Content Mastery Guide

Editor and Ghostwriter

Three Ways to Turn a New Blog Post Into a New Local Client – Without Google!

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woman-reading-interesting-blog-post-text

When you deliver a personal service such as a wellness treatment, it can be challenging to explain what you do in a 60-second introduction or a three-minute conversation in the buffet line.

Prospective clients need more time to learn about you and decide whether to trust you with their wellness care. A frequently updated website is a key marketing tool, but how do you get people there?

Would you be relieved to hear that you don’t need to be on the first page of Google in order to attract new local clients? If so, you’ll want to keep reading.

Here are three ways that your blog can help you reach, teach and draw in prospective local clients who would be ideal for your wellness practice:

Scenario #1: From one friend to another

Your current clients will always be your best source of referrals, so be sure to make it easy for them to tell their friends and family about you. For example, if you’re looking to attract more clients with sleep problems, write a blog post with some sleep hygiene tips.

Follow that up with a case study about how you helped another client to sleep better (here are some more tips about how to write a client story). Be sure to link the two posts so your readers can get from one to the other.

You may be concerned that blog posts about very specific conditions and treatments may not appeal or relate to everyone. That’s absolutely true! That’s why those posts will do such a great job of reaching the exact people who need your help – and those who care about them.

Your current clients want to refer you, they may just be unsure of how to describe what you do. Your blog post will help them do it!

To be sure your clients see them, insert blog post links (use the permalink for each specific post) into your email signature line (WiseStamp does this automatically) or even into your client invoices. If you’re on social media, share links there as well.

Scenario #2: From one expert to another

If you stay active in your professional community, you’ll build a rapport with other practitioners. You’re bound to have different approaches, specialties and personalities, so some clients will be a better fit for them and some will be better for you.

Watch for opportunities to keep in touch (e.g., congratulate someone for moving into a new space or launching a new service), and/or schedule it in your calendar every three months or so. As part of this email, share links to your best blog posts.

Just as in the first scenario, your blog posts will help these other practitioners identify who might be a good client for you AND it will give them an effective and low-pressure way of introducing you.

Scenario #3: Getting checked out

Whether you’ve met at a networking event, through a personal connection or in the checkout line at the grocery store, it’s common to pass along your contact details – including your website address – to prospective clients. And if they’re like most of us these days, they’re going to check out your website before they consider doing business with you. What will they find?

If you’re blogging, they’ll find evidence and examples of your specific expertise. Whether that’s a fit for them or not, you’ve just gained trust and esteem in their eyes. They’ll also see how generous you are with your information, and how conscientious you are about keeping your site and blog up to date with the latest relevant information.

If they’re not ready at the moment, but they want to stay in touch with you, they can subscribe to your mailing list or the RSS feed of your blog. When they are ready, you’ll be in their Inbox and on their minds.

Just be sure to blog consistently so you can build on the good impression you’ve made.

P.S. If you liked this post, you might enjoy the Blogging Tips newsletter, delivered weekly to your inbox! Sign up here.

9 Most Illuminating Ways Blogging Can Spotlight Your Wellness Clinic

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© VILevi - Fotolia.com
© VILevi – Fotolia.com

People are searching for health information online, but so many of them get stuck in the research phase because they don’t know who to trust.

This was quantified in a study called “The Power of the Purse: Engaging Women Decision Makers for Healthy Outcomes,” which found that while 53% of women think the best health information is online, only 31 percent of these women trust what they find.

Here are nine ways that blogging helps your wellness clinic be both found and trusted as a reliable resource for online health seekers.

  1. Credibility – By answering customer questions and demonstrating your knowledge, you and your practitioners are seen as experts in your industry.
  2. Comfort – People will see that you understand their needs and want to help; you’re not just pushing sales messages at them.
  3. Searchability – Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links (source: Hubspot via Writtent). Provided that you stick to the core categories your ideal clients care about, these links will generate visits from exactly the type of people you’re trying to attract.
  4. Recognition – As people read different blog posts on your site, they will gain comfort with your online presence and be more likely to come back the next time they see a link from you. The more time they spend on your site, the more they may see or seek out information about your services.
  5. Service – How you take care of your readers is how people will assume you take care of your clients. By blogging you can show your commitment to consistency, quality, generosity, helpfulness, and excellence.
  6. Passion – By each writing authentically about what’s important to you, you and your practitioners can reveal your passion for what you do. The clinic blog then becomes a vehicle to share that passion with clients, prospective clients, and other health seekers around the world.
  7. Visibility – Promoting your blog posts on social media brings you into the online conversations people are already having about your areas of expertise.
  8. Familiarity – When you have well-crafted bylines and bios on your clinic blog, readers get to know individual practitioners and other people connected with your clinic. This can jumpstart relationships with prospective clients.
  9. Generosity – When people see you are willing to give away your expertise and be helpful without expecting anything in return, it cultivates goodwill and fortifies the long-term, trusting relationships that lead to repeat client visits.

