Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
This seems like a good idea on paper. It helps with SEO stuff for Google. It gives you an outlet to write about floating and share information about the industry. And it seems to fall in line with something that other businesses do, right?
So what are the downsides? How much time and effort does a blog really take? What sort of impact does it have for a float center? Graham and Ashkahn lay out the pros and cons as well as things you may not initially consider about the responsibility of having a blog.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Today’s question is: “Should I have a blog for my flippin’ float tank center?” It doesn’t actually say flippin’.
Ashkahn: Did you edit that in?
Graham: Yeah, sorry. Sorry whoever asked that question. I took creative liberties there.
Ashkahn: They should warn them under where they submit, “We might add flare to your question.”
Graham: We might Just delete your entire question. Make up something else that sounds better, yeah.
Ashkahn: What was the question?
Graham: Something about flips? Should I have a blog? Should I have a blog for my float tank center.
Ashkahn: That’s right, okay. Cool.
Graham: I would say probably not. But –
Ashkahn: Because –
Graham: There’s an exception to that.
Ashkahn: Because it’s hard.
Graham: Yeah, exactly. It sounds … Especially if you’re like, “I’ll just put up a blog post once a month. How hard could that be?” Whole internet graveyards filled of blogs that have about two posts.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: It’s like the first one and then the second one came two weeks later than they planned on it –
Ashkahn: Welcome to my blog!
Graham: Yeah. I’m gonna be putting out a post every week and the next one’s every month and a half. There’s no third post, right? And I think that looks bad. I think that having a float center and if you have especially a big blog link at the top or blog posts on your homepage or something like that and you kinda got it all tied in at the beginning like you really planned on updating it. Then it just turns into nothing and they’re looking back and there’s posts from 2018 only now we’re in 2020. And that’s what they’re finding. It’s not a good … it doesn’t reflect well on your brand. It kinda says “I don’t maintain things and I’m unable to keep my promises”, right?
Ashkahn: And it really is not a small amount of work. Writing blog posts usually people try to put a certain amount of polish onto their blog posts and the process of writing it and editing it and all that sort of stuff is usually more work than people think it is. And we have a blog. We know how much work it takes. Our float tank solution site has a blog and it’s no small feat to keep content good edited content coming into that thing.
Graham: Yeah, the combined man hours per blog post that we put out through the Float Tank Solutions blogs are anywhere from about ten to fifteen hours. And sometimes for some of the bigger, more researched ones that can really easily go up to more like twenty hours of man hours going into a post. And you’re thinking I’m gonna set aside a couple hours every month to write one. It comes as a really big surprise, you know. You set aside those couple hours and you’re one-fifth of the way through having a polished post and you’re like “Oh boy, I have to go clean these rooms and check out customers”, right?
So understandably it’s one of the first things to get dropped in favor of bigger responsibilities you actually have towards your business.
Ashkahn: It’s real easy to let it slip.
Graham: Which is what makes me say maybe you shouldn’t start one to begin with.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: Or be ready to axe it. Get two posts in, realize you’re not gonna do this, and just remove it from the blog. Take it down. Call it a failed experiment and move on, right?
Ashkahn: Or write ten posts before you even put it up.
Graham: Oh, that’s great advice. Definitely do that. Pre-stock If you can get to ten posts, then you’re allowed to have a blog.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: Because it’s at one a month. That’s almost a year’s worth of content. Now you just have two more you have to write during the next ten months. Which probably won’t happen still because you’ll find other things you need to do, you know?
Ashkahn: So why do you have a blog then? Why does anyone even want a blog?
Graham: So the nice thing about blogs is … Google really likes fresh content on websites. It likes things that you’ve written yourself. And as you can imagine just reminding your customers that you exist, it’s really nice for a business, you know? Maybe someone hasn’t been into float in six months and it’s your blog post specifically on how floating helps anxiety or floating helps pregnancy that they see come out or that they get emailed to them if they got subscribed that reminds them how much they should come in especially if they’re pregnant or anxious in this case, right? So, it’s great for pulling on customers, it’s good for Google juice, and letting people find you in the first place.
Ashkahn: And Google specifically, for keyword searching. The amount of times you’re gonna use the word, “float” or “float tank” or all that sorta stuff. If you have a blog versus just a website is gonna be way, way more, right? I mean imagine the amount of times you’re gonna say “float tank” over the course of your blog versus how many times it would actually just appear on your website without a blog. And you can see why that can just up the keyword count a ton.
Graham: Yep, and one other thing I’ll add in, too, is I think that if you are able to keep it up consistently, you say you’re going to launch a blog and do a post every month or something like that. And you do and you’ve been doing this consistently for a few years. That also reflects really well on your business. It is really hard to keep up on a blog. So if you’re able to do something consistently and churn something out on this regular schedule, I believe that that actually gives you a few points in your customers’ eyes. Your prospective customers who are looking at your site.
Ashkahn: But it’s hard.
Graham: It’s really hard. It’s really time consuming. To do the Float Tank Solutions blog, to give you an idea, we actually had to hire on two people to help specifically just with the copy editing and take the content that Ashkahn and I are kind of churning out and put that into written form. Like we didn’t have enough time to just manage the blog ourselves, so.
Ashkahn: And we have an illustrator. Illustrate pictures for it. It’s a project.
Graham: So if you do decide to go that route it might be that you need someone to actually be your own copy editor to take things to format them in WordPress. Figure out the roles that you can outsource to someone else and just plan on actually paying money to get those blogs into reality rather than spending your own time on it might be the more sane approach.
