• by Shankar Gupta , April 28, 2005

It's become an old trope that when you want to drive traffic to your site, content is king. But anyone who's ever Googled something knows that good content can be hard to find. So, what's a discerning Webmaster to do? Buy it.

Aiming to fill the need for quality online content, Advanstar Medical Economic's Mediwire stands ready to provide niche content  in Advanstar's case, information for medical professionals  that can be readily syndicated to any of the 15,000 medical information sites, where medical professionals already congregate. Advanstar Medical Economics, a division of Advanstar Communications, owns 21 health care publications, which it has compiled into a large library of articles on medical topics of every stripe.

Rather than creating yet another health portal, Advanstar has signed a deal to syndicate these articles to other health sites. "The major players of professional health sites are destination sites. Nobody syndicates a professional network that reaches across multiple sites," says Rafael Cosentino, general manager for online business development at Mediwire. "The destination model is very expensive. We're not going to spend a penny on marketing to health care professionals; we're just going to be plugged in."

The database of articles, which includes 36 health care categories, are made searchable on the partner site pages, and rebranded to match the look and feel of the partner site. In March, Advanstar launched on over 105 sites, plus its own 25 health care pages catering to knowledgeable professionals, but also appearing on more mainstream sites like Yahoo! Health.

Cosentino says that Advanstar is in talks with government agencies and other large-scale health care industry groups.