Blogs, Do You Need Them?

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:02:43 – Why you need to write a blog post
• 00:05:23 – Writing a blog in the techie side of it is about boosting your SEO and Google position.
• 00:07:56 – Why you need to know what people are searching for.
• 00:10:21 – Having a blog can build your audience.
• 00:14:08 – How to use AnswerThePublic.com.
• 00:16:18 – The call to action doesn’t always have to be a call to action.
• 00:18:40 – Why you need to make sure your images are royalty free.
• 00:21:03 – Why being visible and having an effective marketing strategy creates impact.
• 00:23:38 – Most business owners don’t have a marketing plan because they’re worried they’ll get it wrong.

You’re listening to treat your business with Katie Bell, the podcast for health and wellness business owners that want and need to give their business the treatment plan it deserves and needs so that you can create more time back in your lives to give you the income you deserve and work hard for and to create more freedom and flexibility in your lives to enjoy the things you love to do. Whether you are a physiotherapist and osteopath, a sports therapist, or maybe a Pilates studio owner, I’m determined to share with you bite sized episodes full of tried and tested tips from my own real experience of growing a successful physiotherapy and wellness clinic and from working with many businesses to do the same. So if you’re tuning in and feel like you’re on a hamster wheel of patients admin, life, constantly juggling working and being with the family, and feel like you’re doing a rubbish job at both not making the income you thought you would by running a business and generally feeling overwhelmed with everything that you have to do, then keep listening. Hello, and welcome back to this week’s episode of the treat your business podcast. Do you write a blog? Or do you think you should be writing a blog? Have you written them in the past and then it’s kind of gone off the to do list and you’ve not put one on the website for ages. And what you want to think about is what position you are in in terms of marketing right now are you somebody that has a marketing plan, you have a marketing strategy, you have a regular blog post that goes out, you take that blog post, and you repurpose it and you use all of the different content in different ways. So it kind of books out your content creation, your marketing strategy for the week, or the month or the quarter. Most business owners that we talked to feel like they should be writing a blog because everybody else’s, that’s what they think they should be doing. Or they write them but they don’t really understand why they’re writing them and what what impact a blog has in terms of their overall marketing strategy. And actually how a blog can then drive customers to towards wanting to book in with them. So if it’s on your to do list, your to do list is probably already far too long. And it’s something that you will keep pushing down, down further down the list all the time. Now, with writing a blog, some people are really creative. I personally love writing. And it this is only something that I have kind of, I guess recognised more and more over the last couple of years as we’ve been having to do a lot more different marketing strategies for for both of my businesses. But I love writing I love content creating. And therefore, that is something that I can quite easily sit down, spend half an hour or an hour and put together a really, really interesting hopefully and useful blog post. For some of you, it isn’t going to be what we would call your zone of genius or something that you really love to do. So I want to first check in here that just because you think you should be doing it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be doing it. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, if you don’t like writing blog posts, and you don’t want to have to spend the time because to you, there is just so many other things that you prefer to be doing, then either, you need to be using some great pieces of software that are out there that can write these blog posts for you and you can just intubate them, or you need to be delegating it to somebody in your team to write that blog post. So everything that I’m going to say in the next 20 minutes or so I want you to first check back in with and think okay, is Am I the right person to be doing this? Or can I give this to somebody else who actually is far better at doing it because they’re really creative and they love writing? Or can you use kind of dual approach where somebody else writes it for you, and you go in and put the kind of finishing touches to it. So hopefully this episode is going to help you decide whether it’s right for you whether it’s right for your business. And I’m going to guide you through what a blog needs to include how to write it, how often you need to be doing one or more. There’s questions. So why first of all, do we write a blog in the first place? Now a blog is something that sits on your website, it usually has a page of its own and on there you will have various different articles that you have written. Now one of the things that we see quite often is that people’s blogs come without any strategy. So they’re completely like random all the time. They just go from one thing to another thing to another thing to another thing. Now in the background to writing your blogs. I always like to be strategic. Don’t I’m always telling you about being strategic. You need to think about what’s the purpose why are you writing that blog? What does it link to? Where does It fit within your content strategy. And perhaps things that might be happening within your clinic or services that you might be promoting or courses that you might