Interview with Rachel Wynn of Story Zest on Blogging & Website Optimization

Hello, this is Dr. Aaron Levouer with Levouer Consulting, and I'm in Greensboro, North Carolina, and today I have a guest, Rachel Nguyen, and she's in Colorado. And what we're going to do is talk a little bit about marketing, websites, therapy, and telling your story. Hello, Rachel. Welcome to the broadcast.

Hi, Erin. Thanks for having me.

Let's see. One of the other things I wanted to mention is I interacted and met Rachel through Twitter, and Twitter and LinkedIn have been some of the best ways that I've connected with other therapists. Rachel has a great blog called Gray Matter Therapy and a new website and business called Story Zest. And what she does is helps other small businesses tell their story and to help foster relationships with customers and potential patients. So, Rachel, tell me real quick or tell everyone real quick how you got your start. You're a speech pathologist, is that correct? That's correct.

Yeah, that's correct.

How did you get your start in what you're doing? Blogging, getting online? Are you still practicing, you know, etcetera?

Yeah, well, I finished school in 2011, and I was not involved in online community at all. Probably didn't discover Twitter working as a speech language pathologist until late 2012. Then once I got on there, I realized, oh, my gosh, wow. I have other people that I can connect with. I started interacting on Twitter and then found that through talking to other people, I had more thoughts and more ideas that I wanted to express. So I started my blog at that time. The blog was called Talks Just Fine, and it was kind of a. That was kind of a reference to most people not knowing what speech therapists do, especially in the adult population. I don't know how many patients rooms I walked into and they would say, oh, I don't need you. I talk just fine. Then I would explain, okay. I work with cognition and memory and swallowing and other areas, too, and got a lot of feedback from that. And then as I grew as a therapist and became more confident in the niche, the specialty I was developing, I started Gray Matter Therapy to look specifically at dementia issues and also the advocacy issues for improved elder care in the SNF setting.

Awesome. Awesome. I know you have quite a big following with that. How is that going? What are you doing and how does that benefit you other than just connecting with other people? Is there anything else there?

Well, I do sell some patient education handouts. I found that there are a lot of resources for speech therapists working with kid populations, but when you're looking for some resources and materials for adult populations, there's not much out there. And so I developed some resources that I use with my clients and then I sell them so that other SLPs can save themselves time and not have to create those resources and have things they can share with their patients. You know, when I do my documentation, I work PRN and a snf. I, you know, will state that patient education was provided regarding this and then, you know, they communicated awareness or communicated understanding via this and I provided written education. I like to make sure I have, you know, I have a conversation and then they have something kind of to refer to so they can develop those questions to ask me and we can continue discussing it next time I see them.

Awesome. So this one question pops up to me real quick is hopefully it's not too long of an answer, but what makes a successful blog? And I guess the second part is, then why is even a successful blog important?

I would say what makes a successful blog is a clear mission. So I have with gray matter therapy, my mission is to improve elder care and I do that specifically through the speech language pathology window. But then I also cover some other issues and I have found on the Facebook forums and things like that when there's a new clinician or a grad student or something and they're like, oh gosh, I just accepted a job in a snf. I need to learn about these things. Who should I contact? People are now referring them to my blog. And so to me that's evidence of success that I have found that niche and people value it and now see it as a resource. So you have to develop a blog that can be a resource. And then what does a blog do for you? Well, when a blog is connected to a business, it helps with your search engine optimization. It helps develop relationships with clients or potential clients that aren't ready to buy yet. They're still looking for information, they're kind of testing the waters. And so it can demonstrate your competence and help them understand that their problem is worth solving. I think a lot of people are like, oh, I'm having trouble with this or I'm having trouble with that, but I don't know if I should do anything about it. I think having a blog where you talk about those issues and talk about those issues being more common and something that you can help solve, they see it as, oh, okay, there's a solution,

I'm going to go for it right now. 2 kind of follow up questions from there. First, real quick, you mentioned search engine optimization. I'm sure there Are a lot of people who are listening who think that that's a German word or maybe Czechoslovakian. They don't really understand what search engine is.

