40 minutes. One way.

I have a commute to work. I live west of Midland, Michigan and my office is in Saginaw Township, Michigan. I’ve been driving roughly the same route for 14+ years. 80 minutes per day. 4 times per week. When you do the math, it’s kind of depressing. I’ve been commuting close to 150 days straight.

I often hear about colleagues who have a two minute drive to the office. “Yeah, it’s two or three minutes. It just depends on whether I catch the light.” Or better yet, “It only takes me five minutes to walk to the office, so I usually go home for lunch.”

Then there’s the guy in New York City who lives upstairs from the office. That’s way too close, in my opinion. Or at least don’t let your patients know it. I’d feel a lot more comfortable calling on a Saturday if I knew it was only a walk down the stairs for you. Just sayin’.

There are obvious advantages to a short commute. I think of all the wasted time that I could be spending with my family. I have two little boys, so they’re not in a lot of activities yet, but I know that’s going to be complicated. I’m not sure how it’s going to work. Perhaps I’ll squish a four day week into three days some of the time. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. A shorter commute would allow me to sleep in a little longer, too. I feed 12 horses, two dogs and a miniature donkey most mornings. So I get up pretty early. Shaving a half hour off of my commute would mean another half hour of shut-eye. I’ve always been one to go to bed early, but that gives me even more of an excuse.

I generally like to know what’s on the schedule for tomorrow and even for the week. So I usually go online to check the schedule if I didn’t take a look the day before. Occasionally you’ll see that one patient on the schedule. You know the one. She’s the one that makes you contemplate injuring yourself while mowing the lawn, just so you can miss tomorrow. Or the guy with the removable case that gets worse. Every. Time. You. Touch. It.

I’m here to tell you. 40 minutes is a long time to think about those patients. 40 minutes gives me time to contemplate each and every way that appointment can go horribly wrong. By the time I get to work, I’ve already lived those tragedies in my mind several times. The upside is that they never go as badly as I’ve imagined them. There’s almost always less swearing and often less bleeding.

The upside of a 40 minute commute is that there’s some time to unwind from work. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts almost constantly. 80 minutes a day gives me some time to enjoy these. I also use the Spotify premium app to listen to whatever kind of music I’m feeling like. My time in the car allows me a chance to think of ideas to blog about. Some of my best ideas for www.meadfamilydental.com have come in my morning commute. This very blog post was inspired by the ride in this morning. I’m less creative in the afternoon, since I’ve usually spent the day working on patients so I generally just unwind. But I think my family gets a better, more relaxed version of me because I’ve got decompression time.

Anyone else have a commute? I’m interested to hear about it. Thanks for reading!

Why dental presentations and dental presenters usually suck

Public speaking is my bag. No, seriously. I like speaking about topics I’m passionate about in front of a group. And I’ve been told that I’m pretty good at it. I keep getting asked back, so I must not be too bad.

I would like it even more if it were really easy to put together a good presentation. It’s not at all. And worse than that, I’m a terrible procrastinator. If I could just fast forward past the idea generation, slide design and rehearsal I’d be in heaven. The actual getting in front of a group and doing it is a blast. There have only been a couple times when I didn’t do well in front of a group. Very occasionally I just don’t connect with an audience or they just aren’t into the subject matter. Sometimes I don’t think I’m connecting and I’m doing O.K. But usually you can tell by the energy of the audience.

One reason why presenting to dental audiences is hard is the amount of time we’re supposed to present. The classic dental meeting time frames are 3 hours (“half day”) or 6 hours (“full day”). John Medina, author of “Brain Rules” suggests that 50 minutes is the maximum amount of time an audience can stay involved with a presentation. Further, the presenter has to do something different to grab their attention every 10 minutes or they’re toast. My experience tends to agree with this.

So why do we have 3 hour and 6 hour classes? I don’t know. The courses I took at the Chicago Midwinter this year were varied. One was really bad, a couple were pretty good. All were 3 hours. And every last one of them should have been no longer than an hour and a half. That would have required the speakers to boil it down and would not have required the audience to have such endurance.

The other problem is the speakers. As speakers, we need to remember that we’re there for the audience, not vice versa. In other words, it’s not about the speaker. It’s about the audience. It’s not lecturing, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s closer to a performance or, as Garr Reynolds describes, a conversation.

