“How often should I blog?” Type those words into Google and you’ll find more than half a billion-with-a-b results trying to answer that question. Everyone is looking for an answer to the same question, but with so many experts offering so much conflicting advice, it can be almost impossible to make sense of it all.

Coming up with a blogging plan can be an even bigger challenge for a hospital marketer. There are few hospital blogs to use as examples as you hone your own organization’s blogging strategy, and what works for a Fortune 500 company or for a small business might not be best for your audience.

Here’s how to design an editorial calendar that works for your blog.

Always choose quality over quantity

The one thing that every blogging expert agrees on is that the more content that’s on your blog, the better, but it’s easy to get caught in a pattern of creating content for the sake of content. Unless you’ve got a team onboard helping you write insightful posts, trying to add a post per day is probably a mistake. It may work just fine at first, but such a pace can be difficult for even a dedicated blogger to maintain, much less a marketing director with countless other responsibilities.

One schedule that’s popular with many blogs is 2-3 posts per week. It’s the one we use on this blog, and it gives you time to plan out each post so you don’t have to sacrifice quality for quantity.

Pick a schedule that covers mutiple themes

Adding 2-3 posts per week also allows you to choose a fixed schedule with different themes. Here you’ll notice that we post a lot about productivity in addition to hospital marketing tips. It’s easy to adapt such a schedule for your hospital, and it’ll help you come up with topics as well.

In this way, you can cover many different areas of interest on your blog while keeping your content organized so you can buld your readership. You can write about new techniques or technologies at your hospital one day, profile physicians and staff on another, and offer seasonal health tips on yet another.

If you have multiple writers, you can assign each of them a topic area, or mix things up to keep everyone on their toes. Even if it’s just you, though, segmenting your blog into topics will help you stay focused and innovative.

See what’s working

Once you’ve added a substantial amount of content and built up a following, you can use Google Analytics to determine which topics have proven to be the most popular with your target audience and emphasize them going forward. That’ll help you turn your content into readers, which is your primary purpose for running a blog in the first place.

Adding between 9 and 15 posts to your blog every month can increase your web traffic four times over. That means more readers for your blog and more prospective patients learning more about your hospital and staff.