How to Write Blogs Easily

You're listening to podiatry marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald.

Welcome back to podiatry marketing. I'm your host, Jim McDannald, joined always by my trusty and, you know, always sharp witted co host, Tyson Franklin. Tyson, how's it going today?

I am fantastic, Big Jim. How are you doing? And your name, Big Jim, is becoming known worldwide.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's when all Five9 of me walks into a room one of these days and we have a, you know, a workshop or, you know, some event together, there people are gonna be very disappointed. So, yeah, I've gotten a few messages about Big Jim. So it's, yeah, it's it's been a it's been definitely something I wasn't quite expert, you know, ready for, but definitely appreciated.

Embrace it. That's what I say. Just embrace. Embrace positive things that happened to you.

No. No. I agree. That's that's a great that's a great way to look at things. And I think, you know, getting these messages from our listeners is super inspiring.

Right? I think we're making real difference here on the show. People are learning things and thinking about things in ways they hadn't hadn't before. So to get some listeners, you know, sending some messages of encouragement and asking some questions is always something that is really great.

Yeah. Well, better than me mentioning and saying some of the big gym people go, oh, who's that? I don't know. Who who is that person? Oh, do you have another podcast?

I didn't know you had another podcast. Who do you do that with? So at least people are listening to the show. And the feedback I'm getting from the show so far is people like the short format. Every episode is about twenty five minutes.

And usually, every episode, there's something you can take away each time, which is no different to today's episode, which I think is very important.

Yeah. For sure. I mean, someday we might be legendary, but I don't think today is that day, but we'll keep on working towards that legend status.

So You gotta keep you gotta just gotta keep working. You can be a legend in your own lunchtime.

Yeah. Legend in my own mind. But speaking of legendary things, you know, as we kinda jump in today's topic, what are we gonna be going back and forth about?

Today, we're gonna talk about blog writing. And I know in a previous episode, we talked we mentioned about people focus sometimes on just writing too many blogs and not focusing on other areas of the business. But this is really looking at if you're going to write a blog, and a lot of people won't do it because they they get burnt out. Just the thought of writing a blog makes them tired. And when they try to write a blog, they'll spend $3.04, 5 half a day trying to write a 300 word blog article, and in the end, they end up never finishing anything.

And reason that happens is because they don't know how to manage their mental energy. And you can use the same principle in a lot of aspects of podiatry.

I think this has been a fun topic. Being a writer myself and writing my fair share of blogs, I know there you know, it's it seems like, oh, I'm just gonna write a bunch of words, right? But a certain level of focus, organization, a little bit of research. And the more you do it, right, you get the the better you get at it. So I think there is definitely a technique and a process that you have to go through to kind of make sure that you're using that energy in a in a way that, you know and you're you're sharing valuable information with your patients.

Yeah. Well, the the problem with it is a lot of times when people think about, oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna write some blogs, they don't have a a good format to to actually follow. And it's like any system. If you got a system in place on doing something, it's proven that having a good system, you will get a more what's the word I'm looking for? A can't help me with the word.

What's the word? Predictable. You will get a more predictable result when you actually have a system. You know, if you do a, b, c, d, you'll end up with a certain result. Whereas if you do not have a system and you're flying by the seat of your pants, you can never guarantee what the result is always gonna be, and that's what happens a lot of time when people are are writing blogs.

Yeah. I mean, consistency in having a system, can kinda go back to, right, like how do you generate ideas? Like, how do you share those ideas in a way that is, you know, palatable and can be easily digested by your patients? So I think that's you know, if you're just kinda pulling things out of the air from week to week and kind of going where you're in I mean, inspiration is important. But Yeah.

You know, putting that into a system, having these ideas, you know, in a spreadsheet, in a document, you know, so you're gonna work on things and have a list of things as opposed to, like you said, just like sitting at a blank screen in front of the computer thinking, what am I gonna blog about? That's probably the worst thing that can happen.

And there's nothing worse than that. See, it's different. You like to write, I like to write. So I could probably walk out of my office here and walk into our because I work from home. Walk into our laundry, have a quick look around, and I'm sure just by looking at laundry, I could find something that would be interesting to write about.

But it doesn't necessarily mean just because it's interesting to write about that my patients wanna read it. So that's that's the important part is you always wanna make sure that you're writing on topic. Yeah. You're writing for your your ideal patient. We're get you on that a little bit later.

