One of the signs of a healthy clinic blog is a wealth of contributions from multiple practitioners. This original content helps showcase your team’s expertise and unique personalities to prospective clients (as it lightens your own load to produce all the content yourself!).
Blogging has many benefits for the practitioners as well, helping them build their own reputation in the industry, and develop ideas they can turn into learning materials and programs.
A Content Mastery Formula client recently told me, “I’d rather not have [other team members] contribute, because what if they leave the practice?”
Let’s address that concern, as well as two other potential risks associated with a multi-author wellness clinic blog.
Risk #1: The practitioner won’t participate
Depending on how your business is structured, your practitioners may be employees or independent contractors. Either way, blogging is probably not in their job description.
Some people are afraid to write, some will insist they don’t have the time, and others just don’t see the point of blogging.
For those who are afraid to write, see the next section for some resources and tips. If time is the issue (and it often is!), point them towards these 12 ways to protect your blog writing time.
Finding the business case for blogging is sometimes the biggest hurdle, and you still may not have crossed it yourself. Be aware that the more convinced and committed you are, the more effective you’ll be at energizing your blogging team.
Start by reading and sharing these nine ways that blogging helps your wellness clinic be both found and trusted as a reliable resource for online health seekers.
If the business benefits aren’t enough to motivate your team members, appeal to their altruistic nature by touting the healing powers of blogging.
Risk #2: The practitioner doesn’t write well
Blogging is a skill like any other; it can be learned, practiced and mastered. It’s a myth that you have to be a good writer to blog effectively. Blogging consistently will not only help your practitioners improve their writing, it will also help them improve their thinking and focus their ideas. So whatever their high school English teacher may have told them, encourage your practitioners to try writing and keep trying.
Does that mean the quality of your blog should suffer? No, absolutely not. You want to maintain a high level of quality on your clinic blog, to make a positive and professional impression on your new and returning visitors.
To give your practitioners the freedom and space to grow and improve as bloggers, put an editor in place (just make sure you don’t bottleneck the process!).
If someone truly has no interest in becoming a better writer, you can interview your practitioners as subject matter experts, instead of having them write posts themselves. That is one of the ways Cleveland Clinic keeps content flowing on their Health Essentials blog.
Risk #3: The practitioner leaves your clinic
In her primer for how to draft a social media policy, Toronto-based lawyer Vandana Taxali recommends that you “require customers and users of your website to agree to community blogging guidelines before they can blog or comment on the company’s website.”
Those guidelines should include what happens when a practitioner leaves your clinic. “When you ask [team members] to blog, let them know it’s your intention for the content to remain in your archive in future,” writes Sheila Averbuch on LinkedIn.
Why are those blog posts an asset to your business, even after the practitioner has moved on? “If a former employee continues to build a great reputation in your industry after she leaves, then that reputation continues to work for your content,” asserts Mark Traphagen in a Moz post called Why Your Brand Shouldn’t Fear Assigning Authorship.
With blog posts written by former team members, Averbuch recommends that you go back and review archived posts to make sure there is no call-to-action to contact someone who is no longer at your clinic. While you’re at it, check for invitations to past events, materials that are no longer available, or any other broken links.
(Tip: To be proactive with this, whenever you use a time-sensitive call-to-action, mark in your calendar to update it once the event or resource is no longer available, and draft an evergreen version you can paste in at that time.)
If you’ve chosen qualified practitioners for your team, sold them on the idea of blogging for your business, and you’re editing their work to reflect well on your clinic, you have nothing to fear about inviting your practitioners to blog on the clinic website.
P.S. How healthy is your wellness clinic blog? Let’s look it over together (for free!).