of reasons that this can well be worth your time and effort. When someone asks, "What is affiliate marketing?" tell them it is about trust and building relationships. This relationship involves the one between the publisher and the readership.

It follows then that readers are increasingly likely to trust a publisher's recommendations for a product or a service when they already have a deep faith in the opinions and observations of the publisher. Still, this is not a surefire approach because this trust may also be irreparably broken if your blog was to, say, promote a product or service that turned out to be a lemon.

Is It Easy Money?

What is this type of online marketing, and can you earn efficiently from it? There is a good number of people who have already at least heard of it, but there are quite a few who are curious if it is easy money. When they ask, "What is affiliate marketing?" tell them that there is a distinction between easy money and it being lucrative. Yes, this business can be lucrative if done right, but this hardly makes it "easy money."

A lot of people who try their hand at it fail to make a lot of money because they are confronted with several factors that they all have to do effectively for it to make them a lot of money. These factors are obtaining a high flow of site traffic, discovering useful products, locating high-quality products, establishing solid reader trust, possessing a readership that is in a purchasing mood, and having the talent to write effective sales copy. The issue largely revolves around how willing you are to make it work.

The topic of affiliate marketing revolves around promotion of a product, service or a website, for which you will be rewarded with a certain amount of money. The challenge of this endeavor relates to finding good products and services to promote to a loyal audience of your site visitors. So the next time somebody asks you, "What is affiliate marketing? tell them that it is not easy money, but they can earn a lot from it if they focus on promotions.