Ashkahn: And it’s interesting, too. I don’t think it’s necessarily the type of business that would even benefit the most from having a blog. I think there’s in terms of bang for your buck in blogs … I think if you actually can pull it off and you’re writing good blog it’s gonna help your business. But, you see the type of business that really benefit from blogs and especially online informational sort of stuff. If you’re tryin’ to sell some sort of Photoshop product and you have a really robust blog covering all sorts of various Photoshop issues and stuff. Then when someone types in a very specific Photoshop problem, the chances that you’ll have a blog post that covers that, that leads them back to your website to where you’re actually kind of have different products for them. That is such a nice funnel in for people.
Graham: Yeah, the problem is it’s not broad in either of the directions that makes a blog post more universally applicable. Right? There’s geographical location, which is one of them. If you’re … if you run a geographically independent business, all of a sudden your blog posts can reach people all over the world and that’s really helpful for you.
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: If you’re writing blog posts in Boston and they’re reaching everyone all across the world … really only the everyone who happens to exist near you are the ones who are going to actually boost up numbers in your business, right?
Ashkahn: Mm-hmm.
Graham: And the other ones I see that are really useful are things to do in an area. All of the different things that you can do in Portland or somewhere else, right? And we’re not that, either. We’re kinda just talking about a specific activity in a specific region. Which kind of immediately makes you question what your maximum readership could possibly be, right? Who are the people who are into floating enough? They’re going to read a blog post every single month who also live in your area. Even if that’s a large portion of your customers, it’s still not a very large readership for the amount of time necessary to go into making it happen. Which again I think is why it’s difficult, why it gets dropped early, and why I don’t see many people who are only running float centers who successfully manage to maintain a long running blog.
Ashkahn: Yeah. It’s like unless you’re really enjoy it and you just constantly have stuff in your head. You’re like, “I gotta write this down and get it out and have this blog post.” Your time’s probably spent better doing some other form of marketing for your float center.
Graham: So there you go. Don’t start a blog unless you legitimately have a problem.
Ashkahn: Yeah, something in your head … you can’t shut it up.
Graham: Like I have with Ashkahn’s voice on a regular basis. Every morning wake up and it’s there.
Alright, so …
Ashkahn: Great, if you guys have more questions, you can hop over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Monthly Budget for Float Centers – DSP 305
Graham and Ashkahn break down the real truth about how closely they watch their budget for Float On on a monthly basis.
The truth is… not much. As it turns out, monthly expenses for float centers don’t have huge variations unlike businesses that rely on retail, for example. Graham and Ashkahn explain they developed a sense for what’s within reason.
How to Sign on Float Ambassadors – DSP 304
Float Ambassadors have been with the industry since the beginning, but gained popularity sometime in the last few years. What are ambassadors and how to float centers find them? When they do find them, how do they get them to represent floating?
Graham and Ashkahn share their experiences with the practice of finding float mavens out in the world and the impact they’ve had on Float On.
How do you Talk about Psychedelics? – DSP 303
It’s no secret that the inventor of the float tank, John Lilly, was also an early psychonaut and used the tank for mental exploration in conjunction with LSD. Not everyone in the float community appreciates this shared history and some actively try to distance themselves from it given the taboo nature of psychedelics.
Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on psychedelics and floating and how, as a business, they can be completely separated while still being important, as well as explaining why some people might reasonably decide to disassociate from them.
What About 75 Minute Floats? – DSP 302
Most float centers divide on floats offered between 60 or 90 minute floats, but some split the difference right down the middle and offer 75 minutes. Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on this tactic, what they see as the pros, cons, and things to consider when implementing it.
Free Floats for Teachers – DSP 301
Graham and Ashkahn give their perspective on the pros and cons of giving free floats away for teachers. Giving out free floats is the Float On way and giving them to a specific group of people who could really use them sounds like a good idea.
The guys break it down and address some of the concerns any float center may have about running a program like this.
Latest Blog Posts
The Basics of Float Tank Sanitation
Some of the most common questions you’ll get as a float center operator involve the cleanliness of the tanks. This post will be an introduction to some of the most commonplace sanitation methods used in float tanks. These are generally either chemicals that go in the water or devices that attach to your filtration system. We’ll be discussing chlorine, bromine, ozone, UV, and hydrogen peroxide, which accounts for the sanitation methods used on nearly every float tank on the market.
Testing and Maintaining Float Tank Water Quality
Editors Note: This is a revision of a past blog post, updated to reflect the most current sanitation methods and standards
In a perfect world, you could just pour water and salt into a float tank and it would stay pure and clean and fresh and salty forever. In the real world, conditions in the water are constantly changing, so keeping your water safe and clean takes a fair amount of vigilance.
This post covers how we maintain basic water quality in the float tank, except for sanitization methods, which will be covered in their own beastly sanitation blog post. Stay tuned for that coming out next week!
Floating, mental health, and wellness
This post will explore the intersection of floating with the concepts, beliefs, and experiences related to mental health and wellness, with a focus on anxiety and depression. I’ll explore my own story as it relates to floating before diving into the current intersections of floating and mental health, with a look at past, current, and potential opportunities for research and personal growth.
Massage, Acupuncture, and Float Tanks… A Chat with Sandra Calm
We’ve seen lots of float centers that aren’t just float centers.
Many have massage, some offer counseling, some have yoga classes next door. Lots of people start out either by incorporating float tanks into a larger business, or with float tanks only being one of many modalities at their center. Being specialists in floating, Float On has not mastered anything else.
So, to help gain insight into this growing aspect of the industry, we contacted our old friend, Sandra Calm. She started up The Float Shoppe here in Portland with her husband and podcast sensation, Dylan Calm, back in 2011. When they first opened, they had just two float tanks, and slowly added acupuncture, massage, counseling, along with two more tanks. Talk about expansion!
She was more than happy to take some time for the industry to help us understand just what it’s like to run a center with multiple services by answering some questions.