be launching, or new things that might be happening within your within your business. It needs to have kind of some form of strategy behind it. Otherwise, you’ll just have loads of random blogs being thrown out there. You can also start to think about kind of what people are wanting to read in a blog. Now blog is about for me, it’s about high value, it’s about great content that people genuinely can read and get use from. So writing a blog, in the techie side of it is about boosting your SEO and your your Google position. Right now, I’m not a Google expert at all. But what I do know is that Google likes fresh content. So I really hope nobody who’s a Google expert is listening to this podcast, but just bear with me. Basically, Google sends out spiders into into the Google world into the cloud. And it’s crawling for data. It’s crawling for keywords, it’s crawling for, for phrases. And when it finds those, it will then Google likes that likes fresh content, and it will optimise your Google position, and your rank. So they also value Google values experts within a niche. So when we’re writing blogs, we are positioning ourselves as people our authority as somebody who has expertise within a certain a certain area. So every time you write a blog, you are essentially building authority in their eyes. And you may stand a better chance at ranking higher. The higher the rank, the higher the chance of people visiting your site, your website and therefore becoming customers. Now, there’s lots more kind of technical stuff that needs to happen with your blog. And sometimes we can be pushing out blogs, and they they hold no keywords linked within the blog. So we want to first of all, make sure we know what people are searching for in our local area. And there is lots of free tools that you can use through Google here that will show you and give you a list of keywords that are ranking high within your locality. Because most of you listening to this will be bricks and mortar businesses, running businesses in a local community, therefore attracting from a smaller radius around you. So we can find what these keywords are. And we can embed those cleverly into our blog. So we don’t want to use keywords in a way that doesn’t sound natural, because it just shoots looks like we’re shoving them in there to improve our Google position. So we want to use them in a in a natural way. But you need to know what people are searching for. Are they searching for physiotherapy clinic in Sheffield? Are they searching for? How do I get my sciatica fixed in Sheffield? Are they searching for best sports massage therapist in Birmingham, because you can use some of those words within your blog. And that gives it the best chance from an organic perspective to rank higher. Now it doesn’t replace paid advertising. Okay, I’m not going to say that by usefully writing a blog, you’re going to get hundreds of more people through the door you’re not it takes a long time to build a poor authority in terms of where your website currently ranks. But it does build your like know and trust factor. And don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through here. Don’t write blogs that are really in detail and to what I say from in your head. So very often when we read blogs from physiotherapist or sports therapists or Pilates instructors, they are using terms they’re using language that their own brain understands but the person reading it doesn’t understand. So we need to break it down. We need to use layman’s terms we need we need to use the language that resonates with our customers. So think about who is reading them and what’s going to be most value to them. And don’t over deliver your blog doesn’t need to be you know, 10 pages long. It can be your three top tips to settling down a flare up of your lower back pain. Okay? It could be you know, your two step method to treating a football injury that you get on a Saturday, for example. So I like to think about people being at different places on the journey. So people have got have a problem and they know exactly what they need to solve it. These people are those that have probably visited physios sports massage therapists Pilates instructors, osteopath before, they know that you are have the solution that they need to their problem, you then got people that have this problem and have no idea what to do about it. So they don’t even know that you are an option that you are a potential solution to that problem. And then you’ve got people that have a problem, but don’t even know at this stage, it’s something that they need to do something about it. Sometimes their belief is, well, this is I just gonna have to put up with this. This is just, it’s just what happens when you get to this age, or when you hit the menopause, this is just what I’ve got to put up with. So we want to be able to make sure that we’re talking to people in all of these three lanes. Having a blog can build your audience. Now, the way that I love to use a blog is to write a blog, and I can repurpose that blog into my social content, which means I’m not having to content create over and over and over again, I’m doing one thing, and then I’m breaking that down and using it in lots of different ways to put onto my social media, and or in my new client newsletter, or however it is that you want to communicate to your people. So you could have have a podcast, for example, that we will turn this podcast into some blog around how to write a blog for your business. And then we will, we will cut that down into maybe you know the three steps to starting a blog as a carousel. And we’ll use that on Instagram on one day. And then we may have the three things that you need to not do when writing a blog. As an educational post, it might be an inspirational post about how this blog