What I'm gonna talk about first is just the mistakes that the rookie writer will do. The person that all of sudden they go, oh, I I've heard I need to write some blog articles. And once again, sit in there, stare at their blank screen, and they go, what do I write about? So what they do and what they try and do is everything at the same time. They try and come up with a title, and they go, no, that title sucks.

So they come try and go with some other titles. Oh, okay. This title is good. And then they start writing. And once they start writing, all of sudden they're going, oh, no.

I don't like that. And the whole paragraph they're done, they delete and they start writing again. And then they'll edit, rewrite, delete again, and then they'll oh, I should really do some research on that. Because what happens if another podiatrist read this? And I happen to say one fact that is it's 8% instead of and I said 9%.

Don't wanna overestimate. So they start editing. They do all this stuff. Three or four hours later, they're pretty much looking at a blank sheet of paper that maybe have two or three lines there and they go, you know what? I'll I'll come back to it and do it again later.

And they end up with this big long list or a file full of partially started blog articles that never get completed and will never be never be completed.

Yeah. That's definitely a tough way to go about it. If you're editing while you're trying to write at the same time, it's just gonna be kind of a cycle of frustration, I would say, because you're just gonna be kind of trying to be perfect, try not to make mistakes. And when you do that and try to write and edit at the same time, you're just gonna, you know, multiply the amount of time it takes to kinda get, you know, to start making progress on these different articles.

Yeah. But and I've done it myself. It's not that automatically I, yeah, just sat down one day and I wrote a book. Yeah. I didn't pass English at school.

My English teacher I should've sent her a copy of my book and said, hey, look what I end up doing, and she probably would've laughed. But, yeah, English was never one of my my strong suits. But I did enjoy the process of writing even though I wasn't really that good at it. And then but it's like any the more you do it, the better you get, and and when you have a system of being able to write. So at the moment, I'm writing my third book, putting it together.

And initially, it was hard to get get started, but now that I have a format on what I'm doing, I'm getting through it just so much easier that it will be finished before the end of this year. Hopefully, halfway through the year.

That's good to that's good to hear. I'm I'm looking forward to reading that. And, you know, obviously, the first two books, you know, I've definitely read those already. So definitely so you're gonna give us any kind of is this a teaser or is this an open loop? Are you gonna give us some some some our listeners a little bit of details about what it might be about?

Oh, the third book is about podiatry marketing of all things. So it's just it's my thing. Yeah. I know. It's my take on podiatry market, and it's all based on what I probably over the last four years, I was doing some podiatry marketing workshops similar to what we will be doing in October.

And on these podiatry workshops, when I've done them back, I created this format of how I explained marketing over that day, and it's just my thinking and my take on a few things. So I thought, this would be great to put in a book. So I've really taken a one day workshop and formulated it down to a book. That's the plan. But what I write in the book is different to what you and I would be presenting together in October.

Very cool. Very cool. Looking forward to it. Hopefully, I don't know, maybe, you know, a free copy or two.

I'll bring you one over. Yeah. I'll give you a free copy, and and anyone that comes to the workshop will get a free copy as well. And even if they already have a copy, by the time the workshop comes around, they're like, oh, I can't wait till the workshop. I wanna get a copy beforehand.

They'll get a bonus copy.

That's that sounds great. Looking forward to that.

So we should get you up. So back to what we were talking about with the the writing blog articles, there's three things well, there's three three parts to doing it. One is you need to put space between your activities. So like I said before, the rookie tries to do everything at the same time, and because they try and do it at the same time, they just get they get all muddled up, confused, burn up a lot of mental energy. And everything I'm about to explain is about reserving mental energy so you're not burning yourself out because I I actually believe you only have a certain amount of mental calories per day.

And if you burn them up and that's why some people get into the day and they go, oh, I'm just I'm mentally exhausted because they chewed up the mental calories. But if you know how to manage your energy and your mental calories, you can get a lot more done because you you've got it planned out. So first thing is putting space between your activities. The second thing is to use a timer when you're actually writing, and I'm gonna talk about each of these in bit more detail. And the third thing is never research while you're actually doing your writing.