Well, let me define it for you. Search engine optimization is what we do on the back end so that when other people, like when I. Let's say I live in Boulder and if I'm looking for Pilates studios in Boulder, then I might go to Google and say, hey, Google, Pilates in Boulder. And Google decides, okay, we have all these websites out there. What's the match with search engine optimization? Basically, we build a relationship with Google or other search engines and say, hey, people are looking for these keywords. This is the perfect match. And so the more keywords you have that match, that search term, the higher on the list that it's going to end up. Let's say if you have a practice, maybe a physical therapy practice, type in physical therapy in your city, are you showing up on the first 10, that first page, or are you somewhere on 5, 6, 7, 8 that no one's going to reach? Through search engine optimization, we basically help your website be a better match for Google.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Search engine optimization has been a huge part of my marketing. In my practice, one of the things that I do is I use my blog for that. What is the. There are two things about a blog that I see. So you can develop it for search engines and just put in a ton of keywords and it not really sound good, but then you don't really have people coming to your blog. And so part of it is putting your keywords in your title and in your text, but helping other people as well through the writing of your blog posts.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. And so with storyzest, what I do is I work on that writing component. Your writing to attract customers and hold their interest needs to be several things. It needs to be valuable. It needs to express your story. What I mean by story is your mission, your values, why you do what you do. And then it also needs to be skimmable. We are lazy readers and most of us don't read every word. And so the writing that we were taught to do in undergrad or graduate school, that doesn't go that academic level writing, nobody's going to read that. It's too complex. There's actually a reading index called the Fleischer Reading Index. And you have to kind of hit a certain mark in that Fleischer Reading Index for it to be skimmable, for it to be accessible to most web readers.

Right. And photos and pictures and drawings, etc. Those things work too.

Those work too. And breaking things up and bullet points, having multiple headings kind of guiding the reader through the flow. As readers we are pretty lazy and if we're not told where to go next, we don't go there. And so setting things up. So it is kind of a guided journey through the information you want your reader to understand.

Yeah, it's not that easy though. I mean, it sounds. Not that it sounds easy, but it takes some time and thought. What are the if someone wants to start writing a blog post, what are the three or four things that you would recommend to them to start to get some good ideas and to include in a blog post?

Well, the first thing I would recommend is something that I actually did not do when I was starting with blogging and it was pictures. I didn't put any pictures. It was headlines. I had sub headlines and things were divided in a readable way but didn't have any pictures. Someone told me, oh, you should add pictures to your blog. That way it's penable. And I'm not a big Pinterest user myself, but my blog posts are all over Pinterest, especially since I started adding photos to them because now that makes it tentable and you can tell what that blog post is. And there's some ways where I've added text overlay to the pictures so you actually have a headline and my website in that picture. So when you're browsing on Pinterest, you know exactly who that came from. And so I get the ownership and so hopefully people do find their way back to me. So pictures, I would say, would be number one. Number two is to keep it short. Keep it short and to the point. Again, we're lazy, busy readers. I just looked at my feedly. I have 124 unread blog posts in my feedly. Am I going to read every single word of those? Absolutely not. And then number three is make it personal. And that means think about your audience and also think about yourself. You are writing it and you're going to have a different message and a different tone of voice. You do it differently. If you're an occupational therapist in a city, there's probably going to be an occupational therapist in that same city that treats pediatrics as well, you know, what are you doing that's different from that other person? Your personality and your attitude are one thing that is different.

Right. Awesome. Those are great points. Those are great points. Where do you recommend finding pictures? Because you can't just go to Google and just copy and paste?

No, that's one of my big pet peeves, especially as I'm someone who's creating resources for others to use. You definitely need to adhere copyright guidelines. I do two things usually. I usually use Flickr, Creative Commons for images for my blog post. And you'll see on each of my images, they'll be usually in the bottom right hand corner, sometimes in the left if the images won't accommodate it. But I have CC in parentheses, which is the Creative Commons license, Flickr, and then the owner's name. And so I attribute that image to them. Now, for images that I'm using on a recurring basis, like I have a series of posts that's once a month, that's called ethical considerations. I go to istockphoto and I get images for those because I feel like I should purchase those images so I have the absolute right to use them. And then all the pictures on my website I either got from istockphoto or I took those photos myself.

