The Power of Blogging to Reach & Educate Clients
In this session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit, I sat down with Melanie Ziltener, a talented copywriter and content strategist, to talk about the power of blogging for health and wellness practitioners. Melanie shared how blogging is a game-changer for building trust, educating clients, and boosting SEO—especially for practitioners who rely on local search traffic. She explained how blogs can answer common client questions, reflect your expertise, and make a lasting impression. We covered practical tips on structuring posts, creating skimmable content, crafting calls to action, and promoting blogs so they reach the right people. Melanie also highlighted the importance of mapping out your client journey to align your blog content with each stage of their experience. For those who feel overwhelmed by blogging, she offers services to write your posts or help you create a clear plan so the process feels simple and sustainable. It was such a helpful conversation for anyone ready to harness blogging to elevate their practice!
Takeaways
Blogging is essential for health and wellness practitioners to build trust, educate clients, and boost local SEO.
Use blog content to answer common client questions and reflect the language your audience uses.
Structuring blog posts with skimmable headings and short paragraphs makes them easier to read and more effective for SEO.
Craft engaging calls to action that highlight the benefits of reaching out or taking the next step with your business.
Promote blog posts multiple times, repurpose content, and integrate blogs into client resources like emails and follow-ups.
Mapping the client journey helps you identify what content is most helpful at each stage of their experience.
Measure blog success with tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to refine your strategy and optimize content.
Consistency is more important than frequency—choose a blogging schedule that you can sustain while delivering quality content.
Outsourcing blog writing or content strategy can save time and ensure your messaging resonates with your audience.
Meet the Speaker: Melanie Ziltener
Mel is a skilled copywriter and content strategist who knows the right words have the power to heal, connect, and inspire your audience to move forward. She helps businesses create content that not only ranks in search engines but also resonates deeply with the people it’s meant to serve.
Mel's clients love her ability to transform complex ideas into clear, relatable messages that build trust and understanding. Her approach is rooted in making your content marketing simple and sustainable while ensuring every piece of content reflects who you are and what you value.
Transcript
Timestamps
[00:01:29] Melanie’s journey to becoming a copywriter and love for blogging
[00:03:10] Why blogging is critical for SEO and building trust in health and wellness
[00:04:21] Finding topics: answering client questions and incorporating keywords
[00:07:22] Structuring blog posts with a framework for clarity and efficiency
[00:08:37] Common formats: listicles, questions, and skimmable headings
[00:09:57] Formatting tips: headers, SEO best practices, and digestible content
[00:10:28] Crafting effective calls to action to encourage client engagement
[00:13:11] Strategies for promoting and repurposing blog posts
[00:14:31] Mapping the client journey to guide blog content creation
[00:16:44] Measuring blog success with Google Analytics and Search Console
[00:19:26] Blogging frequency: prioritizing consistency and quality
[00:20:17] Outsourcing blog writing or strategy to streamline content creation
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: You are listening to the next session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit. Make sure to listen along and then go to the Elevate Your practice.co website to follow up with the speakers and get access to the amazing resources they have shared. And don't forget, you can save 30% on your first three months of Practice Better at practicebetter.io, and use the discount code LATS 30. I hope you enjoy this session.
[00:00:30] Mhm.
Introduction to Melanie Ziltener
[00:00:37] Samantha Mabe: In this session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit, I am talking with Melanie Ziltener about the power of blogging to reach and educate clients. Mel is a skilled copywriter and content strategist who knows the right words have the power to heal, connect, and inspire your audience to move forward. She helps businesses create content that not only ranks in search engines, but also resonates deeply with the people it's meant to serve.
[00:01:03] Mel's clients love her ability to transform complex ideas into clear, relatable messages that build trust and understanding. Her approach is rooted in making your content marketing simple and sustainable while ensuring every piece of content reflects who you are and what you value. You can connect with Mel on her website, tripodcopy. com or on Instagram at melthewordnerd.
[00:01:25] Thanks so much for joining me, Mel.
[00:01:27] Melanie Ziltener: Yeah, I'm really excited to be here.
Melanie's Journey into Blogging
[00:01:29] Samantha Mabe: Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do and especially how you got into helping people with blogs?
