I have been writing a series of posts on the positive measurable value of dentists publishing a blog two to three times a month. And in my last post,  I talked about building your audience by getting your patients to sign up to your Feedburner feed so that they can receive your information by email.

Another very relevant way to build your audience is by developing a social media presence on Facebook. Creating a professional Facebook Page for your dental practice is easy to do. You then can have your webmaster set up what is called the network blog application so that whenever you publish a blog, it is automatically sent to the Facebook page of every person who follows your practice (Likes).

After expending the energy to get all these people reading your thoughts, you now have taken on the responsibility of writing good material. It can’t be pablum. You want to develop a style that is easy and fun to read. I see too many examples of topics being treated as if they were articles for the JADA. I also hate material written in the third person. “Dr. Smith will do this or that.” I suggest that the material be written in the first person – right from you – right from the heart. It is helpful to be low key and conversational and even humorous. And you certainly don’t want to give the impression that you are selling something.

Very important – spend some time creating a catchy title. That is how you grab someone’s attention and draw them in to read your message.

Every day I read three blogs that have been influential in the development of my own writing style. Seth Godin – who is not a dentist-more often than not has something applicable to say about business and marketing strategy. Dr. Lorne Lavine writes an excellent blog about technology. And my good friends Rich and Dave Madow have an insightful and edgy style as they discuss information to help dentists grow their practices and perhaps more importantly, get more enjoyment out of their lives and work.

I also read two sources that come out monthly. Max Gotcher of Summit Practice Solutions publishes a monthly e-newsletter that is very thoughtful and filled with informative material on a host of practice management issues. Bill Rossi, the founder of Advanced Practice Management has a great sense of humor and supports his ideas on practice management with sound statistical analysis.

I would strongly encourage all of you to follow these experts – you will not be disappointed.

For my last few posts, I have been talking about the numerous benefits of blogging. I mentioned specifically the help you get with search engine optimization because you are adding new content to your website. And when you discuss and comment numerous times about a particular procedure, Google references this and drives potential buyers for those services to your site.

But probably the most important reason to blog is to easily and effortlessly and inexpensively disseminate important and useful information to your patient base. You can send your thoughts on clinical topics, new services that you may be offering, health care updates – the list is pretty long. In the old days, we used to do this by snail mail, perhaps by mailing a quarterly newsletter. Very costly and very time consuming.

My favorite way today is to use a Google company called Feedburner to send out your blogs – at no cost – to every patient’s email address. Since you are receiving this, you can see how the presentation is professional and distinctive – not like a normal email.  Of course, if you don’t have email addresses, you can’t send out your message. You could be writing the most eloquent and interesting blog posts, but if nobody is receiving them, it is like singing in the shower. Nobody is listening!

On your website, have your webmaster install the orange reader icon that says “subscribe to our blog by email”. When you click the icon, it opens to a page where you enter the email address and follow the simple security directions. Someone at the front desk needs to sign up every patient at the beginning or at the end of an office visit.  It takes literally thirty seconds, and very quickly you will have built your audience. One very important point – you need to tell that patient to check their email today and be sure to verify the request they will receive from Feedburner asking them if they want to receive the emails from your office. This is an anti-spam thing to protect us from getting junk email that we don’t want. Once a week you should access the Feedburner account in order to manage your subscriber list and be certain that the patients are verifying.

The ultimate challenge for writing the blogs is to be informative and useful and relevant – more on that next time.