How, Why and Where
Image via CrunchBase
A hearing healthcare blog should really be the main platform for your inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing is a term that simply covers marketing that your prospective customers search out as opposed to you actively delivering it to them.
A blog is where you can display the reasons why your prospective customer should do business with you. It is the most effective place to engage and impress prospective hearing healthcare customers. Believe me when I say, a properly leveraged and deployed blog will deliver qualified leads to your Practice.
So how exactly will you set it up and what are the options for deployment?
Blogging Platforms
There are three mainstream blogging platforms, Blogger, WordPress and Typepad. Each one of them are versatile and relatively easy to use, each one can be used with your own domain. I have used both blogger and WordPress and I like both a lot. I prefer WordPress just a bit more than Blogger because of the versatility of themes and plugins available for the platform.
Themes are the layout and design of the blog, plugins are pieces of code that add functionality to the blog. In the case of this blog you will see to the right a MailChimp sign up box. That is just one of the plugins that I have deployed on this blog. Setting up on either platform is relatively easy and you can be blogging within ten minutes. When you have set up the blog, you should connect and display all your social media channels. You should also set up a good about page detailing the contributors and the Practice details.
Leveraging A Blog
It makes sense to set up your hearing healthcare blog on Blogger.com or WordPress.com, you can then use the blog posts strategically. What I mean by that is this, you can then intelligently use the blog posts to backlink to your website content. You can do this by using in text anchor links or by placing links to the relevant part of your site at the end of the post. These links will help your pagerank and returns in organic search rankings in the long-term both for your blog and your website.
That is the key to your online strategy, you are in fact leveraging all your channels to support your main online channel, your website. There is a chap named Brad Dalton, he runs a site called wpsites.net, guy is a genius. What he doesn’t know about WordPress is not worth talking about. He has a fantastic YouTube channel at wordpressites and an excellent intro tutorial for setting up a WordPress site at WordPress Tutorial . Pay him a visit and have a good look at the tutorials before you move forward.
Regards
Geoff
