Keeping a blog is a great method of internet marketing for a medical website. It’s an effective way to keep patients informed on the practice’s latest news and accomplishments, as well as answer commonly asked questions. Blogging is a more modern alternative to the newsletter, which is more advantageous because it cuts down on the cost of printing and mailing that a newsletter would have. Blogs also reach a broader audience because they require no mailing lists and can be easily accessible to prospective patients. Blogging requires a bit of time and dedication, as it needs to be updated regularly with relevant information that will keep people coming back and more importantly, it will drive internet traffic to the your medical website. This, in turn, will hopefully build up the patient base.
The most commonly asked question when deciding to start a medical website blog is which blog publishing service to use. The two most popular blog services are BlogSpot (or Blogger) and WordPress.
BlogSpot
Pros: BlogSpot is that it’s totally free to use. Aside from being a free site, you can actually make money off the blog (at no charge to you) with AdSense. Web traffic statistics can also be easily viewed, letting the user track how many views the blog is getting, where they’re being referred from and which keywords are being to find the blog. BlogSpot can be easily customized and formatted to match the appearance of your main medical website.
Cons: All blogs on BlogSpot are owned by BlogSpot, you can own the domain name, but not the blog itself. BlogSpot is also known to be not great at search engine optimization (SEO), which means it might be harder to drive traffic to your blog with the use of keywords as it would with WordPress.
WordPress
Pros: WordPress has two options to choose from: a basic free service or a paid upgrade. A WordPress blog can be owned by the user if they purchase a domain name and a web hosting service. If the domain name is purchased, there are more opportunities to increase revenue through ads than BlogSpot and the blog’s meta and keywords can be controlled to increase SEO. WordPress is an open-source blog publishing platform that can be used as a content management system (CMS). More plugins like social networking for your practice, an SEO optimizer and Contact Us forms.
Posted on August 04, 2017 by Marie Westerhof
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