Okay, awesome. Yeah, that was. That's always been something that's hard for me. I'll finish a blog post and be like, oh, I need a picture and have one. I'll spend 30 minutes looking for a picture, you know, and it just like half the time or, you know, a long time. So those are some good resources. I found that I really liked was, I think it's 1, 2, 3, RF com, which is. Which is similar to iStockphoto. But I found some good anatomy type drawings and things on there for some of my stuff. So throw that out there too, because I think it was a pretty good one. And there wasn't a lot of Atom

images for my images for anatomy. Yeah.

Okay, now I wanted to talk about websites real quick because there's a blog and which is kind of like a website, and then there's a website. Now, do you think everyone needs both or should we just start with a blog and. Yeah, let's go with that.

I would say let's start with a website. You need some good static content that clearly communicates what you're doing. And usually when I work with people to create their websites and what I do is I work on the writing portion and then I collaborate with one or two web developers to do the actual implementation. I used to do that, but I discovered it just takes me so long. And these two folks I collaborate with do an awesome job. When I work with people on basically designing their websites and the flow of their websites, we do a lot of discovery work to Kind of figure who the target audience is and what message you're going to have through the whole website. I think starting there and just doing that discovery can help set you up for doing the blog. I would absolutely recommend when you do the blog, set up a publication calendar first. Don't just decide, I'm going to write a blog today. Set up a calendar that will keep your content fresh so you're not ending up with three blog posts, one week and then three weeks and nothing and then another blog post. So setting up a calendar can keep you fresh, can allow you to do series. Because there are some things that you can't target, you can't cover in just one blog post. It may need to be a three part series. Like this month in May, I'm looking at death and dying on gray matter therapy and we can't do that in one blog post. And so it's a multi part post, a multi part series looking at from different angles.

Gotcha. Awesome. Yeah, I have a hard time with that. I can't plan things out. I'll get inspired or I'll soapbox to myself and just write it down on the blog post. Yeah, awesome. Well, what I want to do real quick is I want to do a little screen share and show off your website. But because it's laid out really well and I just want to talk about what I see. And then real quick, can you tell me what, what and why you kind of put it together the way you did. So let me see if this works. Bear with me for a second. All right. And this. Okay, There we go. Okay. This is Rachel's website. So you come onto the website and it kind of loads up, let's see, like this with a nice picture at the top. Looks pretty clean and fresh. And you know, with the about the services, the blog contact, pretty. I think this is, you know, really simple and within the upper third or the front page, I still have these, you know, hyperlinks here and things that tell me a little bit more about you. And I just want to say I think this is great and I want you to talk about why you put it together the way you did and maybe why you use this theme. But I see a lot of websites that look confusing and focus a lot on features of the business and where the person went to school and what the techniques they use are. Can you talk a little bit about why you laid it out this way or theme and what your message is?

Yeah, well, first of all, just the minimalist view or look of the website. I'M a very minimalist type of person. When I moved from Austin, Texas to Boulder, Colorado, I guess it was about a year and a half ago, I moved in a pod. I fit all of my stuff in a pod. And so I like to have things very simplistic. You don't need a lot of information to have everything you need. And so when I was shooting for the look and feel of my website, you'll notice that gray matter therapy is very similar. It is very minimalist. When I was designing the stories of this website, my idea is to focus on story and the writing and not just having your website look like a resume. I have eight letters after my last name. Nobody cares. People want to know what can I do for them. And so I don't think I have anything on there actually about the eight letters of my last name. If you go to the about page at the very, very bottom, you have things about my formal education. But that formal education isn't as important as the philosophy that I prescribed to you. And so you have a lot more information about that. And that's kind of the story that I'm telling you. And then when you look into services, I divided each of my services up. That way if I wanted to do any ads, some Craigslist ads or other sorts of ads, I can link directly to my blog services or my newsletter services or the writing and editing. And then one of my most popular services is the website analysis where I basically go through your website and say, here's what's working, here's what isn't working. Sometimes I want to link directly to that and to have that information very simplistic for the reader. That way it's not difficult to find. I was actually referred to a website earlier this week and they were saying, this person's great. They have all this information about X, Y and Z. And I was like, I can't find it. So I tried to make my site. So it's like, okay, someone wants to share that information. There's a no brainer. It's easy for lazy readers because we're all lazy readers to find. Okay, that's exactly what I'm looking for.