It's just it's even when I've wrote my previous books and the one I'm doing now is while I'm writing, yes, all of a sudden I'm going, oh, I should go and, you know, like, check those facts or my so I'll put it in brackets and go expand upon or check facts, and I put it in there, and I just move on to the next thing. Because if I stop there and go and waste time checking off facts, sometimes it can take an hour, two hours to really dig into something to make sure you're you're explaining something the right way. So I'm better to just keep writing, come back to that later because when I come back and do it later, I may not need to even check the facts. I'm like, you know what? The facts aren't really important.

They are. Depends what you're talking about, I suppose.

But in that moment, though. Right? In that moment when you're trying to get in the writer's flow, you're trying to kinda get some words on the page, you know, taking that time to research that even though the facts are important, in that moment, you should be focused on your writing and then going to research and find the you know, do that fact checking later on.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not important right now. What's important now is to keep your flow going. So when I talk about the first thing, putting space between your activities, the first thing is coming up with a few ideas.

What is it you're gonna write about? So come up with with some headlines, and you might come up with you might spend might be, say, day one. You'll go, all I'm gonna do today in between my patients is come up with a couple of headlines. So you do that in day one, and don't do anything else. Once you've come up with your headlines, is then move on with something else that you're doing.

Don't continue writing. But then in day two, you might come up, look at each of those headlines, and you might pick one. You go, okay. Now under the headline, come up with four to six subtopics or just dot points that you would like to discuss and then move away from it. Don't come back to it.

Just day one, did the headline. Day two, you've got a couple of dot points. Now you've gone back on and you're seeing your patients. Both of those tasks could take a couple of minutes in between patients with a little bit of downtime. Then day three is look at each of those subtopics that you put there, all those dot points, and just write, I don't know, maybe 40 or 50 words.

Don't try and go crazy about it. So if you've got six dot points and you write 50 words for each dot point, that's 300 words. That's enough. You don't need to be writing too much more than that. Then day four is go back, look at what you wrote, and just finish each paragraph because you might have written a few things down there that you've gone, oh, yeah.

That was good, and then you write another 50 words. Oh, and then you write another 50 words. Go back and just finish off anything that you wanna add to it. So you might find if you had four dot points, it'll be somewhere between two two fifty words by the time you finish. If you had six, it'll probably be two seventy five to maybe three fifty by the time you're done.

At this point, you're still not doing any editing. This is really just putting the information on paper. And then on day five, you pretty much reread your article, you edit it, and you're done. And that's pretty much it. If you can just break up your writing process over a five day period, but what you realize is what you're doing on on day five, you might be coming up with a new headline.

And then for another headline, you might come up with a couple of dot points and then you might write a couple of things in there. So this is how they just flow week by week here. You can easily just produce another blog article that's related to your ideal patient, don't write rubbish. So just write about what you know your patients are talking about, the questions they're asking your receptionist at the front counter when they ring up.

Yeah. Think taking that perspective of the patient and remembering what it's like to be in their shoes, it's it's really helpful. And actually, whenever you're writing, it kind of reminds you of that. Even when, you know, when you're treating your patients, you're busy running from, you know, office room to office room to to try to treat them. You know, taking a little bit of time to reflect and write these articles can be not only beneficial for patients, but also for yourself.

And instead of, like you said, just trying to sit down at once, write write all of these different things, it's gonna feel overwhelming and most people won't start. And if they do start, they'll get it halfway through, and they'll just they'll kinda give up. So, you know, kind of breaking it down. It's kinda like they say, you know, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Right? So it's one of those things where, you know, don't worry about the end product. Focus on the process. Focus on these things that Tyson's telling you to kinda break it down day by day, and you'll have an article by the end of the week.

It's funny you talk about that. Did I tell you a story? Well, I was talking to my daughter recently about how to eat an elephant. She was overwhelmed with uni. And I said to her, Tia, let me explain a story.

Have you heard the story about you how to eat an elephant? And she went, why would you eat an elephant? I said, no. It's it's just a metaphor. We're not talking about actually eating an elephant.

She goes, why why would anyone in their right mind wanna eat an elephant? I said, we're not eating an elephant. She said, well, why'd you bring it up? She's so logical. And I said, but if you did eat an elephant, how do you eat an elephant?

She went, fried, boiled. I said, no. One bite at a time. And she's gone. Exactly.