Blogging is a very effective way to attract positive attention for your wellness clinic. Once they discover your blog through a web search or someone in their network, it becomes a portal through which prospective clients can evaluate whether you are well-matched to meet their wellness goals.

P.S. If you liked this post, you might enjoy the Blogging Tips newsletter, delivered weekly to your inbox! Sign up here.

12 Most Altruistic Reasons to Keep Blogging

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© Aleksandar Mijatovic - Fotolia.com
© Aleksandar Mijatovic – Fotolia.com

Many wellness practitioners say it’s challenging or near impossible to find time in the week to keep up with their blogging. Yet consistency is key when it comes to building trust, visibility and credibility online.

If helping your business grow isn’t motivating enough to give blogging your attention, here are 12 ways your blogging can help others:

  1. Blogging is teaching – Whether you’re sharing tips, explaining how your treatment modality works, or telling stories about topics your clients care about, you’re giving people information and insights they didn’t have before.
  2. Blogging is gratifying – Because blogs are indexed quickly by search engines, and posts are so easy to share and promote on social media, blogging gives people quick and easy access to what they want now.
  3. Blogging can heal – By teaching others what you know, you’re empowering them with tools they can use to address their health issues and improve their lives.
  4. Blogging opens minds – You have a unique set of ideas, experiences, skills and beliefs. By writing authentically about these and how they relate to your blog topics, you never know what new awareness you’ll spark in someone else’s mind.
  5. Blogging builds trust – When you use your experience, knowledge and research to present helpful and accurate information, people can rely on your blog as a credible resource for guidance.
  6. Blogging can advocate – Building credibility through blogging makes you a powerful advocate because people are more likely to listen to an expert – whether you’re speaking for those without a voice or advancing your own ideas for change.
  7. Blogging can inspire – Putting your ideas into the world and being an expert encourages other people to claim their expertise and raise their own voices.
  8. Blogging gives back – A blog is a great forum for highlighting and promoting the good work being done by charitable organizations in your local or global community, and asking others to support them as well.
  9. Blogging shares the wealth – By spotlighting a colleague, product or service or colleague on your blog, you can give another business the gift of exposure to a wider audience.
  10. Blogging creates community – When you blog effectively about topics that are interesting and helpful to your ideal customers, it draws those people to you. When your blog turns into a community it becomes a treasured place for people to gather and celebrate passion for an industry, tool, belief or resource.
  11. Blogging is personal – By responding to all individual comments and questions sent via your blog, social media pages, and email, you’re offering a personal touch that so many people are missing these days. Not only is that good for people, it’s good for business.
  12. Blogging is good for business – While you’re sharing helpful information, inspiring new ideas and actions, growing a larger audience, advancing worthy causes, building a community, and connecting on a personal level, you’ll be attracting the ideal clients (and referrals to them) who resonate with your unique values and mission.

By blogging to create a more successful business, you will generate more resources to make the world a better place.

This post was originally published on the 12 Most site, which was closed in 2016.

P.S. If you liked this post, you might enjoy the Blogging Tips newsletter, delivered weekly to your inbox! Sign up here.

Blogging About Sensitive Topics

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© astrosystem - Fotolia.com
© astrosystem – Fotolia.com

“I have always thought blogging is perfect for people running ‘sensitive’ businesses [such as family law and divorce], where someone may not want to admit even to themselves that they have problems.

It is highly likely they will start trawling the internet for advice or to understand where they stand. A blog is a really good way to create empathy long before the reader is ready to pick up the phone.”

Victoria Tomlinson is the chief executive of UK’s Northern Lights PR, an expert on social media, business and education, and author of a number of e-books on social media.

The above quote is from PRiME, a career site for women in their second act, where Victoria’s guest post recommends 20 business blogs for women over 50.

I thought her point about sensitive businesses also applied perfectly to wellness clinics, whose prospective clients are grappling with health concerns, or trying to transform deeply ingrained day-to-day lifestyle habits.

I asked Victoria to share her thoughts on this, and she graciously agreed.

[This] most definitely [applies.] And there are two sides relevant to this as far as health bloggers go. Our client, Pat Chapman-Pincher, just wrote this blog post last week and she said:

“I learned an interesting lesson when my husband had a major, but rare, operation. The moment the diagnosis was made I started to research the operation. The results were not encouraging, the survivors (who were very vocal) seemed to have bad side effects and an impaired quality of life.

What I learned in the next few months as he made a full recovery was that the information was very selective. Doctors of course are required to tell you everything that might go wrong and those who had no side effects were too busy getting on with their lives to bother with complaining about them online. Happy people don’t post.”