[00:01:35] Melanie Ziltener: I love blogs. I said before we hit record, blogging is my one true love. So I'm excited to talk about it. I'm a copywriter and content strategist, so what that means is that I am writing the words online that make you all look good, whether that's Your website copy, your blogs, email marketing, that sort of thing. And the way I got into it was by accident. I've always loved writing and then when my son was born, I didn't want to go back to a nine to five and I'm like, what do I like to do? And what am I good at? And immediately the people around me were like, you're a writer. That's why we're always, Mel, what should I say in this email? Mel, what should I? So I'm like, okay, what can I do with that? And I fell in love with this. I learned everything I could about it. And I love the right brain left brain side of it where it's the creativity and the magic of it with the technical with the SEO data analytics side of it.
The Importance of Blogging for SEO
[00:02:33] Samantha Mabe: I was telling you that I tell all of my clients, they want SEO. A lot of them are local and so they want to show up on search results. That's how they're going to get a lot of their clients. And they don't want to hear that blogging is the way to do that, but that really is the best solution. And that brings me to my first point: why is blogging the best solution for all of these things. And why is it so important, especially for people in the health and wellness space who are seeing a lot of local clients?
[00:03:10] Melanie Ziltener: It's important for everything. Especially for wellness practitioners, especially for people that are dealing with other people's health, because we think of what is so important to us- on the client side, it is our health, it is our energy. And so for every business, you want to build trust with your audience, but when you're dealing with this very important part of life, it's that much more important to build trust. And you can't build trust from your quippy headline on your website or from that reel you put up. It has to be deeper.
[00:03:42] And we think about how Google looks at a site's trustworthiness. It's looking at things like your experience and your expertise and your authority and it's putting that together. The acronym they use is EEAT, two E's A T.
[00:03:57] You need to go deeper into what you do. You need to really talk more about it or write more about it to make that impact. And then on the local side, getting those keywords of, massage therapists near me, therapists near me is talking about that more often, that okay, this is what I do and this is where I do it. That will get Google mapping you where you need to be.
Creating Effective Blog Content
[00:04:21] Samantha Mabe: When I talk to people about this, I think their resistance to blogging is that it takes a lot of time. What I think is so interesting, because in this session of the summit, we're talking about client experience. And as somebody who has been a client, even if I don't necessarily need answers to what is my health problem? I'm still going to go look at your blog because I want to know, can you tell me what the experience is going to be like, can I get to know you, what does it look like when I walk into your office, all of those kinds of expectation things.
[00:04:55] So how do we do that with blogging? How do we find the things that we want to talk about, that are within our expertise, that help with the SEO piece, but that also serve people who are going to become clients or maybe even who are clients already and are coming to see us?
[00:05:17] Melanie Ziltener: What's funny is that there's this misnomer that blogging is separate from the rest of your business and there's so many things you're already doing. That if you just write it down, there's your blog right there. You know what I mean? You're having these conversations. You have all the information in your brain that you're already doing. So it's not separate. And the things that your clients are going to be Googling, those great keywords are already things that, you know, and they're the questions you're asking in the language that you're already hearing it. Your audience isn't Googling some technical jibber jabber. They're saying like, how can I get better sleep? What should I bring to my first appointment?
[00:06:00] And there's a lot of great tools out there. I personally like Uber suggest it's a pretty robust solution for a low ticket price that can help you search for those keywords that can help you look at what are the things that your site is already getting traffic from, and you can build from there.
[00:06:16] Samantha Mabe: I had someone asking me what they should blog about. And I said, the first thing that I tell people to do is: what are the questions somebody asks you when they get on the phone with you to schedule their appointment? Those are easy things that you can cover in a blog post, because clearly people want those questions. And then just think about what are the steps that we need to take in order to know what you do, know what it's going to be like.
[00:06:46] I think we try to stuff so much into the copy of our websites, especially people who have all of this expertise and this medical knowledge, degrees and certifications. We want to put that all out there, but if it's on the copy of your homepage, no one's going to read it. It's when we can break it up into blog posts that it's actually going to get traffic and it's going to help people because it can be a lot more specific.
[00:07:10] Melanie Ziltener: There's a lot to say about things being digestible. You know what I mean? I know people use the analogy of like, when you are thirsty, you have a glass of water, you don't have a fire hose. Give people what they need when they need it.
Structuring and Formatting Blog Posts
[00:07:22] Samantha Mabe: So can we talk about if you come up with an idea for a blog post, how do you write one that's going to be effective and make sure you're hitting all those things you actually need?
