Healthy as a Dog: Small Business Blog of the Day

Here's a confession. It was no accident that the last blog I featured was about kitty litter and today's blog is about a veterinarian. We've just added two new additions to the family, a brother and sister of the feline persuasion (Tubbs and Argine). Today was their first visit to the vet which they are still recovering from. Apparently the same sized thermometer that is used for my 7-week old kittens is also the one used for a doberman. Yikes!

What it is
Healthy as a Dog  and The Happy Healthy Horse are the blogs for holistic veterinarian Dr. Dan Beatty from Crown Point, Indiana. Dr. Dan's main website is e-Vet Clinic.

Features
Education of holistic types of medicine for horses and dogs, posts about new products the doctor recommends, professionally designed, extremely clear navigation.

Favorite Post
Border Collie Puppy contains great photos. It's unclear whether this puppy is a patient, or part of Dr. Dan's family, but it hardly makes a difference in the creative impact of the blog.

"She is very patient as you can see. She will make a great herding dog!"

Further Comments
The best part about this blog is the clean layout and very easy navigation to get to a biography of Dr. Dan, the main website about his practice, making appointments to see him, and searching the site. On the down side, navigation to older stories is a bit weird with a slider at the top of the page that slides right to left instead of left to right (backwards). I've never seen a slider like this before and the fact that it's opposite the conventional direction is very strange.

Also, this appears to be the only way to get to older stories as there is no archive by month section. That is a bit annoying, but overall, I really like the layout of this blog.

The dog blog is thin on posts, but the horse blog has been updated more recently. Each blog needs more posts to build an audience, I would suggest at least two per week. The reason is that so many readers use RSS syndication to read people's blogs and many of these RSS programs alert readers when a blog hasn't been posted to in a number of days. If you don't post regularly, you may find that your readership will drop off whenever you have an extended period with no posts.

Google ads appear prominently on this blog. While these ads are fantastic sources of income for very popular blogs (getting 10,000+ hits a week), they are not well-suited to your small business blog. Why? It's highly unlikely you will generate enough traffic to make more than $10 a week on your blog, at least in the first year or so. Instead of these ads, you could promote the services and products of your own company in those spaces, a practice that will probably add up more value in profits as keeping your blog carefully branded. Google will send people to other websites (perhaps your competitors), diluting your message and cluttering your blog's design.

Finally, more photos. The post about the border collie with its several photos leapt out of the computer screen compared to other posts. This post had some of the fewest words in it, but it's the one I stopped to read every word of.

Tags: veterinarian, animal hospital, Dr. Dan Beatty, Dr. Daniel Beatty, Dr. Dan, Dan Beatty, Daniel Beatty, horse blog, dog blog, horses, dogs, crown point indiana, crown point in, border collie, holistic veterinarian, chiropractor vet, chiropractor veterinarian, holistic vet, vet

Comments

[Molly Brown]

Character Blog: Hey easy big fella! Not everyone blogs to make money! Some just blog for distracting or it beats watching TV! I do understand what your saying however, but as for me....who cares!! Its for fun! Life's to short! Hey...do you have a dog???? I bet not!