Blog posts provide an online presence in the health market which attracts viewers to your website and provides an opportunity for you to educate or inform these visitors.

While blog posts are simple to start, there are mistakes to avoid.

 7 Blogging Errors to Avoid in Health Marketing

1) Difficult Readability

If a viewer has to struggle to understand or read your message, the reader won’t struggle for long!  There are too many other sites so the viewer will click off yours and go to your competition.  They will not be your fans or stay your fans.  With this in mind:

  • Avoid technical terms or diagnoses- these words may be second-hand to you but the viewer may not know what the words mean or in what context you are conveying your message
  • Long run-on sentences or multiple sidebars with tremendous amounts of information- the eye needs a place to rest.  Wide expanses of white space will allow a gaze to settle on the message that you want to be seen
  • Avoid eye strain- reading black letters on a white background is easier than reversing this.  Having a dark background with colored letters produces an eye strain- one which the reader may not want to struggle with.

2) Don’t be Irrelevant

If your website and blog reflects a specific niche (which I strongly recommend for visibility), then your posts should be reflecting that.  Readers come to the blog for information that is relevant to them.  For instance, if you are a cardiologist, presumably you are writing about issues dealing with the heart or cardiovascular system.  Topics you may add include issues related to this system.  You wouldn’t want to continually write about your favorite sports, the weather and the latest dope on Jay Z.

3) Optimize your blog posts

Put yourself in the mind of your target audience.  What words do they type in the box when they are doing a Google search if they want to find you?  These are keywords.  Even better would be “long-tail keywords” which are 3-4 words strung together to find you easier.  An example is “Boca Raton cardiologist” to set you apart.  Not only is it easier for your prospective patients and clients to find you, it is easier for the search engines to find you (and understand who you are).  This is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Having blog posts that contain your keywords (one per post) and including them in the title, will enable search engines to categorize you, making it easier for viewers to find and read your post.

4) Be Consistent

If you are lucky, you will develop a large fan base- an audience that keeps coming to your blog posts to get the latest information.  If they have come to expect a post on a particular day of the week and you don’t post then or for a few days after, they won’t keep coming back to check for when you do post.  You’ve lost them.

Decide how many times each month you can commit to writing your posts or how often you want your posts to appear before you get started.  Blogging does not have to be done on the day that your post gets published or the night before.  There are several tools available that will enable you to sit down and write a series of posts, scheduling them for the time and date that you would like them to be seen.  Bear in mind that you still need to go into your site on a regular basis to address and respond to the questions that people may enter into the comment box so that you can interact with them and keep them engaged.

5) Don’t go it Alone

Although your blog reflects you and the information that you would ultimately liked published, you don’t have to be the only one generating the post.  Consider enlisting the aid of your staff members and assign them with the task of writing once a week, or once a month on different prospectives they have in the office, what the latest hours are, new staff to be highlighted or new medical equipment that the office has obtained.

6) Own the Site

This is one of the biggest mistakes that I see among doctors and other healthcare providers.  They are listed in websites under their specialty owned by various participating insurance companies for whom they are providers.  It’s easy to leave web responsibilities to them and simply blog under a site owned by them.  The problem is that they own the information.  They can edit it.  If you decide to withdraw your participation in the specific insurance company down the road, you also lose access to the blog that you have been building up over time.

It does not cost much to own a domain name (which can reflect the name of your practice or your specialty).  For under $10 per year, you can purchase the name (and one for your own name before anyone else sharing your name does!)

7) Registration

Enrolling your blog domain with major blog search directories, will help you get seen instead of just leaving it to chance.  The most outstanding company is Technorati.

If all this is more than you can handle with restraints of time and business obligations, you can still have a successful blog by outsourcing it to a social media manager.  I would be happy to discuss this with you further.  Call 516-647-3002.