How to Use a Blog to Promote Your Medical Practice - If you are a doctor and you’re not blogging, the question is: why not? Blogging is a powerful method of medical marketing that helps you get your name out there, connect with potential patients, and generate more business. You might be wondering why on earth you would take time out of your busy schedule as a physician to write for free. Well, here’s why.
How to Use a Blog to Promote Your Medical Practice
By John White
Jan 11, 2010 - 7:59:36 AM
If you are a doctor
and you’re not blogging, the question is: why not?
Blogging is a powerful method of medical
marketing that helps you get your name out there, connect with potential
patients, and generate more business.
You might be wondering why on earth you would take time out of your busy
schedule as a physician to write for free.
Well, here’s why.
For one, if you’re far
too busy to blog yourself, you can always hire a ghostwriter to write your blog
posts for you, and then review each blog post to ensure that you approve of its
content and request changes if necessary.
Secondly, blog posts aren’t difficult to write.
Even if you just take 30 minutes out of your
day, you can write a pretty decent blog post.
Blog posts tend to be shorter than other kinds of online articles, and
they are written in a casual tone.
Surely, you already
have a website for your medical practice.
If not, you absolutely need to get one.
In this day and age, in order to attract new patients, it’s essential
for a portion of your medical marketingcampaign
to be conducted online.
The majority of
adults search for health information online and when they need to go to the
doctor, they do a quick online search to find doctors in their area.
You need to make sure that you have a search
engine-optimized website that people can find when they search online.
People are more likely to trust you and choose
you as their doctor if you have a presence online.
Blogs help you expand that presence and give
your practice more credibility.
The main purpose of
having a blog is to connect with your patients and potential patients.
Now, clearly, you wouldn’t use a blog to talk
about what happens in your practice or how your day was.
However, you could use a blog to discuss the
latest treatments in your field, recent medical breakthroughs, and other
general information.
When people browse
online for medical information and find your site, they are likely to trust you
as a good source of information since you are a doctor.
This helps you build authority within your
medical field as well as online.
Another important
benefit of blogging is that you can connect with your readers on a personal
level.
Your blog readers will comment on
blog posts you write that they find interesting, and you can then respond to
their comments.
As a result of blogging,
you can connect with your patients and potential patients.
People will think of you as a friendly,
approachable doctor rather than one who is too busy to give them the time of
day.
This personal connection is
important because it helps you attract more patients to your practice.
Blogging is also
beneficial because it gives your online presence a major boost.
People aren’t the only ones who love blogs;
search engines do too.
Blogs are
constantly updated and the search engines like content-rich sites that are
fresh and frequently updated.
Furthermore, a blog connected to your main website makes it easier for
search engine robots to crawl and index your site.
And most importantly, content is considered
king online.
Both people and search
engines love great content.
Great
content attracts links on other relevant sites and blogs, which then leads to a
higher search engine ranking.
Search
engines judge the popularity and relevance of your site based on the number of
links back to your site that accumulate on other websites.
Blogging also makes it
easier for you to participate in social media because you have something that
you can immediately share and use to attract attention to yourself and your
practice.
By joining a site like
Twitter, you can post updates, or “tweets,” each time you write a new blog
post.
If the blog posts are good, other
Twitter users will “re-tweet” them and spread them across the
twitterverse.
Social media marketing is
like word-of-mouth on steroids, and when used properly, it can catapult you to
both online and offline fame.
So, what are you
waiting for?
If your medical marketing
plan doesn’t include blogging, consider adding a blog to your current
website.
The more you update the blog,
the better, but you can even update it as little as once or twice per week if
you are too busy to dedicate any more time to it than that.
There are a number of doctors and hospitals
that have used blogging and social media to generate publicity and attract new
patients, and you can do the same.
Start
a blog today if you want to increase awareness about your practice and generate
publicity both online and offline.
Author Bio:
John White is a medical marketing expert who works full
time with health care providers to increase their visibility on the web space
to get people connected with the Medical Professionals.
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