This post was originally published on HealthWorksCollective, an editorially independent, moderated community for thought leaders in health care.
In March 2012 the Wall
Street Journal’s Health Blog marked its fifth anniversary. With more than 7,300 posts and 118,000
comments to date, the blog’s birthday is significant because it demonstrates
that interest in health care blogs continues to grow. Creating interesting, high quality content
is essential in becoming a successful health care blogger; however, even the best content needs promotional
help to gain visibility and readership.
Here are six strategies to effectively promote your health
care blog to build readership and traffic:
Optimize for search. Search
engine optimization techniques work for blogs too. Selecting relevant keywords and placing them
thoughtfully in the titles and body of your blog text are important first steps
in optimizing your blog content for search.
And don’t forget to register
your blog on Google, Bing and Technorati,
a specialized search engine focused on blogs.
Syndicate to maximize exposure.
Your original content can be published on your blog’s site as well as health
care portals that aggregate content from multiple health care blogs. Each
portal has specific directions on submitting posts for publication on their
sites. Choose a portal whose target
audience or theme most closely matches your blog. Some health portals to consider:
Participate in blog carnivals. A
blog carnival is an event in which bloggers submit posts to a host blog for
inclusion in a themed blog post which summarizes the work of contributing
bloggers. Bloggers take turns hosting
the carnival on their site.
Participation in blog carnivals, as both a host and a contributor, is an
excellent way to gain visibility and cultivate relationships with other bloggers. Well known health care blog carnivals
include:
Post responses on influential health care blogs. Leaving comments on other blogs allows you to
establish relationships with influential bloggers and create visibility for
your own blog. However, as David Meerman Scott writes in The
New Rules of Marketing and PR, it requires skill and finesse to execute this
strategy. The key, Scott advises, is to
focus your response on the issues raised by the blog post, not to write about
yourself; though he notes it is
perfectly acceptable to provide a link to your blog’s URL within your response.
To effectively use this strategy you will also want to comment on
well-known blogs written by health care thought leaders whose topics are
relevant to yours. To identify
influential bloggers you may want to use Technorati, a blog search engine, or
consult a service such as Klout which
identifies influential people and organizations by topic. (Note you will need to set up an account to
access Klout.) The health care blog
portals and carnivals mentioned above are also excellent sources for
identifying influential health care blogs.
Here is a small sampling of some respected, independent health care bloggers
whose blogs you may want to follow:
Physician Authored Blogs:
Westby
Fisher (Dr. Wes)
Kenneth
Lin (Common Sense Family Doctor)
Elaine
Schattner (Medical Lessons)
Mike
Sevilla (Family Medicine Rocks)
Patient Authored Blogs:
Dave
deBronkart (ePatientDave)
Jackie Fox (Dispatch
from Second Base)
Kerri
Morrone Sparling (Six Until Me)
Policy and General Health Care Issues:
David
Harlow (HealthBlawg)
Paul Levy (Not Running a
Hospital)
David
Williams (Health Business Blog)
Health Care Social Media:
Barbara
Ficarra (Health in 30)
Nicola
Ziady (BSocial)
Pharmaceutical Industry
Sally
Church (Pharma Strategy Blog)
Derek
Lowe (In the Pipeline)
John
Mack (Pharma Marketing Blog)
Ed
Silverman (Pharmalot)
Host a guest blogger. Capitalize
on the name recognition of thought leaders and other well known bloggers (see
above) by asking them to write a guest post for your blog.
Leverage your social networks. Posting
a link to your blog posts across social networks can increase visibility and
search engine ranking. This includes posting
links on your Facebook and Linkedin updates, in relevant Linkedin discussion
groups, and sharing on Google+. Links to
blog posts should also be tweeted a couple times a day for several days after
publication to ensure that post links don’t get lost in your Twitter
stream. Again, this strategy requires
some finesse and judgment to ensure you don’t cross the line from a reasonable
level of promotion to spamming.
Finally, you will want to measure the effectiveness of your
blog promotion efforts by using analytics tools to monitor statistics such as
number of visits, traffic sources and time spent on your blog. Several free options such as Google Analytics,
Site Meter and Stat Counter are available.
Creating blog content can require a significant investment
of time. It’s important spend time
promoting content as well as creating it to maximize the return on your investment.
What strategies have you found effective in promoting your health care
blog?
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