It happens quietly and often without fanfare: the allied health blog that once had so much promise slowly... fizzles. In this episode, I’m diving into the common pitfalls that cause blogs to lose steam (no shame here... I've been there too!) and how you can revive yours with purpose, consistency, and some practical tweaks.

Blogging might feel like a slow burn, but it’s one of the most powerful, cost-effective tools we have in allied health to build trust, show our human-ness, and help the right clients find us. Whether your blog is gathering dust or you’ve never started one, there’s something here for you.

In this episode, I talk about:

Why blogging is still one of the most powerful tools for your practice

I share why blogging continues to be a quiet achiever when it comes to growing your practice. It's cost-effective, builds your visibility, shows off your gorgeous expertise (without shouting), and gently builds trust with both clients and referrers. Whether you're trying to grow your client base, shift into a new service model, or just want to be more “findable” online, a good blog can work hard in the background for you, without needing a big marketing budget.

What causes blogs to fizzle

Let’s be honest, most of us start our blogs with all the good intentions, but somewhere along the way, they lose momentum. I unpack the very normal reasons this happens, like inconsistent posting, writing for the wrong audience, going too broad with topics, or not knowing what to do after you hit publish. No guilt here... just a chance to notice what’s getting in the way and what small changes could make blogging feel more doable (and maybe even fun) again.

Key takeaways and reflections:

• Blogs fizzle out for very normal reasons—you're not alone.
• Think smaller: narrow topics are more digestible and helpful.
• Write like a human, not like a textbook (ditch the jargon).
• Frequency matters, but consistency matters more.
• You don’t have to do it all solo—get help with writing, uploading, or promotion.
• A good blog builds trust, grows your reach, and gives your marketing some much-needed legs.

If you’re feeling the nudge to dust off your blog or finally start one, I’ve got you. Inside my membership, we just ran a booster shot week on starting a blog... where we explored purpose, ideal readers, picked topics, and wrote our first blog post together. If you’re craving structure, encouragement, and community around running your practice, come and join us.

Thanks for being here with me, I'm incredibly grateful you're part of this community. If you found this episode helpful, please send it to a friend who might need the gentle nudge too.

Foreign welcome to My Good Allied Health Practice, the podcast for allied health business owners who are looking to bring smart and heart together on their journey.

On the podcast, I'll cover things about being vulnerable and brave, pivoting failures, good wins, things that work, things that don't work.

And I'll talk with other practice owners who are doing good in their journeys.

I'm Amy Geach, practice owner and mum, and I'm here because I believe in you.

So let's go forward on this journey together.

Hello and welcome back to the podcast.

Hi, I'm Amy Gatesh and today I want to talk to you about something that I see a lot.

I don't think many people talk about it actually.

I don't hear people bringing it up in conversation.

Nobody talks about it in mentoring, but I see it.

I see it all the time.

And it is the fizzling out of an allied health blog.

Okay, so stay with me because blogging can actually be one of the most powerful, cost effective ways to grow your practice.

It really is.

I'm going to repeat that because it's this magical marketing tool that can work in the background for you.

And so it is one of the most powerful, cost effective ways to grow your practice.

It helps you showcase your expertise if that's something that you are, you are wanting to really get out there and promote yourself.

And it's one of the most powerful ways to build trust with clients and referrers.

Now, blogging is really ideal for an allied health practice, but it's also really ideal for any of you listening in that are wanting to pivot a little bit.

Maybe you've got an online idea you want to move into or a different kind of business model that you want to launch with different client base.

Blogging can be really helpful across all sorts of different business models and when you're trying to attract all sorts of different clients.

So it's not just for the standard allied health clinic.

Okay, here's what happens though is blogs often fizzle out.

I love that word fizzle out.

And I see this happen all the time.

And as I mentioned, people don't talk about it.

It's almost like, oh, I really don't want to put my head up and say my blog has just kind of lost its legs and it is just sitting there.

