Let’s face it dental blogging is hard! Or rather, it’s hard to come up with insightful content that resonates with your target audience, week in week out, month in month out. That said, the countless number of benefits that sustained blogging can have on any business are heavily documented.
Yet despite the fact that most dentists understand this, many (for whatever reason) don’t have a blog.
On the occasion when a dentist does start to blog, with all the best will in the world, they quickly run out of steam. In fact, the World Wide Web is littered with the corpses of long-forgotten dental blogs.
Why?
Because, unlike other forms of marketing, dental blogging is a long-term marketing strategy. What it isn’t, is a short-term action for a quick return.
Successful dental blogging takes lots and lots of continual effort. If you want to know just how much effort, you might want to check out this great post on Hubspot about achieving blogging results. You might be surprised!
Anyway, because successful blogging can take a monumental effort there are two main factors that constitute a huge stumbling block when dentists try to blog. These are
- Time and
- Know how
Let’s address each of these issues in turn.
Problem one – time
I think you’ll agree that running a dental practice requires a lot of plate spinning. There’s organising staff and staff rotas, meeting and greeting patients, dealing with sales agents, balancing accounts, marketing and promotion, and that’s before you even get round to the job of fixing teeth. Wow! That’s a lot of plates right there!
It’s understandable then that adding dental blogging to your ever-growing ‘to-do’ list just might be a step too far.
Problem two – know-how
While it’s true that anyone can write, it’s harder to write in a way that resonates with your target audience. What’s more, it’s even harder to do it consistently time and time again while keeping your blog both fresh and interesting.
So the question is:
“How can you maintain a great blog while doing everything else that a busy dentist has to do?”
Here are 6 great dental blogging tips that just might help.
Become a creator of ideas
Any blogger will tell you that the most difficult aspect of blogging is not the actual writing itself. Instead, it’s coming up with subject matter on a continual basis.
This is why you need to become an ideas generator
Believe it or not, ideas for great blog posts are all around us. For example, you might be driving to work and hear a news story on the radio that resonates with your target audience. Alternatively, you may be thinking about blog posts while pushing your trolley round the supermarket, and just like that, an idea for a great post comes into your head
The point is that ideas tend to strike when we least expect them, so whether you’re in the supermarket, in the car, or in the bath for that matter, when you have an idea, write it down. This way when you come to actually writing your next dental blog post, you don’t have to waste precious time brainstorming ideas as you’ve got a whole list of them to choose from.
Just to give you a head start – Here’s a useful resource I recently wrote on 27 blogging ideas for self blogging dentists .
Have a dental blogging plan
Even with the best will in the world, blogging can easily fall by the wayside if you don’t stick to some form of blogging plan. It’s far easier to commit to a task by documenting the whys, whens, and wherefores because it’s there in black and white. It can be something as simple as…
‘Tuesday – Write a blog post on 6 benefits of dental implants over dentures
Thursday – Write a blog post on everything you need to know about teeth whitening
Alternatively, it could be something more in-depth such as writing down when to blog, what you’re going to be blogging about and when to promote it via social channels. You can even factor in the time it should take and who’s responsible for the relevant actions. Whatever you choose to do, it doesn’t matter, just so long as you have a realistic, documented plan of action that you can easily understand and execute.
Two good tools for this purpose are Google Calendar (a great document to help you plan your dental blogging exploits) and the Wordpress editorial calendar for those with WordPress websites.
Make a commitment to yourself
When you’ve had a hectic and stressful week the last thing you probably want to do is to invest even more of your time to write a meaningful dental blog. The trouble is if you let it fall by the wayside one week, then it’s the start of a slippery slope that will probably see you give up dental blogging before you’ve really got started.
This is a real shame when you’ve invested time building your blog content up (and hopefully your readers thus far). Instead, try to focus on the end goal and make a commitment to blog every week. Trust me you’ll feel a whole lot better when you do. What’s more, the more you blog, the better you’ll become and ultimately, the quicker you’ll be.
Just write
I have a confession to make….. Most of what I write is utter garbage first off and if I showed you some of the stuff I’d written before I reworked, tweaked, and polished it, you’d probably laugh. However, actually getting it out of my head and onto virtual paper, that’s the hardest part right there. So no matter how awful you think your dental blogging is, just get it down on paper. Trust me, once you’ve done a first draft, you’ll have the bones of something decent.
The trick is then to leave it for a day and when you come back to it, it’ll make better sense. Not only this, because all the hard work has been done, you’re left with the fun part of jazzing it up and making it great.
Round up what’s happening in your industry right now
If you’ve run fresh out of ideas but need to squeeze a blog post out, why not find out what people are talking about, and then do a quick round-up? Not sure what people are talking about? No problem – There are a handful of free tools available that will help you do exactly this.
Google alerts for example allow you to monitor the web for interesting blogs, news stories, or articles associated with your industry, while tools such as Tweet Deck can hep you stay on top of what’s trending in dentistry right now.
A ’round up post’ detailing the latest information on the web not only provides an interesting resource for any reader but is quick to write, making it the ideal style of post if you’re really pushed for time. A kind of dental blogging fallback if you like! Or rather the ace up your sleeve, however you’d like to see it. Just a word of warning, use it sparingly!
Dental blogging delegation
The final solution and one that may be right for you is to delegate the task of blogging to someone in your team. You might want to make it part of their weekly tasks. This way they’re not having to take on extra responsibilities outside of their working day and more importantly it isn’t costing you more money in paid overtime.
If you do decide to delegate your dental blogging it’s important to make sure that the requirements of the task fit the person being asked to do it. Preferably someone who has blogged before and understands the type of content that you need to portray is perfect. In addition, this is also where you may want to incorporate your blogging plan to save time.
So there you have it, 6 great dental blogging tips for maintaining great content!
Remember even if you only have fifteen minutes a day to spare, over the course of a week that can add up to a decent blog post if you’re organised and know what you’re going to write. However the most important factor to keeping your dental blogging on track is to just suck it up and…..
GET IT DONE!
If you are serious about wanting to get your dental blogging off the ground but simply don’t have the time, don’t know where to start, or don’t have the inclination, then no problem, we can help. We’ve written over a thousand unique blog posts for a multitude of dental clients, so why not let us become your blogging voice?
To find out more, visit our website at www.dentalwriters.com or contact us on +34 605 45 73 42 or via email at [email protected]. We look forward to answering any questions you might have.
