Medicare Sherpa’s Audience Grows by Nearly 750% in 2010
Another year. Another New Year’s Resolution. Now it’s time to look back and document my progress to date with my social media experiment – creating an online community addressing the information needs of Medicare and Social Security Beneficiaries. This experiment was designed to provide me the opportunity to learn about blogging, link building, and social media. It was also an opportunity to use this training and research to identify the best tools and practices to attract audiences searching for answers about Social Security and Medicare Health Insurance and apply this experience to my day job.
Launch – Apr 28, 2009: Last year our audience grew to 29,380 unique visitors from 3,887 unique visitors in 2009. Page views grew to 46, 160 from 12,625 pages. The site continues to get nearly30% of site visits from Massachusetts residents. I’ve written an additional 12 articles (at least 1 a month), linked my site to 85 local non-profit organizations serving the elderly, created a discussion board with 6 categories and 60 topics related to Social Security and Medicare, and I am still working on a directory of 350 Councils on Aging to help promote their events.
Search Engine Optimization Strategy (traffic): Nearly 92% of my traffic is driven by search engines vs. 8% driven by the brand name Medicare Sherpa. This is primarily due to the articles deployed on my site. Less than 5% of my traffic is driven by referral traffic. While Joomla is an outstanding Web Content Management Tool (WCM), I believe WordPress is a much more flexible and scalable solution.
The Mission and Technology: Medicare Sherpa provides free, unbiased and up-to-date health insurance information, drug price research tools, Medicare Insurance research tools and assistance to Medicare beneficiaries of all ages and their caregivers. I am still using Joomla as my blogging platform with JomSocial as my module for creating and managing an Elder Affairs Community. As a Web Content Management tool, Joomla has some outstanding features and functions. The “but” is keeping up with versions and maintaining the backend has been difficult. WordPress is certainly easier than WCM.
Link Building Strategy: I’ve created a resource directory using JV LinkExchanger that creates unique URLs, meta tags and descriptions for every outbound link in my directory. These 85 outbound links are indexed and ranked by Google and are responsible for driving 437 page views. The value of tool primarily lies in promoting local partners and creating a sense of community. As a traffic driver it delivers very little value for the amount of work involved in creating all the links.
Long Tail Search Strategy: Using Kunena Discussion Board (To Speak) I was able to create a unique “frequently asked questions” section. This section drew in 658 page views. Unfortunately, it creates a series of nested folders that make it difficult for Google to index the questions (Google doesn’t like nested folders). The tool has very little value. I believe discussion boards are dead technology. I have more activity through comments on articles than individuals on the discussion board. What I like about the technology is the ability to create collapseble questions and answers. This technology really needs to evolve into a micro blogging tool like Twitter to be effective.
Social Bookmarking & Syndication: My RSS feed is registered with Technorati, Digg and Delicious. These bookmarking tools are not nearly as popular as a year ago. I believe they have very little value in SEM and more than likely will continue to decline in there relevance in search engine rankings.
Social Media Strategy: All my articles are automatically published to my Medicare Sherpa Facebook Fan Page (44 visits), Twitter Page (56 visits) and my Linked Page (14 visits). This “write once and publish everywhere” strategy has made it very easy to extend my reach and draw additional traffic from these sites. I’ve added HootSuite to help supplement content from other sites and hopefully increase traffic to my site.
While I have a modest following in these “closed gardens” – 32 “lifetime” fans on Facebook and 350 followers on Twitter, I have identified that there are nearly 89,140 people on Facebook over the age of 64 in Massachusetts alone (another 29,780 between 62 and 63). Facebook provides many unique opportunities to target advertising including by birthday. I’ve also extended my reach by creating a Medicare Sherpa YouTube Channel (589 views) with educational videos from StaySmartStayHealthy.com.
Geography: While I’ve been able to attract an audience from all 50 states, Massachusetts residents are the most engaged out of all visitors.
The main lesson continues to be – content matters. It’s been extremely difficult finding time between my job and family to add content through articles, links and discussion topics. Nearly 75% of the content was created in 2009. This blog has been a perfect opportunity to document my progress and compare year over year results.
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