“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.

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.

If you’re one of the 40% of hospitals that have a blog, nice work!

If you have a blog, you’re starting 2016 with a great foundation for your content marketing. Content marketing is one of the hottest trends out there for hospital marketing in 2016 and you’ve got one of the key tools in place.

But as we bloggers know once you’ve got a blog you want an audience, and once you’ve got an audience, you want a bigger audience.

So how do you grow your blog’s audience? Here are some ideas.