led us to be able to create this, this new audience and we were able to sell from this from this to this audience. And these were the metrics. So a blog can build that audience and it can build your social content, and save you loads and loads of time. You want to make sure these things resonate with your participant your potential customers when you when you’re building that following. Now, what on earth do you write in a blog. So this is where we need to know who your ideal clients are your niche, ideal client, your avatar, all the same thing. If you haven’t go back to listening to some of our previous episodes where we talk about really knowing who it is that you work with, who you solve problems for, what problems you solve for people. Because if you don’t know this, you need to do the work to figure it out. Because otherwise your blog isn’t going to land, it isn’t going to resonate, people aren’t going to engage with it, it’s going to be a waste of your time. writing a blog needs to clearly speak to the conversation in your client’s head. So when you read a blog, or you listen to a podcast, or you you read a long, long piece of content on Facebook, it has to resonate with the either the problem that I’ve got going on in my head at the time, which could be for you guys, I think I should be writing a blog, but I don’t really know what I should be writing. So I’m solving a problem because I understand my customer, I understand the conversation in their client in their head, understand what problem they’ve got, what solution that they’re potentially looking for. You’ve got to know what they’re struggling with, you’ve got to know what their pain points are. Because that will create an impactful blog post. You’ve got to give them good value. I don’t like having blogs that are sales posts. Pay. We’re not We’re not here to be salespeople. We’re here because we’re problem solvers. And we have got a massive amount of knowledge that you can put out there that can help solve people’s problems. So people need to get good value from taking the time to read your blog. But don’t try and be everything to everybody. Okay, be very specific, and talk to that conversation in your clients head. So some good ideas for content creation can be what people commonly ask. So you might have frequently asked questions, okay, things you hear a lot in your clinic. And there is an amazing piece of software called answer the public.com. And you can think you can do one a day free but then you can sign up to to an account with them. And answer the public.com allows you to put something within their search box and it will show you a pie chart or kind of like a yeah, here’s a pie chart lots and lots of different potential blog titles. And it also colour codes them in what is the most popular search titles, and then the lowest search volume and this literally within 30 seconds will give you probably 12 months of blog content. Okay, so you could have questions like what’s the difference between a sports massage and a deep tissue massage Should I put ice or heat on my injury? And I bet you can think really quickly of 12 commonly asked questions in your clinic, or in your studio, that you can then create these blog posts based upon and this could form part of your content strategy. Think about it as a story. Think about a start a middle and an end, have an introduction, make a big bold statement, ask them a big question, something that’s going to grab their attention. Let’s go with the ice or heat scenario. If you saw something that said, something like, Have you been treating your injuries completely wrong. Or never put ice on this.dot.dot.is going to prompt people to want to go home, I need to read more about that and interested. So something that grabs their attention, then you give them the middle. So give them top tips, advice, education, high value content, they need to be better off for reading your blog. So don’t be boring. Don’t give too much detail. And don’t write from your own brain, like I’ve already said, right? Right for their receiving brain. So, for example, five stretches for your quadratus lumborum. No, nobody is googling that. Okay? If they are it’s a very, very small amount of the population that know or know how to spell quadratus lumborum. So five simple stretches to help you get out of bed in the morning. Yes. Now, now you’re resonating with with people, and then conclude your blog posts. Now this is where you need to give them that call to action. If they want to know more, what do they need to do next. And it doesn’t always have to be your call to action doesn’t always have to be cell doesn’t always have to be booking to see us. It could be if you are still not sure you know what the next steps are for your back problem. Drop my client care team and message and we will get one of our team to give you a courtesy call. It could be you know, go to this YouTube link where we’ve got some further exercise videos that you can follow, it could be join our a four class pass for our Pilates, you know, you can think what your call to actions need to be based on what it is that you’re talking about, when to write it. So the thing I would say about anything to do with marketing, it’s all about consistency. So if it means once a month, that’s absolutely fine. Okay shedule your time in your diary in advance, so you know exactly when you’re going to do it. And I prefer to batch write. So I prefer when I’m I know when I’m most creative, it tends to be first thing in the morning. And I will have a specific time where I will batch write my either my podcast plan or my blog posts or my long form content plan, whatever it is, okay, I prefer to be well ahead of where I need to be, because then I’m not just forcing that creativity. If you’re super busy, and you’ve got a