Blogging is a great way to connect with your patients and increase your site’s visibility online. Once you have one set up, consistently updating the content is the real challenge. If you need a last-minute blog idea, here are five topics your patients will find valuable and you can whip up quickly.
1. Consult the calendar. Each month of the year is an Awareness Month – October, for instance, is Breast Cancer Awareness Month – so use it as an opportunity to talk about a health issue: what are its causes, treatments, any preventive care research. Or you can use it to loop in a guest blogger such as a patient who is a survivor or a medical specialist who deals extensively with the disease. You can also use wider seasonal topics such as tips for parents on keeping Halloween reasonably healthy for their kids.
2. Comment on news. Whether it’s industry news or current events, is there anything health-related you can comment on? Or if it’s news from your practice like a medical conference you attended, use that event and what you learned as a post topic.
3. Find out what people are asking. More than ever, people are going to the Internet for answers to questions about their health. Not all answers are accurate or helpful, however, so adding your trusted expertise to the mix is something patients will find valuable. Find out what people want to know by conducting a reader survey for a blog post one day, and once results come in, you can use their questions as your topics.
To conduct a survey on your blog, ask a question in one of your blog posts (e.g. What topic would you like us to write about next?) and invite readers to respond in the comment section (Reply in a comment below!). You can also use a free tool like Survey Monkey. (Survey Monkey allows you to create a survey and link to it in your blog. It is free for up to 100 responses.) We also recommend exploring other blogs and health-related sites in your industry to find out what topics interest patients.
4. List. Simple lists are popular for their practical, easily ingestible format. Five Ways to Treat Allergies, Top 10 Over-the-Counter Meds for the Common Cold, etc. Just thinking with a list format in mind will probably bring up several ideas.
5. Remix your best posts. Look at your highest-ranking posts and see if there’s another angle you can take on it to supplement or update it for a spinoff post. Has there been more research on this topic since you originally posted it? Could you bring in a guest blogger (a medical professional or a patient) to offer additional perspective?
We know generating, scheduling and creating content for your healthcare blog is time-consuming. Practice Builders offers a Healthcare Custom Blog Service so you can focus on your already demanding schedule without sacrificing your healthcare marketing.