Launch your counsellor blog with these 10 steps
As a therapist, you may not have a sale or special offer to advertise. But you do have plenty of knowledge. A counsellor blog could be the ideal platform to share what you know.
A great counsellor blog can help you stand out by showcasing your expertise and professionalism. Engaging content can also resonate with readers and help you establish a relationship with prospective clients.
Here are 10 steps you can take to launch your counsellor blog.
- 1. Identify your target audience.
- 2. Research counselling blog topics.
- 3. Write your blog posts.
- 4. Include calls to action.
- 5. Proof your writing.
- 6. Optimise your counsellor blog for search engines.
- 7. Add pictures to enrich your blog posts.
- 8. Upload a new blog post each week.
- 9. Promote your counsellor blog.
- 10. Update published blog posts.
1. Identify your target audience
Before you write a single word, make sure you know who your counsellor blog audience will be. If you try appealing to everyone, you’ll end up appealing to no one. First, decide who you’re writing for.
If you run a private practice, you may have already identified your target audience. Is it families, young professionals, or couples in need of relationship counselling? Perhaps you specialise in ADHD, postpartum depression, or bereavement?
Next, figure out your ideal client’s demographics. Get a grasp on the challenges they may face and the advice they may be searching for online.
2. Research counselling blog topics
You’ve identified your target audience: now it’s time to decide what to write about. Perhaps you already have a long list of ideas for your counsellor blog. If you don’t, there are two main sources we’d suggest you use to generate counselling blog topics:
- Your client base.
- Keyword research.
Whenever you answer a client’s question relating to mental health or emotional issues, you could turn that information into a blog post. (It goes without saying that all information you share on your counsellor blog should remain anonymous.)
Perhaps you’ve shown your client a breathing technique or offered them advice on coping with a difficult life event. You can guarantee that other people are seeking advice and information on the topics your clients are speaking to you about.
We also recommend you do keyword research to inspire counselling blog topics. Keyword research can help you discover what words and phrases people are putting into search engines like Google.
When someone searches for ‘seasonal affective disorder symptoms’ or ‘what is gaslighting,’ Google shows them countless articles and blog posts. By harnessing keyword research, your counsellor blog posts can appear alongside these results.
And if you do some search engine optimisation (more on this later), you’ll improve your chances of appearing near the top of the results.
3. Write your blog posts
You can’t launch your counsellor blog without writing (unless you hire a blog specialist to take care of that for you). So, step number three is to write your blog posts.
As a qualified therapist, writing is probably a skill you’ve honed through years of work and training. This should set you in good stead when it comes to launching a counsellor blog.
However, it’s worth keeping in mind that writing blog posts isn’t quite the same as writing research papers or reports.
The skill of commercial writing is creating content that engages the reader and delivers a message. Some tips for creating good content include:
- Writing simply. Your counselling blog topics might be complex, but your writing should be easy to read and understand.
- Writing conversationally and empathetically. Welcome the reader in and show them you know what it’s like to be in their shoes.
- Using subtitles and bullet points to break up walls of text into clearly labelled, bite-sized information.
- Keeping sentences and paragraphs short. Your content should be as easy to consume as possible. Plus, shorter paragraphs mean more white space. Big walls of text can overwhelm readers.
4. Include calls to action
You’ve worked hard to attract a reader to your counsellor blog. You don’t want them clicking away immediately once they’ve finished reading. That’s why it’s important to include calls to action (CTAs) in your blog posts.
Effective content convinces the reader to perform some kind of action. That might be clicking through to read more of your blog posts or filling in a contact form.
It’s up to you to decide what that CTA is and what action you want readers to take. To avoid decision fatigue, we suggest using one CTA per blog post.
5. Proof your writing
As a counsellor, you’ll understand the importance of effective communication better than most. Proofreading your blog posts means you can:
- Improve clarity and precision.
- Avoid obvious spelling and grammatical errors.
- Avoid misunderstandings (this is especially important when discussing sensitive topics).
Making sure your blog post is free of errors goes hand in hand with maintaining your professional image. Typos and spelling mistakes may seem like small issues, but they can erode trust in your services.
Plus, errors like including someone’s surname could lead to an accidental breach of confidentiality.
After writing and editing your blog post, wait until the next day to check it one last time. You’ll often find a missed comma, spelling error, or phrase that you could clarify before you hit ‘publish.’
