Singing in the Shower

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.