I haven't put any attention into it.

I started with great enthusiasm and nothing happening.

People don't want to talk about that, but I'm going to talk about it today.

Okay, so how does this even happen in the first place?

I Get it?

It's happened to me before.

That's why I know I can talk about it.

So someone starts with really great enthusiasm.

They post a couple of blogs, maybe even get excited because people are viewing it, people are liking it, it's exciting.

And then tumbleweeds.

So in today's episode, I want to talk to you about why your blog might have fizzled out, what went wrong, and I'm going to give you a couple of tips on how to bring it back to life.

Okay, so let's dive in.

Firstly, before I start talking about the reasons it might have fizzled, let's just reconnect with why it's important, because you're only going to it back from its moment of tumbleweeds if you can really connect to the importance of it.

So I want you to just take a moment and have a think about if you've got a blog already, why you started it in the first place.

And for those of you who don't have a blog yet, listen in too, because as I said, it's one of the most magical marketing tools that we can have in allied health.

And it's something I think really worth considering adding to your practice if you don't already have a blog.

So let's dig in and think about how it can be helpful.

First of all, blogging improves your SEO.

Now, SEO is your search engine optimization.

And what this means, in a nutshell, is it helps people find you, your practice, your services when they're googling.

So if they're googling things like how to manage thumb arthritis, or tips for helping my child get ready for school, if you've got a good blog that answers the challenges, the questions of your ideal client, then people are more likely to find you when they are Googling because your blog is helping that search engine be able to find your page.

The other thing I love about blogging is it's this beautiful way of showcasing your expertise, but also not just your expertise, like just you as a beautiful person, you as this amazing guru in your field, with your gorgeous brand and personality, you can really shine in a blog.

People can see you as knowledgeable, approachable, trustworthy, human.

It also creates content that you can repurpose.

So if you've ever had days where you're like, I don't really know what to put on social media, oh, I want to get a newsletter started, or I've already got a newsletter started, what are we going to write in it?

The blog can really help give you a content that you can recycle and repurpose in lots of different ways and it builds confidence in choosing you.

Now, if you listen to my recent podcast episode with Belinda Weaver, we talked all about being choosable for your ideal clients and the blog can help with that.

When a new client or a referrer sees sees helpful human professional people writing blogs on your website, they're reassured.

Okay, so we know why they're helpful.

You really need to dig into the purpose of your blog.

What do you want to get out of it?

Do you want to use it for growth?

Do you want it to increase brand awareness?

Do you want to showcase your expertise?

Let's get into it.

Dig into that.

Take a moment to just think about that, even pause a podcast and sit and have a cup of tea and really think about what is the purpose for me of blog writing?

What do I want to get out of it?

What am I hoping to achieve?

Okay, here are some of the pitfalls that can happen.

The first one I'm going to share quite a few.

The first one is inconsistent posting.

And this I see really frequently.

So you are not alone.

If this is you, I've done it before too.

It's very, very easy to fall into this.

We start strong and then we tend to drop off after a few months.

Now, this is not a massive deal breaker.

It's not really bad.

So don't stress about it or beat yourself up about it.

The thing to be mindful of though is if you've abandoned your blog and the posts start to look like they're old, then that can almost send a message that you're not as relevant, perhaps as you used to be.

So you can repost blogs if you haven't.

If you started a blog a couple of years ago and nothing since, you can start again.

You can take those blog posts, you can have a little, give them a little tweak, repost them, start again, and you can then go and delete the old ones if you want to.

But you can repost and recycle.

And I, as I said, I see this often, people might post three blogs in January and then nothing for 18 months.

And potential clients might kind of wonder where you've gone.

So start to re get into the habit of just consistent posting.

Make that a goal for yourself.

And if you don't feel like going back and rejoicing the blogs that you've had, or you want to just leave them as they are, which is completely fine, that's also a very good option.

