Blogging For Your Private Practice: Here’s How You Can Start
You need to be blogging for your private practice; here’s how you can start.
You’ve heard about this private practice blogging business and you are now convinced you need to start. (Tip: you do!) As you are reading this, it’s my guess that blogs might have even piqued your interest and cemented your understanding of their crucial importance in private practice growth? Interesting!
But where, and how, and what, and… Breath! Let’s get down to it. Here I share the six critical steps you need to become a therapy blogger, and it’s much easier than you think.
1) A website blog is key
After all, your potential clients need to hear from you and discover how you can help them. If you don’t have a cyber address to share your life-changing insights, they’ll remain sitting silently inside your head.
Choosing a blog can be tricky. You need one that looks professional; it has to perfectly represent yourself and your practice; contribute to an enhanced reputation; while being easy to use and affordable.
PS: When you’re ready to get your blogging on, send an email to our support desk ([email protected]) letting them know and we’ll get it all set up for you!
Once you have your ideal blog set up, how do you come up with ideas to write about?
2) Keep an inspiration and idea’s notebook on hand
While in practice, clients will raise issues that you understand deeply. In fact, these questions may be asked a number of times and by different people. When you have a spare moment, write these down for future inspiration.
Keep your eyes on the news, read the newspaper, and listen for topical and relevant issues.
Scan the net for ‘your specialty’ (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder or post-natal depression) and see if there are popular queries. Quora is a great resource for exploring this.
Maybe the simplest idea? Ask your clients what they’d love to know about.
Still stuck? Use these headline examples to get the ball of private practice blogging possibilities rolling:
- 5 Tips To Help (Symptom)
- 7 Strategies To Boost (Self Esteem/Mood/Relationship Success)
- 9 Critical Resources For (Condition)
This notebook will be a great resource for creating interesting, thoughtful and engaging posts. And on that note, how can you maximize your efficiency rather than spending hours you don’t have to try to write well?
3) Batch time and therapy blog topics
Have you read the story about the ceramics teacher and his curious research?
As a new semester began, he divided his class into two groups. The first was to focus on sheer quantity. Their grade depended only on scale weight once the class clock stopped ticking; the more pots they produced, the higher their score. The second group was directed to concentrate their full attention on quality alone, with the aim to create a single profoundly beautiful pot.
At the end of the semester, can you imagine what occurred?
Those working solidly in mass production crafted more beautiful ceramic pots than those focused only on quality. How can this happen?
Mistakes can be wonderful. Practice irons out quirks. Repetition with a single focus strengthens neuroplastic programming, as you see in practice daily. However, thinking rather than taking action stifles potential growth.
What this means for your private practice blogging is, write and write often. The more you pen, the better you’ll become, the faster you’ll create, and the positive impacts for both your clients and your private practice growth might just stun you.
With this in mind, it’s also important to maximize the time you have. Multitasking is not all it’s cracked up to be. We waste so much time flitting from one thing to another and then trying to jump back into the previous zone. This is where batching comes in.
Dedicate a certain amount of time to writing only. Prioritize this as an essential, regular appointment. Just as you wouldn’t walk out of a client consultation to make a cup of tea, don’t do this here either. Grab your tea beforehand, turn off your phone (yes, completely), ban distraction and get to work.
As well as batching time, a focus on a specific topic can improve flow and creativity. Write three, five, nine articles around a different aspect of this single subject matter.
Advanced tip: Create a blog post series. If an issue is broad and there is much to share, plan a number of sequential posts. Batch write them and then share these one at a time and in order. As you complete one article, tease and create interest for the next. Then, as the next post is completed, return to the original article and update that tease to now guide them to this next post. Add the link, and so on. This creates a ‘sticky’ site; one a reader sticks around on. Google loves stickiness so this approach can promote your site through the rankings online and improve your chances of being found… Which is one important reason for blogging in the first place.
And speaking of rankings, once you’ve been blogging for a while and are comfortable in this space, it will help to implement some search engine optimization techniques like those we share here.
4) Believe in your writing
Ah, but as a therapist, you can. Reports, patient notes, referral letters.
An important technique for blogs, though, is to write like you speak. A conversational tone is better.
Do you use odd phrases? Wonderful, being authentic helps people get to know you better and this builds trust.
Are you an avid gardener who incorporates grubs and grasses to explain health issues? Great! Do this when you write, too.
As with the ceramics experiment, you will improve with practice. And the thing is, you don’t have to be perfect to make a difference. You just need to do.
Advanced tip: As your private practice blogging becomes second nature, you’ll be able to expand your repertoire to include marketing techniques that supercharge your private practice growth. A call to action (CTA) will become crucial.
A call to action is a key aspect of any website. This is what makes visitors on your website actually take action and interact with your site, whether that’s signing up for an email list, filling out a contact form, visiting a specific page, or even “click here to read more” on a blog post.
When you are ready to turn your practice marketing up a notch, our article, Does Your Therapy Website Have a Call to Action? shows you what to do.
5) Save your articles carefully and name them wisely
With batching, you will not write, upload and share immediately as these are different tasks that can lead to distraction. This means you need to keep track of what, where and when you have written.
Writing about anxiety? Create an anxiety folder on your desktop.
Save your articles individually and under their headline name.
In the file name, add ‘un-posted’ and change this to ‘posted (and the date)’ once they go live.
There is another reason for carefulness here. These articles are important resources. Use them often. In practice, they make a great handout where they can benefit a patient or their loved one. Print it out and place one on your notice board and at the front desk. Share them with your local newspaper journalist. Where else could you share your articles to connect with your ideal client?
Note: It’s important to know when a post will be shared so you remember to share it on your social media. This can be done with a simple free online calendar or an old school calendar.
6) Upload the blog content and share
With the right website and blog, uploading and sharing your articles is easy.
Our clients Liza Bizon, from Hope Springs Counseling, and Laurie Donaldson, from Melbourne Integrative Psychology, are therapy bloggers. By sharing their expertise with the cyber world, they are able to reach more people, make a real difference and their private practice growth is reflected accordingly.
Still not interested in writing, but value the importance of blogging? We’ve got you covered. Our Growth Platform service allows you to choose from hundreds of already written therapist blog posts and publish 2 each month to your website. Pretty awesome, right? To make this deal even sweeter, we’re giving you a free month to test out the platform!
Get started with your free month of already written blog posts right here: