A while back, the The Connecticut Online Business Club discussed Dr. Mercola’s website: mercola.com. Dr. Mercola has been around online for a while and has built what looks to be a very healthy (and lucrative) online business.
It’s helpful to put other people’s work under a microscope to try and understand why they might have become successful or why they might have failed. Charlie Munger has mentioned how important vicarious experience is. There is always the caveat though that you must be careful of who is relating that vicarious experience to you. If it is somebody trying to sell you something, well… you can guess how I feel about that.
In this instance, we observed as directly as we could and drew our own conclusions. I wish I had taken notes at that meeting because a lot of interesting ideas came out of it. That is why you really have to be there. Hint hint.
Who is Dr. Joseph Mercola?
- He is a licensed osteopathic physician.
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1972-1976
- Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine 1978-1982
- Chicago Osteopathic Hospital 1982-1985 Family Practice Residency. Chief resident 1984- 1985
- Board Certified American College Osteopathic General Practitioners July 1985
- State of Illinois Licensed Physician and Surgeon
- Has also published in many journals.
- On the board of several health boards and various health-activism boards.
Site Technology
- Using Kentico CMS 4.0 Free License (look at headers in the HTML source)
- Kentico is a ASP.NET application written in C#.
- Uses Sql Server database.
- Has a lot of modules that can be purchased.
- Extensible architecture provides hooks for module development.
Content
- Over 60,000 pages of free content.
- His site is broad (health) but his articles are well focused on niches.
- It looks like he covers a lot of current issues, hotbutton topics.
- He often publishes results of studies or information newly made available to the public and offers his interpretation and comments.
- Products in his online catalog are available through dynamically generated pages with URLs that are not search engine friendly. Many show no Yahoo inlinks. However, many of his more important (bigger ticket?) items do have stand-alone sales pages with search engine friendly (SEF) URLs and do have inlinks.
- He runs a blog and many of his articles allow for community commenting.
Promotion
- Daily, Weekly, Monthly emails with article teasers and product promos.
- A lot of people mention him on other sites.
- Article marketing by his team.
- Linked to by a lot of alt-health and alt-health activism sites.
- Uses twitter.
- Listed in directories.
- Pages appear to be search engine optimized. They come up with high rankings for many searches.
- Appears you must be logged into his site to view much of his valuable content.
Monetization
- Sells products directly.
- Some products are Mercola brand or Mercola affiliated.
- Some products are from other sources.
- Products include supplements, books, CDs, DVDs, e-books, software, electronic items.
- Good mix of hard and soft items.
- Uses sales letters for products.