Just think, what's my next blog that I could add and how often can I add that for myself?

Okay, the next one is when people write for themselves, then not really writing for their ideal reader or their ideal client.

And I see blogs all the time full of jargon, or focusing only really on the language that you might use in your practice or in your professional world, but not really using language that resonates with how your clients might describe something or talk about something.

And so one of the golden questions is, what does my ideal client want to know?

Dig into that and lean into that.

So I'll give you an example.

If you're an OT and you're writing a blog, and your ideal reader for that blog are parents of school aged children and you write a really long technical post about sensory integration theory that might be great for other OTs, but the parent reading it might be completely lost or it's not really resonating with them because their challenges have helping their child at home.

So they're seeking out just practical tips for helping their child at home.

And then reading a big technical post on sensory integration is perhaps not going to be what's helpful for them.

So it's really important you lean into who your ideal client is, the language they use, and write the blog accordingly.

The next one is people go too big on a topic, right?

They go too broad.

And this is a, this is something I see all the time in Allied health as well.

So we have one massive blog.

I'll give you an example.

If I, in my practice, if I wrote a blog on thumb arthritis, just one blog topic on thumb arthritis, instead of breaking it down into five smaller, more helpful posts, then I can lose people really easily.

When you go too broad, first of all, you run out of ideas faster for blog topics, but readers are likely to not finish the post or not really get a lot out of it because it's too general, it's not specific enough.

There's not enough specific tips or help or knowledge in there that they can find useful.

And sometimes the blog can become either too short and as I mentioned, general in nature, or too long and just a big vomit of information for people.

So rather than go too big, try and break it down into smaller components.

So for example, if you wanted to write a blog on like handwriting, messy handwriting for children, you could break that down and you could have why these pencil grips don't fix messy handwriting.

What you can talk to your child's teacher about in regards to messy handwriting, break it down into different, smaller topics rather than having one big one.

Okay, the next one is being Too salesy.

So this is where the value of the blog kind of dies a bit.

And you've spent too much emphasis on just talking about how great your service is and what you do and listing all the different ways that you can help people and how to book in.

And this is who we are and about us and all of that.

And every blog post becomes quite similar and really you're just, it just feels like an ad really, which is not what it's supposed to be about.

So when that happens, clients will tune out.

The blogs should educate, they should provide help and value and build trust first.

If you can do that, your blog will be so much more successful than if you are just treating it like an advertisement.

Number five.

So we've done 1, 2, 3, 4.

Number five is poor readability.

This is huge for me.

Huge for me.

People are going to scan a blog and that's okay.

Not everybody has time to read every word of your blog.

That's okay, right?

At least there's eyes on it and they're scanning through and picking out the bits that are helpful for them.

If you've got walls of text, no headings, no images, it's harder to read.

It's harder for people to kind of grab the good stuff that's helpful for them.

People will naturally skim through.

So you need subheadings, dot points, shorter paragraphs.

Think about your ideal client.

If your ideal client is a parent of school aged children, my goodness, I've been a parent of school aged children.

I've still got two out of my three children at school at the moment.

And we're limited with time.

I don't have time to read a thesis.

So I'm not saying make your blogs so short that there's no value in them, but I want you to thinking about how you can make it easily readable and scannable for people.

Okay?

Once you've got your blog post written, one of the other things that happens is I see people write it, they put it on their website, then think, yep, good job done and that's it, right?

And they just kind of hope people will magically find it.

But the spoiler alert is they won't, they won't find it buried in your website.

You need to be actively sharing it.

So share it in your newsletter, share it on social media, share it in community groups, share it in your clinic with a poster, for example, that has a QR code on it.

Tell people about it, put it in your email signature.

Okay?

The next one is when you don't put Any calls to action?

So ending a blog with just kind of thanks for reading, like, it's fine and it's okay, but you're missing out on an opportunity to help your ideal clients know what to do next and take the next micro step forward for themselves.

