The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur

The Blogging Boomers Carnival #90 lands at The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur

When it comes to marketing, you can’t function in a vacuum. You need to connect with real people who might need your products or services. To be a really effective marketer you shouldn’t just randomly send out messages and hope they stick; you need to start a conversation.

The same is true of blogging. Whether you’re blogging for your business or for personal reasons, it’s not enough to write a post to your blog and sent it out into the ether. You’re not really blogging until you become part of a broader conversation in the blogosphere.

This is partly why I joined the Blogging Boomers Carnival - to be part of a larger community. As bloggers we connect to each other through these weekly Carnivals. We also comment on each other’s blogs and communicate via email as well.

But what about you, readers of The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur? Why should you care about this Carnival? For the same reasons - to become part of the conversation. First, by reading a variety of blogs you virtually meet new people with different points of view. This makes your online community slightly larger.

But don’t just lurk. To really be part of a larger community you need to be active. When you read blogs - this one, other members of Blogging Boomers, or others you discover in your travels - stop from time to time and leave a comment. This simple act gets you into the game. You become an active and vital part of the community, not just a passive consumer.

Often your comment will be made and forgotten. But other times it will be the start of something more. Your comment will inspire others to leave follow-up comments. Or may inspire people to visit your site and connect with you there. Next thing you know you’re chatting with someone via email or social media. You may meet in person, or do a joint venture together.

You just never know what can happen when you take the plunge and join the conversation.

And that, my friends, is the power of social media.

This week’s Blogging Boomers Carnival

Here are the links to this week’s contributions in the carnival. As usual, there’s a broad variety of topics. But they are all thoughtful and entertaining. So please, take a visit to some of these sites. And if the mood strikes, please join the conversation and leave a comment or two.

Boomers’ retirement lifestyle will be much different from that of our parents. Learn how different at SoBabyBoomer.com.

What makes a woman sexy after 40? Just ask daytime TV heart throb, Michael Damian. Find out what the star of “The Young and the Restless” has to say to The Glam Gals about what looks hot and what does not, on a boomer woman. Just Visit Fabulous after 40 to hear this podcast.

Gilligan’s Island. In the TV theme song hall of fame, if such a thing exists, surely the Most Hallowed section contains the tune that tells the tale of how first mate Gilligan and his skipper (named, as every trivia fan knows, Jonas Grumby) and the rest of the gang found themselves stranded on a desert island.

Will you have to continue paying your mortgage into retirement? How the heck are you gonna do it? Check out the comments at The Boomer Chronicles.

The Midlife Crisis Queen aka Laura Lee Carter is asking an important midlife question:

If your life was a message, what message would that be?

Head over to Contemporary Retirement to discover the surprising signs that you’ll live longer than you think.

Over at Don’t Gel Too Soon is a brief meditation on some of the really nasty campaign tactics that have arisen in the past month or so.

Worried about the economy? Just in time a little (tongue in cheek) CASH for you to enjoy, courtesy of Gen Plus.

It sure seems like when a guy hits middle age, it all hits the fan - and all at once. No, you’re not imagining it. Midlife is the time when everything starts to go wrong, and all at the same time. Read Statistics, Setbacks and Self Esteem

This week, Dina at This Marriage Thing, goes looking for an entirely different kind of spot.

A newsletter or ezine is just another way to keep the conversation going. And so here at The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur I wrote about How To Increase Subscribers To Your Newsletter. After all, your newsletter isn’t part of the conversation until people start reading it.