team, ask them to write that write this in a half an hour slot every month, every week. And you will soon have a lot of content that you can then use as a blog, you could do as a Facebook Live, you could take that same theme. And you could then separate that out into lots of content for your social posting. Do what works for you. Okay, do what works for you. Remember, just a small thing, you can put images within your blog, but make sure they’re royalty free. So use go into something like Shutterstock or, or what’s the other one I can’t remember, I’ll put it in the show notes. But something that you can go in there and you can either pay for the rights to use those pictures, or they need to be royalty free pictures. Blogging is just one one very small element of your marketing strategy. And I’m really keen on business owners spending time on the right things that they need right now to create more time, more money and more freedom. So I want you to be kind of, don’t just come off this podcast and think right I need to start writing blogs. Just check in. It’s part of your overall marketing strategy. And if you’re not clear about your marketing strategy, that’s something that you need to decide first, and a blog becomes part of that because I know that for a lot of you you are time poor. And this can just feel like another overwhelming thing that is on your to do list. Now very excitingly in the next few weeks, we have got a brand new course releasing and it is called makeover your marketing in one day. It’s going to be with Make, and this is going to be a live, but you can watch it recorded if you want to a live one day course, for you to get more clients and become the best known name in your area. It’s perfect. If you don’t like marketing, if you don’t know what you should be doing. And maybe you’re somebody that wishes you could just rely on word of mouth, because that’s what you’ve always done. That’s what we we have, a lot of us have established businesses based on a fantastic reputation or word of mouth and people passing on our names and our numbers to other people, we cannot rely on that the market has changed. So the course is starting very soon at the end of March. And this is if you are a clinic owner, if you’re a studio owner, you know that you do need to deal with your marketing strategy. This is something that you keep putting off, this is something that you don’t really understand, you don’t know where to start. But you know, you need to stand out amongst all of the noise and all of the crowd. You might not know that being visible and having an effective marketing strategy has so many extra benefits, it creates impact. So when you rise to the challenge of becoming more visible, the ripple effect is that you make a massive difference to the health and wellness of so many more people. It grows confidence being visible grows, confidence. Being vulnerable is like a muscle. As you work on it, your confidence will grow. Many, many businesses I speak to a so worried about what they put out there and putting themselves out there that they end up freezing and not really doing anything about it. Being visible establishes expertise. You listen to this podcast, I’ve got so much knowledge you’ve spent so long training. And one of my biggest bugbears is when the biggest barrier to putting yourself out there is that fear of failure or that fear of not being perfect or not saying the right thing. Establishing expertise elevates you from being a person with knowledge to an expert in your field. And it’s going to increase your revenue. being visible allows you to stay in the top of people’s mind when they do require your services because not everybody sees your marketing, sees your sign outside the clinic and instantly goes up, I’ve got any problem I need to go in and see them. This is about being visible, consistently and consistently and constantly to different things and being visible reduces your stress. And I’m definitely here for that. So having this multi layered marketing strategy, the blog being one of them, means you can stop worrying about your diary. week on week, you can spend more time with your family less time posting randomly on social media that we’ve all been at fault for before. So if you’re wasting loads of time posting on social media, and isn’t really generating any leads, if you’re in freeze mode, you might be burying your head in the sand. When it comes to actually having a marketing strategy, you’ve probably relied on word of mouth, you’re probably worried about spending money and feel like actually you don’t have the money to spend on marketing right now. You might feel like you don’t have time. And if you do have the time you end up wasting it and procrastinating about what you what marketing you shouldn’t be doing. Or perhaps just writing random blog posts because that’s what you think you should be doing. And you probably worried about putting yourself out there. What will people think about me if I start marketing myself if I become more visible, being visible and having a marketing plan doesn’t mean living your life on social media every day, or posting on it every single day. But most owners, business owners don’t have a marketing plan because they worried that they’ll get it wrong. They don’t know what to put, they want it to be perfect, perfect. They think nobody’s really interested. And I want to reassure you that you are not on your own, even those people who appear to be the most confident people. And the people that are out there the most the most put together, the most fearless have all struggled with being visible to start with k and they all started with no plan. It’s not enough now to just have a website, it’s not enough to just post on social media occasionally, we need to use everything that you are