6. Optimise your counsellor blog for search engines
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a vital step in launching your counsellor blog. You may have written the most insightful, valuable content ever. But if you don’t optimise your blog posts for Google searches, it’s unlikely anyone will find them.
There are plenty of practical ways to optimise your blog posts for search engines. Choosing a focus keyword is a good place to start (this is where your keyword research from earlier can come in handy).
Select a focus keyword for each blog post and include that keyword with a density of 1-2%. For a blog post of 600 words, you’d want to make sure 6-12 of these words are your keyword.
Also, remember to include your focus keyword in the:
- First paragraph of your blog post.
- Top-level heading of your blog post (and a few of the subheadings).
- Meta title, meta description, and slug. You can tweak these in the back end of your website when you upload your post.
7. Add pictures to enrich your blog posts
Once you’ve done the writing and technical SEO jobs, add some pictures to your blog post. Let your creativity guide you as you select images that convey or match the theme of your counselling blog topic.
Yes, adding high-quality images will make your posts look pretty. But they can also help break up all your text and increase the white space, improving readability.
You should use copyright-free pictures unless you have access to a paid image library. (The database we use has over 75 million stock images, so our clients’ blog posts are always picture-perfect.) You can get plenty of free options on sites like Unsplash and Pexels.
Quick tip: For faster web page loading speeds, use JPEG files rather than PNG files, as PNG files are larger than JPEGs.
8. Upload a new blog post each week
We often get asked how often bloggers should post. The honest answer is: at least once per week.
It may seem like a big commitment to upload one new blog post weekly. That’s because it can take time and effort to create quality content. But your counsellor blog won’t get off the ground if you blog less than once a week or have an inconsistent upload schedule.
Upload more than one blog post a week if you have time. Just make sure you’re not sacrificing quality over quantity. Each post on your counsellor blog should be full of useful information.
Think of blog posts like planting seeds in a garden. The more seeds you sow, the greater your chances of a good harvest.
The more blog posts you write and upload, the greater your chances of attracting your ideal clients.
Plus, blog post traffic continues to increase over time, and the best blog posts generate more and more organic results as time passes. So it’s worth the initial investment of time and effort to upload weekly.
Choose a day of the week as your upload day and stick to it. If you struggle to set aside time each week for blogging, try writing in batches. Plus, you can schedule your blog posts on website platforms like WordPress. That means you don’t need to hit ‘publish’ at a specific time or on a specific day.
We also recommend creating a content calendar for your counsellor blog. A content calendar can help you plan which counselling blog topics to write about and upload each week. Planning can be a huge help for staying consistent with your blogging schedule.
9. Promote your counsellor blog
Once you’ve uploaded your blog post, don’t expect it to blow up right away. It may take some time for your blog post to gain organic traction in search engine results.
In the meantime, we suggest sharing your blog posts on your professional social media profiles. You can also link to your counsellor blog in your e-newsletter or other marketing channels.
If you feel uncomfortable promoting your counselling services online, you might find sharing your blog posts a little easier. You don’t have to talk directly about yourself and the services you offer. Let the blog post do the talking for you by demonstrating your knowledge and experience.
10. Update published blog posts
Once you’ve written, uploaded, and promoted your blog posts, you might find yourself forgetting about them. But it can be worth revisiting older posts now and again. Neil Patel suggests you do this at least once per year.
As new information becomes available, articles or studies you’ve referenced in your blog posts can become outdated and need updating.
Or you might find your blogging skills have developed after several months and you can now find ways to improve your early posts.
Counselling practices keep evolving as new research comes out. You’ve probably continued to learn and hone your skills even after qualifying as a counsellor. Why not apply the same approach to the content you’re sharing online?
Google wants to show users up-to-date, relevant content. Updating your counsellor blog posts regularly tells Google you care about the quality of their users’ experience.
Get help with your counsellor blog
Now you know how to launch your counsellor blog to help you attract more clients and benefit more people.
If this all seems a bit daunting, you might prefer to get some reliable blog specialists to launch your counsellor blog for you. We’ve designed a blog package specifically for business owners like you who want a blog that acts like a 24-hour salesperson.
Our blog package includes a weekly blog post, plus counselling blog topic research, a content calendar, and SEO.
About Finer Things Editorial
Finer Things Editorial writes for businesses that help others achieve abundance, whether in the form of profit, self-love, or physical health. Our content helps these businesses attract their dream clients, so they don’t have to chase them. Having taken businesses from 0 to 1,000+ primed-to-buy website visitors per day, we take businesses from unknown to really known.
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