As online reputation and digital footprint become more important for professionals, blogging has to play into your strategy.  Unlike purely social applications, a blog represents one of the best ways to define and park your ideas for others to see. A surrogate blog is on way that doctors without their own blog can strongly impact their digital footprint.

Conversation and curation are good, but creating the stuff that everyone talks about is the ultimate footprint move.

I also realize that this isn’t realistic.

So a surrogate platform may represent a good solution.  A surrogate blog is one that belongs to someone else but hosts guest bloggers.  Good examples are KevinMD who provides a great place for general medical commentary. And if I didn’t spend so much time here, I’d write more for Medicine | Milestones | Miracles or Momentum, the blogs of my own Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.  Most institutions these days have blogs and they’re typically thrilled to have a member of the medical staff or faculty willing to pitch in with good thinking.

So when should you consider a surrogate blogging platform?

• Fear – When you don’t want to go it alone.  When the perceived risk of owning a site is more than you can think about, you might want to write out of harm’s way.
• Money – When you don’t want to spend the cash.  When done right, keeping a blog costs money.  Writing in someone else’s space saves you the cost of web development, maintenance and other hidden costs.
• Time – When you haven’t got the time.  Looking after a busy blog can eat your bandwidth.  And if you’re only in it for a couple of posts a month, maintaining a site may be more trouble than it’s worth.  The surrogate site does the heavy lifting by taking care of issues such as setup and server issues.
• Reach – When you need more reach.  When you blog on someone else’s site, you ride on their Google juice.  An established blog will offer instant reach and visibility that takes years to develop on your own.

Of course there are more reasons. Why else would you consider a surrogate platform for blogging?

Updated November 15, 2018