Freelance MD: 30 Days In

Freelance MD was launched one month ago today. There have been a few changes.

Greg and I launched Freelance MD after meeting at the Medical Fusion Conference in Las Vegas at the beginning of November. We'd already had a number of discussions about the need but I wanted to talk to physicians outside of my usual cosmetic medicine contacts and listen to what they wanted, and gauge their reaction to what we were thinking about. Well, whatever doubts I had about the need for this type of community were quickly assuaged. I could see that the opportunity to provide a very broad, horizontal platform that focused on providing physicians information, products and services was growing and we were in a unique position to address it.

The conference ended on the 7th and on the 17th we launched Freelance MD in it's current iteration. Now, one month later, we've been astounded by it's growth and it's resonance with physicians. I've been involved with a number of online communities but the speed with which Freelance is growing is more than unusual, it's astounding. Here are a couple of notable milestones from our first thirty days;

• We've grow to almost twenty authors that include experts on topics as wide ranging as physician entrepreneurs, non-clinical careers, wealth planning, investing, and writing. We've passed 100 posts from our own authors, had our first guest post. It's actually been difficult for Greg to get back to everyone as fast as we'd like—but we're trying.
• We're growing fast. Take a look at the growth curves below. For a community site that's just one month old and hasn't launched with an existing network this is phenomenal. As a point of reference, when I started Medical Spa MD it took me more than a year (maybe two) to reach this number of unique monthly visitors. Fast growth often comes with volatility but this trajectory is better than we could have hoped for.
     
  

  Freelance MD traffic From November 17th — December 17th, 2010

  
  10,319 page views an more than 2,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 1,500+ unique visitors so far this month! ; )
• We're sticky. Take another look at the image above and you'll see a wide gap  between unique visitors and page views. This shows that the average visitor views slightly more than 4 pages each time they visit. For anyone who knows something about user behavior online, this is a key indication of how 'sticky' a site is and how interested visitors are in the content. The fact that we're seeing 5 page views per visitor literally blows the doors off of most sites, especially since there are 20 blog posts that are visible on the first page. This indicator—even more than the growth curve—is something to get excited about since it denotes that readers are heavily engaged.
• Readers are recommending us with 500 Facebook likes, more than 1,000 stumbles, and an unknown number of tweets. (You can do us a solid by helping out here and posting a recommendation to our favorite social networks.) If you look up in the right corner of the site you can see the number of times that we've been referred through popular social networks. (The Twitter number will change because it relates to the specific page you're on, not an aggregated total. That's why you'll see changing numbers under different posts.) We've also just added the new LinkedIn 'share' button. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what to think about what's going on there since I've never seen numbers like that appear so fast before.
• We've partners with some fantastic organizations. You'll notice that our Select Partners list is growing and we're also excited about that. With partners like Health 2.0, ExpedMed, and the Medical Fusion Conference, we're tapping in to a number of other communities and events that we can add value to.
• We've expanded our community to include Freelance MD groups on LinkedIn, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds... You can connect with the community through any or all of these. (You'll get bonus karma for connecting with them all.)
• We're building out promotions for some of our partner organizations. If you haven't visited the ExpedMed CME Polar Bear Adventure to investigate your adventurous side or thought about attending the Health 2.0 Spring Fling in San Diego, you should take a look.

The numbers above are pretty impressive, but we're not going to be resting on our laurels any time soon. There's too much to do. We'll undoubtedly have some issues as we grow, but we're committed to pushing through these obstacles and making Freelance MD the single best community for action-oriented physicians on the web.

In the very near future we'll be adding memberships, downloads, a non-clinical physicians jobs board and even more authors to the mix.

If you're appreciative of our efforts here on Freelance MD, please give us a Facebook 'like', share us on LinkedIn. You can also ask a question in our forums. Better yet, help us out and write a guest post or leave a comment to let us know what you think.

Comments

[Mike Woo-Ming MD MPH]

This is amazing. Thanks for putting in all the hard work - Great job guys!

[thuc]

congrats for a successful month! the partnership with Health 2.0 is really cool !

[Greg Bledsoe MD]

Thanks, Mike and Thuc.

It's been very rewarding to watch Freelance MD grow so rapidly, but I have to say that it could not have been done without the hard work of our authors. The content on this site has been provided by a very talented group of individuals and I've been very excited to read the various posts-- I'm learning as much as anyone.

The goal of Freelance MD is to provide valuable information to physicians on a variety of important subjects. I think our first 30 days is evidence we're on the right track, but there's a lot more to do to keep things going.

Many thanks to Jeff for the update and thanks once again to all the contributors who've made this site so great.