A blog? Who me? Ya, I’m talking to you. Well, you say: Who wants to read about what a dentist has to say? Or, I have nothing interesting to talk about. Well, you would be surprised. Rule #1 when marketing your business, Don’t assume everybody thinks like you, they don’t.

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Believe me, it doesn’t matter if you are a landscaper, a plumber, a baker, or a dentist, people do want to hear what you have to say. Oh you doubt what I say do you? Consider this, Dominick DalSanto of Baghouse has a dust collection business. Not exactly very exciting is it? Well he has been successfully blogging for over two years. If he can make dust collection interesting, chances are you can make your business interesting.

So let’s look at three keys to successful blogging.

1. Connect

If you don’t blog and have minimal activity on social media, then it is very likely that your existing and potential customers may just see you as a business, not the person behind that business. A blog can show your personality and allow you to connect with your customers at a level that your competition isn’t.

Think about this, if your clientele sees you as a hard working small business owner, with values, with morals, with ethics, and with your priorities in the right place, who do you think they will call? You or the business that is simply a name and logo? The obvious answer is you. On your blog I
recommend having comments enabled, preferably social media comments like the ones I have below. This will allow your users to easily make a comment, but it also has the added benefit of spreading via social media whenever somebody posts on your blog.

2. Consistency

If there is one thing and one thing only you take from this post, take this: To be successful at blogging, you need to do it consistently. I recommend a minimum of twice a month. Preferably at least every week, ideally a few times per week. There is nothing worse than coming across a blog and it hasn’t been updated in a year and a half. What message does that give out? Well, to me, it gives the impression that you started something and quit. Not exactly something that a potential customer would like to see.

3. Differentiate

How does a small business differentiate itself? There are lots of ways. But one way to do that is to show that you value your customers, that you have vision, that you are up to date with technology. Try this scenario on:

I need to find a landscaper in Salt Lake City. I come across a company with an old website (Company A). No social media. Website is obviously old and clunky. Down at the bottom it says it was built in 2006. Not too impressed. Very little information. So, I go search again. Go to another result (Company B).

This time I come across a nice looking site that has social media and it has a blog. I check out the blog, I see that the business owner has similar interests as I do. I also see that he seems like a down to earth guy just trying to make a living.

Who do you think I call? Company B every single time, no question about it. If a company can’t invest in something as basic as an updated professional website, the impression that it gives is that they aren’t passionate about their business. If they don’t invest in their company to give it a great impression online, then I fear that they won’t be investing in the most basic aspects of their business as well, such as the tools they use to perform their trade.

Blogging, like fitness takes time. It takes effort, it takes dedication. It isn’t easy. Neither is building your business. It’s a matter of making the commitment to your business that you will blog on a consistent basis, and if you do that you’ll reap the rewards and benefits that few others do.

Yesterday I talked about three ways to make blogging work for your business, so hopefully you understand by this point that blogging is a great way to market your company if you are a small business. Today I am going to talk about the top five mistakes you want to avoid when blogging.

1. Hard Selling

Nobody likes to be sold to. If you come across a blog for a local company, chances are you will be impressed if they are blogging consistently. After all that shows that they are why small businesses need to blogcommitted to their business and are committed to getting information out for their potential customers.

So imagine reading the blog and being sold to throughout the blog. You decide to check another post, and same thing there. Is that the experience you want to give you traffic? Heck no. You want to provide quality content that they feel is interesting and engaging. Soft selling only.

2. No Multi-media

Nothing is more boring than white and black space on a webpage. Add in some interesting and intriguing graphics. Add pictures or video from your work as appropriate. If you need stock photos, you can get free stock photos at Stock.xchang or you can pay for stock photos at someplace like Shutterstock. You can have infographics made which are great at displaying information and images combined. Format it so it is easy on the eyes, use a professional font, and a few pictures.

3. Poor Grammar

I understand not everyone is good at spelling or punctuation. Everyone is at a different level when it comes to the English language. That being said, grammatical errors on your website not only makes it hard to read, but it makes your business appear unprofessional. Spellcheck and go back and edit your posts as necessary.

If you are really bad at it, you may want to have somebody else proofread it for you before you post it. We can all forgive a few errors here and there. But obvious errors throughout need to be addressed.

