A blog can boost your business by establishing you as a subject matter expert, boosting your brand, attracting more traffic to your website, increasing your target market, and helping your medical practice standout. There are websites that offer automation, data analytics, and even artificial intelligence to help you seamlessly integrate blogging into your busy life. A blog is a written form of content to inform readers about products and services, and to establish a brand. Consumers, potential business partners, and future employers can be referred to your blog posts which can be archived for quick searches.
Become a subject matter expert
Whether you own your practice, partner, or work for someone else you can use blogging to establish yourself as a subject matter expert (SME). You can write about all things dermatology or select a niche within dermatology to hone your expertise even more. Niche practitioners and businesses are easier to market and thus it becomes easier for brands and potential customers to find you. There’s a nurse practitioner (NP) who became well known for her knowledge about diabetes management. When she decided to open her niche practice, she targeted Black obese women diagnosed with diabetes. Think about how confident she must feel when talking about her clinical experience and how satisfied her patients must feel knowing their provider has extensive experience caring for patients like them.
Boost your brand
You can use your blog post to provide free content to your audience and educate your patients. The free resources you provide establish your position in dermatology which can then be leveraged to attract future clients and brand partners to your paid services. There are easy to use tools on social media websites that can automatically synch to one another and link blog posts to your business website. Take advantage of tools that help you create a system of automation so you spend more time working on your business than in it. These tools also offer data analytics so you can see where to invest more of your resources. This will increase your return on investment, job satisfaction, and afford you more time to spend on revenue producing tasks.
Marketing made easy: Part 1
You can provide a great service, but if no one knows you exists your business will not reach its full potential. It’s recommended to spend an average of $2,000 to $3,000 the first 2-3 months to market a new business. Afterwards, a great deal of marketing will be done by word of mouth and dependent on your location’s visibility to passing traffic. Look at all your connections as an opportunity to market your business or your brand. Your marketing campaign can be as small as getting your business logo embroidered on an article of clothing or appearing on a podcast. It can be as big as advertising on a bill board or wrapping your car in your company logo. Don’t forget about tried-and-true marketing products like brochures, customized merchandise, and letterhead to direct recipients to your website.
Marketing made easy: Part 2
The first step to marketing is understanding your target customer down to the smallest detail. This is easier to do when you have a niche business rather than trying to serve a broad market. The second step is to get a Google Business Profile. Insert your website address into the URL Inspection tool to see if Google sees your page the same way as your intended users. The third step is to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is used to describe specific improvements made to your website that make it easier for search engines like Google to find and rank your website when people look for you or the type of service you provide. According to Google’s SEO Starter Guide, you should allow access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files on your website. You can also hide pages from Google’s crawl feature by adding robots.txt in the root directory of your site. If you only want users with a link to your website to have access to the information, then add the noindex tag. Successful SEO strategy also considers the word-count where the higher the word-count the greater your ranking in search engines. While I’ve used external hyperlinks to refer you to outside resources, you can use internal links to drive traffic to other areas on your blog and increase the amount of time users spend on your website. Backlinks (external links) expand your audience, your networking potential with other creators and businesses, and enhance your SEO.
Increase your target market and revenue
Once you’ve established your Google Business profile, think of ways you can encourage your current and new clients to review your business. The number of 5 star reviews your business receives are proportional to the expected revenue for your practice. Consider offering friend and family discounts, free consultations, free facials, or a low-cost, high-value treatment like botox. You’ll get more return on your investment (ROI) by trying to upsell current clients than you will trying to make get your first sale with new ones. You can further increase your revenue by monetizing your blog through Ads, affiliate marketing, selling physical or digital content, subscriptions and coaching aspiring and experienced providers. When thinking about your target market, don’t limit yourself to other nurse practitioners, physician assistants, or the healthcare industry. When you see Apple and Microsoft entering healthcare, you should be assured your value is much bigger than your clinical setting. Partnering with other brands and emailing subscribers or clients a weekly newsletter addressing FAQs and new service lines can be used to expand your target market. In fact, blogging is an excellent tool to use if you’re interested in collaborating with other businesses. They can highlight your business on their website and you can invite well-known industry experts to write a guest blog on your website.
Help your business standout
If you’re going to attract more people to your website, it needs to be modern, easy to navigate, and aesthetically pleasing. There are a number of websites like WordPress, Webflow, GoDaddy, and Wix that make it easy for you to insert pictures and text of your choosing that are free or low-cost. You can also hire someone. As a provider in a visual field, your website and social media account (which can be managed by a medical assistant or social media manager) are often the first impression future clients encounter. The fee for a web designer can range from $0 to $2000. When considering if you should hire someone or do it yourself, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferris recommends calculating what you think your hourly time is worth and then comparing that with what you’re willing to pay someone. Whether you build your website yourself or hire someone, your website needs to be mobile friendly as most people will access it on a mobile device.
Be more interested than interesting
Lastly, when considering what to write about, Dale Carnegie, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, recommends being more interested in other people than you are in being interesting. Find out what your target audience wants to know and provide it. Spend more time listening than talking. Carnegie recommends asking 5 questions every day, this will help you gather valuable intel as well as increase engagement with your audience. If you want longevity in your business, building relationships and increasing engagement is key. Bigger is not always better, as it’s easier to provide high quality engagement in smaller groups. This is much easier to do when you focus on a niche business or target audience. Including a call-to-action will also increase engagement and tell your readers what to do with the content you provide. For example, if there’s anything in this blog post you would like to learn more about, like how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to write blog posts, leave a comment letting me know and I’ll be sure to elaborate on it in future articles.
Kimberly Madison, DNP, AGPCNP-BC
Kimberly Madison is a new dermatology nurse practitioner with a passion for writing, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and mentorship. As one of the newest members of Diversity in Dermatology’s publication committee, she is here to provide personal and professional development content designed to support and motivate new nurse practitioners and physician assistants specializing in dermatology to recognize their value in and outside of the clinical setting.