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While the messages that you post may be valuable to your patients, you won’t be seen unless you have an audience. Here is a strategic plan to get viewers to your blog without having to spend a big budget on ads.

Problem: How do you

  • Increase your visibility?
  • Build an Audience?
  • Establish your authority?

Solution:

  1. Sharing is Caring

Encourage people to share your posts and make it easy to do so by providing a noticeable share button for social media sites and a RSS feed button.

Make your headline enticing so that people want to open the post. Ensure that the images on your post are in the right format for the various social networks so that they can be seen on them.

  1. Tell everyone

Let all your patients know about the posts as well as friends and family. Encourage them to talk about the posts and to share them with others. Don’t keep the posts a secret until they are well established. After all, they won’t spread if no one knows about them.

 

  1. Build links to your blog fb_like_thumbs.jpg

People will better be able to find your blog if your website, email signature and social media profiles are connected to it.

          

  1. Blog Frequently

The more often you post to your blog, the more content can be picked up by the search engines (increasing your ranking) and the more content that you can share with others in social media channels.

 

  1. Advice

Ask patients and everyone you communicate with online for feedback on your blog posts. This will give you great information for blog improvement and will establish a relationship with an audience.

 

  1. Identify the most effective channelsKIEV, UKRAINE - OKTOBER 03, 2015  Collection of inscriptions, symbols of popular social media  Youhoo, Google, Instagram, Flickr, Linkedin, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and others printed on paper. Selective focus

Figure out which social media sites your target market (i.e. your prospective and current patients) spends their time on. This is where you should concentrate your efforts. For many, it will be Facebook. Here you can have a site solely for your practice or business which will link back to your website and until you have a wider audience, you can invest a small amount in Facebook ads for traffic.

 

LinkedIn is mostly for business professionals but don’t forget that you want to be visible to your colleagues and referral sources as well, not just your patients! LinkedIn Pulse also gives visibility and strengthens your brand as an authority in your field who has information to provide.

  1. Guest Blogs

Post blogs on other sites that have the same niche. By doing so, you are exposing yourself to a built in audience with more visibility. Offer to be an interview partner for their blog sites.

  1. Participate

Find forums and chat rooms where people are struggling with problems in sync with the services that you provide. Become active and give solutions to these problems. This will establish you as an authority in your field and will encourage prospective patients to increase communication with you.

  1. Create a VLog or video blog

People love viewing videos and seeing short movies about the topics that you post will attract many people who will find the topic easier to understand when seeing images.

Interview celebrities or people in the news so that your video trends and spreads faster.

10. Call To Action

The most important key of your blog posts is including a call to action. This is what you want your reader to do upon reading your post. Don’t assume that they will take the following steps that you want them to take. They may just read your post and then move on to something else.   Examples of good calls to action include:

  • Contact the office to make an appointment
  • Request a copy of a whitepaper or tip sheet with the most common questions and answers
  • Register for a newsletter
  • Comment on the blog post and share their thoughts
  • Offer a freebie that would be desired by your target market

11. Hold a Contest

People love contests and enjoy seeking out answers to questions that are being posed. You can have the contest of the week or month with questions that are pertinent to your posts or where they must refer to older posts to get the answers. In addition to adding popularity, it will increase your email list.

12. Curate

     Find breaking news or other blog posts that are in sync with your niche. Post a list of topic sources, best articles on the topic or best post of the week. Readers will return often to see what you are highlighting. Lists are quite popular. You can also contact the authors of the posts and ask them to share the posts that you feature.

 

For the first 25 people to respond to Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com, I will interview you for my podcast show.