Business Blogging for Health Professionals

A Shout-Out to The Blog Squad on Branding by Blogging

The question I'm asking myself today is, Where has the Blog Squad been all my (blogging) life? I give people advice on business blogging, but a lot of my advice is about the mechanics of building a presence on the Web and optimizing a business blog for search engines. This is a sideline for me, a labor of love rather than a money-making venture. I don't spend nearly as much time as I should looking at what else is out there in the way of good business advice for professionals looking to use blogging as a marketing tool. Excuses, excuses...

I talk in my book about the importance of branding, and though I think the advice I give is pretty good, I'm not a branding expert. That's where the blog Squad folks really shine. Are you interested in building a personal brand as part of your professional identity, as well you should be? Then you, dear reader, should do as I am going to be doing over the next few days, and read a bunch of the posts at the Blog Squad's blog, http://www.buildabetterblog.com.

Business blogging is del.icio.us: can you Digg it?

In addition to the new TypePad Pages feature, SixApart added more useful tools for promoting your blog, making it easy for you to add Post to Delicious and Digg This links to the footer of your posts. You can read about it in the Everything TypePad blog in a post entitled  Feature Updates: Comments, TrackBacks, sharing, URLs and statistics.

We've added the ability for you to add "Save to del.icio.us" and "Digg This" links to the footers of your posts and pages. These links will let your readers easily share your posts and pages on the popular social content sharing services del.icio.us and Digg. While we did this, we updated the design of the page that lets you select the content that appears in post and page footers to make it easier to control the footer content that appears on your site. We're looking to add more social sharing services in the future, so let us know which services your readers are using.

Life Beyond Code :: FREE eBook - Personal Branding for Technology Professionals

I just stumbled on a free eBook entitled Personal Branding for Technology Professionals by Rajesh Setty, a very successful entrepreneur and and high-powered technology business development consultant whose blog is a regular stop for me as I wander about in the Blogosphere.

While his book title implies that it is about technology professionals in particular, a quick read-through has shown me that its advice applies to any professional who wants to use the social networking power of Web 2.0 to build credibility and trust and to grow one's practice and/or career.

BBC NEWS: Blogging 'set to peak next year'

BBC News recently ran a story about a Gartner prediction that blogging is about to level off in popularity: BBC NEWS | Technology | Blogging 'set to peak next year'.

The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million. The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs. Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010. Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so. He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on.

What I find curious and fascinating is that Gartner is talking about the number of bloggers, as opposed to the number of people who read blogs.  It brought to mind a post from this summer by Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Strategy at Yahoo!, entitled Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers. He offers some insights that might suggest ways to estimate the number of blog readers out there.

He includes a chart that gives a starting point:

The chart is based on the experience of Yahoo! Groups, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison with blogging, but it's still enlightening. What the post says, and the chart illustrates, is that for everyone who posts in a group (a creator), there are an order of magnitude more commenters (synthesizers) and two orders of magnitude more readers (consumers).

Taking his numbers literally, if Gartner is right about 100 million bloggers, a billion people will read and comment on blogs, directly joining in the conversation. There will be ten billion blog readers. OK, there are only a bit less than seven billion humans total, so the math clearly doesn't work as written. But let's use powers of two instead of ten. If there are 100 million bloggers, there are 200 million reader/commenters, and 400 million people who only read blogs. That makes the estimated size of the Blogosphere in the range of about half a billion people. That number's a lot smaller than the mythical ten billion, but it's a nice consolation prize, don't you think?

Bottom line: If you choose to blog, and to make your blog findable, there's an audience out there for you. There's work involved, but there's a payoff in store. Blogs aren't going away any time soon.

