Share everything!

Broadcast quality content to build your web community

It used to be the case that you built your website, published it, gathered a few back-links to promote in Google and job done.

Of course a great website is still the starting point but these days, particularly where competition is fierce, more needs to be done to broadcast your message and promote your services on-line. And this is where “content sharing” comes into play….

How does this work?

For a dentist operating in a reasonably competitive environment, the following tools are becoming increasingly important:

• a blog associated with the main website which is used regularly to generate new and interesting content
• active social media channels to broadcast your content to help grow and stimulate a community of interested users
• direct email marketing to your opted-in community to keep them interested in you and your services

If you think about a website that stands alone without this proactive approach, the chances are that it will not attract visits or stimulate the natural back-links that are so important to help climb up in Google. On the other hand, by broadcasting useful content on a consistent basis, engagement, visits, back-links and improved Google results will result. Whilst this is a tried and tested method at Dental Media for our dental web marketing campaigns, don’t just take our word for it – Matt Cutts, head of search at Google has also explicitly stated that generating and broadcasting useful content is a primary route to great search results.

More specifically, which tools should be used?

Our tool of choice for blogging is WordPress. More recently, efforts have been made to create a full website CMS from WordPress but for us it’s strengths are still as a blogging platform.

It is relatively easy to customise WordPress so that it looks like an integral part of your main website.

WordPress can also be linked to the major social media channels using software “plugins” – these tools allows you to publish excerpts of your blog articles to Twitter and Facebook etc automatically. Very slick, a great time saver and a good first step to getting your content out there.

To supplement your blogging you should also strive to make regular posts to your social media channels. To start with, try to generate a head of steam with Twitter, a Facebook business page and Google+. Tools like “HootSuite” allow you to manage your social profiles from one web based admin platform – another great time-saver and also free.

Remember that social media is 80% about engagement and 20% about (subtle) selling but unless you are getting interesting information out there, who is going to want to engage in the first place? No-one wants to hear about what you had for breakfast or did in the gym on Twitter!

We talked in an earlier blog about “content curation” – to recap this is the mechanism whereby you identify and collate useful information from the web and then re-broadcast it to your community, again typically via your social media channels. At least half of what we broadcast is curated content – without this you’d be writing blogs all day long which is impractical of course.

The final link in the chain is direct email marketing and our tool of choice for this is “MailChimp”.

E-newsletters are a great way to get straight to the in-boxes of your community and, if they know you write great stuff, they will open the mails.

To summarise

Proactive marketing using content sharing is increasingly useful to build your online community. Whilst a website is still the important foundation, stood-alone it is a passive tool. Generating great content on your blog, curating content from other useful sources on the web and broadcasting both via social media channels *will* build your web footprint, stimulate interest and help your Google position.

Please call us on 01332 672548 to see how we can help you get moving or if you would like more information about how the Dental Media team can manage these processes for you.