Within your practice. Tell your patients that you have a blog. Consider listing the url of the blog on your business card.
And beyond. If you don’t want to promote your blog outside the practice, that’s fine. But if you like the idea of reaching more people, promote your posts on Twitter and Facebook and on information-sharing sites, such as reddit (http://www.reddit.com" target="_blank">http://www.reddit.com) and Digg (http://digg.com" target="_blank">http://digg.com). Note that Facebook and reddit are currently more popular among women; these two tools may be better suited to your needs if you’re looking to get the most promotion for a blog that’s geared to women’s health.
Promotion takes some work but, if what you write has value, you’ll be surprised at the viral life that a blog post can take on. Example: Recently, on my blog, I wrote a post that I titled “Oprah signs off and doctors everywhere rejoice.” The post went viral thanks to multiple re-postings on Twitter and Facebook and to views from reddit. In 3 days, the post was viewed more than 30,000 times.
This kind of traffic increases a blog’s ranking with search engines; it helped my blog stay at the top of the first “Results” page on various search engines for a while.
A blog can be a great tool for you and your practice
Blogging doesn’t have to take hours a day (although the public is fickle, and people will drift away if you don’t post at least three or four times a week); with only a little time and effort, you can have the satisfaction of self-expression. And, if you’re committed to good content, you will raise the quality of health information on the Web.
4 points of caution about blogging
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