Blogging first started out as a simple online journal and has quickly become the new craze. It is amazing what people write about and what people want to read.
The biggest thing blogging does is helps build traffic for your website. Everytime you write a post in your blog, it sends out messages to the internet that you have posted something there. The search engines come alive and start scanning your site. They look for the new content and all of the links that you have on your pages.
It does this through something called an rss feed (really simple syndication).
People can subscribe to a blog or rss feed. (It doesn’t just have to be on a blog- it can be a rss feed on your website). When you create new content it tells people that you have written something so they can come back to your site and read what you wrote if they are interested. It is almost like writing a newsletter except people can choose what they are interested in to go online and read it or they can just ignore it and go on with their life. Simple!
While you can set up your own blog for free at many different sites, I think it is better to have a blog embedded in your site. I created this blog with a few clicks of a button using my host -ez-web-hosting.com. It allows you to put these add on programs on your site for no extra cost.
My favorite SiteBuildit! also comes with a thing they call blogger. It doesn’t allow people to post their own thoughts and comments which I at first thought would be necessary. After blogging consistently for a few months here, the number of spam posts far outweigh the real posts and I spend time each day deleting them. (You would be amazed at what people try to post and I can’t figure out why because most blogs let you approve posts before they go live.)
SBI also has an rss feed that you can add just by checking a box when you create the page that sends out a “Ping” to readers who have subscribed. It doesn’t have to be a blog doing the work. SBI does it all for you.
So what does that mean for your massage business? More traffic basically. More potential clients.
What do you write about?
Anything related to health, healing, massage, touch, that you want to do.
I found this nicely done blog by a massage therapist
My massage-career-guides.com blog done by SBI and my massageseattle.net blog just updates the pages that are created. (although you can post separate news and announcements such as holiday specials or whatever you want to talk about.) If you look at those pages you will see the rss feed on the left of the page at the bottom of the navigation bar. That allows people to sign up easily for your blog.
After you set up your own blog, it helps to be the first subscriber. You can do that easily with a yahoo or google email account or using a rss reader that is included with an email software program like Thunderbird
RSS resources:
SiteBuildit!- Really Simple Syndication
Related posts:
- Blogging Do you need a blog for your website? It depends...
- Blogging for Massage Therapists The past few years I have been blogging with WordPress...
- Blogging for dollars I haven’t been blogging much this weekend as I got...
- Setting up a wordpress blog Blogging has almost tripled my traffic in the past 6...
- Blogging about massage Last week I was sent an email announcing that my...
Julie,
Glad to see you commenting on the use of blogs. I enjoy yours, and see tremendous potential for MT’s using this medium. There’s a great deal of education in our field that can be leveraged by any practitioner using technology on the internet. I hope to see more massage practitioners take advantage of the internet as a medium. Best to you always!
Barbara Calkins, CMT SF Bay Area