4. Boring Posts

I’m not saying that you have to be a regular Jerry Seinfeld in your posts. I wouldn’t recommend having strictly dry, instructional posts with no pizazz, no flavor. Your blog post should be written in a way that a total novice can come and read your post and want to learn more about your business.

5. Jumping All Over The Place

What I mean by this is blogging about anything and everything. Say you own an HVAC company. Visitors to your site don’t want to hear your thoughts on the current political situation, (that’ll likely alienate some
people) or what you ate for dinner last night.

They want content that is relevant to your industry. Don’t forget, you are the expert, many things that seem obvious to you are not well known to the general public. Sure, throw in some personal stories so your visitors can relate to you, but focus on your industry. Think of what your clients would want to hear about.

Keep these five rules and as you are blogging you’ll have much more success. Did I mention that blogging helps with SEO for small businesses? Yep, sure does. So sprinkle one or two of your keywords in there. The more relevant content you have out there the, the more pages that the search engines can index and that you can potentially rank for. Comment in the box below and let me know what you’d like to hear about next!

This is one of the most common questions I receive, and that makes a lot of sense because it isn’t something that is discussed very often in the SEO world.

Your website’s content is the key to everything when it comes to your ranking, and this is what Google and other major search engines are looking at when they index your page with their crawlers. These search bots will pick through your pages and look for anything they can find to help them find clearer associations and gain a better understanding of your website, just as you pick through them to find ways to insert more little crumbs for the search spiders to gobble up.

But that doesn’t address the frequency with which content is updated at all. The way we normally talk about search engine optimization would seem to imply that you will get the same results if you post one perfectly optimized page and then never do a single thing with the site again. Is that true? Does it matter if you keep things moving, or not?

People talk quite a bit about the idea of new, exciting content. They will tell you that it is important to keep things fresh and interesting, but this is always in the context of the user’s personal experience browsing your site, not meeting the demands of the search engines. Further, it is almost exclusively something we talk about in regards to blog content and other things that keep people coming back, and it doesn’t seem to be very important that we make changes to individual pages for services or products, since that kind of information doesn’t change very often.

When it comes to those types of pages, which should already have comprehensive information available which describes the products themselves, then I don’t see any reason to make a modification. You should certainly keep reconsidering your content, thinking of anything that might be missing or improvements yet to be made, but if you think you already have very complete pages then it is best to leave them be.

Search bots are very sophisticated, so while in truth there is sometimes an advantage to be gained by updating content, there is an important counter to this, which is that the search engines also give more credibility to trustworthy content that has stayed consistent.

The way I would look at this is actually pretty Are you happy with your current search ranking? If not, you should make some
changes to see if you can get a better result. If your ranking is good though, you might want to focus on other pages to build up your website overall, because the changes you make may end up decreasing your ranking and as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Why is this true? Well, I said the search bots are very sophisticated, but this is quite basic in principle. Whenever you modify the content of a page the search engines are going to re-evaluate the content. If your keywords are completely different, it’s like starting from scratch. You should really pick your keywords or phrases and then stick with them for the long haul, which is why that is such an important early decision to make.

Another thing to consider is that the rules change over time, and SEO is an ever-evolving game. When it comes to pages that haven’t changed in a two years or more, it is a good idea to re-evaluate those yourself to make sure they have stayed in line with current trends and any ways in which the search business might have changed. You don’t want to be left behind, so when I say that it is generally not important to keep these types of pages fresh please don’t take that to mean that they should be let to go stale. There is a difference between updating content for the sake of garnering more attention, and updating content that is no longer effective.

This is one of the big reasons why blogs are so important for absolutely every kind of business. You don’t want to focus entirely on your blog, but it is a very good place for experimentation and it is certainly a good place to show signs of life and activity. Every time you publish a blog post you are signaling the search engines to come and have another look at your content, with a particular focus on the post itself and anything linked from it. Each post is also a chance for you to create a whole new page with keywords and new marketing ideas you want to try out, or simply strengthen. Blog posts really call attention to your entire website, and if you can get people sharing your content through social services then the speed with which your pages are visited and revisited will always be high.

