TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

Starting a blog sounds easy and it is, but keeping it up is time consuming. Should you add a blog to your practice website? The short answer is of course, yes. (You are reading this on our blog after all!) But where should you blog? What should you blog about, how often should you blog and why?

In a  nutshell, blogging is another way to publish content on the web. We have all heard that content is king, and a blog is an effective vehicle for unique, interesting, relevant content. The key word here is unique. Canned blog content is more likely to damage your online footprint than enhance it. If you don’t have the time to blog, make sure you chose the right person who will be doing it for your practice who has experience as a writer and also knows what you do.

There are many blog platforms available on the web. The most popular are wordpress.org, blogger.com, squarespace.com, and tumblr.com. All are fairly intuitive. WordPress is the most professional and widely used. Tumblr is a blog platform that tends to skew very young and is more fashion and celebrity-oriented, so not ideal for most aesthetic practices. You will need a programmer to set you blog up correctly and add the requisite plug-ins for functionality.

The benefits of blogging and doing so regularly are improved search engine rankings, consumer interest, and potential earned media coverage. Avoid writing blog posts that are entirely SEO driven as consumers are wise to this and will not read your blog. For example, if you include “Leading New York dermatologist” or “Best plastic surgeon in Houston” more than one time in a brief blog post, it can render the content unreadable. Use keywords judiciously and balance this will content that speaks to the reader and informs.

The best way to reap the benefits of a blog is to position yourself as an industry expert on certain topics that suit your fancy. Write about the latest trends you are seeing in your practice, the awesome new technology that you now offer, what you learned at a recent meeting, or sound-off on something you just read in a journal or women’s magazine. The list of potential topics is endless!

Entries don’t have to be very long — 500 words is usually fine given our limited online attention spans. Images always help make text stand out. When you do blog, make sure you share it with everyone in your social networks. Add social buttons on every post to make that easy for readers. It is also good to add a visual with every blog post to make the blog more readable.

Don’t forget to have fun! You may find you love it, I know I do.