How to Survive the Summer Heat Without Air-Conditioning

There was a time in my life when I spent several years without air conditioning and I live in the state of Texas. Anyone familiar with this area knows that it can be hotter than Hell when it wants to be, and even when we don’t want it to be. When people found out I did not have air conditioning, they were totally aghast! However, I was comfortable, because I had figured out some tricks for how to survive without A/C. 

Friends have suggested that I share these tips with you, just in case you find yourself in a similar situation either due to financial concerns, storms, homelessness, or if the power grid goes down, and in Texas, well, we do have a little bit of a flaky power grid at the moment.

Now, before you freak out, remember, people had to live with out air-conditioning for CENTURIES, and in some areas they still do, so there are ways to do this. Even in these days of global warming, no matter how unpleasant it may seem to our modern lives, you CAN do this!

So, here are my 10 tips for living without air-conditioning:

1. Live wet. Keep your clothes damp.  Wet your hair.  Soak in a kiddie pool under a shade tree or an umbrella and don’t dry off. Take a brief cold shower a few times a day, with your clothes on, or run through a sprinkler with the neighbor kids, who obviously have the right idea. Keep a large sprayer bottle of water handy, and mist yourself as needed. Keep one beside your bed at night and aim it at the ceiling, because when the mist falls down onto you, it will be much colder. 

2. Drink a LOT of water.  Yes, WATER. Ice is nice, but I had no ice last year when the fridge died, so had to give up on that luxury.  Putting a bag of ice in a giant cooler, really didn’t work very well, because it was hard to slide that monster out the door to empty it every morning, but it’s an option. Oh! Here’s an ice water trick I used before the fridge died: fill a large/gallon jug half full of water. Put it in the freezer at a 45 degree angle. This gives maximum surface area for your giant ice cube when you put your drinking water into the jug with it. It also melts slower than standard ice cubes. Keep several of these in the freezer, and put them back before the giant cube totally melts, so that it will freeze faster. I currently have a 2.5 gallon jug with a spigot in my fridge so that my gardener can have ice water when needed.

3. Remember that sugar dehydrates, so limit sweet soda drinks and other sugary foods. If you feel you need an electrolyte drink, choose a “Zero sugar” brand. Or, drink a LOT of WATER.

4. Salty foods will help you retain water and stay hydrated. Try to use sea salt whenever possible because it has 80+ trace minerals in it that can help your hydration. Stay aware of your sodium/potassium balance, and add a potassium-rich avocado, banana or Swiss Chard to your diet when eating a lot of salty foods. (There is also a calcium/magnesium balance to be aware of to avoid leg cramps at night, but that’s a topic for another blog)

 5. Acclimate!  Meaning, do your best NOT to be in A/C during the day, or you will ruin your acclimation to the heat.  For example, do not turn on the car A/C. Just sweat it out and you’ll be able to acclimate to higher and higher temperatures and be more comfortable as summer progresses. If you work from home, this is a lot easier. Your air-conditioned office is your enemy, so sweat your way home without the car A/C so that you will be better able to sleep in your miserably hot bedroom. That being said, limit your time in air-conditioned stores. Get in, buy, and get out fast! If you can do curbside pickup that would be great, and if you can afford home delivery, go for it!

6. Fans are good.  I have a rather large collection of battery-operated or USB rechargable fans in many sizes. My collection grew over time: and as my budget increased, I purchased  better fans. I even have some that I can wear around my neck or hang on my computer monitor. I also have several very large USB power banks (20000 mAh) that I can plug these fans into for charging or for directly running them if the power goes out and I have run out of batteries for those versions. And I can also charge the power banks from my car. It’s actually quite amazing how power efficient these fans are! Make sure you keep your fans and power banks fully charged at all times. Especially if you see a storm coming. If you have only one little 3” fan, like I started out with, have it blow on your face at night. You’ll be amazed as to how much cooler it will make you feel than if you have that single fan on your body. Having an 8” or 10” fan blowing up from your feet rather than from the side of your body will keep you cooler as well. I had to fasten mine to the foot of my bed because I kept kicking it over. A remote controlled one for that location is best.

7. Open your windows on both sides of the house, apartment, or room to allow for cross breezes as much as possible. If you are wet, then a breeze will really help, no matter how small the fan is or how little the outside breeze is, if you are lucky enough to even have a breeze. It may seem counterintuitive to open your windows on a 100° day, but when you consider that your house without air-conditioning is probably already the same temperature as outside anyway, you’re only going to gain comfort if there’s a breeze.

