Online Marketing for Boomers

Rethinking Retirement?

Then You Have to Reinvent… Why You Absolutely Need Online Marketing!

Forbes reported back in June of this year that Baby Boomers are more likely to start a business in the next year than Millennials – twice as likely.  One of the fastest-growing segments of entrepreneurs in the U.S. is comprised of Baby Boomers (specifically, those over 50). See Boomers Rethinking Retirement.

Good news:  Boomers have decades of invaluable experience.  Bad news:  they may not have all the experience (or facts) they need to start a successful “encore career.”  For instance, what it takes “nowadays” to market the products or services they’re promoting. 

We may be a little biased, but we don't think any business can succeed without using online marketing.  Digital Marketing includes a variety of necessities such as a responsive website, SEO, Optimized Content, Social Media and Online Advertising.

Awareness Creation Reinvention Services (aka Internet Marketing)

Marketing is all about inventing and reinventing a business. So, if you’re ready to reinvent your retirement with a new business, you need to get in touch with us.

We love small businesses, we love entrepreneurs and we love the Boomers.  So much so that we’ve created a special SMB Internet Marketing program that helps startups get a grip on how to do business in the digital world; which, by the way, is much more cost-effective than most people think.  Check out Awareness Creation Small Business Internet Marketing.  

Should Doctors Be on Social Media? Absolutely!!!

You'll find a lot of doctors who are very vocal about all the reasons doctors should not be on social media:  HIPAA issues, no ROI, no time to keep up with it all, the potential of being burned by disgruntled patients' online reviews.  My comment?  Get on with it!

All business have very similar objections to using Social Media Marketing in their business development and communications strategies. However, the businesses who are using Social Media (including medical practices, hospitals, therapy providers, etc.) are finding ways to go around their initial objections and, ultimately, reap the benefits of Social Media:

• Affordable Marketing for greater reach than traditional methods.  Doctors can build or sustain their practices with the amount of new patients that can be found within a variety Social Media platforms.  Using tools such as Google Analytics or Facebook Insights can provide you ROI (or even Social ROI - SROI) values.
• Improved patient relationships result when doctors provide useful information about health management. Getting "social" doesn't mean you share your party selfies or travel plans. It's about having a give and take "conversation" about the needs of your audience and the professional information you can share that relates to those needs. Of course, you will not give personal health advice or reveal any person's private health information.  But, you will create a trust and following among your social media contacts. 
• Outshining the competition is never a bad thing.  Your social media participation can position you as an expert, a leader in your field.  And, if much of your competition is still afraid of social media, you can definitely leave them in your dust. You will be seen not only as an expert but as a progressive professional. And what if you do get a bad review? It can happen even to the most perfect.  But staying on top of the social chatter and keeping on track with your strategy will resolve any negative issues that may (or may never) come up.

Need other reasons to get in on Social Media. Check out 24 Outstanding Statistics & Figures on How Social Media has Impacted the Health Care Industry.

 As always, I welcome your feedback and questions!

Carole

Google has announced that changes in mobile search results are coming as of April 21, 2015. One point that is important for every website owner is that Mobile-Friendliness will become a ranking factor for SEO.

If your website is not mobile-friendly or does not use responsive design, your search engine rankings may be negatively impacted. Mobile searches have grown and so has mobile traffic. If your website is not "friendly" to this type of traffic, you may find a drop in your website activity in addition to a drop in the rankings.

You don't need to use responsive design but you will need to make sure that all the pages in your site are, again, mobile friendly.  Google will be updating the search rankings once they discover the mobile status of each URL.

Don't know if your website will pass the new Google mobile-friendly test?  Get in touch with Awareness Creation and we'll run a free test to let you know if Google sees your website as mobile friendly.

Remember:  the deadline is April 21, 2015!

Good luck!

Carole

Beware of Semalt Referral Traffic

For some time, our clients website analytics have been showing minimal traffic being driven by semalt.com which was not creating any big concern. Even though this type of traffic has been showing up for some time, most likely it wasn't referring a great number of "visitors".  However, during the last half of 2014, Semalt has beefed up its activities and this can now create problems for your website.This is website traffic you don't want.

What is Semalt?

It's bad news. Semalt is a Ukrainian-based spamming operation that uses its "botnet" to hijack hundreds of thousands of computers around the world by hiding within Soundfrost, which is a mp3 download web utility. Without going into the ugly details, just know that Semalt affects your website analytics by "driving" high numbers of bogus referral traffic; however, the traffic will show a 100% Bounce Rate, reduced average session duration times and takes up bandwidth - which can negatively impact your website rating. So what can you do to lower the impact of this spammer? 

Semalt Don'ts

• Don't opt-out of Semalt with any links they provide. Many have reported that once they attempted to opt-out, the more traffic was generated by Semalt. 

• Semalt ignores robots.txt commands so trying to block it with robots.txt won't work. 

Reducing the Impact of Semalt

Fortunately, there are a couple of ways you can fight the Semalt battle:

• Check with your web development team to make sure they have used the required  code for your .htaccess file. to block Semalt traffic.
• If your website is on Wordpress, use the Block Semalt plugin. 
• If website uses PHP, Nabble has a Semalt Blocker.

You've got enough to deal with when it comes to getting and tracking legitimate traffic to your website; use the above recommendations to stop Semalt from driving bad traffic and messing with your analytics.