Dental Blogging Success – What It Takes To Achieve And The Stats To Back It Up

If you really want to achieve dental blogging success – the golden rule is to:

“blog early and blog often“

At least this is what many content marketing specialists tell you. After all, a series of well-written blog posts has the ability to show you as the ‘go to’ dentist in your area. Moreover each time you make a new post it presents a new opportunity for you and your practice to be found in the search engines.

While this is all well and good it fails to answer a crucial question. How often should you blog?

In order to answer this I’ve pulled some data from Hubspot, a leading inbound marketing company, to help. Although this information doesn’t pertain to dental bloggers and dental practices specifically, analysis is taken from over 13500 clients, so it represents a really good cross section of industries and niches.

Firstly – ii seems that companies who publish 16 or more blogs per month (around 1 every 2 days) should see a increase in traffic of around 2.5 times more than companies that publish 1- 4 blogs per month.

These results become even more interesting when you segment these by company size. Let’s take a closer look.

It’s probably safe to assume that most dental practices have somewhere between 1-25 employees. Therefore when it comes to dental blogging success – this is the area that we should be reflecting on.

The key factor to take away here is that dental practices who effectively blog between 6-10 times per month  will see a 50% increase in potential patient leads from those who blog just once a month – from roughly 100 leads to a little over 200 per month.

However, and here’s the key tipping point – Practices that blog 11 times or more per month stand a greater chance of seeing a 100% increase on customer leads.

So what’s the outcome of these findings?

It seems that the real sweet spot for dental blogging success falls somewhere between 11 and 16 blogs per month.

This is all well and good, but the fact is that this is only half the story.

After all – over what length of time should you ideally be publishing 11-16 dental blogs per month? Is it 2 months, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, ad infinitum?

To answer this let’s dig further into Hubspot’s findings to check it out.

According to one of the graphs that I viewed, the number of leads to blogs rises steadily from around the 50 blog mark right up until the 350-375 mark with a slow but sure increase in traffic of around 40%.

However, while these figures are certainly heading in the right direction, look what happens when the blog count surpasses this and starts hitting the 400 mark? The number of leads rocket dramatically to a 200% increase. That’s a 133% increase from those who have published up to 375 posts.

The tipping point it seems for dental blogging success (or any other industry for that matter) is somewhere between 375 and 400 posts, and anything over this ( say 401+) and the amount of leads grows rapidly.

So why is this? After all, old blog posts are purely that, and surely carry no weight as you continue to publish newer ones?

Surprisingly, most companies who run any type of website analytics will notice that somewhere between 75 and 90% of customer leads came from blog posts that were 3 -6 months or older. To prove a point – the blog post that gets the largest amount of leads and views for my company Dental Writers is a post that I wrote way back in December last year (2015).

The reason?

Blogs continue working long after you’ve posted them!

As long as you’re producing meaningful content that adds value, people will find you. Whether that’s via the search engines when a potential patient is looking for a particular dental answer, through social media, or by links from other websites. The more content you have – the more your virtual trail will lead right back to your dental practice door. That’s the real power of dental blogging right there!

So what are the key factors that dentists can take from these finding about dental blogging and particularly how to achieve dental blogging success?

1. Dental blogging is a cost-effective way to grow your customer base over a gradual period of time by increasing your online footprint.
2. The sweet spot for dental blogging success is somewhere between 11-16 blogs per month . However, if this isn’t achievable, or indeed sustainable, then any blogging is proven to be better than none at all.
3. Just 50 blog posts will start to show around a 40% increase in leads. However if you really want to see a dramatic increase in patient enquiries and leads, then the figure you should be aiming for is 400 blog posts and over. How soon you reach this magic figure will ultimately boil down to how often you blog!

So blog early and blog often, and you’ll certainly be on the right track.

If you feel like you really should be blogging but simply don’t have the time or the know-how, then why not let us help you? With a great match of experience and prices that won’t break the bank, we’ll work with you to achieve dental blogging success. To find out more, you can visit our website or contact us directly on +34 605 45 73 42.