What to Blog about????

What should you blog about? Hopefully you are passionate about "something." Maybe its your nursing job caring for the elderly - write about the funny things they discuss, the way life was when they were growing up (living history). Or...maybe you want to improve nursing by...

....educating nurses

....empowering nurses

....supporting nurses

....sharing resources

....Or something completely different. Here are some ideas from our members:

PaleoNurse owns a nutrition business and promotes that by blogging. She writes about system changes in healthcare and encourages changes by establishing a proactive versus reactive healthcare business.

One of our members wants to organize nurses to be patient advocates. Her passion is caring for the whole patient.

Holistic medicine is a huge field and is tailored for the blogger who wants to promote a wellness concept. allnurses hosts a Holistic Nursing forum.

Many hospital systems are advocating for nurse health coaches. Much of this education would provide material for bloggers who are interested in improving overall health of a particular medical system's patients.

Improving provider/patient communications is also an open field for bloggers. How many times have you provided discharge instructions to patients only to have them ask very basic questions? As nurses, communication knowledge is built into our education and we hone it thru years of clinical practice. Here is one thread about using social media to get the word out.

Nurse bloggers talk with one another, have their own conferences where they can network and discuss new ideas and AN also offers blogging tips. One of the more popular threads in that forum is this one that talks about starting to blog/write.

Here are some tips from that forum:

1) Writing articles on what is important to other nurses and not necessary what interest you the most. You can search with google trends or twitter.

2) Learn backlinking well. This means becoming involved on multiple message boards that allow you to put your website address in your signature. The number of high quality websites that link to your site will tell Google where you belong in pecking order when someone does google search. 95% of web traffic comes from being on first page of google for your specific keyword or niche.

3) Social Media - it will be your best friend in getting your blog on the map. Google does not reward social media sites as much as say established community message board or web established web site that is in your niche but it is increasing becoming powerful. Facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc should be springboard to your site. Remember goal is traffic to your site and not just become well known on social media sites.

4) Speaking of niche - you will do much better if you pick a niche and become an expert in it. The sheer number of blogs out there has eliminated the need for broad based blogs. Users are looking for specific well written, intelligent information geared toward their specific need.

So...there you have it - some solid ideas about how to decide what to blog about....now you are ready to get started.