This is the second post in a series of three.
Why Your Blog Strategy is So Important
How to maximize readership of your blog content
And those who do rarely have a proper, long term plan to maintain and develop a body of useful, “owned” content. Or they once had a blog—the idea sounded good at the time, posts were written and published, but then after fits and starts it just kind of fizzled. The most recent post for many centers date back months—even years! Does any of this sound familiar? Under which category do you fall? It’s time to either remove your blog altogether or re-engineer your approach. I’m pushing for the latter.
The process of consistently creating quality, informative content around your brand (center or clinic) is not easy. However, maintaining a quality long-term program doesn’t need to be difficult if you follow these basic guidelines:
You need to assign one person to take lead of your blog program. This person will ultimately be responsible for assignments, deadlines, internal communications, editing, image collection and post uploads. If you have more than one leader heading the initiative, it will quickly become unwieldy and unsustainable.
Whether you previously had a blog that has since been abandoned, are maintaining a spotty, lackluster effort today—or just now getting around to launching your new blog—you need buy-in from your team. Get your group of practitioners together and clearly explain the importance and benefits of establishing an effective blog presence. Emphasize the importance of establishing thought leadership to positively influence current and prospective customers.
Review the list of integrative modalities offered by your center and the mix of practitioners fulfilling these services. Ask each team member to commit to writing two consumer-oriented posts per month, approximately 350-600 words in length, on topics around their area(s) of interest and expertise.
The topics for your posts are virtually endless. Do you provide integrative services around, say, primary care, oncology, pain management, naturopathy or women’s health—and offer dietician/nutritionist consults, supplementation, massage, acupuncture, mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques? Have each contributor (practitioner) start their own list of topics. Flesh out each list as a group and offer feedback to help shape the most viable ideas.
This task is crucial and fundamentally helpful. Create a simple spreadsheet that captures your contributing authors’ names, assignments, word counts, text deadlines, image deadlines, publication dates and any special notes. Make the spreadsheet available on the company server, DropBox, Google Docs or otherwise for all authors to view in real time. Give editing permissions to your team if you want them to provide direct input. Or, ask for ideas to be sent directly to the blog manager who’ll subsequently approve and enter. There is no right or wrong way; do whatever works best to keep everyone in your organization on the same page.
If you have ample blog contributors on your team, you might easily be able to publish 3-5 quality posts per week, ideally several across a few different subject matters.
The following proven rules will streamline the writing process and increase reader engagement:
A couple more important tidbits:
Three of the most common mistakes with blog posts are that they’re too long, dense, and stray off topic. You may be able to follow your own writing perfectly well, but, if your transitions are not smooth, you will lose the reader’s interest. Writing two separate posts are usually better than conflating two themes into one. Follow? If so, I’ve kept your attention thus far by employing the same tactics and avoiding the pitfalls I’ve written about in this section of the e-Book!
If you wrote it, you should not edit it. You are too close to the trees. If possible, get another set of eyes across your copy. Depending on your organization’s size or capacity, perhaps there are internal marketing and communications resources. Or maybe the blog manager herself or an outside resource is the best match for your editing needs.
My last couple posts have explained why having a blog is important for integrative practices and how to go about setting up of an effective, long-term blog content strategy. Next up: how to maximize traffic to your blog and distribute your original content more widely.
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The Rise of Integrative Health & Medicine
By Glenn Sabin and Taylor Walsh
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