Exactly. Do you know what's your theme called?

Yeah, it's the Sailing it theme.

Okay. Did you adjust it or customize it? Did you do anything like that or did.

Well, I mean, yeah, I changed like all the colors and I made all the modules and everything like that. I did definitely fine tune each one of those pages for the content that I was creating. You'll See the little icons, you'll have the little circles with an icon in the center and I customized all of those. But a lot of it's things that were already kind of included in the theme and it's just selecting the options to make it work for you.

Right, right. I think that one of the things I want to kind of point out to everyone is it's theme is the look and feel, the paint job on the website. And making a great looking website sometimes is not just the content but the way it's laid out. And it's downloading a theme that you like that tells the kind of puts things in place where they need to be and where you like them so you can get a good view of what's going on. And it seems complicated, but it's almost like plug and play. But not that easy.

No, it's certainly not that easy. There are some themes if you are doing it yourself. Like the theme I used with Gray Matter Therapy was a little more plug and play. And there are ways like you don't have to customize it as much as I did, you can just have more straight text pages. But I decided to do modules

so

I could break up the information and display it in multiple columns or in different ways. Have different width bars and sliders and things like that.

Yeah, it looks great. And I've been working on another website myself and the little things here, there, the picture size doesn't quite match up the way you want it to and things like that. But in general, just starting a blog, is there a platform that you would recommend for people if they want to do it themselves?

I would recommend WordPress. I think WordPress really has the best amount of plugins. And what a plugin is, is a plugin is kind of just an extra tool that you put in to kind of make things easier. I'm a big cook, so I liken everything to cooking. And so like, you know, I could make, I could make salad dressing and I could whisk it with a fork or I could use an immersion blender. Like an immersion blender just makes it easier. And that's kind of what plugins are. There are some things you could do on your website and you could do it in hard code or you could do it with some wonky formatting. But plugins just kind of make it easy, right?

And WordPress sites come with a standard theme or two and then there's just what, hundreds of thousands of them probably, right?

Oh yeah, there's thousands of them and they range in price. You get themes for free. I paid $55 for mine, which seems to be kind of the average price for some of the themes that are a little more robust.

Awesome. Let's see. One of my other things I wanted to ask was, When you look at a therapist, like someone who's selling to their patients or clients, what kinds of things should a website or blog say? Maybe more specifically the website, but what. What should it say? When readers come in, they see things spaced out, they see some pictures. But what does a patient or a potential patient want to read about? When they visit a website of a

potential therapist, they want to read about two things. They want to read about how you can solve their problem, and then they want to read about who you are. Especially when you're working with a therapist, you're going to spend a lot of time with that therapist. I'm in physical therapy right now and have been for a couple of months. Boy, my PT and I, we know each other pretty well now. So having a little bit of your personality on your website will tell that patient whether or not you're someone they want to spend time with. Because that is definitely important. I think people are going to be more compliant with therapy if they enjoy working with the therapist that they're working with. And so that is something that I'm working in the skilled nursing school field nursing environment. There aren't an abundance of SLPs to pick from, but I actually work with two others. And so there may be some patients where I'm like, you know, we're just not hitting it off. Maybe you could try working with them and see if you hit it off a little bit better. Or I might look and know about it. Like, might look in a chart and find things about their social history and know, oh, that person is going to work definitely better with this therapist. And they try to match people up. That way they're going to enjoy the experience a little bit more.

