Blogging is a great way to communicate and connect with your veterinary clients, build credibility and expertise in your field, and bring more traffic to your hospital’s website. Blogging provides an outlet for you to make a personal connection with your clients and for your clients to make a connection with you. A blog is also an excellent way to build relationships with all pet owners, particularly potential clients and pet owners in your community.

The problem with most veterinary hospital owners is that they think blogs are frivolous and a waste of time. I need to tell you that they are not!

You and your clients see each other once, maybe twice a year. During those short medical visits, your clients hardly get to know you. If they want additional information, the only other place to look is on your website. Even if you have a remarkable website, the pages on your website are just not enough if you want to communicate regularly with your clients and local pet owners. Having a blog sets you apart. Blogs enable your clients and potential clients to learn more about your hospital, your staff and you on a professional level and on a personal level.

Setting up a blog is easy and inexpensive. Many blog platforms, such as Wordpress and Google Blogger, are free of charge. You don’t have to know website design, HTML, web hosting or be computer savvy in order to set one up. Both Wordpress and Google Blogger provide you with a free account and a step-by-step process for setting up your animal hospital blog. Once you have set up your account, both allow you to login to the administrative dashboard of your blog and start blogging away.

A blog can be used for almost anything. Some veterinarians post photos of their hospital clients’ pets along with funny anecdotes. Other veterinarians post interesting medical cases and include educational articles. Newsworthy items, top ten lists, engaging stories, random thoughts and hospital employee accomplishments are just some of the items that can be posted on your blog. A blog can be used as a “Breaking News” page and include emergency articles and local pet disease updates. Updates about Lyme disease, Rabies epidemics and Leptospirosis outbreaks would make great stories for your blog.

Your blog doesn’t have to be limited to news and events happening at your hospital. It can serve as a major resource for pet-related news and events in your community. Get local pet groups and organizations to send you events, information and stories to post on your blog. This is a great way to get more local pet owners involved in your veterinary hospital’s blog and a reason for them to return to your blog regularly. The more local pet owners return to you blog, the more chance of them becoming new clients.

After you post your blog, it is out there for the world to see. Each article that is added contains a text box where visitors can make comments. Don’t worry about comments, since you decide what comments get posted and what comments don’t.

Since it takes time to develop a following, don’t expect too many visitors or comments right from the start. However, once you develop a following and post articles and stories on a regular basis, the traffic to your blog is going to increase and your blogging community is going to become established.

The last thing that I want to mention is that Google and other search engines have a particular affinity for blogs. Google favors websites that are regularly updated and supplied with fresh, new content. If your blog is included as a link in your website, the articles that you post are regarded as updates. If you are supplying good, relevant articles to your blog on a regular basis, your website’s Google rankings are going to increase significantly.

If you would like VetNetwork to setup your blog, please give us a call. We also provide various blog maintenance services. At a very reasonable fee, we can keep your blog updated, write and publish articles about your hospital and manage your comment boxes.  We can also set up your blog as an actual page on your website. Having a blog as an actual website page is the technique that raises your hospital website’s Google and search engine rankings.

If there is any internet-based marketing strategy that interests you, please don’t hesitate to give us a call. The talented staff at VetNetwork is here to help you with all your hospital marketing needs.

Call VetNetwork today for a free quote 603-743-4321.

Written and Copyright ©
Mark Feltz, DVM
VetNetwork, LLC 2010
www.vetnetwork.com