8. If you still MUST have A/C, build a DYI air-conditioner out of a Styrofoam cooler, a small fan, a PVC pipe, and a bag of ice. There are many affordable ideas on the Internet, with video instructions, some are even as cheap as $8! Pick one that works for you. Mine worked only in a very small space, (the back seat of a Toyota Yaris) so take that into consideration as well. You pretty much have to be sitting next to it for it to do you much good, but a lot depends on the size and power of the fan you use, and how well you can seal your ice compartment.

9. And finally, if you are a nomad in the desert, wear light weight cotton clothing in light colors; stay in the shade (be watchful above if you have to sit under your camel); look for a breeze; near a stream or pond; or find a big palm leaf and have someone wave it at you. Oh, and did I say, drink LOTS of water?

10. By the way, this all works for your pets as well. I’m not sure if a hamster or a rabbit would approve, but I have had cats that I’ve had to wet down, and who actually enjoyed sitting in front of a fan while they were wet once they realized why I was torturing them this way. They didn’t get sick either. You don’t catch cold by being cold, contrary to what your mother may have told you when you were growing up.

And, I am happy to inform those of you who may know me from that trying period in my life that I have moved out of Hell House and I now have a well-insulated paradise house on Avalon that has air-conditioning. I have it set at 80°, both to save money and to help keep me at least somewhat acclimated if the power goes out, and I’m comfortable, and grateful to the Lord for getting me here! Thank you, everyone, for caring.

How Your Marketing Video is RUINING Your Internet Campaign

All the internet marketing gurus have told you that you need video on your website to get sales, right?  But did they bother to tell you HOW to create a sales video that will grab and hold your visitors' attentions, not bore them to tears within the first 30 seconds of  clicking PLAY?

Thought not...

Especially considering how many horrible marketing videos there are out there.

You may have noticed in your hit logs that visitors are MOVING ON to your competitors' sites after only remaining briefly on yours.

Yes, CHEAP, amateur videos, are CHASING your visitors AWAY before you ever get to the important parts, by not holding their interest long enough to get the cash that is in their hands away from them that they WERE thinking of spending on your site, before you ran them off with that  $5 video purchased from a popular slave labor site.

You see, just like you, when you have the TV remote in your hand flipping rapidly through the channels for a good TV show to watch, most people will not watch past the first 30 seconds of a long, boring, talking head, cheap webcam  video with cluttered background and poor sound quality!

Especially when they have NO IDEA how long the video will run, and are prevented from "cutting to the chase" and fast forwarding past all the doctored shots of checks and faked "live" affiliate account logins (yes, live can be faked!) with blurred areas hiding where the money REALLY came from that they have all seen before and that take up WAY too much brag time...past all the time-consuming fluff to get to the MEAT of the program being offered, because your video is wasting their time.

On top of those issues, the quality and style of your video tells the world exactly how much you are making with the program you are promoting!  And people won't buy into your program if the video quality and style is cheaply filmed and and more cheaply edited.

If you shot your video with a webcam or a cheap camera using amateur, ambient room or outdoor lighting, without paying attention to shadows, windscreens and cluttered backgrounds, your visitors are going to know it is nothing more than a "home movie" and they will know you aren't making a dime with your program.

If it is nothing more than a talking head sitting in front of a webcam or even a professional camera, or driving a car (complete with distracting road noise because it is in a cheap car), visitors are going to be very bored, because that is all they are going to see and they are aren't going to wait around very long for the scene to change. And if you aren't particularly attractive,  then you might as well have made an MP3 audio instead of an MP4 video, because it may be simply unpleasant to look at you, and others may be distracted by your garish or unkempt hair style or your choice of attire.

Additionally, "face readers", such as myself, can tell a lot more about YOU by not only watching your body language as you talk, but by the actual physical characteristics of your face. It's downright spooky how a stranger pegged a very personal part of my life just by the way my eyebrows are shaped!.  Google it, it's extremely revealing what your face says about you, moreso than the words you are speaking that often contradict what your face is actually saying.

Now, do you still want people to see your face after THAT revelation?

And please, please PLEASE stop using miles of simple plain text on a plain white background  without borders that make it hard for a viewer to actually FIND the video they are hearing. 

