Guest blogging is one of the best and one of the most overlooked marketing strategies for doctors. Doctors looking to grow their personal practice can build trust with their target audience by contributing helpful content to other blogs related to healthcare or specifically to their specialization area.
Most doctors won’t be convinced that guest posting is a viable growth strategy for them. After all, who has the time to create content for someone else’s website?
That’s the point we’ll be addressing in this article. If you’re a doctor, you’ll discover why guest blogging is beneficial both for you and your clinic.
1. Exposure For Your Practice to Targeted Traffic
When you contribute a genuinely helpful and valuable guest post to another site, it is sure to attract the attention of the site’s audience. Most sites will link back to your practice website as a good-will gesture for providing content.
Because of this, you can expect traffic from the guest post to flow to your practice website. The more traffic your site has, the better. Just imagine, you can get a couple of patients from one guest post. Or imagine being noticed by RedCross.org or the Oprah Winfrey Network just because you’ve been featured on a high authority blog. Doctors attract attention of giants like these through PR, and guest blogging is an excellent way of doing just that
Of course, your site needs to be designed in a way that converts traffic to patients. For this, optimize your service pages, call-to-actions and other elements.
2. Get Featured as an Expert
Online marketing has a fair bit of authority associated with it. The more authoritative you appear in a medical niche, the more patients your practice will get (online and offline).
This is one of the reasons why many pay-per-click ad campaigns fail – even if prospective patients come to your site, they won’t trust your brand right away.
By contributing to other high ranking, authoritative blogs, you get a chance to show off your expertise and credibility as an information source. Just imagine the number of patient inquiries Dr. Oz gets in a day!
Once you start getting featured on respected healthcare blogs, your audience will realize you must be someone who’s an expert in the field. And when they do come to your website, they’ll be prepared from the start to trust your brand and any claims you make.
3. Get Introduced to Other Doctors and Thought Leaders
Guest blogging can be an excellent way of getting introduced to other leading doctors in the field. Some authority websites that accept guest posts often have a community of contributors related in relevant niches.
Sometimes, the website will include you in an email thread about a co-authored article, to get everyone’s opinion. This not only gives you the opportunity to brainstorm content with other doctors, but develop a personal relationship with them.
You can also leverage your authorship on good websites to reach out to other doctors and pitch them a guest post on their site. Go one step further and invite thought leaders in your practice field to contribute to your website blog!
4. Get Social Media Exposure
Social media exposure has the power to increase the number of patients you get manifold, almost overnight. Writing valuable, targeted content will get you social shares.
For this reason, you can also target blogs that have a lot of social media activity. This way, shares will come naturally once your content is published.
Perhaps an overused yet very effective way of getting social shares is visual content. Consider embedding an information-rich infographic in your content to increase the amount of social shares you get.
5. Get Backlinks to Your Practice Website
Let’s start this point by explaining what backlinks are. When another site links to your website, that’s called backlinking. If a high authority website links to your website, that’s called a good backlink. Think of backlinks like votes, the more your site has, the better it is in the eyes of Google.
Doing guest blog posts is an excellent way of getting backlinks. We’re not suggesting you to do guest blogging solely for the sake of getting backlinks, but that can be a nice little bonus. With more backlinks, your site is going to be more visible to search users on Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Backlinks are a core part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can read our SEO for Doctors article to learn about the other core parts.
6. Grow Brand Awareness
Guest blogging is a great way to build your brand and establish authority in treatment niches you serve.
To become successful in this, try to share unique and practical tips that haven’t been discussed at large by other major blogs.
There is a lot of dubious healthcare information out there, and that provides you with an opportunity to build authority by providing genuine information that’s backed by your personal experience.
7. Get Our Ebook
Did you know Logic Inbound has an ebook on how doctors can grow their practice online? What’s more, it currently sells on Amazon for $9.99. By doing a guest blog post with us, you’ll get free access to this ebook.
In the ebook, we outline specific and actionable ways doctors can grow their practice online. The ebook is meant to be read and understood by doctors, and its value is clearly demonstrated by this case study.
8. Get Educated On Growing Your Practice
Logic Inbound is creating a community of doctors with a vision to help them serve and reach patients. And like Logic Inbound, other healthcare focused blogs have a community of doctor contributors.
This opens a way of communication between you and other healthcare influencers. You can reach out to them and use your authorship as a way to start a conversation. Being part of this contributor’s community allows you to get educated on how other doctors are advancing their business.
9. Get Feedback From Your Community
Writing a guest blog post on a popular website is a great way to get feedback from other thought leaders in the healthcare space. You’ll get to know how other doctors feel about your content, and about your opinions.
When you talk about certain treatments for example, other practitioners may tune in to share their own experience in the comments section. Whatever your guest blog post is about, expect other
This is also a great way to start conversations with other thought leaders in the space, as some of them might even reach out to you.
Pro tip: Ask the website you’re doing a guest blog on to publish your social information, along with a brief bio. This allows interested readers to get in touch with you easily.
10. Gain Trust By Using ‘As Featured On’ or ‘As Seen On’ On Your Practice Website
If you’re a contributor on popular healthcare blogs, why not let your website visitors know about that? Adding a ‘As Featured On’ or ‘As Seen On’ badge to your website gives an impression of trustworthiness, credibility and authority.
You don’t have to gain permission from a website to ‘boast’ about being featured there.
11. Get a Custom Analysis Of Your Practice Website ($200 Value)
Disclaimer: This applies for guest posts done by doctors on Logic Inbound only – that request it.
Logic Inbound has helped several healthcare clients to grow their businesses. With any client that we take on, the first step is to do an analysis of their website. By doing a guest post with us, we’ll do a custom analysis of your practice website FOR FREE.
With this custom analysis, we’ll uncover the pain points of your website. We’ll tell you if patients are having trouble accessing your site through a smartphone. There are a lot of points covered by the custom analysis, and it’s basically going to tell you if your practice website is good for attracting new patients or not.
12. Build Strategic Partnerships
A strategic partnership is a symbiotic relationship, and you can possibly find these by becoming a regular contributor on high authority blogs. Building strategic partnerships takes time, as it’s often hard to find people who share the same interests as you.
With guest blogging, this becomes simpler. Guest blogging helps you build relationships with audience and other thought leaders. Nurture the right relationship and you could find yourself a strategic partner, who refers new patients to you.
And you don’t just have to guest blog on other websites – invite thought leaders to contribute to your blog as well. Create content that’s not just great for getting backlinks, but beneficial for the audience and community. There are tons of guest bloggers who only contribute for getting a link – don’t be one of these.
Some blogs organize meet-ups at blogging conferences like New Media Expo for all their writers and guest writers. You’ll meet a lot of great and like-minded people this way, and become part of a community you never knew existed. And of course this opens doors to a lot of strategic partnerships.
