One of the most common questions we get when helping plastic surgeons, cosmetic dermatologists, and other elective healthcare providers work on their web presence is that they often want to know how to write a good blog post. They want to know how to come up with interesting content that is worth reading without spending a significant amount of time on it? One of the key challenges is how to do all of this while keeping with the primary purpose of advancing the practice’s online marketing efforts.
Introducing Content Curation For Plastic Surgeons & Dermatologists
One of the best ways to add engaging meaningful content to your practice blog is to curate other interesting content that is already out there on various medical websites and social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Medical Blogs, etc…). Content curation is the process of sifting through the vast amounts of content on the web and then arranging it yourself in a meaningful way. Basically collating interesting, timely content while adding your expertise and opinion on these already talked about issues.
Where Do I Find Content To Curate?
The best place to find content that would make up a good blog post would be:
- Facebook (and other social media sites)
- Other medical blogs (from other surgeons, WebMD and other major medical portals)
- Press Releases (think new lasers, new FDA approvals, surgical equipment, celebrity beauty news, etc…)
- Google News
How To Put The Curated Content Blog Post Together
The best way to put it together is to follow the following steps:
- Find a few interesting pieces of content from one of the sources above, then copy/paste them into your blog post window (ensuring you format the text properly as it most likely will be distorted when you copy/paste from another website)
- Add some interesting commentary before each referenced piece of content. Commentary should give your expert opinion and view point on the topic of the content. Example: You find a press release discussing a potential new dermal filler that has just hit the wires… you can add your opinion about this new product, how you think it will fit into the marketplace, how effective you think it will be, etc… basically just evaluate the press release and add value (your expert thoughts) By curating this news you are providing significant value to your readers because they are getting the benefit of having an expert digest this news for them.
- Make sure to give proper credit to any content or images you use (reference author and link back to original source).
Content Curation Summary
You may ask why would linking out to all of these sources from my blog be a good thing? Well, it’s necessary because #1 you are using their content to create yours, and #2 by linking out to other blogs you will get a backlink to your blog as well.
Yes, you will get an automatic link back to your blog simply by linking to other blog posts if they have “pingbacks” allowed within their blog software. That’s a little known trick to this method and it can quickly get your blog more readers, more links and better search engine placement!
