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As much as you may not want to think about it, your parents are aging. With age, comes the loss of some functions and a higher risk for disease. No one wants to think of their parents as elderly, but there will come a day when you have to step up and start taking care of your parents just like they took care of you. Helping care for your elderly parents can be a tremendous act of love and appreciation. It can also be an involved job, especially if you take over sole charge of their health and well-being. There are many different situations you may find yourself in as you age and your parents start requiring more care. No matter what your role becomes, there are some general tips to consider while caring for your elderly parents.

Monitor their health

Bodies and minds are not built to last forever. As we age, certain systems may start to deteriorate and break down. This can sometimes be hard to cope with, especially when elderly individuals become forgetful or frustrated by simple tasks that have become difficult. As a caregiver for an elderly parent, it is important that you are involved in their health decisions. Check for warning signs of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, or dementia.

Perhaps one of the most difficult situations is consoling a parent with dementia. Also known as going senile, this disorder indicates a mental deterioration or a decrease in cognitive abilities. Physical signs of dementia include stooped posture, decrease in muscle strength, or an increase in bone brittleness. You may also notice your parents have impaired judgment, childlike tendencies, or loss of memory. Knowing the symptoms can be one of the quickest, most effective ways to treat the illness. This may be an emotional journey, so give yourself and your parents space and time to deal with this new way of life.

Bring in help when necessary

It can be difficult to know when your elderly parents will require extra assistance. When you check in with them, do it in person to better gauge how they’re living. If they’re forgetting to take medications, hoarding, or not keeping up with their household chores, it may be time to bring in extra help. This can range from a housekeeper, an in-home nurse team, or moving your parents into an assisted living facility. This can be a difficult conversation, but in the end, it is about getting your parents the care they need to successfully enjoy the last years of their lives.

Keep finances stable

Elderly individuals usually are not working and live solely off of retirement funds. It is important to help your aging parents maintain stable finances. As they age, there is a chance they will be diagnosed with chronic illnesses that may require costly treatments. In some cases, your parents can reach a viatical settlement and trade their life insurance policy in for a slightly lesser cash value. A settlement provider will buy your insurance policy so you can pay for medical expenses more immediately rather than leaving behind debt after they pass away.

Be sure daily activities are taken care of

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are the essential tasks you do every day like dressing, self-feeding, bathing, and using the restroom. For some elderly individuals, these tasks can become difficult with age. Other activities — cooking, cleaning, driving, taking medications, managing finances — are essential to maintain independence rather than just functionality. As your parents age, be sure they are still managing their ADLs and maintaining some sense of independence for their own mental well-being.

Take care of yourself, too

Taking care of an elderly parent can be an emotionally draining task. It can be difficult to watch cognitive functions or memory start to lapse for the people you’ve always looked up to and relied on. Be sure you’re taking care of your own mental health. Communicate with your loved ones and take breaks when necessary. You will be able to take care of your family better when you first take care of yourself.

Getting your supplement company up and running is a laborious process, but if done right, it could pay significant dividends. Continue reading to get some tips to help you start your dietary supplement company.

1. Decide on a business model.

The first step in launching your supplement company is to decide on a business model. This is a crucial step because it determines who your customers will be and how you will interact with them. Your business model also decides how you will make money as well as how you deliver your products.

Currently, a business model that’s gaining a lot of traction is the membership/subscription model. A lot of companies that provide essential or even special interest products are signing people up for memberships and providing products or services on a monthly basis.

If you decide to go the route of offering memberships and providing products on a periodical basis, then you could save significantly on operational costs. You won’t have to worry about getting your supplements on the shelf of nutrition stores because your consumers would buy directly from you. This business model is also a great way to promote customer loyalty.

2. Find a manufacturer for your supplements.

The next step in launching your supplement company is building a relationship with a private label supplement manufacturer. Of course, you could manufacture your own products, but that option is much more expensive.

To make your own supplements, you would need a factory, lots of heavy machinery, and a workforce capable of meeting production demands. That’s a lot of buying, building, and training for a fledgling business to attempt to undertake.

To shorten the process and lighten the financial burden, you should consider going with one of the many supplement manufacturers in USA markets, like Makers Nutrition. Private label supplement manufacturers handle everything from making the supplements to packaging and labeling them. The key is to shop around to see which companies have the most industry experience and can offer the most competitive prices.

