Stop Writing Boring Blog Posts With These Five Tips

By Katie Armatoski, Au.D
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Are you publishing blogs and hearing crickets? Draw more potential patients to your website with these blogging tips!

Are you constantly wishing that you had more blog content to share? Are you feeling underwhelmed by the blog content you’re receiving from your marketing agency and think you could probably do a better job on your own? 

 

Blogging takes a little bit more time compared to other marketing efforts but it is much more long-lasting and the ROI can be really impressive. In this post, I want to give you some of my favorite tips to write better blog posts that actually get clicks and shares! 

Tip #1 – Create a List

There’s a reason I created this blog as a list. It’s because according to marketing experts, 36 percent of blog readers prefer list-based headlines. Seriously! Not only that, odd numbered lists outperform even ones by 20 percent. Kind of crazy, right? That’s psychology in action!

It’s so easy to turn any topic into a list format, and in fact, I find that it makes the blogging process even easier because your list becomes your outline. Then, all you have to do is just come up with a few paragraphs for each list item. Give it a try!

Tip #2 – Create Timely Content That’s Also Evergreen

One of the major advantages of blogging is that you put in a little bit of work upfront and you get a piece of high-quality content that will live on your site basically forever, driving new online traffic to your practice based on the keywords you’ve used in your article. 

This is all true, but you do also have to be mindful of when the content will post. Sometimes, the content that we receive from marketing agencies isn’t the best fit for the current climate. For example, I recently came across this Facebook post promoting an audiology blog post about protecting your hearing while enjoying summer activities like concerts and fireworks:

As you can see, this photo (and the blog content) is extremely irrelevant in the middle of a pandemic. It really bums me out because as an audiologist myself, I know that these blog posts cost a pretty penny and of course, if you paid for it you’re going to want to post it.  

Posting something like this will not only be counterproductive, it will also cause your patients to question whether you have their best interests in mind.  

When you create content (or have content created for you), it’s important that it’s timely and takes into account the world we live in today. If you can also position the information in a way that will stand the test of time, that’s an added bonus!

Tip #3 – Get a Little Negative 

Want to get people to click through to your blog after only seeing the headline? Write a negative headline! Negative headlines have a 30 percent higher click through rate than positive ones, according to a study of over 65,000 blog headlines done by Outbrain 

What do I mean when I say negative headline? No, you’re not going to bash your competition or your patients in your next blog post. Instead, use words like “never” or “stop” in your headline to make it negative. 

For example, I was originally going to title this blog, “5 Tips to Write Blog Posts that Actually Get Read and Shared” but after remembering this tip, I decided to change it to a negative headline. If you’re reading this now, maybe that small switch up had something to do with it! 

Tip #4 – Create Video Content

If the idea of sitting down to write blog content is really holding you back, consider video blogs! You don’t get the same on-page SEO as you would with a written blog, but many people prefer video content these days. You might be able to make up for the lost SEO traffic just by providing content in a more easy-to-consume format.  

If you have someone on your team that needs an extra project, they can always transcribe your video, add keywords, and publish it underneath your video. That way, your potential patients are still seeing your face and they’ll see that you’re an expert in your field PLUS you’ll get the added SEO from the written keywords underneath so you can rank higher on those search engines!

Tip #5 – Create a Schedule

Even if you can’t blog every week, don’t let that stop you from blogging altogether. Even one blog a month will make a huge difference in your website traffic. In fact, DemandMetric found that companies with blogs produce 67 percent more leads per month than those without.  

I’ve found that the simple act of creating a blog schedule is one of the biggest ways audiologists can stay on track, produce regular content, and come up with blog topics that are actually interesting.  

Get out a piece of paper and plan out 1-2 interesting blog topics each month for the next few months, then carve out a few hours to knock them out. They do not have to be perfect, but when you force yourself to just do it, you’ll start to develop a habit that will become easier over time. 

Do you have any questions about how to write better blogs for your practice? I would love to help! Go ahead and leave me a comment below and I’ll do my best to give you some additional resources and tips!

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