Your dental blog can be a great way to stay in front of your prospects until they’re ready to choose you to solve their dental problems.
However, there’s a lot of competition for your prospects’ attention. Unless your blog is absolutely first-rate, readership is going to be a hit-or-miss proposition.
There are some things you can do to get more regular readership and have a greater impact with your dental blog. With that in mind, here are six tips to make your blog a winner.
- Content still rules.
It’s the rare prospect who will read a dental blog for entertainment. Your new patients are looking for useful and authoritative information about their dental needs or wants. Be sure to write your content for your audience, which is not other dentists. Use everyday terms for dental problems and procedures. Keep the writing simple and easy to read. When in doubt, use one of the online readability checkers to discover the reading comprehension grade level. You should aim at around a middle school reading level.
While your content should be focused on dental issues, that’s not to say that you can’t mix in the occasional off-topic post about your practice, amusing stories, and so on. But around 80 percent of your content at least should be specific to educating your current patients and prospects about dental issues and solutions.
- Get them hooked.
Make your landing page an opt-in subscription page. As a landing page, your subscription invitation is far more powerful and noticeable than a small box somewhere on your blog. First-time visitors probably won’t opt in, but they just might on subsequent visits.
- Wow them with visuals.
The internet is a highly visual medium, and your prospects are conditioned to expect some wow factor. Break up your posts with relevant but striking images. Pro tip: for most people, pictures of advanced periodontal disease, fractured teeth, and/or severe abscesses are an immediate turn-off. If you use before-and-after pictures, make them powerful but unobjectionable.
- Go mobile and do it well.
More and more people are accessing the internet via their mobile devices. Your blog has to be mobile-optimized. That means it will load quickly and display properly across all devices and operating systems. Those pictures on your blog have to be compact in size to make that happen.
Don’t take this one lightly. Attention spans are shorter than ever, and people have little to no tolerance for sites that don’t display properly. Keep your readers by giving them a great online experience.
- Leverage your readers for shares.
Great content gets shared, but only if you make it easy for your readers. Your blog doesn’t have to have every possible social media share button, but you should include the most popular: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, and YouTube. Add others based on your experience and your readers’ feedback. Which brings up the last point.
- Open a dialogue and keep it going.
Your blog absolutely must allow comments, and you should monitor those closely. This is your chance to really wow your readers by responding in a timely fashion to compliments, questions, and criticisms. Avoid defensiveness at all costs, and admit readily that you’re at fault when and if it happens.
Follow these six tips for winning blogs, and you’ll have more readers and followers. You’ll be able to stay in front of your prospects until they’re ready to become your new dental patients.