[00:07:33] Melanie Ziltener: I love writing a framework first. Having that kind of just a rough, what do I want to cover? What are the main points? And having some sort of structure to fill in afterwards. It feels smoother. It feels okay, I've already started. Now I can really just fill in and it feels more manageable.
[00:07:53] I also think people put too much pressure on their first draft. The whole point of your first draft is to exist. That's it. It doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be good. The grammar can suck. It's fine. Just have something down because writing is a lot less about writing than it is about editing. Research is, probably 30, 40 percent writing is 20 and then editing is another 40, right? Just get something down and you can edit it.
[00:08:22] Samantha Mabe: Do you have a framework that you find works well for people if they're thinking, okay, how do I even start? What should a blog post look? Should it be one paragraph? Should it be a whole term paper?
[00:08:37] Melanie Ziltener: And I think that's another misconception. Cause some people with SEO are like, Oh, the longer the post, the better it will do. And that's not always true. I have had 500 words do exceptionally well because it's hitting the keyword that people are searching and It's doing well, so don't feel like you have to write your thesis because you don't.
[00:08:57] There's like some formats that you can do where it's like a listicle where it's ten things and those are your headings, right? You can do something where it runs through something in chronological order. You can organize it that way. Or just top questions about this.
[00:09:14] Questions are great headings because people don't read online. They skim, right? When your headings are capturing someone's interest, then they'll read what it says underneath. But you want to make it skimmable. And even with paragraphs, like two, three sentences to a paragraph tops, right? You want to have that nice breaking up the points.
[00:09:35] Samantha Mabe: And for anybody who's actually in there doing the blog posts, the title of your post is going to be your heading one. That should be in your settings already. And then your big sections are going to be heading two, and then you might have a heading three underneath that if you're breaking it up. But do not just assume that if you bold it, that it's a heading, like you actually have to go in and do the formatting.
[00:09:57] Melanie Ziltener: Very good point. And that's on the SEO side where that's where Google it's going to crawl your headings.
[00:10:01] Samantha Mabe: I love the idea of The top questions about such and such service or any of that, because you're not answering them one by one in these really short blog posts, but they don't have to be super in depth answers either because you're putting them all in one place.
[00:10:18] Melanie Ziltener: And the point is to get people to reach out to you also, so it's like enough for them to feel good. And then when you speak to them, you can answer the whole a to z if you want.
[00:10:28] Samantha Mabe: Another question I get a lot is what do I do if I write a blog post to then have them actually reach out? How do I set up a call to action that makes sense on a post?
[00:10:38] Melanie Ziltener: I like to have two call to actions in a blog post one closer to the top where they might not read the whole thing, right? They might get through your intro and be like, Yes, this is the person I need to talk to. I don't want to scroll down. Don't make them. It's extra work, so having that up in your intro is great. And then having your call to action be a good thing. If you make it sound like work to reach out to you, nobody wants to work. Nobody wants to put all this effort into it, right? So instead of click here to download my free guide, that's a chore. Whereas, get started on your journey to better health, that's ooh, I'm getting something, right? Everybody wants to know what's in it for me, so make it really clear What's in it for you?
[00:11:24] Samantha Mabe: Do you have a recommendation for should you share your freebie? Should you share your service? Does it just depend on the content of the post?
[00:11:33] Melanie Ziltener: It depends on the content. And I hate questions where it's it depends. It depends on the post. Looking at your content, it's thinking about who the reader is most likely going to be. So if it's most likely going to be somebody that is brand new to your world, it might feel too soon to ask them to connect with you. It might feel like asking somebody to move in with you on the first date. You know what I mean? Where it's like, Whoa, we're not there yet. Whereas a freebie might be better to be like, now you get to know me a little bit better and then we can, we'll get there, but not today.
[00:12:06] Samantha Mabe: And what about sharing related posts, do you have any suggestions for that piece? A lot of times people see at the bottom of posts, like here, read these other ones, what do we do there?
[00:12:18] Melanie Ziltener: So you can do that there, but you can also have it in the content of your post as just a little aside, oh, by the way, I actually talked about this over here if you're interested. And that can be a really good on the email side of your content. Being like, Hey, I have a bunch of stuff on this one topic. Here's a compilation. Here's a greatest hits about this topic.
[00:12:39] But I would do no more than three. I like things in threes. Our brain seems to do best with threes. It shouldn't compete with your call to action either. It shouldn't be like download my free guide, but then also read this blog post, but then also book a call.
