Medical and health education are hot topics right now. If you’re looking to focus your content marketing efforts in this direction, news blogging is one of the most effective areas of medical blogging in 2021. If you’re looking to enhance your blog offerings for a medical practice, staying current and keeping your patients well-informed isn’t just a good idea right now — it’s mandatory.
I talk about building trust quite a bit in this blog, and I don’t think there is any area of marketing where that is more important than medicine. Every medical marketing niche is focused on the current crisis, and with the advent of several proven effective vaccines, personal health and safety are on most people’s minds. That interest isn’t going to diminish anytime soon, presenting you with a unique opportunity.
Get good at medical news blogging, and you’ll establish a solid trust base among your readers that will carry you far beyond the COVID crisis. One of the easiest — but simultaneously tricky — avenues of medical blogging comes in the form of content curation. This is when you draw from other sources to populate your blog while also giving your readers the benefit of your perspectives, commentary, and insights.
For a news-based blog, content curation is likely to be your primary approach, but there are definite pitfalls (which I will show you how to avoid). If this is a new area of content development to you, or if it hasn’t worked out well for you in the past, keep reading. I’m about to provide some advice that will help make your efforts more effective.
Responsible Content Curation
There are right ways and wrong ways to gather and use curated content. First, you need credible sources. Next, you need to properly cite your sources every single time. The downside to this is that it can decrease the amount of unique content that appears on your blog, which will affect your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
The good news is, it can work. Just ask brands like Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and The Daily Beast. These sources thrive on content curation, and they’re well-known, high-ranking brands. Not all SEO is contingent on the content on the page. If you get good at using your support content, you’ll also get good at creating off-page SEO. The more organic traffic you drive to your site, the more certain aspects of SEO will work in your favor. For now, let’s focus on the blog itself.
Choosing Good Source Material
While finding sources for any medical subject is fairly easy, finding quality sources can be a bit more of a challenge. The simple rule of thumb is to use trusted sources, like news outlets and established, trusted medical websites. The real question is: How can you tell if a source is trustworthy?
Just because a source is well-known and has a strong online presence doesn’t mean that it’s credible. Don’t jump on news stories just because they seem interesting. As the current political climate in the U.S. has taught us, not all news is news. Vet every source you choose as a base for your content. There are even reliable tools out there to help you do just that. I highly recommend clicking that link. It can help save you some real embarrassment and protect your own reputation among your readers.
Remember that real news is unbiased and doesn’t have political or commercial slants. “News” articles fraught with opinion and conjecture aren’t news; they’re opinion pieces, nothing more. That doesn’t mean the information is necessarily bad. Still, you’ll do far more work vetting questionable sources than you ever will sticking with ones that are known to be credible already.
Building Off-Page SEO
I mentioned the concept of off-page SEO a minute ago, so here’s how those efforts relate to support content. Remember that you aren’t just writing a blog. You have to promote it, as well. The primary method of building off-page SEO is through backlinks. This is when you post links to your own content in places like your social media pages and in interactions on other social channels and forums. The latter is becoming a less effective avenue but should still be part of your off-page SEO strategy.
Here are some of the basic ways to build off-page SEO:
• Link to your own content via social media.
• Include links to your blog with calls to action to click on them in your email campaigns.
• Follow influencers in your niche on social media and interact on their pages.
• Drop your links in conversations on influencer channels.
• @mention the sources you use when promoting your content.
There is quite a bit more to it, and I encourage you to click the link I highlighted above to learn more.
Setting Up Your Blog
Another way to build good off-page SEO is to make sure that your blog’s structure is conducive to good rankings. Always launch with at least five articles. Always use a responsive format so your pages look right on any device.
Finally, make sure there are clear lines drawn between your curated content and your original work. Never try to intersperse your remarks as part of a quote, change the wording of a quote, or rewrite part of an article to create the illusion of unique content. These things will only impede your progress.
Keeping Up with Content Development
Like I said in the beginning, working with curated content can be a bit tricky. If you have lingering questions or concerns, we would love to hear from you. We can answer your questions and help you develop a strategy for delivering solid curated medical blog content that builds your reputation and grows your readership for your blog. Reach out to BeezContent today to learn more.
