Be a Leader in your Industry
James Maskell
As we have looked at in previous columns, developing dynamic, socially integrated content is the most important task in growing your presence on the new world wide web. Your basic checklist to do this successfully is:
• A Blog – preferably integrated into your website (sharing the same domain)
• Social media sharing
o Facebook
o Twitter
o LinkedIn
• An e-newsletter platform
o Mailchimp, Constant Contact et al.
With this platform developed, the act of writing good content and sharing it through these networks is a “Most Valuable Activity” (MVA) for the physician-entrepreneur. There are so many topics in health where the information gap between what is optimal and what is current are so large, that any ND giving clear, concise information will be able to gather a pretty steady following on their blog.
However, limiting that content to those people in your network, either those on your email newsletter list, social media followers and RSS feeders, will make the process a lot slower than it has to be. The key thing about blogging, is that once you have a solid foundation, you can start to get your content out to other, more visible websites and blogsites.
In our company, we have just switched over to our new website / blog platform at www.revivenyc.com, and from the analytics we can see that the web traffic we are gaining is pretty limited. However, writing for NDNR.com and submitting our content to other sites keeps the traffic and leads coming into our business and traffic is much easier to drive than it was a year ago when we started our original blog.
Here are some social media sites where NDs could easily submit their content for reposting on sites with much higher traffic volume, and a keen interest in natural health.
1) Huffington Post, Health – ‘HuffPo’ is the biggest blog site in the world, attracting over 25m unique visitors every month.
When I met the healthy living editor of The Huffington Post in NYC in 2010, she told me that although they were copping a lot of flak by supporting natural health on their site, their strategy was long term. According to them ‘Huffington Post would like to be able to look back in 15 years and see themselves as a catalyst for the natural health revolution.’
In January 2011, we put on an event in Los Angeles with Dr Patricia Fitzgerald, Wellness Editor of HuffPo and she offered these tips for submitting blog posts.
• Be appropriately licensed – Talk about topics that are within your scope of work
• Cite your references – Well cited articles are much more likely to be published
• Be topical – Topical articles are more likely to get published as they are likely to attract more traffic
2) KevinMD.com
Dr Kevin Pho has positioned himself as the central source of medical bloggers on the web. There are more and more alternative health news stories on there and not only do you get the advantages of being featured on his high traffic site, but also his e-newsletter reaches a n even larger cross section of the medical digital community. According to his site, the website now boasts 500k monthly page views and 100k socially networked subscribers. How could those numbers change your practice?
3) Your professional remedy company
Many of the professional remedy companies out there are looking to social media to grow their practitioner bases. If you have a good working relationship with your remedy or nutrition company, this should be an easy way to get your articles out on other sites. Companies like Energetix are leading the charge, their blog at blog.goenergetix.com is a great practitioner resource.
4) Social aggregation websites
Sites like Reddit.com, Digg.com and StumbledUpon.com are growing exponentially. They serve as democratic systems of content distribution, with popular blogs rising up the ranks to receive exponential page view numbers. Well cited articles, positioned and set up correctly can drive tons of traffic to your site. Our recommendation would be to choose one of these sites, get to know the community and what type of posts make it. Also, get to know the subcategories, for instance, Reddit.com has “sub-reddits” for health, science and other related topics.
5) NDNR.com
Support your profession and your fellow professionals by writing for articles for your industries premier online resource. NDNR.com!
Good luck in your blogging, we encourage questions or comments either here, or on our new site, www.revivenyc.com.
James Maskell is CEO of Revive NYC, a Brooklyn based digital media, practice development and branding company that helps holistic practitioners bring their message to life. To connect with Revive, please visit our website at www.revivenyc.com
