You need a great blog with regularly updated content to reach out to a wider audience. Online marketing is increasingly dependent on investments in innovative content creation. However, developing good content alone is not enough in today’s competitive world. It is equally important to find ways to ensure that the content is seen and shared.

Once you are ready to invest a significant amount of time and effort in creating high quality content, you cannot afford to let it remain unread in the obscure depths of cyber space. Sharing your dermatology blog content on social media is one part of the effort, but you need more ways to distribute content in order to gain a higher level of targeted traffic.

Build Content to Educate Your Audience

Rather than focusing on content that is designed to promote your practice directly, your goal should be provide useful content that informs and educates your target readers. When you look at your blog as an educational resource, you will be able to create content for the sake of your audience, and not for the sake of your own practice marketing. This will build your thought leadership and earn you a robust online reputation over time.

More importantly, this is the kind of content that is likely to get widely shared by your audience. Stay focused on areas of your specialization where you are particularly knowledgeable. Provide new insights or updates that help your readers to make better decisions about various procedures. Make use of videos and infographics wherever it helps to improve the goal of educating your audience.

Utilize Email and e-Newsletters

As a dermatologist, you and your staff would most likely be sending emails for communication for a variety of purposes, including to patients. Try to utilize email communication for content distribution as far as possible. You can use your email database to send a link to your latest blog post, which includes an excerpt to showcase what the blog is all about. This will have more people clicking on the link and visiting your blog.

You can also create a dedicated email newsletter to distribute your blog content. This newsletter can go to subscribers once a month and include links to and snippets from your blogs posted in the previous month. This will improve your blog reach and give many people a reason to visit your blog to seek out the content of their interest. When you send regular email communication, you may include a link to your latest blog post as a part of your email signature. This is a sure way to increase awareness about your blog over time.

Optimize LinkedIn

Many marketers tend to ignore the power of LinkedIn as a content distribution avenue for professional blogs. But in reality, LinkedIn is an excellent place to showcase your content before the people who want to read it. LinkedIn has more than 300 million professionals worldwide as its members. Nearly half of these members look at their accounts every day.

That makes it a very vibrant, active platform for distributing your dermatology content. To begin with, you can build a company page on LinkedIn for your practice. Gradually, you will be able to link with many people and deliver your new blog updates to people who are willing to read them. It will enable you to target the kind of audience you wish to share your content with by location or by demographic.

Distribution Through Influencers

Online influencers are a powerful way to distribute your blog content and gain more exposure for your blog. Identify potential influencers on social media, online forums and blogs, and engage with them constructively. Give them a good reason to look at your content, and if they like it, they will promote it for you. To make creative engagement with the influencers, you may begin by sharing their content, commenting on their social media posts, or even sending them an appreciative email to start the conversation.

In some cases, you may even bounce off some content ideas with an influencer before you actually create a piece of content. It is also a good idea to seek their input, suggestions, contribution or a quote that you may be able to include in your proposed blog post. This will not only add more value to your content, but the influencer is more likely to share it, and a good relationship may take off.

Content Syndication

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Content syndication is a time tested strategy to magnify the power and reach of your blog over a period of time. When you syndicate your blog posts with other reputed blogs or websites, then each time you publish a new blog post, it will get re-distributed automatically to those sites. However, it is important to address the SEO aspects when using content syndication as a distribution strategy.

To ensure that your content does not get perceived as duplicate by Google’s search engine crawlers, you can make use of the “Fetch as Google” feature in the Google Webmaster Tools. This will ensure that you receive credit from Google for your original content. All you need to do is place your URL in it and “submit to index.”

Expand Your Reach

Building shareable, high quality content is the foundation of a successful dermatology online marketing strategy. But if the content remains buried, it will not produce any benefit for you at all. Therefore, it is important to put equal emphasis on your content distribution plan as on your content development plan. Use your creative thinking and find ways to expand the reach of your content. Apply the strategies that have been discussed here, and evaluate the results after a while to determine which of them work best for you. n

Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company which focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of Dermatologists.

With a team of 130+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps doctors who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call Naren direct at 877-249-9666.