3. Use technology to manage daily operations.

For any new business, it’s imperative that you have a firm technological foundation. You’ll need software to do everything from providing customer service to marketing your product, but you don’t have to be an IT wiz.

Mano Byte offers software that is capable of managing customer and distributor relationships as well as streamlining all of your operations from a centralized database. Being that it’s a cloud-based technology, you don’t have to worry about hiring an IT department. Mano Byte handles all software updates and can even manage the program for you thus eliminating the need to spend time and money on training.

4. Be knowledgeable about your products.

There’s much more to launching a supplement company than just getting a supplement manufacturing company to make and package some pills and then selling them at a higher price. You need to have a solid grasp of the science behind your supplements.

To establish your company as a stalwart in the dietary supplement industry, you need to be able to provide answers and advice and not just supplements. When consumers turn to you seeking knowledge about how and why a product works, it’s crucial to be able to provide them with the answers they seek.

5. Create a strategy to bring in customers.

Once you have decided on a business model, nailed down a supplier, and put your operational infrastructure together, it’s time to create a customer acquisition plan. You can’t expect people to start buying products en masse if they don’t even know who your company is.

The most cost-efficient way to create a demand for your product is through social media. Today, business owners are growing their brands through social media marketing, and you can too. Create accounts for your company on all of the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. As your social media following grows, so will your customer base.

One of the best things you can do for an effective SEO campaign is to take advantage of content marketing. This involves original content creation that showcases your business and what you can offer your target audience— whether that’s your products and services, information, entertainment, etc. Producing relevant content that answers your audience’s questions and solves their problems builds trust and establishes your brand as an expert voice in your field. Website content optimization is not only more affordable than traditional paid advertising, but it’s often more effective as well. Here are some great ways you can optimize different types of content.

Text Optimization

Text content typically includes things like blog posts and articles. You’ll want to conduct keyword research to find good keywords for your field and incorporate these into your content. Your target keywords are the words and phrases users are likely to enter in the Google search console to find your business.

Which title sounds better? “How to Edit Your YouTube Videos Using Final Cut” or “Final Cut for Beginners”? Many would think the latter because it’s precise and gets straight to the point. That’s not necessarily the case, though. The first one is wordier, but it’s also more specific. These blog post and article titles are your title tags, and the more relevant keywords you fit in here and in your content, the easier it is for the search engine to find your content. Your meta descriptions also help search engines find your content. An accurate description combined with the right keywords can significantly improve your odds of being found.

Video Optimization

Video optimization is partly similar to text optimization in that it also employs title tags and meta descriptions. Videos also use thumbnail images, so you’ll want to choose one that’s attention-grabbing and accurately reflects your content. You also need to be aware that not all video hosting platforms are created equal. If your primary goal is simply to build brand awareness, then sites like YouTube and Vimeo can help you reach a great number of people. Search engines that index these videos, however, will only take users to the hosting site. If you’re primarily trying to increase traffic to your own website, you’ll be better off using alternative tools to host your video content on your own site.

Image Optimization

Google image search accounts for nearly 27% of searches conducted in the United States. Thanks to Google updating the “view image” button to the “visit page” button, images can now be an excellent source of traffic to your site. You can help your images rank higher by giving them file names with relevant keywords separated by hyphens. You can also add title attributes to images, which provide context for your site and can help you rank better for user intent. You can add more Alt attributes (text describing your image) to product images that describe the model and other product information to help your rank as well.

Page load speed is one of the most important factors for on-page SEO, so you’ll want to keep your image file sizes under control to avoid slowing down your site. JPEGs are the easiest file sizes to keep low, and your aim should be to keep images to 100Kb or lower.

The key to consistent high-quality content is to make sure it’s helpful to your audience and not just trying to sell them a product. The more trust you can build, the more likely you are to convert visitors into buyers or subscribers.

Ultimately, the core of your business launch will stay the same, even with a 2020 launch. Even so, you may want to take this time to reflect on a few different components of your business as a way to ensure that you’re ready to open in the midst of a global pandemic. Here are five tips for a successful launch in 2020 and beyond.

Clearly aligning your team to different goals is crucial.

With working from home being the new normal, it can be challenging to keep your team members on the same page. After all, many people have even moved back in with older family members as a way of helping out, meaning that some workers aren’t even in the same time zone that they normally would be. All of this makes it more important than ever to have a clear business strategy and communicate to your employees where their work fits in with that strategy.