[00:12:51] Samantha Mabe: You're just giving somebody a here, if you want to learn more or like you had a specific offshoot of this question, here's where you can find that. And Google likes when you tell it how everything is connected, so there's a benefit for that part too.
[00:13:05] Melanie Ziltener: We forget that the www is a world wide web, like it's supposed to be webby and interconnected.
Promoting and Sharing Your Blog
[00:13:11] Samantha Mabe: Do you have strategies for people who are writing these blog posts and need to promote them and share them to make sure they get in front of the right people?
[00:13:20] Melanie Ziltener: Yeah, I think sometimes what happens is people write a blog post and they're like, Hey, I wrote a blog post and then they never talk about it again. Keep talking about it, maybe not back to back, but go back to it. The information is still good and take different points from it because we're all attracted by different things. I love stories, right? So somebody is going to be more attracted to the story that you're telling. Somebody might be more into the data of, here's why this is so effective. But just giving a little bit, enough to make somebody interested and being like, Hey, if you want to learn more, there's the whole thing. But just don't just post once and be like, why is nobody looking at this? Like we're content overload. Not everybody's going to get it the first time.
[00:14:04] Samantha Mabe: That leads me into my next question of like, how do we, integrate this blog that we've written with the resources that we're sharing with our clients, with our email list, how do we use the content we're writing to educate and prepare and all of that piece to really make our whole business benefit from what we're doing?
[00:14:31] Melanie Ziltener: Look at your clients entire journey. Map it out, like actually write it down, pen to paper, what does it look like when somebody doesn't even know they have a problem? What does it look like when they realize they have a problem and are choosing? What are the solutions they're choosing between? When are they meeting with you? What does it look like to work with you? Map it all out and be like, okay, what does somebody need to know at each step of this journey and have it written down and then it's easier to work into your processes.
[00:15:00] Somebody just met with me and I'm going to write my follow up email and here's what I'm going to send them with that. We're finished working together. Here's what I'm going to send them with that. But having that whole journey mapped out, because I think it's one of those things that when you're in your business, you know what it looks like, but you'd never look at it as an entire process. Having that whole journey mapped out, and then saying, okay, what is helpful here and here, at each step, and then having the blogs to go with it, and then it's all cohesive and then you can work with it.
[00:15:33] Samantha Mabe: When I went to go see my naturopath and I learned that I have a sensitivity to potatoes, which are in everything and ridiculously hard to get out of the food that you eat. And so they gave me a printed out resource of here's all the foods you need to avoid. And I thought if this was just a blog post, they could email it to me in the follow up email. And then they would get the people who found this out elsewhere or thought maybe they were sensitive to potatoes, get that SEO piece that could then lead them to bringing people in.
[00:16:09] Don't be afraid to put some of the resources onto your blog and then just link to them. Make sure they're accessible to the people As they're going through the process and maybe that's like an individual resource you have to pull up based on what they need maybe it's what to expect at your first appointment, but it's actually a blog post that you're sending them to instead of we just wrote it all out in this email that you now have to read and keep in your inbox.
[00:16:34] Melanie Ziltener: It builds trust at those different points of your relationship, right? Because it says Hey, I'm a professional. I've done this before. I know the questions you were going to ask and I've already got it covered. Don't worry.
Measuring Blog Effectiveness
[00:16:44] Samantha Mabe: How do you tell people to measure the effectiveness of their blog posts, if they're working, what they should be writing more of, that piece of analytics?
[00:16:59] Melanie Ziltener: So if you don't have your Google Analytics set up yet, have your Google Analytics set up. So there's two separate parts of it. It's your Google Analytics and then Google Search Console. Those are two different sites. So you want to have both of those because the Google analytics will tell you how you're getting traffic to your site, right? So if your organic traffic is doing well, that will mean that your SEO is doing well.
[00:17:22] The search console will tell you what people are searching that leads them to you. And that is so cool because sometimes I'll write something on a certain keyword and I think this is what people are searching for, but then when I go to the console, it's oh, it's a different question that they're asking and it's leading them to this blog post. So I might want to answer that question more fully within the blog post. I might want to go back and edit it and say, okay, this is actually what people are looking for. I didn't realize that I didn't know what I didn't know. And now that I know it, I can better optimize it.
[00:17:55] So those two things, your analytics and your search console, for sure. And asking clients when they meet you Hey, how did you find me? How did we get here?
