Image courtesy of tiramisustudio at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
It’s funny how these things turn out sometimes, I was at a dentistry shown last year having a very interesting discussion with a colleague that runs a dental consultancy. We were talking about what I specifically did for dental practices with their communications.
Out of nowhere I simply replied “Well I, Create, Curate, Syndicate and Aggregate”
And that has now become my golden rule of online marketing… It should become yours also!
Modern search engine optimisation focuses much less on keywords we want to be found for, where we rank in Google search results or how many people visited the website. These may be important metrics but the real focus is on how many people we can help. Period!
The more people we help, the more people will talk about us. This works in real life as well as online. If more people talk about you online and share your information then more people will visit your website, Google will notice those people talking about you and give you a boost up the search results.
Let’s look at each of the Create, Curate, Syndicate and Aggregate areas individually.
Content Creation
This is where you use your experience as a dentist to create unique and individual content. It’s an opportunity to talk about what is important to you and what you value most. It’s the time where you can show what you are interested in and what you believe in and how you believe you can help people solve their dental problems.
You could consider creating content for a free download on your website (check out my free guide also), you could create blog posts (such as this one) or do micro-updates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google plus, all designed to hand out useful, free and relevant dental health advice.
Creating your own unique content sets you up as a person that genuinely cares in the local area, if people like what you say they will share it which results in more people visiting your website.
Content Curation.
Curating content is about understanding what problems your patients are trying to solve and then directing them to other people’s uniquely created content. You may see articles written on news websites, columns written in online magazines or other non-competing dental practice websites.
Sharing other people’s content again shows that you genuinely care about the people in the local area. It builds trust as it demonstrates that you want to help solve their problems and that making money is not your primary concern!
Yes, dare to share content that you did not create! (That means sharing with full attribution, NOT copying to your website and claiming as your own!)
Content Syndication.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Syndication means taking one piece of original digital content and syndicating it across various media. This is where online marketing really comes into its own. Consider this blog post, this blog post is going to be shared on:
- My own dental marketing website.
- Google plus
- Linked in
- 4 different e-mail databases
- RSS feed readers
Syndication using modern technology such as Feed Burner, Social Media Borg or Hootsuite allows you to rapidly reach the maximum number of people as quickly and simply as possible.
The more people you reach, the more likelihood there is of them sharing your unique content which drives more traffic to your website.
Content Aggregation.
This is the process by which we pull in multiple streams of information into one easy to read place. Take a look at the bottom of my website and you will see Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all if aggregated into one place.
Using software allows us to aggregate multiple streams into one, for example, you could take your original content that you have created, and aggregate it with your content that you have curated, placing all of it onto twitter.
Aggregating content from multiple places, particularly if you automate the process, allows you to keep a very active presence on the Internet.
People often comment that I always seem to be online on Facebook and Twitter… I do spend a lot of time online to be honest, but I use software to aggregate content from around the Internet, I then use software to syndicate that content which has been curated by others or created by me.
Taking time to create your own content, curate content from others, aggregate all of that content into a single stream and then syndicate it and round the Internet has become the hallmark of a successful Internet marketer, it’s also the hallmark of many of my dental practice clients.
Will it also be your hallmark of success?