Survey: What Do You Think About Telemedicine?

Take our 2 minute survey and share your thoughts and opinions about the future (or lack thereof) of telemedicine!

Telemedicine is gaining at least a toe-hold in health care at both ends of the health care spectrum. For some large hospital groups and insurers it offers an ability to scale with significant cost savings, and on the other end individual physicians like those in concierge practices are using telemedicine to stay in touch with patients and offer services on-demand.

We're asking you for a few minutes of your time to take this survey an answer a couple of simple questions to see what providers are thinking about telemedicine.

We'll aggregate the answers and create a report outlining the sentiment of physicians and other providers around telemedicine.

Here's a direct link to share with your networks: https://storyteller.typeform.com/to/CFMq33

Freelance MD & Spam

Freelance MD gets spammed but hey, so does everyone else.

Unfortunately, success and traffic breeds spam and in this situation the cure's are often worse than the solutions...

Freelance MD is starting to attract a fair amount of spammers who are trying to tap in to a growing physician community for either SEO backlink Google juice or just to get in front of doctors.

There are three solutions we're investigating as a solution:

1. Require users to login to comment.
2. Hold all comments for approval.
3. Prevent users from adding links when they comment.

Require users to login: This one just kills your community. Requiring users to login to comment easily cuts comments by 70% or more in most cases. It's just a tremendous barrier to overcome. It also destroys any benefits that you accrue for SEO purposes. Since everything is behind a firewall and not public, the search engines can't index it so they don't see your site being updated and changing often (which is good).

Hold all comments for approval: This one's just painful. First, it's a huge headache to go through and approve/discard every comment and it only gets worse as the site grows. It also takes away any immediacy with the social reward of seeing your comment go live on the site. In effect, it just slows everything down and makes for a less-than-optimal experience as we try to get people to come back and contribute regularly. Also, while this is common tactic with Wordpress we're not using that system and it's not practical with our current configuration.

Prevent users from adding links: I've avoided this but it is possible to do. We have a number of people who are fairly regular and they always back-linking to their site [ including you ; ) ] and I don't want to prevent that. However, it is an option and we could try it out. I haven't done this so I don't know what kind of drop off would result.

Since you refer to your 'subscription' I'm guessing that you've subscribed to the RSS feed on the site and not just the posts. You're way back in the minority even knowing how to do this so this specific issue of spam showing up in your feed is probably restricted to you... and maybe someone else.

(Believe me, I hate spam with a red-hot passion that could melt glaciers and raise sea levels world wide. Hate it. We check all of our sites and remove spam 3-6 times a day and not just for this site. It is just painful. Medical Spa MD gets about 20x the traffic and a corresponding amount of spam. I would actually bring back crucifiction as a punishment for spammers.)

Ok, so there we are. I see that the only really workable solution would be to prevent people from adding links to their comments. I'd like to hear your feedback on this. Do you think it would prevent people from leaving comments (which is absolutely imperative for success) or is it better to just swat at the flies rather than burn the house down [intentional exaggeration].

Free Resource Report For Physicians

To access this free report you'll need to login to Freelance MD. If you're not a Member, you'll need to join Freelance MD first.

Our Free Resource Report for Members

In this report you'll discover the products, services, tools and resources that we use to build our businesses or that we have researched and recommend on a daily basis to our friends and colleagues.

Of course this is a free report for our physician members. If you're not a Member yet, you'll need to join Freelance MD. (We'll also be adding to this report from time to time to keep it up to date.)

Upcoming Product Launches On Freelance MD

We're working hard on the number product launches for physicians to help you increase your income and have more control over your lifestyle.

The first three or four of these will be launched over the next two weeks or so and include a webinar on how to protect and control your online reputation, a membership site that teaches physicians how to add new cosmetic Botox and fillers to their existing clinical practice (Botox Training MD), some videos on social marketing and building relationships and quite a few others. These are being launched in conjunction with other physicians and businessesto have information and expertise that are of value to the Freelance M.D. community.

We are also working on integrating a number of new technologies into our systems and providing greater conductivity for our membersand will be rolling out some new systems in the (hopefully) near future.

One of the principles that we founded freelance and beyond is the idea that there are many physicians who have information that is of value but that is siloed and unavailable outside of the confines of a medical conference or seminar.

One of our goals is to take that information and to make it much more widely available to physicians who want it by building information products and membership sites that allow very specialized information a broad reach and benefit both the author and the consumer.

We will be announcing a number of these products in the next few weeks... and besides just building in announcing these new products, I'll be diving into great deal of detail about how we produce this content and how physicians can benefit from it. My hope is that you'll take a look and give this new system a chance.

