"I trust his work. I trust him to take good care of me."

These words, spoken by a patient in a "welcome to my practice" YouTube video of Dr. Jared Waite at Aspen Ridge Dental Care, are perfect. They get right to the heart of what inbound marketing via social media is all about: projecting yourself and your practice to a mass audience as capable, attentive and worthy of any would-be patient's trust and care.

Effective social marketing, however, isn't easy. It takes preparation and planning, an investment of time and money, and a fair bit of creativity.

Remember the old saying, "Good things come in small packages?"

It's still as relevant as ever. But these days, little packages aren't limited to things that twinkle and gleam. They beep and ding and dash off a favorite ditty, too.

If you're thinking of how best to grow your practice and grab notice in the digital age, you need to be thinking of launching a mobile website. Specifically, an optimized site that plays well on that small screen you, very probably, and so many others, definitely, spend hours at: the smartphone.

Welcome—almost—to 2014! For doctors, dentists and just about any healthcare professional, the New Year promises to be a year chock-full of challenges and changes. But opportunities exist, too, for those thinking of how best to take advantage of them.

That's why setting up a good strategic schedule now will help elevate your practice and make you a brand worth noticing.

Here are 4 ideas for making the most of 2014:

A look into how the dental industry is using the web

Dr. Jeffrey Patrician, dressed in all white scrubs, sits in a big eat-you-up-kind-of-leather chair in the lobby of his new Boulder, Colorado dental office – Boulder Dental Arts. He’s cordially agreed to have me interview him about his marketing strategies, something that I am quite curious about since his is one of the fastest growing dental practices in this town. Not only that, but I’ve actually heard of this guy (who hears about a dentist??). Heard he is the best. Heard that I should definitely go have a check up because he somehow makes going to the dentist fun. And I’ve noticed my roommate has basically taken up a part-time job with his practice. She’s referred so many new clients to his firm, that she has a small stack of $10 iTunes gift cards on our coffee table – one for each person she sent Dr. Patrician’s way.

There’s all this hype these days about building more content onto webpages. WooRank, a popular online software that provides SEO and keyword analytics, often recommends “more content” as one of the top five improvements for a site. But some people are left scratching their heads saying, “Why?! I’ve already said everything I want to say!” Well, it’s because Google doesn’t care. The more you are saying, the more credible you become. Here are three reasons why content is king:

Do you want people to find your website when they are searching online for related terms? Then you’ve probably thought about search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and maybe even wondered how they differ from inbound marketing strategies to drive traffic from search engines.