A couple pet peeves of mine when I’m watching a speaker:

  • The speaker reads their slides…usually bullet point by bullet point. No offense, but you could have emailed me that and saved me the trip.
  • The speaker prepared the slides up to the morning of the presentation and never did any rehearsal. I’ve been guilty of this in the past. I’m trying to get better. Just try not to be baffled by your own slide deck, mmmkay?
  • The speaker isn’t sure how long their stuff is going to take. So, they go way over. Usually into lunch. Don’t do this. Ever. Go short as much as you want. Don’t go long. It’s rude and disrespectful of your audience. Remember, going “short” means there’s plenty of time for questions.

Dentists and dental teams are above average audiences. They forgive a lot. Trust me, I know. They can stay with you on the wildest tangent and they’ll overlook your awful tie if you treat them with respect. They’re colleagues and they want you to do well. Just do your part as a speaker and they’ll keep asking you back. Or at least that’s my experience.

What you get from a blog that you don’t get from a traditional dental website

Whoa, meta.

 

Whoa, meta.

Authenticity.

Your office website can say what everyone else’s website says. It can have the same photos and same “blog” posts as everyone else using your web guy has.

Or it can tell a story about why someone might want to be your patient. Your blog could give a glimpse at what it’s like to be a patient in your office.

I’ve met thousands of dentists over the years, and none of them were even close to the same. But you wouldn’t know it from their websites.

The “rules” of blogging

been there

been there

If you want to know the rules of blogging for dentists, you could do a lot worse than reading Dr. Jason Lipscomb’s post.

Probably the most important part of the entire article: “If you know you aren’t going to do anything with it, leave it out of your social media plan.”

“But my social media consultant tells me I have to have a blog!”

Here’s the simplest rule about whether you should have a blog. If you aren’t going to write it (or most of it), then don’t have one. Generic blog articles copied and pasted by your web guy just plain suck. Even if you’ve got great search engine results, if you have lame content on the blog a savvy potential customer is going to be able to tell that it’s canned copy. And you need to assume that everyone that gets to your site is a savvy potential customer.

Note: web comic taken from www.toothpastefordinner.com

 

why Google loves blogs

Google loves blogs. There’s no two ways about it.

Actually, Google loves websites that change a lot. And since blogs are websites that add new posts all the time…they change a lot. Therefore, Google loves blogs.

I’m a wet fingered dentist. I don’t pretend to know how Google selects what’s important. I can barely spell algorithm (?), much less understand how a search engine really works. I’m actually pretty skeptical of anyone who thinks they’ve got Google figured out. (can anyone say Demandforce?)

It turns out that the more you update your site, the more often Google has a chance to “crawl” the new material. My office website/blog routinely ranks pretty high in Google organic results. I have no special training in search engine optimization, although I do use a WordPress plug in called All in One SEO pack. But my (relatively) consistent posting over a few years has gotten me on the first page of Google listings in my area for quite a few search terms. I haven’t paid a consultant and I don’t have recurring costs to do it. What I do have to do is write blog posts.

Most dental websites are considered “static.” They may have great information and may be beautiful, but they don’t change much over time. Google can tell when a site isn’t changed often. These sites often suffer in organic search rankings because of their very “static-ness.”. A static dental site of the cookie cutter variety (my pet peeve…I’ll save the details for another post) has to resort to other tactics for Google ranking.

So, one good way to keep a good organic Google ranking or improve one that’s not so good is to have a blog. Blogs are a lot of work, but they’re totally worth it.

So what do you think? Could a blog help your website? Do you think I’m full of it? I’d love to hear your comments or feel free to email me at alan@thebloggingdentist.com.

 

A dental blog about blogging? For dentists?

No, seriously. That’s what this is.

If you happen to be reading this you’re actually reading the very first post of a new blog. So I’ll keep it short and sweet.

Blogs are one of the very easiest and best ways to spread ideas. Whether your idea is which candidate to elect, what dish soap to use or why  your dental office is the one to choose, a blog is one of the simplest and most cost effective ways to get your message out.

So, you’re asking, what makes me the expert? Well, I’ve maintained a blog as my only dental practice website for more than three years. I’ve learned a few things since I started…mostly the hard way. My real expertise comes from being an avid blog reader for the better part of a decade. I was reading blogs before I knew what blogs were.

So, what’s a blog? The word blog is short for “web log” is described on Wikipedia as “a personal journal published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often are themed on a single subject. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.” It’s just a bunch of posts or articles with the latest entry first. That’s it.

So why am I so excited about blogs? You’ll have to stay tuned for that. More to come!