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Slide 1: Click to edit Master subtitle style 5 Reasons To Start A Physical Therapy Blog That Attracts Patient Refe 6/30/10
Slide 2: If you haven’t noticed or payed any attention to the latest trends in the tech world, blogging has evolved quite a lot in the last few years. It has become a key part of Web 2.0. In fact, if you’re a super geek like me you probably are familiar with the more popular blogs like the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Gizmodo, that have a huge user base, and are much larger than most websites. 6/30/10
Slide 3: If not maybe you noticed sites in our own industry, like Advance For Physical Therapy starting to use blogs to manage more of their own content. Why all the blog talk you ask? Well if your planning on building a website anytime soon for your physical therapy business, you may want to think about which direction you should be headed in. 6/30/10
Slide 4: With that said, I want to give you 5 reasons why you should consider starting a blog that can potentially generate patient referrals for your physical therapy practice versus having a boring static website. This can also be applied to those that have a physical therapy product and want to generate more buyers or if you have a physical therapy continuing education course and are trying to increase attendee enrollment 6/30/10
Slide 5: So here are the 5 reasons to ditch your boring static website and get going with a new blog: 1. A blog is a more personal medium than a website: When your patients read your blog posts, they feel as if they are listening to your voice. They form a much deeper connection with you as they read more about what you write and learn more about you. The content on a static website can 6/30/10
Slide 6: sometimes feel like it has no “voice”. It can come off like canned jargon with no personality. In my opinion static websites are dry, boring and can lose its appeal with your visitors. 2. Search engines like blogs: This is a known fact in the blogging community! By their very nature, blogs are updated frequently with new content, and search engines love websites with new content. Search engines, like Google, devour them like a slab of roast beef. 6/30/10
Slide 7: Keep the content coming and you will have no problem having your content picked up by the major search engines. You also have a lot of latitude about what you can write about, and can often leverage your patient’s common interests. I recently did a podcast interview with Monique Serpas, a physical therapist who blogs about injury prevention, conditions treated by physical therapists, 6/30/10
Slide 8: descriptions of treatment techniques, and other helpful information mostly catering to the patients she treats in the clinic. If you listen to the podcast, she mentions that she provides preventative tips, she references earlier blog posts she has written and uses the right keywords that is relevant to the search engines and her patients. Monique was able to do 6/30/10
Slide 9: this all while providing valuable content to her readers. It’s a great combination that attracts patients and the search engines like bees to honey! 3. Interaction and community: Blogs are a lot better for interaction because they have a comments area below each post where people can leave comments. As a reader you can then respond to these comments and leave your opinion 6/30/10
Slide 10: about the topic being discussed in the post. People are usually motivated to leave comments when they read something that strikes a chord with them. You as the blogger can respond to these comments and slowly build a community of loyal followers who will begin to like know and trust you based off of the interaction you have with your readers. 6/30/10
Slide 11: 4. Blogging technology has come a long way: You can build a very professional looking blog with the technology that is around these days. I actually prefer using Wordpress which has many benefits over the other blog software I have come across. In fact, you can achieve all the features of a static website using a WordPress blog. I have seen a lot of websites that look like static websites but were actually built using WordPress. 6/30/10
Slide 12: So if you don’t like the blog look, you can build a “static-like” site using the powerful features of WordPress and still get all the search engine benefits that comes with having a blog. 5. Repeat Visitors: If your blog content is compelling and provides value to your readers, they will come back hungry for more. This is great because it increases your traffic and gives you a higher chance of converting your reader into a 6/30/10
Slide 13: patient referral, a buyer for your physical therapy product or having them become an attendee for your CEU course. Providing quality posts and content is a recipe for repeat visitors and website traffic. It’s very hard to get repeat visitors with a static website because there is no real reason to go back and visit. The blog content, interacting through comments, and the relationship readers have with 6/30/10
Slide 14: the blogger is what drives blog readers back to a site. This can be a powerful physical therapy marketing strategy ultimately want to achieve if you have and a what blog you online. Hopefully I have given you a reason to ditch the thought of creating a static website and move towards creating a blog. As I mentioned before, a blog will help you drive a lot more traffic to your physical therapy business and this could translate into 6/30/10
Slide 15: increased revenues and growth in your private practice, physical therapy product or CEU courses. If you want to create a strong presence for your physical therapy business online, getting started with a blog is a move in the right direction. I cover a lot of how to set one up and promote it in the PT Marketing Academy. I will even host it for free! You can go here now to enroll and get started. 6/30/10
Slide 16: If you have a blog or a website for your physical therapy business and would like to share your thoughts on this topic, leave your comments below to share with everyone else. 6/30/10