For Ocularists
Hi, our names are Paul and Jenny Geelen. We are a brother / sister team of Ocularists from Western Australia, and are both founding members of the Ocularists Association of Australia.
We have launched this website with a view to allowing Ocularists from all around the world to participate. The plan is for this site to be an information and support site for people with artificial eyes, and to help people find an Ocularist in their area.
We have been operating our own artificial eyes website in Western Australia for the past three years. Our web site has been good to us by opening up numerous opportunities.
If you think Ocularists might not need to be online, we’d like to encourage you to think again. We have been invited to work in five countries and we have been approached for newspaper interviews, radio interviews and TV shows. Our website also been a contributing factor in numerous invitations to address staff at hospitals and nursing association meetings.
Every month we receive visitors from over 50 countries to our practice website, with the largest portion coming from the United States. The great majority of people looking at the site are people who have an artificial eye. We get a lot of emails and phone calls from people who visit our website first.
With this website, we have invested in a facility to allow for profile pages and editorial contribution from Ocularists from around the world. This means the site will better inform people who are searching the internet for information on eye loss and how to find a local Ocularist.
This is how it works
Visitors to this site can use the Find an Ocularist link to search the site for a local Ocularist.
You can register on this site to have your own page. For example, artificialeyes.net/texas
When people search, they will see profile pages for relevant Ocularists.
Your profile page can have your logo, a photo, links to YouTube video footage and any reasonable amount of information your want to put in to it. It will include your own contact page with a map to your rooms. You can also include a link back to your own practice website if you have one.
This will be your profile page. As long as you stick to our editorial guidelines, you have editorial control. You have a password to your page and can edit it whenever you want. If you don’t want to edit it yourself, for a small fee you also have the option of emailing adjustments to an editor who can do the editing for you.
Your page on the site could help people looking for an artificial eye in your area. You can also use Google AdWords to advertise so that when someone searches for artificial eye or any related subject in your area your advertisement would appear pointing to your profile page. For example:
- Artificial Eyes Texas - Bob Smith, Master Ocularist.
When they click on your ad they go straight to your page.
The first 40 Ocularists who register can elect to have their own email address, such as bob@artificialeyes.net. This gives you a full Google Mail account to work with, or you can just arrange to forward it to another email address you use.
Blogging
As a member ocularist you will be entitled to contribute up to two posts per year to the ArtificialEyes.net blog. A blog post is like a short essay discussing an issue pertaining to your business. For example, I might write an article about sterilising conformer shells. I would encourage you to think about sharing your knowledge and experience about artificial eyes, Ocularists and dealing with eye loss.
Stories of eye loss
We encourage our clients to write stories of their experiences of eye loss. These are published on the site to provide support. We have many stories which generate incredible feedback.
We had a client who once told us, “When I read the stories of eye loss I knew everything will be OK.”
We print the stories and leave a copy in our waiting room. We often have clients who can identify with the stories and share their own similar stories.
You may also wish to encourage people to write their stories and share them with other people on the net – before they can be shared, the owner of the story must give their permission for the story to be published.
Peer support
The artificialeyes.net site provides resources for peer support. You might want to consider helping a peer support group in your area.
We have been supporting Arteyes WA which is a peer support group in Western Australia. The group started as an internet chat group who have two events each year. As their Ocularist and sponsor we do a mail out to our client list inviting them to special events.
I was sceptical at first as to who might want to be involved in a peer support group. To my surprise we generally attract 80 to 100 people to each event. There is a need for the groups and they don’t take much to get them up and going.
How to get your own Profile Page
Your own profile page costs $32.50/month USD, paid to Allwest Management Pty Ltd (our Australian based company). We use PayPal as our payment provider – you can pay with Visa/Mastercard without having to sign up to PayPal, or if you have a PayPal account you can also pay with that. You can cancel your page at any time, there is no minimum period.
Once you make your first payment and complete the startup information form (below), we’ll setup your page for you and send you details on how you can update it.