Healthcare Blogging Summit

[cross-posted from FutureHIT]

I know everybody who was there loved it, but I was extremely unhappy that the Healthcare Blogging Summit held yesterday in Washington, DC occurred at a time when I was unable to join in either as speaker or attender. The logjam in my schedule was my fault, not theirs, which makes me even more unhappy. I have to learn not to say "yes" so much...) From all accounts it was a great success, which only increases my disappointment at not being able to attend. I do, however, feel joyful about two things:

1. From what I have heard so far, the attendees came away with a lot of new insights and inspiration about healthcare blogging.
2. There will be not one but three Healthcare Blogging Summits next year, and I will plan in advance to participate as actively as I can, whether that participation be speaking, moderating or sitting in on panel discussions, or simply attending and networking with others present.

The three conferences next year were verbally announced but are not yet online anywhere that I can find. From what I'm hearing, the dates and locations are:

• April 30, 2007, Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas NV
• September 17-18, Hilton Hotel, Chicago, IL
• December 3, 2007, Crystal City Hyatt, Washington DC (actually the Hyatt is in Crystal City VA, just across the Potomac from DC and even closer to Reagan National Airport)

I'll post more news on these summits as it becomes available.

Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog

One of the most popular blogs run by a healthcare professional is Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog. Kevin Pho, MD, is a practicing internist and family practitioner. I rely on it for pointers to news of interest, in addition to other insights he provides from time to time.

His blog is especially interesting because he uses it as a way to promote a Web business he runs, KevinMD.com. On this site, he takes questions from e-visitors and provides detailed, well-researched and documented responses. He does not diagnose or prescribe, but the information he provides would be very useful in a visit to your personal physician. For this service he charges $15 on average, more for complex questions.

The blog being such a good read, I'm reminded every time I read it that his service exists. The blog doesn't trumpet the service, but many of us visit About pages when we like a blog, and visiting his pops up a news story about his service. Yet another layer of indirection, but it obviates much of the stigma that "shameless commerce" attaches to a blog. 

It's a good model to follow for selling services if your blog is not the primary value you are delivering via the Web. My assumption has always been that most professionals who blog do so for marketing rather than sales reasons - building their personal "brand", so to speak. But if you have a service to sell as Kevin does, or perhaps a line of nutritional supplements or a book or some other health-related product, Kevin's approach looks like it would work pretty well.

His blog gets about 72,000 unique visitors per month, according to the advertising agent for his site, BlogAds.  Many of those, like me, are regulars who visit more than once a month. 

With that scale of visitation, advertising becomes profitable, and a service like BlogAds is a good way to manage it.  Google AdSense is the most common way to put ads on your blog, and TypePad offers to put ads on your blog as a way to pay for your service (from the Weblogs tab, choose Edit Design, then Content Selections, and you'll see Text Ads at the top of the Sidebar Content column). 

I'd bet that the number of visitors you need to outweigh the mild stigma ads on your site may create is situation-dependent. Kevin's blog has ads that look tasteful and fit well with his content, and that's another key to reducing the negative effect of ads. In fact, Dmitriy Kruglyak of the Medical Blogging Network maintains that tasteful, well-targeted ads like those on the KevinMD blog actually add value. I'm turning into a convert as time goes by... :-)

Blogging | Going pro | Economist.com

This week's Economist magazine has an article entitled Blogging: Going Pro. In Blogging for Health Professionals, I stated that not many people actually make money blogging. While in proportionate terms that's still true, apparently it's becoming less so every day.

ON HER blog, called Dooce, Heather Armstrong chronicles her life as a disenchanted Mormon in Salt Lake City, her former career as a high-flying web designer in Los Angeles, her pregnancy and postpartum depression, and so on. A year ago, her blog started generating enough advertising revenue to become the main source of income for her family. She is not alone. There are now just enough people like Ms Armstrong to signify a new trend: blogging as a small business.

Traditionally there have been two kinds of blogs: personal diaries and the online equivalent of shiny-cover magazines. Now a third category seems to be emerging, which the Economist calls "mom and pop blogs". These are blogs with a small number of writers - say one to three - that outsource ad sales and blog promotion to companies like Federated Media (better known as FM), a startup ad agency targeting the blog market. They make the kind of money that people can live on, so they can become full-time ventures.

Sometimes I don't mind being wrong. This is one of those times, if what the Economist is saying about them turns out to be true.