creating and putting into the world to build your business and break through these barriers that we’ve got. So without further ado, might make over your marketing in a day costs coming at the end of March is I’m gonna give you two dates to choose from, okay. And the reason that we’re going to do this in a day, it’s going to be from 930 to 330. Most of my business owners that listen are people who’ve got children and they need to juggle everything around that. Okay. They are usually people in their clinic doing the due seeing the clients as well. So I’m going to be asking you to take one clinical day out. And I undenied whether to do this over six weeks over six months. So you know that you could you could go on and on and on but we’re not we’re going to do it in a day. And this is going to teach clinic owners studio owners how to create this multilayered visibility strategy. Okay, and it’s going to be very specific to you and your business if you don’t like doing social media posts, and guess what, it’s not going to evolve social media posting. But it’s going to show you how you can get a consistent source of clients. So you can make more money, you can get more hours back in your week, and you can actually leave the course feeling confident in your marketing skills, because most of the time, we just think we’re not great at marketing, or we don’t have the skills to be good at marketing. It isn’t just a course, it’s like a complete guide to developing and creating your marketing plan for your clinic or your studio. And you can take that guide, and then you can go on to your tell team to go and deliver it. But I’m really, really kind of strict on if you bring in a marketing team, if you have a freelance marketing consultant, you still needs to be the people in the driving seat, you are the owner of that business, you know your clients better than anybody, you are the face of the business. So for most of you listening to this, you’re not at this stage big enough to feel like you can have a marketing consultant come in and take all this over or to recruit a marketing firm. So you’ve got to we’ve got to learn this, we’ve got to commit the time to learn the strategies behind how we put ourselves out there, how we stand out. So you’re going to have this step by step sort of project plan that leaves nothing out, it takes nothing for granted as you implement it. And the end result being that you’re going to get more clients through the door. It’s the first programme of its kind, very exciting where you were going to get it done in a day, you’re short on time, we never have any of it. So this course is about time saving fast, effective techniques, and lessons to get it done together in the day. So the day will be about implementation. It’s going to give you a community, it’s going to allow you to grow your presence within our safe space first, so you can gain that confidence. And what we do know is that we learn best adults learn best in the cohort and in our community. So there’s going to be two dates that you can choose from. And we’re then going to have four weeks of ongoing support to where you can drop in and have those questions answered. We’re going to be teaching both the strategy and the mindset behind impactful marketing. We believe marketing strategy is 75. It is 25%. We believe 75% is your mindset. So we can’t stand out unless we deal with both of those components. And we’re going to do that in the day. And we’re going to leverage your expertise. So we’re going to use what you know, we’re going to use how you like to present it to your advantage because there’s no one size fits all here, we’re not going to be telling you the only way to grow is to stick yourself on Facebook Lives, because that just isn’t true. Nobody can know like or trust you if they don’t realise you exist. So underneath this episode, there was going to be a link and you can head to that link. And there’s going to be loads more detail about what’s in each module that we’re going to cover on the day. Because some of you are high detail people and you want to know all the nitty gritty, great, some of you are just gonna be like, I mean, let’s just do this. So this one day out of your clinic is going to leave you with your marketing strategy for the entire year ahead. I am super excited to be delivering it live, it will all be recorded. So if you can’t be there for all of it, don’t worry, you’re going to have access to it for life. So it will be there in the background for you to to go back and listen to those recordings. So hopefully, this episode has got you to understand whether or not you need to be writing a blog in your business and how you how you actually go about creating that and how you can use that blog to then time save into terms of your perhaps your social media posting. And it’s also got you to start thinking about what how does a blog fit into my marketing strategy? What is my marketing strategy? And actually do what I need one? And if the answer is yes, then I would love you to join us for the makeover your marketing in the day course which is going to be launching at the end of March. Thank you for listening. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thank you for listening to treat your business with Katie Bell, the podcast that tells you what you really need to hear. And now when it comes to running a successful business in the health and wellness industry that gives you the time, money and freedom you are wanting for access to our free workshops on how to get more clients in your business, how to make more income in the next 30 days. And to get more time back in your business and life. Head to our free Facebook group today. Treat your business or head over to thrive dash business coaching.com All of the links are available in the show notes