Oh, yeah. That's that's really clever. So she didn't she didn't get the humor of the whole thing anyway. So the point number two, the second thing that I said was use a timer to keep you on track. It's really, really important.

And they referred to this as, like, the Pomodoro technique, and it's where you and Pomodoro because of tomatoes or tomatoes depending on where you're from. And now so I speak both languages. So so the Pomodoro technique is breaking up your your writing into intervals. So you might go you might block out a bit of time that you wanna do some writing. Write for twenty five minutes on, five minutes off.

Don't sit there and just continue to keep writing. You might set a timer. I have a thing called the time cube which sitting over here on my desk, And I use a lot, and it's a five, ten, fifteen, I think thirty minute, forty five, and 60. And you just flick it over. And if I if all of sudden I'm going, oh, I wanna work on something for an hour, I'll flick the time cube over to an hour, keep writing, and as soon as the beeper goes off, I have a five minute break.

Get up and walk away. Don't just keep writing. But the best thing about time is as well, they help you set deadlines. So if you say you're gonna write for half an hour, write for half an hour. If it's gonna be fifteen minutes, write for fifteen minutes.

Just stick to a certain deadline and then finish. When the timer goes off, you must stop. You must have a break. And this actually prevents you from just getting exhausted and wearing yourself out. Remember, mental calories, we're gonna try and maintain them as much as possible.

No. You definitely have to maintain those mental calories. I totally wasn't aware that you speak both American and Australian. That's

Yeah. Tomato, tomato, tomato.

But like, all joking aside, I think anyone that's, you know, sat at a desk or, you know, done, you know, maybe you're doing charting and things like that, you know after about twenty to twenty five minutes, you just you're just not as sharp as you were in that first five, ten or fifteen minutes. So the same thing goes for writing. If you really wanna write sharp articles that are really valuable to your patients that you, you know, are happy to promote and happy to get out there on different forms of distribution through social media and other places, you have to, you know, know, you just can't stare at the the screen for three hours and expect something's gonna happen. Breaking it down to these smaller chunks again, I think is super helpful and utilizing your little tomato timer or your your time cube. Those things are fun little toys to to use them with.

I I've used one a little bit on my my computer. You know, like, they have some timers you can use on your computer. So I'm usually go that going that route on occasion, but it's the physical item thing is a good good idea as well.

Oh, time cubes are great. I I find it really, really helpful. And I probably need to use it more than what I actually do. But a friend of mine, Dave Wyman, who's a psychologist, doctor Dave, and he says he does this all the time. He he'll see whether it's a client who'll be working with somebody, but a certain time, once at least once in the morning and once in the afternoon, he blocks out ten minutes purely just to walk out of his office, and he goes and walks around the block for ten minutes and then comes back again.

And he says, how that how much that recharges his battery and his mental energy is just incredible. Then he comes back and all of sudden, he's just totally recharged. Whether it's blog writing or anything else, you need to give yourself those breaks.

For sure. What's what's point number three? What's how how are gonna bring this one home?

Well, the point number three was about never research while you're actually writing. This is the fastest way to mentally chew up all your mental calories. Because while you're while you're researching, you can't do writing. And and research sometimes can take a lot of time depending on what the topic is. If you're if you're writing a blog article for your patients, I don't think it really takes a lot of research.

Majority, if not 99% of what you're writing, should already be up here in your head or you probably shouldn't be writing about it. But if you just wanna check a couple of facts, it shouldn't really take too long. But if you're writing articles for, say, other podiatrists or you're gonna be getting ready for a conference or you're writing it for an association or a podiatry magazine, you probably need to do a little bit more research. If you're gonna make if you're gonna make a statement or or say something, you wanna check your facts. So it's just important to remember that it does take time to do research.

So you're better to go to your your schedule and block out a certain amount of time that this is my research time. And don't use your research time to write. Do your research use your research time to research. And then when you're done, block it out. And next time you go to write, you go to your research, and then you use your research.

Well, I think that's the funny thing about the Internet and our computers these days. Right? I think you and I are both around where, you know, you can only have one browser tab. You know, back in the back in the olden days, maybe some of the younger people on this podcast will, you know, listening right now will kind of chuckle and laugh. But there used to be the Internet was so slow that you'd only could have one browser, and it would take forever for images and those kind of things to come up.