Thankfully, there are software solutions that help facilitate this sort of organization for you. For example, if your business uses the OKR method to drive and plan objectives and key results, you may want to look into getting Workboard. Workboard makes it easier than ever to visualize your strategic priorities and comes with a variety of analytical tools that make measuring data and understanding risk so much simpler. The end result is a unified workforce regardless of where they work.

Funnel more money into social media marketing.

Social media usage has increased a staggering amount during quarantine measures, which means that you have an even larger captive audience online than you were probably initially planning for. Beyond that, many business experts agree that the quarantine has accelerated online shopping behavior by several years. This means that more people than ever are comfortable using the internet to shop for products and services they’d otherwise look to a brick and mortar store to get. As such, the time is ripe for you to spend more money on your digital marketing since the prospective ROI has never been higher.

Explore ways to make your business COVID-compliant.

If part of your business launch does involve a physical presence, you’ll want to read up on CDC guidance (as well as state and local guidance) on how to ensure you’re in cooperation with regulations about the way you do business. Even though this sounds like a logistical nightmare, many companies have found success pivoting to contactless delivery and curbside pickup. Take a look at what similar businesses in your field are doing and you might be surprised with how simple it is to stay COVID-compliant and keep your customers and employees safe.

Brush up on your tax law.

2020 is an election year, which means there could be a wide swath of governmental changes coming your way. Just to be safe, it never hurts to review your business tax compliance and get a better understanding from a tax expert about what sorts of regulations your small business needs to abide by. Forging this kind of relationship with a CPA now can save you a headache later in the year if there are sweeping economic reforms and you need to ensure you’re managing your finances properly.

See if you can secure additional funding.

If COVID-19 has illustrated anything, it’s the need for an emergency or rainy day fund. If you can secure additional funding from investors or the Small Business Association, it’s a good idea to do so. It never hurts to have a larger contingency fund, and even if you don’t tap into it now, it could be useful in the future.

As of April 2020, 83% of US students were participating in a distance learning program through their school, according to a Gallup poll. Online math is one area where students and their parents might find themselves particularly stumped. Some students may find they are not getting the full value of a lesson when it is done virtually.

Luckily, there are math tutoring programs available online to bridge the gap students may be experiencing with their math skills during this virtual school year. When seeking out an online math tutor, it can be difficult as a parent to decide who will best suit your child’s needs. Searching through individual tutors online means there will be a lot of trial and error. By using math tutoring programs, you have the help of an entire online team that has the same goal as parents: helping your child succeed this school year.

Thinkster Math is one online tutoring program that students can use to build a strong foundation of math skills. This can help ease the burden of taking online math classes that might have very little direct support from the teacher. By using a tutor for one-on-one math help, as the school year progresses, students can truly flourish and excel in areas that they may have struggled in previously.

Thinkster Math offers an array of options for parents and students. By testing your child to track which math skills they have already mastered, Thinkster Math is able to find their strengths and weakness within each subject. This information allows your child to be matched with the exact tutor for their specific needs.

Once Thinkster Math has paired a student with the tutor that is right for them, they will gain access to worksheets and video explanations of the content, which is all available online or through their convenient mobile app for the iPad.

Thinkster Math states on their website: “You get unlimited hyper-personalized and custom curated math worksheets tailored to your child’s learning needs by your dedicated tutor.” Thinkster also provides students access to their tutor seven days a week, and they provide parents with consistently updated progress reports that tracks their child’s growth.

Tutoring options are separated by grade level for K-8, and for high school, the options are broken down by specific subjects. Whether a student needs general math help, homework help, or even test prep; Thinkster Math is a great source for finding a math tutor who will help your child successfully conquer those intimidating math problems.

For K-8 students, the subject material is broken down by grade level, and Thinkster Math ensures that all the content meets Common Core standards. They also show a preview of what topics each grade level covers, which is helpful for any children that are working above their grade level or children that may need a refresher on topics from previous years.

High school students can work within whichever subject they are currently studying, but Thinkster Math will also soon be providing coursework to prepare these students for college entrance exams (i.e. SAT, ACT, PSAT).

Getting your child the extra help they may need can be particularly tricky now because of COVID-19. Teachers are stretched thin, and online learning can sometimes fall short. Students may find themselves becoming frustrated with the limitations of the educational system right now. With online math tutoring programs— such as Thinkster Math—you can be confident that your student will thrive in their math classes moving forward.