HOW TO HAVE A HOSPITAL BLOG AND A LIFE TOO

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.

Here are some ideas for reusing your blog content in other formats:

1.    E-newsletters

Use 3-4 of your blog posts as the content for your e-newsletter. Simply use the first couple of sentences from each post as the “teaser” content in your e-newsletter. After this “teaser” text add a link saying “read more” and hyperlink this to the appropriate post on your blog.

This can be a “double win” for you: Not only do you get an e-newsletter without having to write new content but you also drive more traffic to your blog. Email is still the most effective ROI generator of all digital marketing when it’s done right. Here’s a way to send out useful content to your prospective patients with minimal extra work.

2.    Social media posts

Need to get your message out on social media? Blog posts are a lay up for creating social media posts.

Simply post a “teaser” from your blog as your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter post and just like the e-newsletter include a “read more” link that links back. Just as with the e-newsletter you now have more content and a mechanism to drive traffic to your blog (see chart below from Shareaholic.)

You can even automate the posting of your blogs to Facebook, Twitter etc. If you use a common blogging platform like WordPress you can get plug-ins that do this for you.

3.    Ebooks

If you’ve bought into content marketing’s ability to generate results, such as additional patient volume or attendance at events, you’re going to want to create some “premium content” pieces. You’ll want these “premium” content pieces so you can “trade” them for information such as email addresses and build your email lists.

The most common form of premium content out there is the ebook. Trying to come up with a 20-page ebook from scratch can be overwhelming.

One way to cut through this is to look at the blog posts you’ve already written and look for common themes. Often you’ll find you can take several of your blog posts and “glue” them together into an ebook. You’ll probably need to edit them once in the ebook tand write some other content to dovetail them together but you’ll get an ebook done in a third of the time it would take if you started from scratch.

4.    Videos

You can take your blog posts and turn them into an outline and script for a video. Post the video on YouTube to gather more exposure for your content and hospital. (Youtube is the world’s second largest search engine with approximately 3 billion searches per month.)

Grab your iPhone and shoot the video yourself or contact a professional video services company.

5.    Slide shows

You can use one, or more, of your blog posts as an outline for a deck that you post on Slideshare.com. If you don’t know Slideshare, it’s one of the most popular websites on the Internet. It’s a treasure trove of slide decks available for your download. As a marketer, it’s another way to get your content out there.

6.    Presentations

Naturally you can turn your blog posts into a deck that you can present in-person or present online in a live or recorded webinar.

7.    A real book

It may seem wild but you could become an author of a real book. There’s nothing quite as powerful as a printed book to position you or your institution as experts.

If you write enough blog posts, you will in fact be able to group them together into the content of an actual book. No doubt you’ll have to create quite a lot of extra content to make the book hang together but you will certainly not be starting from scratch.

By creating content in many different formats you can:

• Reach different audiences—different people consume different media
• Enhance your institution’s credibility in your field—“they have a blog, an ebook and a webinar on the subject. They certainly seem to be leaders in this field.”
• Drive more traffic to every piece of your content
• Become famous! (Maybe, you never know)

You can view the original article here: http://wainscotmedia.com/blog/how-to-have-a-hospital-blog-and-a-life-too

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