Some of my readers may be aware that I have strong ties to the Epilepsy community here in the UK. My son Thomas has “Generalised Epilepsy”, he has had since he was just 1 year old. Over the pas 5 years I have been involved in the Epilepsy community in one way or another. In the beginning when I was trying to learn about Tom’s epilepsy I noticed there was very little information on-line about it, other than the “Charities”. The information I was reading was pretty scary, and nothing was written from a “parents viewpoint” which got me thinking about how I could contribute to the community and help support other parents going through what myself and Tom’s mum were.
It was on the way to an SEO conference in London (Distilled’s Link love 2011) with two very good SEO’s who worked with me at Adtrak(@PaulTyler & @BenSpray), when we began discussing what I should do, Ben and Paul suggested I start a blog as it would be the ideal way to get information “out there” and the epilepsy community would be perfect for a blog!!
Towards the end of March 2011 “The UK Epilepsy Blog” was born, I bought the domain www.ukepilepsy.com and got cracking. Looking back on it I should really have used the .co.uk variation of the domain as a primary, but oh well! (I do own both).
Within a week or so of the domain going live I began to gain pretty good rankings for certain terms, the epilepsy community is relatively niche and pretty straight forward to target with SEO. There are the major UK charities which form the bulk of the competition, and I thought they might make the job of getting my content out there more difficult!! By the end of the second week of the site going live I was starting to shake up the Epilepsy community and got a phone call from “The National Centre For Young People With Epilepsy”…. NCYPE for short.
John at NCYPE had spotted that the site was starting to “out rank” their website for certain longtail terms, he was soon on the phone discussing the possibilities of working together, I was extremely interested as you could imagine, John agreed to a guest blogging spot on The UK Epilepsy Blog.
Their first post can be seen here - http://www.ukepilepsy.com/epilepsy-charities/ncype/.
The blog developed gradually over the year, traffic increased, it was gaining more and more guest bloggers, a very good freelance journalist called Liz Wells got involved, she her self has epilepsy, it was great to get her input.
In October I got a phone call from Zoe at Enable Magazine, a disabilities magazine here in the UK, they were running a feature on unseen disabilities and wanted to feature my son Thomas. Zoe was put in touch with me by John at NCYPE.
This was the first time I have dealt with the media, but it wasn’t the last! In Novemeber Thomas was also featured in a local paper in Birmingham called the Sunday Mercury. The sunday mercury picked up on the Blog as well and linked to it from their website, FANTASTIC ! They also featured some of my video content on their site.
http://www.sundaymercury.net/news/
Click Here To Read The .PDF
All of this has helped raise the profile of the blog and my involvement with epilepsy.
To date, the story & blog has been featured in 2 national papers and 5 local papers, not to mention the numerous “syndications” of the story, it even went as far as Spain and Gahna in Africa.
On-line Stories:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ - Daily Mail.
http://www.thisisderbyshire.co.uk/
This media attention has been amazing!! I hope 2012 continues to be great for the blog and raising awareness of Epilepsy.