| Your Online Chiropractic Community
You can bring in more patients, enhance your reputation, and educate your community about health by having your own blog.
Chiropractors have a lot of knowledge to share that can benefit more people—why not share what you know? Starting a blog for your practice may help you build your patient base and do more outreach. With some careful planning you can put together a calendar of blog post topics, prepare your own articles, and publish regularly according to schedule. Then, you can use social media to promote your content.
Read on to learn more about how your practice can leverage blogging.
Content strategy basics
Before you start, you need to decide what you want to accomplish from your blog and prepare a basic plan. Without a content strategy, you may end up writing without any clear direction and fail to capture attention with your content. Complex plans are not necessary, but you do need to decide a goal and plan benchmarks you can use to measure your success.
You also need to decide how frequently you will post. In the past, more frequent posting was usually better. Now, long-form posts that have actionable, useful information are generally favored over short, frequent posts that lack depth—even if you only post twice a month, great content can still perform well online.
For example, you may want to create a blog specifically to provide information about family wellness and chiropractic care. Perhaps, you decide to judge the blog’s success on how many social media shares your posts get and how many comments you receive on your social media pages. Or, you may want to use a blog strictly to bring in patients—if that’s the case, plan on making your blog useful to your readers instead of being too pushy.
Then, find a way to measure how well your blog brings in new patients, such as an intake survey asking patients how they found your clinic.
Prepare your plan and write down or type up a few notes about it and keep them where you can refer back later. Try to stick to your purpose and avoid getting distracted. You will also need to remember to focus on your practice and avoid making your blog overtly personal. Your readers probably will not be interested in reading a post about your pets on a blog dedicated to nutrition, for instance.
Calendar and post scheduling
Now, you are ready to make a content calendar. Decide when and how often to post new content, and then plan out your post topics. If you can work two or three posts in advance, that is generally better. Generally, the website hosting your blog will have some type of content management system (CMS), or you can use other software for this. You can write several posts in advance and have your CMS post these on different dates according to a schedule so your blog practically runs on autopilot.
Or, post manually whenever you need to. You could have an office assistant do this for you, if you want.
Content promotion and social media
Promoting your content is as simple as sharing it on social media. You want other people to follow your posts, share them, and read your blog. Generally, the more positive interaction, the better. Check your social media pages regularly to make sure they
If you already have social media pages, you can simply share your blog posts on your page along with a short teaser (a sentence or two, or maybe a thoughtful question) to encourage people to visit and read your posts. If you do not have social media pages yet, you could get started with a Facebook page for your practice.
Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram are also popular social media pages. Find out which website is popular with your patients and start there. When you have time, you can add other pages—keep in mind that it is important to keep your pages active and updated.
Start a blog
Ready to start? Be willing to experiment, adapt and manage your blog over time. If you encounter problems, such as a lack of interest, then you may need to revise your content strategy.
With some planning and preparation, you can have a successful blog to promote your practice and educate your community.
Reference
- Wainwright, C. “Why Blog? The Benefits of Blogging for Business and Marketing.” Hubspot Blog. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/the-benefits-of-business-blogging-ht. Published: September 2015. Accessed: October 2017.
