Anaks Labs
Article 07

What publishing every month is really for

We sell this, which is the reason to be careful about how it is described. Writing eight posts a month for a clinic is a real service with a real purpose, and the purpose is narrower and slower than the way our industry usually sells it. Here is the version we would want to be told.

Published · Anaks Labs

The pitch you have probably heard

Publish consistently, dominate your local market, own the conversation, become the authority. It is not exactly false, in the way that "exercise more" is not exactly false. It is unfalsifiable, which is a different problem, and it leaves a practice owner with no way to tell after twelve months whether anything was delivered.

So set that aside and take the claim apart into things that are either true or not.

Three things it genuinely does

  • It puts an answer at an address you own

    Every question a patient asks at your desk is currently being answered somewhere. Occasionally that somewhere is a forum, a competitor, a directory or a general health site with an advertisement on it. Publishing the answer on your own domain does not remove the others, but it does mean that a version of it now exists at a location that belongs to you and says your name at the top.

  • It leaves evidence that the practice is currently operating

    A site that has not changed since it was built reads, to anything examining it, exactly like a site belonging to a business that may have closed. That is not a scoring rule anybody publishes; it is a plain observation about what a page with no recent additions communicates. Regular publishing removes the ambiguity as a side effect.

  • It compounds, and only compounds

    The value is never in the post. It is in the accumulation: ninety-six answers after a year, covering the questions your particular practice gets asked, is a categorically different asset from six. Which also means the first few months feel like nothing is happening, because in a real sense nothing is.

Four things it does not do

  • It does not buy you a position

    Not on a search results page, and not inside an assistant's answer, where there is no position to buy in the first place. Anybody who attaches a rank to a content plan is describing a relationship between the two that they cannot demonstrate.

  • It does not work quickly

    We would rather lose a sale to this sentence than win one against it. If a practice needs more patients this quarter, monthly writing is a poor instrument for that and something else should be doing that job.

  • It cannot rescue a page nothing can read

    This is the order-of-operations point and it is the one that costs practices the most money. Publishing onto a site whose text does not reach anything is a great deal of careful work landing in a place where it cannot be picked up. The writing is worth commissioning after that question has been settled, not before, and a vendor who sells you the monthly plan without ever raising it has told you something about the vendor.

  • It does not make the practice better

    Obvious, and worth saying anyway, because the pitch sometimes implies otherwise. It makes an existing practice legible. If the underlying thing patients experience is poor, making more people aware of it faster is not the win it is being sold as.

The attribution problem, said out loud

Here is the part our industry avoids. When a new patient arrives, you generally cannot tell what caused it. They may have read one of your posts. They may have asked an assistant, which drew on something of yours without ever showing them your site. They may have been told about you by a neighbour who read something of yours eight months ago. Every one of those is a return on the work and none of them is traceable.

The honest consequence is that anyone presenting you with a confident figure for what content produced is presenting a model, not a measurement. You should be told which of the two you are looking at, every time. What can be reported truthfully is narrower: what was published, what changed on the site, what moved in the numbers that are actually observable, and what is planned next. That is what a monthly report should contain, and a report that contains more than that is containing something invented.

What is genuinely countable, and what a clinic should decline to collect →

How to judge it after a year

Not by traffic charts, which move for reasons nobody in the arrangement controls. By three questions a practice owner can answer without help: is there now an answer on your own site to every question your front desk gets asked in a week; can you find those answers by searching for them; and did you have to do any of it yourself. Those are checkable, and they are checkable by you.

Questions

  • How long before anything happens?

    Longer than anyone selling it would like to say, and we will not put a number on it, because we have not got an honest one. What we can tell you is what exists and when: a post is on your site from the day it is published, and whether anything ever draws on it is not on a schedule that we or anybody else controls.

  • Will this put my practice at the top of Google?

    Nobody can promise you that, and being promised it is the clearest signal you will ever get about who you are talking to. Positions are decided by companies that take instructions from neither your vendor nor us.

  • Can I not just write them myself?

    You can, and some practices do it very well. The hard part is not the writing. It is producing them every month for two years while also running a clinic, and most practices that begin have stopped by the fourth month — at which point four posts dated two years ago are a worse signal than never having started.

  • Are more posts better?

    Not in any way we would sell you on. A page that answers nothing is not improved by having nine more like it, and the count is not what does the work. What is on the page is.

  • What does the monthly writing cost on its own?

    It is not priced on its own. There is one build charge and one flat monthly rate with everything in it, and both numbers are put in front of you together with the finished site, before anything is signed.

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