Right? Awesome. I just got one more question. I disappeared. There we go. Can you see me?

I can.

Okay, good. Because I can't see me. One more question. And what I want to know is, okay, we've talked about blogs and websites. Give me two or three other things. Or websites where people should kind of participate in or list their business. Or what else can we do to improve our search engine optimization and our ability for patients to find us online?

Well, that's really a great question for my husband. He specializes in search engine optimization and he does things beyond actually the text for clients. But I really do focus on making sure. That text is personal and includes your keywords. But I would say one thing you can do is you can have. I would recommend having several conversion points is what we call them. So several things that you're asking your viewer to do. So when you go to my website, I ask you to schedule a free consultation. I ask you to contact me about specific services, I ask you to share things on social media, I ask you to subscribe to my newsletter. So those are several points of buy in. And we know that usually unless you're just like, okay, I need the service right now. I'm ready right now. People are going to buy in right away. So we need multiple points of entry. And I like newsletters because newsletters are a nice way of ending up in someone's inbox and saying, hey, I'm still here. I've got solutions to solve your problem. And you're doing it in a tactful way that's not glaring pop ups and things like that. But you're continuing to provide them with valuable information and building a relationship with them. And when they are ready, then they will be more likely to contact you.

Right. So it's like a call to action. You're telling what you want them to do. Now that they've decided they like you now what do they do? You kind of have to tell them. Right.

Or maybe they just want to find out more.

Not ready to buy. They can sign up for your newsletter.

Absolutely. And that's a way that people will get free tips, free information. They're continuing to benefit from your information and you're continuing to build value. I definitely recommend if someone is interested in what I do, sign up for my newsletter, see what you think. After getting a couple of newsletters, can I solve your problem and try implementing what I recommend? And does it work? I know some of the things I recommended. I had someone comment and say, oh, this decreased my bounce rate by 10%. Which a bounce rate is essentially when someone hits your website and they're like, nope, that's not what I'm looking for before they really even dig in.

Right, right. Awesome. I need to figure that out. You got to know what your bounce rate is too. But that's a whole nother analytics.

Yeah. Whole other conversation.

Awesome. Yeah. I give away a book on back pain on my website. 80% of people have back pain and the majority of people who come to my practice have back pain. That's not necessarily the only thing that describes them. So I give away a book to entice people to join my Newsletter and follow my blog and information, and I get people. Every couple months, someone from that list calls to schedule an appointment. It's a really powerful way to help people without know. Giving away anything for free. Well, it's not giving away my time for free. Yeah, I'm giving away good, valuable information. But, you know, and people get it and it helps them, but I'm not, you know, I guess. What is it called? Your multiplying yourself?

Yeah, it's a little more passive. You're not having to do it over and over independently. My free consultations are not passive, but I find that I do the initial consultation just to make sure I'm the right person for that customer. Because there are some people who are just like, I just want plain, generic content. I just want something written. I don't want to have any involvement. That's not who I want to work for. I can't work with you to tell your story. I need to talk to you.

Gotcha. Awesome. Well, tell me again, what's. What's the address of your website or how do we find you online? What's your website? Give me two website addresses. And how do we find you on Twitter?

Okay, well, if you're looking for information about my writing and websites, that's Storyzest, and it's@www.storyzest.com. or you can find me on Twitter, and that handle is Storyzest. On Facebook, it's facebook.com storyzest. And then if you're looking at my advocacy work, trying to figure out what I'm doing to improve healthcare for those who work in skilled nursing and the elders who receive that care, that information is@graymattertherapy.com and the Twitter handle for that one is Gray MatterTX. Like therapy.

Awesome. Well, Rachel, thank you so much. It's been a lot of fun talking to you today and where you are. Looks like it's so beautiful outside that

it's threatening to rain, but right now we have sun.

Well, enjoy the rest of your day in Colorado and North Carolina. I will see you on the Internet soon.

Absolutely. Tweet at you later.

All right.