Marcia E. Brubeck: Small Business Blog of the Day

Today's blog represents a segment of the business world we don't see enough of: professionals. Doctors, attorneys, architects, etc., would all benefit from writing a blog in the following ways:

   
• increased search engine traffic to their firm.
   
• reinforcement to clients that the professional is an expert in their field.
   
• creating customer service opportunities by allowing comments to their posts and responding to questions customers have.

Two examples we've already reviewed include Ernie the Attorney back in May, and recently, Dr. Dan Beatty, veterinarian. Today's blog looks at psychotherapy.

What it is
The blog for Marcia E. Brubeck covers psychotherapy and advocacy to obtain healthcare for mental illness. Marcia has offices in the Hartford, Connecticut area.

Features
Articles suggesting supportive strategies towards children's mental well-being permeate this blog showing Marcia's area of expertise. Mixed in with these posts are articles covering general mental health advice as well as lengthy reviews of books in the mental health category.

Favorite Post
Helping Your Child Deal with New Experiences and Major Changes explores things parents can do to diminish the anxiety felt with children during experiences like moving to a new school or their first airplane trip:

"The more your child understands about what will be involved, the more prepared he or she will feel. Hands-on activities stay in memory the best, and pictures are more memorable than spoken words."

Further Comments
This is a fairly cerebral blog, which mostly makes sense considering the subject matter and the author. The content is well-written, well-researched, and totally committed to the overall subject the blog is portraying.

However, the posts are consistently long. Too long. The shortest post that is currently residing on the home page is over 500 words long. That's a two page article if you print it out. Nothing but long articles on a blog is extremely exhausting to read.

There are two good solutions for having long articles. The first solution is simply to write a larger number of posts with varying lengths. Don't be afraid to write a post that's 30 words long that is simply a link to someone else's article or blog post on another website. If it fits your readership, they will appreciate being told about the article.

The second solution is to take the long posts and simply break them up into shorter ones with a "Part 1," "Part 2" approach. One main reason to avoid long posts is because it is at least as exhausting to write as it is to read. This is not a motivator for continuing your blog for more than a couple of months. The blog should be worked on fairly effortlessly and frequently as opposed to thoroughly but seldom. So far, Marcia has done a good job keeping the post count/week up, but I don't see this continuing with the length of posts that are currently being written. If Marcia throws in some 50-100 word posts, she will be doing both herself and her readership a favor.

On the formatting side of things, the blog needs 1) a month-by-month archive navigation to find older posts, 2) photos in the posts, and 3) a "permalink" link in the footer of each post. The permalink is critical as it allows other bloggers to link directly to that specific article, rather than just the home page of the blog. Marcia is using Typepad as her blogging format, so adding a permalink and the month-by-month archive is simply checking two boxes in the design section of the blog's administrator section.

Overall, this blog has a very good start and Marcia clearly seems committed to get the most out of the marketing opportunities a blog presents to professionals.

Tags: marcia brubeck, psychotherapy, hartford, hartford ct, hartford connecticut, childhood anxiety