Christmas Greetings and New Tech

First off and most importantly, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Despite all the restrictions of the pandemic, Della and I had an enjoyable Christmas day. I spent part of Boxing Day creating a Facebook Live to outline what we’ve been up to during the holidays. I’ve Facebook Lived before but never using OBS to … Read more

Becoming Normal

How are you doing during physical distancing? I so prefer that term over social distancing. We still have tools to communicate socially so physical distancing is so much more accurate. The first couple of days we did not accomplish much. We soon learned to develop a routine and we accomplish much more while reducing TV … Read more

Why did we update our site?

For years our site was hosted by WordPress. It ran there very successfully and I was happy that it did not require much maintenance from me. The cost for the service was also good. After a couple years, we did get our own domain name. Still the cost was not an issue. Over time, I … Read more

Daily Method of Operation

Working from home for yourself is not like working in an office. You have to set aside time to work on your business without distractions. Sounds simple, right? My, there can be plenty of distractions to get you off track. Housework, children, the door, pets, family, phone, social media, the list goes on and on. … Read more

Learn how to Build a Memory Jogger

You need one. You need to remember the people you want to share with, the people that have ordered from you, the people that you simply want to further the relationship with. Can you remember all their names, their important dates, (birthdays, shipping dates, start dates)? Do you worry that you will run out of … Read more

The value of Vision Boards

Sound hokey, I thought so too until I learned from my experience and coaches. A Vision Board is just putting your goals and dreams on paper and looking at it every day. Your dreams and on paper are key. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always set professional goals. Less often personal goals. These goals were … Read more

Our Connected Home

I’ve always thought having a connected Home would be cool. We used to go to a lot of show homes and how intelligent they were impressed me. I saw controlling alot of features from a panel. Nice, but costly and not that convenient. But the cost of a new build with that technology always struck … Read more

What I've learned about social media

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Ipad setup for content creation

I really became interested in social media when I retired and my wife decided to become a distributor for Juice Plus+. When I was working as a Deputy Chief in Emergency Services I was aware of the value of social media in getting information out. It wasn’t until I started curating and creating content for Della that I really got my feet wet.


I started out using Avid Studio on the PC to create video content. I loved it. The problem I had was that I didn’t use it every day so that I practically had to listen to the training video with every use. A smaller issue was that I had to go back to my home office and create the video before publishing it. Still I loved the program and still use it.


I’ve learned about Pinnacle Studio on the iPad. Its what we use now to create, edit and post content. We can go from start to finish in 30 minutes. You can’t beat that kind of immediacy.


I’ve learned that content we create does a lot better with the Facebook algorithm’s than curated content. The results for our own video and photos are much higher than content we curate. I remember one superb post that got very little coverage because I used a photo I got from a site.


We have experimented with Facebook Advertising. For a very small cost, you can dramatically boost the number of people that see your post. The lesson I’m working on is creating a boosted post that spurs a call to action.
Here’s an example of our video’s:

Software we use:

  • Hootsuite. We use it to monitor our personal and fan pages on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Instagram, Google+. I like it but I’ve not much experience with other programs. Occassionally, it looses a stream which is irritating. I don’t like that the iPad version does not have the same capability as the browser version.   
  • Avid Studio for the PC.  Full of features, longer learning curve.  
  • Pinnacle Studio for the iPad. Enough features for on the fly editing and posting to the Internet. Its what we use now for content creation.                    
  • Canva. It’s what we use to create images for our posts. After all, posts with images are read. Without an image, the post is less interesting                
  • IoGrapher Hardware for the iPad. We use a frame with handles that the iPad fits into. The frame allows for lenses, microphones, lights and a tripod to be attached.
  • Filmic Pro. That’s the program running on the iPad in the photo. It assists with 3 different zooms, focusing and lighting.     

We have a couple of issues remaining:

  1. We’re not used to being on screen presenters. Showing the energy and excitement we feel is harder that we thought. Still we’re getting better. It helps to have a solid belief in what your doing.
  2. Developing engaging content.
  3. Advertising. No doubt that using Facebook boosts will get you in front of more people. We don’t yet know if that will translate to more site and page visits.

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