by Tony Chen

Well, it's been a lot of fun doing Hospital Impact recently partly because I get to explore many nooks and crannies of the burgeoning blogosphere business. This blog gives me the chance to learn about blogging / media / publishing just as much about healthcare. So, today we go on a slight detour off our "business of healthcare" track and check out the business of blogging. The blogosphere is alive and kicking and people are starting to figure out business models to monetize blogs in new ways.

Some recent developments:

- Hospital Impact content is licensed by Newstex, a blog aggregator company that makes my blog and many others available to LexisNexis users worldwide. In January, ~150 folks did searches through LexisNexis and ended up on hospital impact posts. That's $5 for me, enough to pay my hosting costs.

- Hospital Impact content is also available via Blogburst, another blog aggregating company whose customers are big media outlets like Reuters, FoxNews, USAToday, and others. When editors see a good post, they'll put it up on their news sites. Take a look at the main Reuters Health page, and you'll see a recent post selected from Hospital Impact. Almost 1,000 people have viewed hospital impact content right on the Reuters site. I only get paid if hospital impact is one of the top 100 blogs referenced by these outlets - that's highly unlikely, given our niche audience. However, our fellow blogger Fard might have a chance - he was #92 last time I looked.

- As you'll see on the right, I've started running google ads (yes, I'm selling out, but to be fair, I've held out longer than most). I think the links are actually fairly targeted, but still deciding whether it just clutters the page too much.

- The popular social media giant MySpace recently entered the news business. They, too, are utilizing blogs as news sources. Hospital Impact has a story up on their front news page for health. Nonetheless, no one seems to be reading MySpace news at all.

- Fun! Memorial Hospital and Health System of South Bend, Indiana is quoting hospital impact on their main website.

- Some company in Arizona offered me $500 for the url www.hospitalimpact.org. (don't worry, I did not accept. Add a zero and maybe we can start talking).

- It's really through hospital impact that I have the honor of blogging over at the World Health Care Blog. Honestly, the last 2 weeks of posts there from all my fellow bloggers have been the best healthcare blogging I've ever seen. Definitely worth a read.

- A couple of months ago, an editor from a health IT magazine paid me to put one of my posts into his magazine. Sure, why not!

- It's really humbling to see hospital impact as a source for Advisory Board and FierceHealthcare news items. Increasingly, I see particular posts sourced for university blackboards.

- 200-300 folks a day stumble upon hospital impact through google searches. Some recent searches: tony chen enh (weird!), clinic in drug store, true incent of father and daughter regarding breastmilk sucking, hardwiring excellence, disney hospital, hospital marketing, world health blog, revolution health, hospital management getting departments to work together. The power of google is amazing - all businesses must incorporate "search engine optimization" in their web marketing strategy (and blogging can be a big part of that!)

Okay, enough hort-tootin'. At the end of the day, blogging is a lot like sports. 0.000001% of all people who play sports get paid to play sports. The rest of us play because it's good exercise, it's social, and it's just plain fun.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program...