The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur

It’s that time again. Ann Harrison over at Contemporary Retirement Coaching has posted another edition of Blogging Boomers Carnival.

Ann Harrison is the owner of the Contemporary Retirement Company. She’s a Retirement OptionsTM coach, a pre-retirement trainer and the UK’s only 2young2retire certified facilitator. Her blog offers tons of resources to help people make the transition to an interesting and vibrant retirement.

In this week’s carnival there’s a video on how boomer women can use accessories to update their look, career opportunities after 50, commentary on the US presidential election and more.

Please do check out Blogging Boomers Carnival #91.

Andrea J. Stenberg

I was at a networking meeting this week and we began talking about our favourite podcasts. For the uninitiated, a podcast is an audio recording distributed over the internet. It’s like radio except you can download episodes, listen at your convenience, pause and re-listen at will.

For business people, business podcasts can be an invaluable learning tool. Instead of having to travel to attend a course, you can download a podcast on almost any topic and be learning at home.

You can listen in your office while you work or you can upload them to your MP3 player and multi-task - listen while you workout, commute or do housework.

If you’ve never listened to a podcast, here are some of my favourites:

1. The Podcast Sisters - this weekly podcast features discussions by Krishna De, Anna Farmery and Heather Gorringe. These three women discuss Web 2.0, social media and other technology for “non-geek” businesses.

2. Street Smarts Marketing - Marketing expert Kathleen Gage interviews a variety of industry experts on topics to help you run your business better. You have to register to get access to get the downloads but it truly is worth giving up your email address.

3. Wonderful Web Women - Janet Beckers interviews successful women on the internet to learn their secrets.

4. Marketing Over Coffee is a new podcast for me … recommended by an internet marketing colleague. Hosts John Wall and Christopher Penn record it every business Wednesday at 5:30am Eastern at a coffee shop in Natick, MA, just outside of Boston.

5. Andrea’s More Effective Marketing Podcast. Yes, this is a shameless plug for my own podcast. I interview people who have knowledge to offer on subjects that I want to learn about. I learn tons from these people and hope you will too.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Do you listen to any podcasts that help you run your business? Please share the links by leaving a comment below.

If you’re still on the fence about getting involved in social media for marketing your business, perhaps you need to look at some hard numbers to help convince you.

Here are some of the statistics I was able to dig up

Facebook

(these are Facebook’s own stats)

• More than 110 million active users (people who have accessed Facebook within the past month)
• Facebook is the 4th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)
• Facebook is the most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

LinkedIn

(LinkedIn’s don’t publish as many of their own stats as Facebook)

• More than 25 million experienced professionals from around the world,
• More than 150 industries listed on LinkedIn

Twitter

(note - Twitter stats may be out of whack because not everyone accesses Twitter from the website. Many use their cell phones or third party tools like Twitterrific)

• Total Users: 1+ million
• Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
• Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

Want more information about social media usage? Try the following sites. They have some interesting and hopefully useful information.

What’s Greater than Sex from Scott Monty has some very interesting stats about young men’s usage of social media.

Looking for Canadian Internet Usage Statistics? Ed Lee, an Englishman living and working in Toronto. He’s compiled some interesting facts about Canada’s internet users.

Katharina Scholtz at Get a Quirk blog has even more Social Media Statistics for you to peruse.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Have you found some interesting - and more importantly - useful statistics about social media marketing and usage? Please leave a comment below and share the wealth!

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.

The Rule of Seven is an old marketing adage. It says that a prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you. Now the number seven isn’t cast in stone. The truth of the Rule of Seven is you can’t just engage in a marketing activity and then be done. Marketing must be an on-going process in order for it to be successful.

So why do prospects need to hear your message so many times before taking action? If you are doing your marketing well, you are targeting the right people; your ideal customers. You have created powerful marketing materials that use language your target audience relates to. You speak to their major problems and how you can solve them. Why don’t they jump to their feet and grab what you have to offer the first time they see your message?

1. Noise

In today’s world, people are being bombarded with messages constantly. It is truly difficult to get past all this noise and be heard.

The first few times someone sees your message its likely it won’t completely register with them. We all have marketing blinders we’ve built up over time - otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with the constant noise from businesses clamoring to be heard.

It’s no different with your prospects. They’re not sitting around waiting for you to show up. They’re busy living their lives and you may not even be a blip on their radar.

2. They don’t need you … yet

Even if you’ve closely targeted the right people, they may not need your product or service today. And if they only see your marketing message once, it’s not likely they’ll remember you tomorrow or next week or next year when they suddenly do need you. When it comes to marketing out of sight is definitely out of mind.

This is true even when your target audience is a business. When I was doing marketing research Continue Reading »