Come on, let’s face it, dental practices don’t have an unlimited marketing budget. So in order to get the most for your marketing dollar, it’s essential that you spend your money only on strategies that will be affordable and effective. Online marketing can be one of the most successful ways of building the size and profitability of your dental practice, but only if you go about it the right way.

What’s Wrong with Your Dental Blog?

When blogging for dentists fails, it’s often because the content reads like sales copy. Most visitors aren’t going to click on something that reads like an advertisement or an Amazon product description. If the sole purpose of your blog is to sell something, it’s going to turn off most visitors.

Another common problem among online marketing for dental practices is that the content is not focused enough. The 300 to 500 words in your blog aren’t going to give you enough time to ramble on about just any topic. Visitors want to educate, entertained and informed. If you vary too far from familiar subject matters – such as good oral care, a comparison of oral health products, and so on – you can cause your readers to lose interest. And once they leave your blog, they may never come back.

When readers genuinely engage with a blog, it’s usually because the blog offers a consistent voice. Visitors know what they are looking for and they like it. But in smaller scale businesses such as dental practice, it’s usually not practical for you or a single designated person to write every blog entry. If you want to provide your readers with frequent, fresh content, generally you need to rely on other people, either within your organization or outsources blog writers. This can lead to an inconsistency in the tone and focus of your blog, which can be confusing and off-putting to regular readers.

Another common problem with dental practice online marketing is that content producers set out with the objective of “going viral”. For most local dental practices, this is an unrealistic expectation. Your message generally is too localized and targeted to appeal to Internet users outside your geographic area or genre. On the other hand, it’s also unproductive to produce blog content just for the sake of publishing a blog every day or every week. Both of these approaches can hurt you if visitors feel you are “trying too hard” or “not trying hard enough” with your online marketing.

6 Ways to Improve the Blogging Performance for Your Practice

One things your followers want most is consistency, both in style and in your posting schedule. So if you are going to commit to publishing a blog, you need to make sure it is well written, informative, entertaining, and that it is published according to a reliable schedule.

Here are a few techniques you can use to ensure that your blog is going to be effective and consistent:

1. You Write About Your Speciality

People don’t click on a dentists’ blog because they want to know your political opinions or hear what you have to say about your local sports teams. The content of your blog should meet the expectations of your readers. Generally, that means limiting yourself to information relevant to your dental practice. Before you commit to producing a regular blog, it’s helpful to develop a list of topics that you can refer back to for ideas. You can add additional topics to this list as you think of them. This list can be either active – such as a sequential schedule of specific blogs you want to publish – or in reserve, such as a list of “backup” topics you can write about if you don’t have any original ideas. In either case, these topics should include only those subjects your readers would be interested in as it relates to your dental practice. Maintaining an ongoing list can also help keep your overall content strategy organized and on track.

2. You Have Objectives in Place

Before you write your first blog, spend some time considering what it is you hope to accomplish with your blogging. Like most bloggers, your first priority probably is going to be improving client engagement and building your client base. But these can serve as the starting point for something bigger. They can be used to build a blogging strategy that gives you whatever results you want. And as you encounter problems with your blog, you can look back on these goals to help you clarify the message and image you want to project to your clients.

3. You Have Standards

If you are going to hand your blogging duties over to somebody else, you want to make sure they are creating content that is consistent with the style and standards you want to maintain. These can be as simple as “no bad words” or as complex as defining the exact fonts and point size you want. All of these rules can be compiled into a style guide that outsourced producers or guest bloggers can use as reference when producing content for your blog.

4. You Think Locally

Tailor your content so that it is most appealing to people within your geographic area. While there may be people in other cities reading your blog, it’s not likely that they are going to utilize your dental practice.

5. You Engage With Your Audience

Encourage people to leave comments on your blog and respond to them when they do. Invite them to share your contact on their social media pages so you can expand the scope of your influence. These types of things help build interpersonal relationships which can be effective in getting other people to evangelize for your dental practice.

6. You Measure Performance

It’s important to know what’s working with your blog and what’s not working. Using analytical tools can help you identify opportunities for improvement, as well as letting you “double down” on those elements of your online marketing that are most effective.