Time. There’s never enough of it. With all the responsibilities involved with your job, blogging can feel like an extra chore that you just don’t have time for. But we really think you should consider putting it on your list of things to do. Here’s why:
Benefits of Blogging
We can’t stress enough the benefits that blogging can have for your practice website. Want to get found online? Blogging is a significant way to make it happen. Blogging has a ton of SEO benefits, including updating your website regularly, helping you to target more long-tail keywords that will bring you up in more search results, and encouraging other websites to link back to your site. It also helps you position your practice as pet experts, and entices traffic from social media back to your website with relevant information that pet owners want to know about.
Have we convinced you yet? Great! Then let’s talk about when and why you should create blog posts in under 60 minutes.
When to Write a Quick Blog Post
Not every post on your practice blog can be a 60 minute post. The reality is, sometimes you’ll have to buckle down and write a longer post, and it’s going to take some time. But if you find that time constraints are making updating your practice blog regularly difficult, then this might be a good solution to keep your blog running (and benefiting your practice through SEO and knowledge transfer), without forcing you to spend time you don’t have on it.
While length can equal a more substantial and informative blog post, not every blog post has to be lengthy to be effective or helpful. Sometimes, all your readers are looking for is a few hundred words on a pet-related subject that will help them better care for their beloved pet. When you want to churn out a quick blog post, these are the types of posts to create. They’re easy to create quickly, and they’re beneficial to your readers as well.
How to Write a Blog in 60 Minutes:
Let’s not waste any more of these precious 60 minutes! Here are our tips for writing an awesome blog post in under an hour:
Plan ahead
Sometimes, the task of coming up with what to write about can take just as long, if not longer, than the writing itself. So don’t make picking a topic a part of your writing time. Instead, come up with a list of potential topics ahead of time, so you have a bank to draw from every time you sit down to write a blog post.
Eliminate distractions
You’ll never finish in under an hour if you keep checking your email or dealing with interruptions. Try, if at all possible, to eliminate all distractions. Put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, and then close and lock it. Settle in, and get ready to focus your full attention on this one task for an hour. You can do this!
Dig into your personal expertise
A lot of online resources will tell you that writing a great blog post in an hour is impossible because you need to spend a lot of time researching and backing everything you say up with statistics. To that, I say nonsense!
You are a veterinary industry expert. You possess knowledge about pets’ health and behavior that your clients do not. The goal of your quickly written blog post can be to share some of that expertise with your readers. Tell them something about their pet that they wouldn’t necessarily know, but you do, whether that’s your best tips for trimming their puppy’s nails or a brief explanation of how obesity can adversely affect their pet’s health. Even if you do need to look up some of the facts, I suspect you can do so in 10 or 15 minutes, because you know and access the best and most accurate resources on a regular basis.
Keep it short
When you write a blog post, it can feel like you should write a lot to get your point across. But the good news is, people on the Internet don’t really read anymore. They skim. So keeping your blog posts short and sweet can actually cater to your readers.
A blog post can be informative at 500 words or less, especially if you narrow in on a specific topic and keep your blog focused. Get granular. Keep the topic of your blog focused on one aspect of one thing. If you feel the need to elaborate on a part, make a note of that part, and write it down as a topic for a future blog. You don’t have to cover everything in this one post.
An example of a quickly put together blog post would be one on the topic of common poisonous household objects. All you need to make this an effective post is a quick introduction, a list of the top 10, and a conclusion including a call-to-action to bring their pet in immediately if their pet ingests anything on the list. Boom! Easy peasy! You’ve got a blog post.
Create an outline
Whenever I create a blog post, I start with an outline. Write down all the points you want to cover in the post, in the order that you want to cover them. I find that using this technique really makes words just flow out of me when it comes time to do the actual writing, and you can also use those points as headings to help break up the text.
Get others involved
So you really don’t have time to sit down and come up with all the information yourself. That’s OK! Ask your staff to pitch in. If you ask several members of your staff to make a small contribution, even just a paragraph, it can make writing a blog post much faster.
For example, you could ask your staff to each write down their favorite pet care tip, reasons they love working at your clinic, or their favorite dog breed and why, etc. The possibilities are endless. There is definitely still work involved, including creating an introduction, conclusion, and editing each blurb. But it can really speed up the process, while also bringing several other valuable opinions to the piece, in addition to your own.
Save the editing for later
You’ve created a blog post in an hour. That’s awesome! But before you hit publish, you should give your blog post a second going over. It’s likely that you missed some things on the first go around, and your pet owners will appreciate it if you take the time to iron out any wrinkles.
You have two options here. The first is to ask someone else to read it. A second set of eyes can always be beneficial for catching any errors or grammatical mistakes you may have missed. The second option is to put the blog post down and walk away from it for a while. When you come back, you’ll be able to look at it with fresh eyes. Whichever option you choose, an edit is always a good idea.
Got all of that? Good, then what are you waiting for? Â On your mark, get set, GO write that blog post in 60 minutes!
