Dental Blogging: 10 Tips for Blogging Success
Dental blogging is one of the best ways to improve your dental SEO and draw new customers and clients to your practice. It’s about more than just having lots of keyword-rich content, it’s about having useful, engaging content that your customers actually want to read. When you are the provider of helpful, valuable content and knowledge, you are much more likely to get more clients and sell your services. In order to make sure that you are at the top of your blogging game, here are ten tips to increase blogging success.
1. Podcast your blogs.
You don’t have to turn every blog post into a podcast, but providing an audio version for those who don’t have time or desire to sit down and read the entire post is a great way to engage with busy individuals who might otherwise overlook your posts. These don’t even have to be as professionally produced as a weekly podcast. Just you, reading the post, maybe even adding additional insights as you go along. Make the download available right from your blog and add it to your podcast feed.
2. Organize it.
If you don’t have a queue of blog post ideas drawn up, now is the time to start writing down and collecting those ideas. Before you even start writing, it might also be helpful to outline your post, just to make sure that you are going to hit the right points in the right order. It might feel like you are back in grade school, but the result will be much cleaner, organized posts.
3. Make sharing easy.
Most blogs already have social tags at the end, allowing their users to tweet, tumble, or Facebook the post with just the click of a button. You can make them even more shareable with services like ClicktoTweet, which enable you to add code to your post, so that if a readers wants to tweet a quote from (and link to), your post, the button is waiting right there for them.
Tweet: When you are the provider of helpful, valuable content and knowledge, you are much more likely to get more clients and sell your services.
4. Don’t start with the title.
Don’t necessarily get attached to the title you give your post when you first start writing it. Let’s face it, writing is an organic process and sometimes the end result is not what we intended in the beginning. Instead of trying to smash content into a title where it just doesn’t belong, save the titling for last and come up with something catchy that really reflects the content of your post.
5. Use strategy.
If you write truthful content that is relevant to your industry, chances are there is someone out there who wants to read it. But what really builds a dedicated readership? Strategic publishing? The content has to be there, and it has to be consistently good, but one of the most important aspects of running is a blog is frequent posts. If a readers returns again and again to find the same content, without update, they will eventually stop coming back. However, if there is almost always new content, you can bet that they will continue to return.
6. Align your content with your customers.
You already know who your ideal customers are. Whether you call them avatars or personas, you use them to tailor marketing messages. Now, start using them to tailor your blog posts. Remember that just because you are getting clicks on your blog, you aren’t guaranteed that those clicks are going to morph into customers. Why? If the content on your blog isn’t tailored to the people that you really want to work with, it isn’t going to draw them in and funnel them towards making a sale.
7. Keep an eye on your analytics.
Whether you use Google Analytics or a more sophisticated tracking service, make sure you know what is working and what isn’t working. You want to know what posts draw the most visitors and how long they stay on the page. You also want to know which posts are barely glanced over before the reader clicks away. Look at those that do well and look at those that fail and analyze why one does better than another. Does one include shareable graphics, while one is just comprised of a giant block of text?
8. See what works for other blogs.
If you blog, you probably also read a lot of dental blogs. Use this time to see what posts work for those bloggers and why. This doesn’t mean that you should lift content or even topics straight from competing blogs, but these blogs are a great model to aspire to. If you find a blog that has roughly the same topics as yours, but is doing much better, it can show where you are falling short and how to achieve the kind of success they have found.
9. Guest blog.
Very few bloggers are secretive about their success. Many are perfectly willing to share the limelight, especially if it means they can take a day off. Asking to be a guest blogger on someone else’s popular blog is a great way to draw new site visitors. When you ask the blog manager if you can post, you should already have an idea (and maybe even the post itself) fully formed, so that they can make a quick decision about whether or not they want to hand their blog over to you for the day.
10. Stay on top of the news.
If there is any news brewing in your industry, you want to comment on it. That way, when consumers take to the search engines to look for information about that development, your blog will be among the results. Read your industry publications and even consider setting up a Google Alert for certain keywords, just stay in front of breaking stories.
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