Blogging: Why you need to start if you are serious about medical marketing

Writing a blog for your private practice or health clinic takes time and effort, but it is worth it.

7 Reasons for writing a blog for your medical business

1. It helps to establish expertise in your specialty (especially if you have a unique perspective about a multi-faceted subject)
2. Blogging helps to enhance and maintain patient relationships and customer service (prospective patients can get a feel for your personality and your view on complex subjects; existing patients can maintain a connection with you and refer their friends and colleagues to you in a non-promotional way).
3. It can support your media relations (having a great collection of journalistic content will enable you to respond to media requests in a blink of an eye – which is usually how fast they want it)
4. It enables you to test ideas (toss out some ideas and see what feedback comes back)
5. Blogging helps your search engine ranking (blogs have considerably more reach and linkability than company websites, enabling your message to spread faster and wider, enabling search engine spiders to find you more easily). And, blogs are a great way to add fresh content to your website, helping SEO efforts
6. Writing articles for a blog enables your email marketing newsletter to write itself. By selecting your most popular articles, you can compile a list of links and send them to your customers and inquiries on a regular basis to increase their likelihood of returning to your website
7. Your blog posts can be shared in social media to extend your reach to where your customers may be spending their time (like Facebook and Twitter)

I blog for all of these reasons and more. I blog because it organises my thoughts into meaningful chunks (hopefully!). And I blog because it makes me do my homework (what good is having an opinion if you can’t back it up?). But most importantly, companies that blog get 55% more web traffic. The more you blog, the more pages Google has to index, and the more inbound links you’re likely to have. The more pages and inbound links you have, the higher you rank on search engines like Google—thus the greater amount of traffic to your website. Blogging is good.

What if you do not have enough time for blogging?

Often, medical practitioners say they don’t have the time to respond to emails, let alone blog. There’s no need to write a post every day, or even more than once a week (although some degree of regularity helps keep your audience engaged). Also, there isn’t any reason why the blogging job can’t be shared amongst staff with a multi-author blog.

What can you write about?

In my next post, and you won’t want to miss it, I’ll share an idea with you that combines video, blogging, and SEO to help you generate more traffic and convert more web visitors into inquiries and produce a huge amount of content is very short amount of time.