Websites for therapists

Why blog?

Over the past decade, establishing an online presence has become an important way for therapists to connect with potential clients. One of the most effective ways of achieving this is through blogging. Consistently producing quality content is an effective way of improving your online visibility (Lord Google loves quality content!), resulting in more enquiries and ultimately, more clients. Perhaps more importantly, blogging affords you the opportunity to provide valuable information and resources to clients and convey something of your unique qualities and interests as a therapist, so that you stand out from the rest. It also provides an opportunity for you to raise the profile of therapy and reduce the stigma around seeking help for mental health issues.

Choosing Topics

When choosing topics for your therapy blog, it’s important to consider your target audience and their needs. What challenges do they face? What questions do they have about therapy? What topics are relevant to your practice and expertise?

Here are a few subjects that therapists blog about:

  • Common mental health issues and how you might work with them
  • Theories relating to clients’ presenting problems and how therapy can help
  • Tips for self-care and stress management
  • Strategies for coping with anxiety and depression
  • Mindfulness and meditation exercises
  • Personal stories or experiences that offer insights or inspiration
  • Reviews or summaries of therapy-related books or podcasts

The topics you choose will depend on your interests and on issues that arise in your particular therapy practice.

Language

When writing blog posts, use language that is accessible and engaging. Write in a conversational tone, avoiding jargon or technical terms which may be confusing to your audience. It can be helpful to use examples or personal anecdotes to illustrate your points and make your blog posts easy to relate to. Headings, subheadings, and bullet points break up your content, making it easier to read.

Promoting Your Blog

Promoting your blog on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, can help you to reach a wider audience, attract readers and build a following. When posting on social media, use tags and hashtags to increase visibility and engagement. You could also consider collaborating with other bloggers or therapists to cross-promote each other’s content.

Maintaining Your Blog

Maintaining your blog requires consistency and dedication. Develop a content schedule and stick to it, whether it’s once a week or once a month, whatever feels realistic to you. Make sure you respond to comments and engage with your readers to build a sense of community around your blog.

Overcoming challenges to regular blogging

Despite the benefits of blogging, I find that many of my website customers are reluctant to embrace it, perhaps because they feel it is too time consuming, or because they don’t know what to write about. These are genuine challenges which need to be addressed in order to get good results from blogging.

Producing high quality content certainly is a time-consuming activity, so choose a schedule that feels realistic for you. If blogging on a weekly basis feels too much, try committing to one post per month to start with. You can always increase the frequency once you’ve got the hang of it.

It can also be challenging to keep coming up with new ideas for posts. One way of overcoming this is to draw inspiration from your own experiences or those of your clients. You may have noticed patterns in the sorts of issues that are being raised in the therapy room. What are your clients struggling with that you could address in a blog post? The chances are that a number of potential clients are struggling with the same thing.

Another common challenge to blogging is writer’s block. To overcome this, perhaps you could try brainstorming topics in advance and using a content planner to plan ahead so that you will know what you are going to be blogging about. You might decide, for example, to do a series of posts on setting boundaries, and address a different aspect of boundary-setting each week for a month.

As with most activities, blogging gets easier with practice, but if you don’t start, it will continue to feel like an insurmountable hurdle! Our WordPress websites come with a user-friendly blogging facility built-in, so what have you got to lose by giving it a try?