So this kind of task switching like wouldn't be as much of a distraction. Right? No. If you're if you're typing your computer, you're not gonna be go going through the library, running to grab a book, coming back, typing again, running to go grab a book. Like, that didn't happen back in the day because of computers were so slow.

But now now now you can have 40 browser tabs open. You can have Twitter open. You can have your Apple Music. You can have your sports scores all going on while you're writing. So I think not only do not need to research while you're writing, but you should try to eliminate a lot of distractions.

Maybe it's turning off I mean, if you're on call and stuff, you don't wanna turn off your phone. But find the maximum ways to eliminate distractions so you can really focus on the task at hand.

Yeah. And that's why you will when you're doing research, you need the Internet because you're gonna be diving into things and you flick it between tabs. But that's why once you've done your research and you're going to write, turn off all your notifications. Turn off the Internet because you don't need it because you're in writing mode now. When you're writing, you should be in writing mode.

If you're trying to write, next thing you hear, ding. It's really hard to go, oh, that's that one email that I know. I don't know who it's from, but I guarantee that one email is gonna change my life. Therefore, I'm a stop writing and check the email. And then the next thing, you know, you're watching a cat play the piano on YouTube.

It's just what happens. And then your writing is just totally stopped. So I've gotten really good now at eliminating distractions. The other part too with your research, you need somewhere to store your research. So whether you use Google Docs, Evernote, OneNote, you just wanna place your Dropbox where you put your research in an orderly fashion so that you can easily find it later.

Don't randomly have stuff in all different places, and then you see it and go, Jesus. Where did I end up putting that? I've done that before too.

No. That's an excellent point. Right? Like, sometimes you get a there's a new way to, you know, like, it's Google Docs. It's Google Drive.

And then maybe it's like it's a Dropbox notes. It's in your Apple notes. It could be as much time and work and effort to try to grab things from four different places where you've kept that research. So like you said, really just focus on one one kind of source of truth or one place where you keep it. Otherwise, you're gonna be task switching again or you're gonna be wasting time.

Yeah. So just a couple of final tips to to wrap up on the subject about blog writing is always only write articles or blogs for your ideal patient. Think about the patients that you wanna see more of in your clinic and make sure you're only ever writing for them. You can also think of all the patients that you the last patient you'd wanna see. Brought a list to describe the person you you never wanna see in your clinic again.

And if you've got any blog articles that have written that you've done in the past that talks to them, take them off your website. And if you want, email them to someone you don't like. So here are some of these blog articles for you. You should put these on your website. They're awesome.

Because then they'll attract all the patients you don't want.

There you go.

Final tip is make sure every blog article has a call to action. It's just there's no point writing it if you're not gonna direct and tell the person reading it what you want them to do next. That people love being directed on what to do. It just in life in general, like, if I walked into anywhere, I would rather have somebody there go, hey, Tyson. Just you can enter through this way here.

Go down those steps there. Turn to your left. There's your seat. I'd much rather that than have to walk into an auditorium and go, bloody hell. Where's my seat?

I can't find it. I know if I keep looking, I'll find it. Eventually, it's no different when you're writing a blog article. Be that person who's showing the person to the seat where they're gonna sit next or what they need to do next. So at the end of the article, if it's about heel pain, they're reading it for a reason.

So when they read that article, what do you want them to do as soon as they finish reading it? Do they want you to call them? Do you wanna do online appointment? Do you want them to download some information? Just be really clear with what you want them to do and and how they can do it.

I think that's great advice. You definitely have to you know, people are you know, whether it's make an appointment or learn more about the services we provide, there's different types of call to actions. And I think that's really important, like you said. People want they they've come to you for not only for information, but sometimes guidance. And if you can kinda help lead them in that right direction, they'll be very thankful that you did so.

So I have covered everything I wanted to say in this topic, Jim. So if you got anything else to add, I I don't. I'm done.

All your all your mental capacity or your mental calories have been used up for this

For this particular episode, my mental calories are done, and they need a rest. And I'm looking right at the twenty five minute mark, so my Pomodoro has just cut in. And it's it's time to call it a day. So I will talk again next week, Jim.

That sounds great, Tyson. I'll talk to you

then. Okay. Bye. Bye.

Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDonnell. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.