And so it could be booking a call with you, it could be reading another blog post to get more information.

It could be downloading a guide, it could be filling out a referral form, it could be reflecting on something for themselves.

Whatever that next step is that feels logical for your reader, pop it in there.

It's called a call to action, and it's helping people know what is the next step to do.

And it can be something subtle like, read this next blog if you think there's another micro step needed for people.

Or you can go straight to book an appointment, and that's completely fine.

You can be quite direct with your call to action, and that can be really helpful for your reader.

You don't want them to get to the end and go, oh, yeah, Kev, I've just read all about trigger finger.

I think I've got a trigger finger, but what do I do now?

I'm not quite sure what to do.

Yeah, okay.

I might just go and Google what else I can do.

Because you might have missed in your blog about trigger finger, what someone should do if they think they've got a trigger finger.

Like, what is the next step?

That's the call to action.

Okay, the next one that can mean your blog can fizzle out is if you're not checking your stats because then you don't know what's working.

So maybe your blog on helping kids with pencil grip is getting loads of traffic, but you didn't notice and you never promoted it again.

Or you then went and wrote lots of blogs about toilet training and they're not getting any hits and they're not popular.

I'm not saying that's going to be the case, by the way.

That's just an example.

So maybe pencil grips is the hot topic and people want more of that.

So if you look at your stats, you'll be able to see what's working and what's not working.

Okay, so there's some of the reasons a blog can fizzle out.

How do we bring it back from the fizzle?

Okay, I just want to share a couple of things with you.

First of all, if you've already got a blog, audit what you've got.

Look at your existing posts, which ones got the most views or engagement.

Could you refresh Them with updated info or new images or a stronger call to action.

Next one is pick a rhythm that you can sustain.

So when I'm talking about a rhythm, I mean how frequently you're going to be posting on your blog monthly is often realistic for allied health practices fortnightly.

Yep.

If you've got the time, or if you've got a team that can help, pick something that is going to work for you that you can maintain going forward.

One of my next tips is to batch the content, Write two or three blogs at once because then you can kind of get into the zone and then they're done, tick the box and move on.

It's not kind of on your mind all the time.

I really want you to lean into client frequently asked questions because every time a client asks a question, that is a potential blog topic.

Right.

So you really be listening into your clients about what are they asking, what are their challenges, what solutions are they hoping for?

Because that is what you can definitely be writing about on your blog.

My next tip is to promote more than once.

Like once is just not enough.

It is not enough.

So share the same blog in different ways on different platforms over weeks and months.

If you've done a blog post recently, there's nothing wrong with resharing that in a month's time, in three months time, in six months time, that is completely fine.

The more you can do that, the more the better.

And then the other thing I just want to remind you of is you don't have to do all the steps all by yourself.

You can delegate.

So a team member might help you draft a blog.

An admin person might help you put it onto your website.

A virtual assistant might help you track some stats.

So there's lots of things that people might be able to do to help you maintain a blog once you get it started.

There you have it.

9 reasons your blog might have fizzled and some practical ways to get it back on track now.

Blogging can feel like a slow burn.

And it is.

It's a cumulative effect, but a powerful effect.

And the payoff, I think can be really big.

More visibility, more credibility.

So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I really need to get my blog going again, then you'd love what I've just done inside my membership.

We have just had a week of booster shot, which we called starting a blog.

And it was a mini course where members could work through their purpose, their ideal reader, choose their topics, write their first blog and promote it, and then learn tips on how to keep it alive.

If you want that kind of support and structure and accountability, come and join me inside the membership.

I would love to help you not just start a blog, but keep it alive and thriving and also help you with all the other parts of running practice.

Thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you for being here.

I am incredibly grateful.

If you have a friend that would find this helpful, please go ahead and share it with them too.

You can learn more about me and how to be part of my Allied Health Connection community over at theconnectionco.com au.