PS: As a side note, if you're a physicianor medical provider that has some specialized knowledge that you think would benefit from a wider physician audience please contact us and let's discuss if there is a way that we get that online.

Freelance MD: The First 100 Days

Freelance MD's first 100 days of growth is awesome.

Actually, it's really impressive. Here's the chart showing Freelance MD's growth from our launch in mid November of 2010 through the end if February 2011, the first 100 days.

Traffic Overview

In looking at the numbers there are a couple of things that stand out immediately. First, there's a huge gap between the number of visitors and the number of page views that show that there are almost 3 page views for each reader per visit. This is a fantastic ratio and indicates that new readers are actually clicking around the site and not just leaving. If the gap were narrow, we'd know that people were coming to the site but not finding it interesting so this gap is a good indicator of how 'sticky' the site is.

Of course we're still growing traffic at a very respectable pace too. I'd expect to see this trajectory flatten and even have a few bumps but it will certainly continue this upward trend. Breaking 10,000 unique visitors in the first 100 days is fantastic and we're on track to hit all of our traffic and interaction goals.

You'll also notice that we have more than 700 Facebook likes and a growing community of physicians interating in the Freelance MD LinkedIn Group that I'd invite all docs to join.

We've also been contacted by a number of other medical and physician sites that have asked to be able to distribute our content to their audiences. The most notable of these new partner sites is KevinMD.com which is among the web’s most prominent and influential clinical health care blogs. These sites will choose selected posts from Freelance MD that speak to their audiences and republish them to their own sites.

We've also received quite a few inquires about joining or writing for Freelance MD (We've got some really great guest posts already)so we've written a number of posts to get help you get started, from how to add a Freelance MD badge to your website, to how to write a guest post, to how to become a contributing author.

There are also a number of new parts to the site that we've just launches. They're a little bumpy right now as we work out all of the technology kinks but they're live and working.

There's a new nonclinical jobs board, a resources directory and a calendar of upcoming events. There will be many changes to all of these as we add additional functionality and integrations.

It's been some heavy lifting in the last 100 days and there's more to come but Greg and I are committed to making a Freelance MD a must-have portal for physicians looking for more control of their career, income, and lifestyle.

Get Freelance MD Content via Email

As a Freelance MD Member you can subscribe to any content and have it sent directly to your email, ensuring that you don't miss anything you're interested in.

Every time the thread or blog is updated you'll receive the content in your email automatically. That way, you'll be able to recieve the content you're interested in without the need to visit the site and see what's new. (Although that's a good idea from time to time so you can see if there's something new you're interested in.)

Make sure that you subscribe to the main blog as well as this one so that you're aware of new updates to the site. Here's the how to for subscribing after you join Freelance MD:

Subscribing To Individual Pages

(Blog, Archive, Library, etc.)

Members may subscribe to any content and have it delivered to them via email.

To subscribe to any page:

1. Click on your name in the top right corner of the page.
2. Click the Subscribe to Page Updates >

You will now receive updates to all the pages you subscribe to via email. You may subscribe to any page on Freelance MD.

Managing Your Page Subscriptions

To manage or remove a Subscription:

1. Click on your name in the top right corner of the page.
2. Click Edit Profile
   
3. Click Subscriptions



Freelance MD: 7,000 Unique Readers In Month 2

Freelance MD has passed 7,000 unique monthly readers in just two months.

I thought we may have a slower month in January after our first 30 days of astonishing growth, but I was wrong. Here's a screenshot showing how quickly Freelance MD is growing traffic, from 4,100 readers in December 2010 to 7,100+ in January 2011. That 70% month over month is a staggering jump.

At some point I'll be expecting this growth curve to flatten out since we're a pretty small niche -  physicians interested in getting more control of their careers and lifestyle -

• We've added a physician jobs area that we're looking to grow. We'll be adding non-clinical jobs in the very near future.
• We continue to be sticky. This indicator—even more than the growth curve—is something to get excited about since it denotes that readers are heavily engaged.
• We continue to add new members across our network. From our LinkedIn Group to our physician members on this site. (You can join Freelance MD for free and get access to our members only areas and downloads.)
• We've got a number of new Select Partner applicatants that would like to be part of our community. 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're in the process of adding a number of new reports and downloads for our members and the should be up shortly.
• We've added a number of new physician authors over the last month and there are others who should be up and running in the next few weeks.

There'a more than a little going on behind the scenes as we continue to build this community as a trusted resource for docs. Please let us know how we're doing, give us suggestions, or just vent if there's information that you want but can't find. Leave us a comment.

Update on Feb 1, 9:46 AM by Jeff, Freelance MD

The final number for January was 7,260 unique visitors. ; )