Blogging is a viable platform for promoting your clinic for a number of reasons. Having a blog is an important way to get your clinic moving up on search rankings. Blogging allows you to do so much more than just sharing news and promoting events. You can use a blog to boost your credibility, create a personal connection with your audience, and answer questions and queries.
Unlike Twitter that requires status updates to be made throughout the day to be meaningful, or a Facebook page that demands at least one post daily, blogging is a less time-intensive undertaking. You may choose to blog once a week, or preferably more, and your frequency of posting may vary from time to time. If you like writing, and are willing to invest the time and effort to think of interesting topics for your posts, blogging can actually be an enjoyable pursuit for some physicians. However, if blogging is just going to become another thing on your daily ‘to do’ list, delegating to a staff member or hiring a writer may be the best way to maintain a blog over time.
Social commenting is a way to enable discussion on your website and turn it into an interactive social place for people to visit. Allowing comments creates an interactive, social place and allows you to make posts interesting, get a discussion going, and increase social media optimisation. Your blog can be set so that all comments require approval before going live to avoid spammers or inappropriate posts.
Getting started
Creating a blog is actually a relatively affordable and simple process. The real obstacle is finding the time to maintain a blog by developing content that is relevant to your readers.
The most common blog platforms are blogger.com, wordpress.com, and squarespace.com. A knowledgeable programmer can assist with customised themes and features, uploading widgets and plug-ins, and many more critical tools unknown to non-techies. You may need some instruction on the steps to create and optimise a blog so that you can post your own content and upload photos. Ideally, a blog should have a complementary look and feel to your website, as well as all of your branding and marketing materials, to be consistent.
A blog can be as a useful tool for getting your message across, educating consumers and the media, keeping your patients informed of developments or newsworthy items, and sharing your opinion on selected topics. At least one mission of blogging should be to convert traffic to readers, subscribers, and followers who are interested in what you have to say. You can also use your blog to elicit feedback or input from loyal patients and followers.
Search engine-friendly posts
Another aspect of blogging is learning Google-friendly language to optimise your blog posts for maximum marketing effect; this is called search engine optimisation (SEO). You can channel your creative juices to produce a steady flow of organised blog posts, but like Twitter, Facebook, texting, and other platforms of modern communication, blogging has a language of its own. It may seem that Google, Yahoo, and Bing dictate what is a good blog; however, the best blogs contain a balance of good writing, humour, compassion, and personality, as well as hidden search terms and strategically placed links. If your blog posts are all about SEO, you may have high search engine ranks, but you may not develop a following of readers or subscribers who actually pay attention to your content. By using key phrases, key words, and search terms to optimise your blog content, you can attract more readers. However, it will impose restraints on your posts and add an extra layer to the process.
Consumers are able to identify content that is purely driven by SEO because it tends to be awkward, dull, repetitive, and borders on the absurd. For example, if your key words are: ‘Cornwall’, ‘Plastic Surgeon’, and ‘Tummy Tuck’, taking readers to a page where the phrase ‘Cornwall Plastic Surgeon’ or ‘Top UK Tummy Tuck Expert’ is written ten times in a paragraph will render it unreadable.