And please stop reading it verbatim to your customers as if they are illiterate!  It is extremely offensive to insult your viewers' intelligence like that.  If you want them to READ it, put it in your sales page or sales letter. If you want them to HEAR it, make an MP3 audio that they can click or download if they want, after reading compelling ad copy on why they need to listen to it.

Oh, and videos that start playing as soon as the web page is opened, not only startle your visitors who were peacefully surfing quiet pages for hours, perhaps listening to their own music or TV, and who are now scrambling to find the MUTE switch or the STOP button, but they annoy most people who are trying to READ your three-mile-long sales page hype without someone babbling more useless nonsense into their ear at the same time.

And finally, a webpage with video and audio that a visitor cannot control themselves, is a frustrating experience for your visitor and potential customer, and they will move on.  Trust me, I move on a LOT on these marketing sites, but I move faster, about 10 seconds, because I can tell immediately that there is no money to be made from  your program.

Ok, enough of what NOT to do.

Here's how you can fix the problem:

You need to give your videos a PROFESSIONAL look, so that you can create the ILLUSION that you actually ARE making money online.

Without the professional touch, people will KNOW that you are really NOT making a single dime, or you would be able to afford a videographer who understands lighting and interesting and varied camera angles, and a video editor who can add the pizzazz to the entire shoot.   Better yet, stay out of the video yourself, except for your voice.  But if you are not a trained voice talent, your video will still lack that necessary professional quality that also comes from having a proper sound studio rather than a PC mic on your webcam.

The best approach is just to check out the video styles of the sites that already have professionally created videos, such as Ashmax, GDI, IBS, and others, that have no people in them, just stock footage, sound effects, graphics and music, and that have creative titling that is not ever read verbatim by the voice talent. They are also less than 2 minutes long, 1 minute is best, action-filled and packed with just enough info to get your veiwers begging for more information!  Not 11 minutes of here's my Clickbank check, and my Paypal account that I have never taken any money out of (ask yourself why??) and other info that just bogs your viewer down if they last that long in PLAY mode...

Now, remember, these site affiliates may actually not be making the money their video style implies they are making, and that is whole point.  Use video as the ILLUSION that you are successful, rather than as the PROOF that you are not...

Even if you are NOT making enough money with your promotion to afford a professional quality video that can actually HOLD their attention and interest in your program enough to buy into it, you can find semi-professional video editors for a little less who would love to take your footage and give you the best creative and entertaining video they can from it. Stock footage sites abound, where you can purchase single 10-20 second clips for $30 - $100 and there are also FREE SOLUTIONS, such as free footage collections of clips that are available for the price of shipping. or sign up for 7 days of free downloads. Add some free royalty-free music from either site, or get a free song here, and you are rocking and rolling!

Yes, professionally shot footage and creative video editing CAN make a HUGE difference in whether people watch your video or not, or think your program is making money, or not...
And that is how to make your marketing video more enjoyable to watch to the end ..so that you can realize better conversion rates.

About Crystal Eikanger

Crystal Eikanger is a video editor and voice talent working as Ei-Kan Productions on www.elance.com as well as other freelance sites. The Footage Firm is an online provider of FREE royalty-free licensed stock video footage, sound effects and royalty-free music for professionals

The One Bug in PostworkShop 3 that Xycod REFUSES to Fix!

Yes, folks, it's true! Xycod, KFT has actually refused to fix a bug that is in every version of PostworkShop, from the very first revolutionary release, to the latest offering of the new and vastly improved PostworkShop 3.

Xycod has always been very responsive to users' requests for features and bug reports with excellent, fast, friendly, customer support, and the PostworkShop 3 development team is no different. Customer feedback is their driving force when it comes to making PostworkShop feature rich, yet this latest version is now easier to learn, simpler to use and much, much faster.

Within barely a month out the door from the PostworkShop 3 official public release, Xycod has released the latest software update "bug-fix" that makes the best even better! More powerful features, more workflow options, as well as accelerated styles. But what you won't find in this release, or in ANY future bug-fix release, is the "Creativity Bug" fix.

You all know it. You all have it. It's part of every PC and MAC owner's PostworkShop life. It's responsible for every first sale, and every upgrade purchase. As soon as you start the program for the very first time, you suddenly notice this bug, and you also notice that it just doesn't go away, either! Even after you shutdown the program, that bug persists! Even when the computer is turned off, and you have left the building, that bug is there, like a contagious virus, ready to infect the next person who opens the program for the first time, or the next time...