[00:18:04] Samantha Mabe: I always think it's interesting to go into the analytics and if you are getting search traffic, which is most people's goal, you're going to have blog posts that are some of the most visited pages on your site and it's always interesting to see which ones those are. And then what keywords are bringing people to your site.
[00:18:23] Going back to creating things through That makes sense for your clients, , the more you think about your client journey, like you mentioned, and you're writing stuff that follows them before they figure out what the problem is, once they know what the problem is and they're searching for the right person, and then once they're in the process of working with you, that's going to lead people back because you're addressing content to the concerns of the people you work with.
[00:18:49] Melanie Ziltener: And It's okay for things to change. If you're newer in business your scope might be broader and then you might be like, Oh, I'm going to hone in and now I have to update my content to reflect that. And that's okay. That's part of it. So don't think that like a blog post is posted. It's published and now it is like etched in stone and nobody can ever touch it again. It's okay for things to change.
[00:19:13] Samantha Mabe: Yeah. And especially in the health and wellness field, research changes and all of that so there are going to be times when you have to make updates and that's fine. Just go in, update what you need to, google will figure itself out.
[00:19:26] Do you have suggestions for How often somebody needs to blog?
[00:19:32] Melanie Ziltener: It's one of those things: what you put in is what you get out. And it's more important to be regular and sustainable than it is to mass produce. If you can write a hundred terrible blogs, that's not going to do much for you. If you're just spitting out what ChatGPT told you to put in. So whatever is Sustainable, whatever you can keep up and give your audience something of quality. If that's once a week, that's beautiful. If it's twice a month, that's also beautiful. And if it's once a month, it's beautiful. It's what you can do that's going to give you value to your audience. Regularity is really what you want.
Outsourcing Blog Writing
[00:20:17] Samantha Mabe: As somebody who does blog writing, can you tell us a little bit about how you write blogs for other businesses and if someone is interested in they, they don't wanna do it, they just wanna outsource it, what does that look like?
[00:20:33] Melanie Ziltener: I like to make the process fun because I know so many people don't like this part of business. It's like I just wanted to do my thing and I didn't want to do marketing and apparently I have to. So I do like to make it fun. So basically what it looks like is we sit down and we have a conversation and it's collaborative. What are people asking you? Here's the research I did. What does this look like to you? Can you flesh it out? How would you explain this to me if I came to you and said, Oh, my back is killing me? How would you explain it to me?
[00:21:04] And I record those calls so that I can get your voice and I can really trick people into thinking that you wrote it. And then I go off and I write my little heart out and you take a look at it, make sure I got everything that we needed to get, and I go ahead and post it. It's an hour of your time to talk to me, and I like to think that I'm a fun person to have a conversation with. And then whatever time you need to read it over, and that's it. And you can get a lot of content from it.
[00:21:30] Samantha Mabe: I think that's helpful because a lot of people are in that they just don't have time to write a blog post or they don't like writing. And sometimes we get caught up in, we know so much, how do we distill that down into language that somebody else is going to understand?
[00:21:45] Melanie Ziltener: The other thing I do too, and I just started doing this is it's more of a strategy day where I'm not actually writing it for you, but I'm mapping everything out. You're getting a really robust outline. You're getting all your headings. So we're having those conversations. We're setting everything up and then you feel good about starting because so much is already done. You're just taking it from there. So that's another option if you're not quite at the point where I'm going to write it for you, but you need something to get started.
Connect with Melanie
[00:22:13] Samantha Mabe: Where can people connect with you online? And I know you had a resource you wanted to share, so where can we get all of that?
[00:22:20] Melanie Ziltener: So where you can find me online, Instagram, it's melthewordnerd with periods in between the words. That's not me being cute. I'm a massive dork and I wanted to warn you. My business is tripod copy, so it's tripod copy. com.
[00:22:32] And the resource I gave was a writer's blockbuster because when you're sitting there staring at a screen being like, Oh God, what am I going to write? It's just a quick little work through to get the ideas flowing.
[00:22:43] Samantha Mabe: Thank you so much.
[00:22:45] Melanie Ziltener: No problem. Thank you.
[00:22:52] Samantha Mabe: Thank you so much for joining me for this session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit. If you enjoyed it, make sure to go to the elevateyourpractice. co website in order to connect with the speaker and get access to the free resources they mentioned in their session. You can also share the summit with any of your friends in the health and wellness space and send them to the website elevate your practice dot co. You can get 30 percent off your first three months of Practice Better at practice better. io and use the code L A T S 30.
