Blog Your Way To a Successful Private Practice -

Home
>
Blogging, RSS & Feeds
>
Blog Your Way To a Successful Private Practice

Blog Your Way To a Successful Private Practice

What is a Blog?

Blogs are a type of website often defined as an on line journal or diary. Although there are many blogs where the blog author keeps a log of their own thoughts, experiences and ideas, bloggers also frequently share and discuss information from other sources.

Blogs typically focus on a certain topic and have frequent (sometimes daily) posts (or entries). Posts often link to other blogs or websites that discuss a similar topic. Many blogs are set up so that readers can add comments below each post.

Blogs have been around for about 8 years or so. Business blogs have become increasingly popular in the last couple of years, and especially in the last year.

Why Use Blogging To Market Your Practice

Counselors, therapists and other healing professionals often shy away from using technology when marketing their practices. While there are many effective ways to market your practice that don't involve technology and the web, the Internet increasingly becomes an essential method to utilize when starting and marketing a practice.

Furthermore, if you market your practice on the Internet in addition to using offline techniques, you are creating a lot more exposure for your services. Blogs are just one more method of marketing your practice.

Fortunately, much of the technology involved in setting up and managing a blog is very simple. This makes it easy for you to manage and update content on a blog by yourself. You can get a blog up and running in a few minutes without having any technical skills whatsoever.

Blogs also are way to connect with your target market more personally. Because blogs are updated frequently, they allow "your voice" to come through more easily than a static website.

Finally, search engines love blogs because of their numerous and frequent posts as well as the common linking that occurs amongst those in the blogosphere (the blogging community).

How to Use Blogs To Market Your Practice

There are several ways you can utilize a blog to market your practice. You can start by posting interesting information on your blog that is valuable to your clients and potential clients. There is nothing like quality, fresh content to keep your visitors coming back to your site. Building relationships with your target audience is key to having a successful private practice.

You can also market your practice through your blog by linking to other websites or blogs that provide information that your target market wants or needs. You can be the filter for your clients and potential clients, posting up-to-date information on your area of specialization so they can keep up-to-date with their areas of interest.

Posting comments on other blogs related to your topic can increase back-links to your website which is important for your ranking in the search engines.

If you have a newsletter, you can have a sign-up box on your blog and/or you can put up a sign-up form so visitors can subscribe to receive notification when your blog has been updated.

Just like a website, you can also sell your services and products through your blog.

Blogging as a method of marketing your practice can be an effective method for building your reputation, gaining credibility, attracting more clients, and gaining more exposure. It can be a great compliment to a traditional website-- or if you don't yet have a website, a blog can be a first step towards getting one.

If you decide to blog as a marketing strategy for your private practice, you might want to peruse the blogosphere (the community of blogs on the web) so you can get a better feel for blogging and the types of blogs that exist.

Bio of Author

Juliet Austin is a Marketing Coach, Consultant and Copywriter who assists counselors, therapists, alternative health professionals, and socially responsible businesses in marketing their businesses. She helps her clients overcome resistances to marketing, learn no or low-cost marketing strategies, create compelling promotional materials, and write effective website copy.

Juliet can be reached at: http://www.julietaustin.com or through one of her marketing blogs: http://www.marketingaprivatepractice.com or http://www.websitedesignandpromotion.com

T he author grants permission to reprint this article so long as the copyright and by-line remain intact. Informing her of where the article will be published would also be appreciated.

In The News:

Tips On Blogging For Dollars
Corsavoo.com, France - 1 hour ago
Use RSS feeds. This is a great way to encourage people to keep reading your blog, and will help you drive traffic with much less effort. ...

Appscout
Google says Goodbye to RSS, Hello to Followers
Appscout, NY - Aug 28, 2008
It mashes up blogging, RSS, and social networking without doing anything but changing the terminology. Blogger Buzz says eventually it will integrate with ...

Lessons from the India USA Nuclear deal
indiainteracts.com, India - 19 hours ago
... September 6th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. ...

E-Mail marketing and blogging provider iContact gets $5 million in ...
InternetRetailer.com, IL - Sep 4, 2008
"We have worked hard to bring the best e-mail marketing, blogging, and RSS feed web application in the world to our customers. It is our mission to be the ...

9 Things To Think About When Planning An Executive Blog
Social Computing Magazine, NY - Sep 4, 2008
Perform a content audit that covers not only existing content that should be surfaced, but external content (RSS feeds,blogs,industry sites) that needs to ...

Getting Sucked Into Social Networking
Corsavoo.com, France - 11 hours ago
When you post blogs or files in your account, everyone from your network of friends will be informed of the update through RSS feeds. ...

Travel 2.0 marketing services for hotels launched
m-Travel.com - Sep 5, 2008
It combines blogging, RSS feed syndication, Twittering and email harvesting with hotel profiles on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, Photobucket, Squidoo, ...

Fast Talk Response -
Fast Company - Aug 20, 2008
... in the last year to 18 mos. is because it has all the benefits of blogging (RSS,commenting,sharing,tagging,bookmarking) but none of the hassles. ...

The Snags in Doing Business with Friends
Entrepreneur - Sep 5, 2008
Joanne shared all sorts of valuable information about how to drive traffic, target influencers and handle the process of blogging so that itwouldnâ€™t ...

Pro-Blogger - How to have a Constant Stream of Blogging Ideas
PR CannaZine (press release), UK - Sep 2, 2008
Now, subscribe to RSS feeds on those topics, or printed magazines, newsletters - anything that has info on those subjects. ...

blogging rss - Google News

Blog Your Way To a Successful Private Practice

Blogging, RSS & Feeds