How Can a Busy Dentist Blog Successfully? By Adding a Blogging Consultant to Her Team!
Business blogging expert, Meghan Wier, helps position Dr. Ellie Philips online as an expert in her field.
If you are an expert at what you do, your surest path to success is sharing that expertise with current and future customers. Of course, that’s one of the key tenets of content marketing. The sticking point tends to be that many executives and professionals are so busy running their business that they have little time to devote to make that communication connection.
That’s where business blogging expert, Meghan Wier, enters the picture. Although Meghan views herself as an introvert, she shaped a successful sales and marketing career with a Web software company prior to launching her own business in January 2007. She learned just how important it is to position yourself online with great content that makes your expertise clear.
Meghan’s client, Dr. Ellie Philips, is a great example of how a busy practitioner can communicate knowledge by leveraging the skills of a blogging expert like Meghan. Dr. Phillips had been actively communicating one-on-one with patients via e-mail. She would answer all kinds of questions in order to help her patients. The limitation of course is that each communication benefited only one person.
Although Dr. Phillips had had a typical brochure style website, it did not effectively demonstrate her expertise–or her genuine concern for patient welfare. With the Meghan’s guidance, she has been able to transform those one-to-one communications into a one to many business blog, “AskDrEllie.”
Meghan uses all those e-mails as the basis for a blog post. By removing any personal detail and sometimes by making the answer somewhat more general, she enables Dr. Phillips to position herself as an expert online. The blog structure that Meghan helped her design is simple, clean, and very well organized with a detailed set of categories that enable prospective patients to browse the site quickly.
In addition, Dr. Phillips is able to use her blog as a way to communicate her enthusiasm about the xylitol products which she sells separately. Although the products take a back seat to the blog itself, it is easy for visitors to her blog to learn about the products and head off to a related site, Zellies.com, where they can actually buy them.
The blogging partnership between Meghan and Dr. Phillips is extremely powerful. Dr. Phillips shares her expertise. Meghan translates it into well structured, bloggable content that quite literally puts a beautiful smile on the faces of the visitors to her website.
Three keys to corporate blogging success from Meghan:
- Define your niche carefully so that your expert content will be easy to find when your prospective customers are typing keywords into Google. Work hard to integrate key phrases that will appear again and again on your blog–and which relate specifically to your market niche.
- You must keep blogging consistently over time before you will see results. Several entries per week are ideal.
- Stay on topic. Don’t start rambling on about your dog or the kids or the weather.
If you know you have a lot to say–and you would like to start saying it on the web in order to prove your expertise–be sure to check in with Meghan to see if she can help. Click here to visit her website: www.meghanwier.com.
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Comments [4]
Newt, this was a very relevant post. You correctly point out that a business blog must have a purpose, and it must be focused on the reader’s interest, not the writers.
A couple of other points:
1. the information presented must be meaty. No one wants to read sales copy or fluff. I like to answer questions in detail on my blog.
2. a business owner can get multiple uses out of questions submitted by answering in audio or video format. I use Wordpress which easily provides for podcasting. In my case, I answer questions in writing at http://www.ssdanswers.com and verbally or on video at http://www.ssdradio.com.
3. I’m not sure if I agree with you that one must post 3x a week. I post two or three times a month and I get a nice response. My experience has also been that the blogs and podcast generate nice feedback, but they don’t convert into paying customers as well as a traditional web site.
Jonathan Ginsberg
Newt: Another helpful column about marketing in the 21st Century.
I provide blog services for Dr. Robert Brueck. Fort Myers plastic surgeon. ( http://beauty-by-brueck.blogspot.com ) Dr. Brueck and I try to provide news and relevant observations about cosmetic surgery. But we also venture out to tell background stories about Dr. Brueck, his professional accomplishments and his public service.
We currently are running pages from his diary while on a medical mission to Siberia. The idea is that the Dr.’s patients and would be patients want to get to know the doctor personally, often before engaging him even in a consultation. But then, cosmetic surgery seems to carry a little undeserved stigma that dentistry doesn’t.
The primary glitch, a temporary one to be sure, in this plan is teaching people about RSS feeds and how to set them up. As an interim measure, we regularly email our base with alerts that send them to the blog for more information. It seems to be working. but a simpler approach to RSS feeds would be much better.
I think that a blog is a useful was to help disseminate information. How many posts a month do you recommend?
Haddon in Bondi beach, Sydney http://www.bondibeachdental.com.au
I agree – you just can’t do everything yourself as there are only so many hours in the day.