So this is an opportunity for professionals to provide clear factual information, the good and the bad and put it in perspective. But also to provide commentary on what patients/carers/families might find if they were to search – recognising what is coming top of Google and then providing independent, impartial comments to balance the negative.

How do you see the relationship between empathy and trust?

Empathy is all about the reader going ‘that’s me’. I think trust comes when you see consistency and empathy over time. That the blog posts you write are always written with the best interests of the reader in mind. And never do you go ‘salesy’ and spoil that brand. It takes time to build trust, empathy can be achieved from one post.

What are some of the steps wellness bloggers can take to express empathy for their readers and prospective clients?

The best way to create empathy is to listen to the questions that their patients/clients are asking them. These are their gems and treasure them. They are what readers will be searching online.

The blogger then needs to talk to the reader as if they were in their clinic or at a meeting and answer their questions honestly, without jargon and giving lots of examples to bring the points to life (storytelling).

Referring (anonymously) to patients will help this, e.g., ‘I had a family in my clinic last year and the thing that worried them most was ….’ So you are making the blog a fantastic repository of discussions from the clinic. A brilliant resource for any patient and creating lots of empathy in this way.

What do you think has to happen for people to move from anonymously trawling the internet and reading blog posts to actually reaching out by phone or email?

Blogs need personality and ownership. There are still blogs where companies post anonymously – these do not engage. But if you put a name to it and people can find out more about you online (Twitter, LinkedIn, articles about you, etc.) and it is all consistent and really helpful, this builds a relationship. And it happens quite quickly online.

People don’t create relationships with faceless corporates; they do with a named and pictured individual.

How can wellness bloggers increase the odds of this happening?

Give plenty of options to contact directly. These would include a direct email (not a contact form which feels so faceless and impersonal), a mobile number, and ensuring people can leave comments on blog posts. Everyone is individual and some will prefer mobile, others email and so on.

The key is that whatever contact details you leave, someone is answering every day. People may have had to pluck up a lot of courage to make this contact step – and not replying for days or weeks could be really damaging.

For readers with sensitive health issues, blogging is a very effective way to show empathy and build trust. Be sure to nurture these building blocks of a long-term relationship with clients and prospective clients.

Thank you so much to Victoria Tomlinson of Northern Lights PR for sharing your expertise with us!

[Update: In a guest post for Victoria’s site, I wrote about the process I use to find and connect with new people like her on social media, and how that leads to new content for my blog. Click here to read the post.]

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Blogging to Tempt the Local Media

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© flucas - Fotolia.com
© flucas – Fotolia.com

There are many benefits to being featured in local media outlets like cable television shows, community newspapers, or larger print outlets like your city’s main paper or magazine. This kind of exposure can help your clinic to:

  • Attract local clients for your services and events
  • Connect with local partners, vendors and referral sources
  • Increase your credibility with both local and global audiences

Local media professionals are just like anyone else – they do business with people they know, like and trust. And in this case, their business is to write about the key topics in the health and wellness industry, and to feature knowledgeable and trustworthy people in their stories.

One of the first things a media professional will do to vet you as a source is check out your clinic online, including your blog. If they see that it’s consistently updated with new posts about your area of expertise, it shows them that you and your team are just who they’re looking for.

There are many other ways to build relationships with local media professionals. Here are five to get you started:

  1. Respond quickly to all media inquiries even when they’re not an exact fit. Do your best to connect them with someone else, and then record their contact information so you can keep in touch!
  2. Build on this list by adding the names of any journalists whose work you admire, or who have covered wellness or health stories. Tip: Create a private or public Twitter list for local media (see #7 on this list of ways to use Twitter lists).
  3. Contact these folks directly if you have an idea that might interest them. See PR and marketing specialist Janet Falk’s sample letter for a byline article.
  4. Monitor social media hashtags, your own Twitter lists, and email services like Help a Reporter Out for specific requests from journalists.
  5. Practice the four networking basics (be visible, be positive, help out, and educate). You never know when one of your colleagues will get a call from the media that isn’t right for them, but is perfect for you!

So you’ve been blogging regularly, you reached out to a reporter, and found yourself featured in an article or show – congratulations! Now make the most of that priceless exposure by telling the world.

You can distribute printed copies of a newsletter or magazine article, and share links to online posts and video clips. Add these to your email signature, social media profiles, and website. Looking for more ideas? Janet Falk has an abundance of creative ways to promote your celebrity status.

How could being a local celebrity attract new clients to your wellness clinic?

This is an updated version of a previous post: https://www.contentmasteryguide.com/2009/08/how-to-use-article-marketing-to-tempt-local-media.html.

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