“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.

Just the thought of starting a blog is enough to make many hospital marketers run for the exit. You have no time already. How can you possibly add a blog and still have a life?

But you may also know there’s growing evidence that blogging produces results (see chart below from Hubspot).

You also know these results don’t come for free. It takes us on average 60-90 minutes to write a blog post. That’s a sizable investment in today’s harried business world.

One way to increase your chances of getting a good ROI from your blogging is to reuse the content you create in as many other formats as you can.

If I had to bet on one thing you have not done, this would be it: I’d bet you have not developed personas of your patients.

I’d bet on this because I’ve developed a persona of you. My persona of you says you have very little time. And with very little time available this is a step in marketing it’s very tempting to skip. (I’ve skipped this step many times myself and I’m in marketing too.)

But skipping this step is a bad idea.

I’m presenting a webinar in 2 weeks on the subject of hospital blogging. I thought I’d start the presentation by talking about the benefits of publishing a blog.

I’m sure you’re already aware that blogging takes a bunch of time. If something is going to soak up so much of our most valuable resource then it should really pay off.

So I got to work looking for data to show the benefits of blogging, especially the ROI. This post covers my findings.

A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk writing one of these blog posts when I received an email from one of our editors. He said he had several new blog posts ready to go and I should review them before they were sent to the client.

So I stopped writing my post and hopped over to review the client’s posts (clients come first!). What I saw was not what I expected. In fact what I saw put me in such a state of uncertainty that I could not even start writing my blog post again.

Instead, I ended up conducting a few hours of research on the Internet. Finally, I gathered together enough data to shake me out of my writing paralysis. In fact, it inspired me to write an additional post—this one! Here’s what I found.

This is the second part of my post about driving more readers to your blog. (That is if you have a blog, our research shows only 40% of hospitals have one.)

Last week in part 1 of this post, I described three keys to getting more readers to your blog: knowing your reader, knowing the influencers in your space and making friends with these influencers.

In this post I lay out four more ways to grow your blog audience.