The Creativity Bug grips you every time you look at an image that you just downloaded out of your camera or that stock image you just bought off the internet. It's that age old "Wow! I think this image would look fantastic with that "Random Paint" style! I'll just add a little sepia over there, mask that section there for a more Antique look, and...oooh, I can't wait to get home and start working on this photo!"  You even find yourself wondering which PostworkShop Style, or combination of styles, was used on that painting in the doctor's waiting room, or on the restaurant wall, and you can't wait to get back to your computer to try to recreate that same effect.

So, why in the world would Xycod want to fix THAT bug, anyway?

The Creativity Bug...a necessary part of the artist's world that's reinforced in every PostworkShop 3 session...and a PostworkShop bug that no one has ever complained about.

With both a Standalone version, and a free plugin mode that works with Adobe Photoshop and as well as an external editor to Lightroom, along with over 300 adjustable style presets (and growing!) and  the ability to create custom styles, as well as sell your own original creations through Fotolia or other stock image sites, or even your own framed fine art prints, you can't IMAGINE the possibilities!

Check out the website below and start using the newest, easiest, fastest,PostworkShop 3 today. Get infected by the Creativity Bug that Xycod refuses to fix. :)

Clipped from: postworkshop3reviews.pixelclickspicks.com (share this clip)

About Crystal Eikanger

Crystal Eikanger is a freelance writer, web designer, video editor and voice talent working as Ei-Kan Productions on vWorker.com as well as other freelance job sites. She has also been an avid PostworkShop fan since version 1 and uses it in video production. The Footage Firm is a popular stock footage website that periodically gives away HD and SD video collections as well as royalty free music, After Effects templates, and now Red One footage.

A Short Course in SEO Marketing

I know that a lot of people charge high prices for their SEO and marketing services, but you may need some background on what it all entails that may help you to understand what is involved and why prices are so high:

First of all there is usually an initial flat rate fee for going over your site with a fine-tooth comb and optimizing every bit of code for SEO purposes. Then there are comparisons with your competitors' sites to see what they are doing with their code, and then your site/marketing campaign is tweaked even more, so as to outrank them.

Then there is a monthly keeping-an-eye-on-your-site-and-on-your-competitors'-sites fee, to make sure that if they move ahead,  we can figure out why, and make your site overtake them again. However, one morning you may find a competitor, who was on page 22, suddenly showing up on page 1...and where the heck did YOU go? Dang! You're now on page 14! But why?

Well, Google has a nasty habit of periodically changing its algorithms and rarely says a word about it. And they most certainly will never divulge how ANY of their algorithms or indexing methods work, since it's all proprietary.

So, internet marketers and SEO gurus keep an eye on such Google trends, and when something happens that causes the rankings to get suddenly scrambled like eggs, the panicked buzz starts, and the experts start speculating on what the change was that mighty Google implemented, and then they react accordingly: creating test sites,  tweaking them in various ways...until the ah-ha moment arrives and they can say "Ha! This is what they did! You now need to... "  So, the professional SEO marketing service providers are paying members of this network, too.

Now add to all this, that you can usually only rank highly on a single keyword,and it's usually a longtail one these days, since all the single word ones were taken long ago and bidding is fierce for them on Google Adwords.. I did my own SEO on my site, and for years I was number 1 for "sequential interlocking articulated wooden puzzles" but I just checked last night, and.now I am number 4, due to no activity on that site for that keyword anymore, as well as others figuring out how to outrank me in their own code now.

Plus, you have to be careful with the % of your keywords vs the rest of your written text. This is yet another part of the algorithms that can change. Get this wrong and you can be sandboxed for "spamming the engine".  Oh, and if you use "black hat" methods or services that promise to get your site on page 1 in 2 days, well, by the 3rd day, you could find yourself banned from Google completely.

So, as you can see, it's very tricky stuff! 

Another thing to consider. Google offers their own SEO services. Sounds good, right? Well, think about it this way: trusting Google to do the SEO on your site for their own search engine is like trusting the medical insurance provided by the hospital you are in.... there can be a severe conflict of interest.  As they change algorithms, and drop your rank, they can keep you tied to them for life, money-wise, to get you back to the top of the heap and stay there...only to drop you again at the next algorithm change which they probably already know will be coming up as they are working on your site. (Oh, and you might want to read Robin Cook's "Fatal Cure" for that insurance comment I made. It's scary what a conflict of interest can do to you.)

