Make your blog succeed — for you and your practice

“If it’s not on the internet, it might as well not exist.” This is the underlying thinking of most consumers today, including healthcare consumers. For this reason, it is critical for you and your practice to have a website and blog. Your website and blog are places where you can establish and reinforce your brand and values.

A blog, in particular, can be a cost-effective way to communicate with your patients, advertise your services and specialties, educate healthcare consumers, and reach more potential clients. So if you don’t have a blog already, start one today. Sites like Wordpress and Wix make it easy for anyone — even busy dermatologists  — to start a blog. No specialized computer language knowledge is necessary.

If you do already have a blog, maximize its efficacy. Here are some tips for creating meaningful content for your dermatology blog.

• Produce high-quality content. You are the expert. What is common knowledge to you is expert advice to your patients. Translate your knowledge into meaningful content that will actually help your patients improve their health. While it may seem like extra work on your already long to-do list, it could actually save you time in the long run. Start producing content that answers the questions your patients most commonly ask you.

• Length matters. Aim for more than a couple of paragraphs if you can. Specifically more than 300 words. You might think that in current climate of limited attention spans the shorter the post the better, but articles with fewer than 300 words can appear — to both search engines and human readers — to be lacking in meaningful content. Readers may write it off as advertisements or fluff without even reading it.

• Organization matters. It is true that most readers have short attention spans. So you need to organize your blog and the individual articles in a way that is catches your reader’s attention. One way to do that is to use easy-to-read bullet points lists (like this one) and catchy headlines that help your reader know what the blog post will be about.

• Use graphics and images. What’s that saying? A picture is worth a 1,000 words. The first thing your readers will see are the images on your blog. Make sure they are worth seeing. That said, if you use patient photos, you must not violate HIPAA. Protect your patient’s privacy by making sure you crop the photo so that their are no identifiable markers or that you get your patient’s permission before you share it.

• Link with social media. They call it the world wide web for a reason. You post something on the internet and it can be immediately shared around the world. Make sure you make it as easy as possible to do so. Connect your blog to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and/or LinkedIn.

• And most importantly don’t forget to share your blog posts with your colleagues on DermRounds. Let’s use this space to promote each other’s work. A strong community, is a vibrant and dynamic community. Let us know what you are up to by sharing your work with us!