Why No One is Reading Your Chiropractic Blog

This is a guest post by Dr. Jon P. Heins of Belvidere, New Jersey.

You’ve done the hard part by designing and launching your chiropractic blog. And, if you were smarter than I was, you let Dr. MacNamara’s company Chiropractic Blog Designs do all the hard work instead of learning about HTML, CSS, PHP, and SEO yourself.

You’ve written and published a post at least once a week and now Google has started to index your site. You’ve even got that elusive page one ranking for your niche specific keyword terms. Yet no one is either clicking on your blog posts or they’re clicking but bouncing right off.

The reason why this is probably occurring is because your posts are either not what people were looking for or they’re nothing more than a sales pitch.

I cannot stress how important the concept of Inbound Marketing is in our Web 2.0 world.

The reason why is simply this — in our current market people don’t want to be sold to but want valuable information that allows them to make an informed purchasing decision related to their wants, needs, and desires.

If you read Next Generation Chiropractor, you’ve probably heard this before. Yet, since some of you may have practiced the old concept of traditional outbound marketing for so long, now you’re having difficulty with the concept of Inbound Marketing.

So, Dr. MacNamara kindly asked me to write this guest post and I hope the following example helps you.

Let’s say, you get something in the mail selling something you didn’t ask for, like, hmm … I don’t know … let’s go check the mail! Here’s one selling Life Insurance, which I already have, so I’m pretty sure I’m good and in the recycling pile it goes.

Even if it’s the best professionally designed advertisement you’ve ever seen and pitching something that is of incredible value, is the ad ever going to convince you to actually buy something you don’t need or want?

Of course not!

You didn’t want it so it will inevitably end up in the proverbial recycle bin, aka trash.

So what do you think your prospective patients do when you send them something selling your services?

That’s right! It ends up in their trash or recycling pile. On the Internet this relates to either little to no hits or readers bouncing right off and onto what they were originally looking for.

So, first, to succeed some of you will need change your mindset to one of an educator that gives away FREE valuable information. By doing so, the public can make an informed decision and your content will not only be read but will also potentially be shared with their family and friends!

The best example I can give to illustrate my point is this:

In my Follow Friday post, it mentions that I’m an avid audiophile, which is obviously a pretty specific niche. As such, I subscribe to a magazine called The Absolute Sound.

Now of course it has advertisements from manufactures and dealers of high-end audio equipment, but that’s not why I read this magazine. I read it for the articles that inform me of what’s new in the industry, the equipment reports and reviews, as well as helpful tips to help me with getting my sound system to sound and perform at it’s best.

Now let’s say I decide one day I want to get a new pair of speakers. Is my decision on what brand and model to purchase made from the advertisements or from the information from the reviews and reports in the magazine?

Well, obviously, from the reviews and reports.

And, once I’ve made my decision and am more than satisfied with my purchase, I’ll enthusiastically mention it to my audiophile friends. They will, of course, ask how I made such a decision.

Do you think my response will be that I saw this great advertisement? Or, do I cite the review article?

Again, the answer’s obvious — I cite the review article.

So try this. Write posts that educate, inform, and serve to help your readers solve their problems. Don’t sell yourself by saying, “Get Chiropractic Care HERE!”

Matter of fact, just the other day someone who I’ve had the pleasure to meet at a local Tweetup but never would’ve made the hour long trip to my practice announced on Facebook and Twitter that she was going to a local chiropractor to get help after talking to me and reading my blog.

And that is precisely what my blog is about. It’s purpose is not to get new patients, but rather, to educate and inform people about their health, wellness, and the many benefits of chiropractic care.

If you’re educating prospects about the benefits of chiropractic care, do it in general terms of the profession. You will then have an opportunity of not only attracting patients from your blog and the various social networks to your practice, but will also influence people outside your practice’s proximity to go to other chiropractors to get the care they need but may have not considered if it wasn’t for you.

Pretty cool huh?

So, to close, here’s what you should do in five easy steps:

1. First follow @ChiroFeeds on Twitter.

2. Next, when Dr. MacNamara retweets a chiropractic blog post, follow that doctor on Twitter and subscribe to his or her RSS feed.

3. Check your RSS reader frequently and comment on their posts.

4. Bookmark their content on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, et cetera.

5. Share their posts via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

This will get the word out about health, wellness, and the many benefits of chiropractic care.

Question: Are you writing posts that are educational, informative, and that are helping your readers solve their problems? If so, has it increased your traffic to your blog and more importantly, have you noticed that the overall time people stay on your blog to actually read your content has increased?

Let us know in the {comments} section below.

About the author: Dr Jon P. Heins D.C. practices at Belvidere Chiropractic Center. Your Family Chiropractor. Where Generations of Your Family Are Cared For By Our Family. Located at: 6 Greenwich Street, Belvidere, New Jersey.

If you’d like to connect with Dr. Heins, he can be found online at BelvidereChiropractic.com.

He’s also active on the following social media networks:

On Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and YouTube.