What Is Blogging and Should Nurses Be Doing This?

What is blogging? Well, blogging is sharing information on your blog. So what’s a blog?

A blog is basically an online information site that publishes articles or posts, photos, links, video and audio, made by the site creator known as a blogger. I call myself a career blogger who just happens to be a nurse.

Most blogs allow readers to leave comments creating interaction between the blogger and their audience which is what makes blogs different from a static web page.

This interaction, along with the ability to share your published material, makes it worthwhile to invest your time. Especially if you have information, are a business owner or support a non profit organization, you want a blog to spread your message.

Nurses should ABSOLUTELY be blogging and I would like to see more nurses doing this.

Here’s 7 nurse blogging ideas to get you started

1. If your a student nurse why not blog about your experiences, this could greatly help other student nurses especially if you have found an easier way to do something or want to create a community of student nurses who can support each other.

2. Blog about your nursing specialty. Other nurses who want to go into that specialty would love to hear your stories and learn from your experiences. They also would be able to ask questions and interact with you. Great way to build relationships.

3. Maybe you want to be a writer. You can be a freelance writer, non fiction or fiction writer or a nurse who writes for nursing journals or wants to do technical or research writing. Blogging is a great place to start, it will help you to find your voice and display your work so when you do go looking for a writing jobs you have a place to send people to for a sampling of your work.

4. Educate the public on healthcare issues or provide healthcare tips.

5. Promote your nursing business by blogging about your services, the benefits, how to, answering FAQs etc. A must for nurse entrepreneurs today.

6. Start a travel nursing blog for those of you nurses who do travel nursing. This is a hot topic now and other nurses would love to hear how to get started tips, where the jobs are, what are the best agencies to work for and tons more. I like reading travel nursing blogs and if I was 20 years younger this is what I would be doing.

7. Get a movement started! As a nurse you have power and can create change. Be proactive about an issue that is near and dear to your heart and it doesn’t have to be about nursing.

But a word of caution here….you want to make it very clear, if you are talking about healthcare issues or giving advice on management of diseases, you are not a substitute for their primary care physician. You also want to talk in general terms about your experiences and lessons learned, not specifics about patients or their families.

Read my post on “6 Social Media Tips For Nurses” Blogging is part of social media and if you are new to blogging I recommend you read this post or even if you’ve been blogging for a while still read as a refresher. There’s also a very useful book recommendation for you to read written by a nurse for nurses with a whole chapter dedicated to privacy, disclaimers and professional issues when using social media.

So how do you get started blogging?

~Pick a topic.
~Have an objective, meaning what’s the purpose of your blog – do you want to educate, make money from your blog, be a connector. What’s the reason for starting your blog.
~Pick a platform and create an account. You can use blogspot.com or wordpress.com which are free but if you are serious about long term blogging, I highly recommend wordpress.org and purchasing your own domain name and hosting.
~Pick a name for your blog.
~Write an About page and a disclaimer page.
~Start writing high quality content.

That’s it in a nutshell, there’s certainly more involved in each step but I think you get the jest of it.

Blogging is no longer online journaling which is what it started out as way back when. It has evolved into a powerful tool nurses can use to share their knowledge with others around the globe.

Blogs are also a great way to organize your content using categories and tags. There’s also a media library where you can store your photos and a search functionality so others (and you) can easily find what their looking for. If you are a creator of lots of content, blogs can be your content management system.

Another useful reason to have a blog is it can be a place to showcase your videos or power point slides of presentations you’ve done, interviews you’ve been a part of, you can share short reports, white papers, audios. Just endless possibilities for nurses who want to spread their mission to the world.

Your blog can be whatever you envision it to be, that’s the beauty of a blog and it’s why I love blogging!

Get blogging now! 🙂

Tina