But it's not just tweaking your website code that is involved in SEO marketing services. It also involves dealing with Facebook, Twitter, other social sites, different videos everywhere, not just on YouTube, backlinks that need to be from the right places, press releases, blog articles, forum posts, email marketing etc..

As you can probably guess, it is very time intensive to set all of that up in the beginning, as well as keep up with it every month so that the site does not "go stale", You will lose rank if your site "stagnates".  This blog of mine was ranked high in 2010-11 for the keyword "horse" because I posted an in-depth article about horses every 2-5 days during that time.  It has gotten stagnant now, with no posts for months and now I have dropped. And as I said above, my stagnant wood puzzle site is now lower, too. Oh, well. I just haven't got the time to promote either, since nothing is for sale anyway. But they have been good practice for me in the SEO world where I work now.

Anyway, I hope this "short course in SEO marketing" helps you somewhat while you try to decide on who to hire for your SEO marketing services. I'd like to recommend that you check out our company, FrancySolutions.com for all your web design, SEO and internet marketing needs, both online and offline, before making your final decision.


About Crystal Eikanger

Crystal Eikanger is a freelance writer, web designer, video editor and voice talent working as Ei-Kan Productions on vWorker.com as well as other freelance job sites. FrancySolutions.com also uses her services in many ways. She has also been an avid PostworkShop fan and uses it in video production. The Footage Firm is a popular stock footage website that periodically gives away HD and SD video collections as well as royalty free music, After Effects templates, and now Red One footage.

Website Review: Sean Donahoe's Internet Marketing Success Center (IMSC)

I really wanted to write a great review of Sean Donahoe's Internet Marketing Success Center, (IMSC) Inner Circle because he's such a nice, helpful guy...but sadly, I cannot.

The site, Internet Marketing Success Center, (IMSC) is more often down than it is up, pages are slow to load, many links do not work properly, and the navigation of the site is frustrating at best, assuming the site doesn't die on you in the middle of a page change.

Sure, the IMSC site looks good, with a splashy background and an excellent sharp picture of Sean Donahoe, along with professional looking icons and very nice, eye-catching pages to display a ton of great informational videos and PLR software and article downloads, but unfortunately Internet Marketing Success Center (IMSC) is a navigational nightmare. So much so, that I did not last through my one dollar 14 day trial of the site. I cancelled after 5 days of struggling with the slowness, the errors and the downtime.

For example, in the download section, the "Download Now" button does NOT mean Download Now, so you can't do the "right click.save target as", like I can on Mark Austin's Resell Rights Weekly No, "Download Now" means click here and go to yet another page that has exactly the same description information (and some useless download stats). THERE you can download by using "save target as", etc. But I did not find this out until I had gotten frustrated by the "Download Now" button constantly telling me I had already downloaded the file, which turned out to be an .htm, not a .zip.

However, even after you click into that additional page, many of the downloads do not give you the zip file. but rather you end up downloading the jpg or png image of the item instead. There is also no way to get back to the page you were on, other than using the back button, and for some of us who have randomly double-clicking mice/touchpads, this means NOT getting back to the page you were on, and having to waste even more time waiting for page loads to get back to where you were.

Additonally, there are only 4 or 5 items per main download page, and a lot of self-advertising banners that are the same on all pages, that makes the pages slow to load. If the pages were cleaned up better, to be more like Mark Austin's Resell Rights Weekly that has over 100 downloadable items per month on a single page that loads in a blink with direct click links on all items, I would have stuck around on Sean Donahoe's Internet Marketing Success Center (IMSC)

In the section that has the "Ask Sean" videos (which are not available at the cheaper price), it is not obvious that the videos can be downloaded for later watching offline. There is a barely noticeable and non-intuitive "download" link called "Read more" that leads to a page where you can download the video. However, right click/save target as, often gives an .htm file to download, NOT the mp4 video. This .htm page is an error page that says "This page demonstrates link redirect with "WP-NoExternalLinks" plugin. You will be redirected in 3 seconds. Otherwise, please click on this link"

Clicking on the suggested link however has the browser just sitting and spinning for long minutes until the browser finally admits that it cannot display the page. Nor can you get back to the video page once this error occurs, as the site has just dropped dead on you.   Not even a cached page at Google will get you back to the Inner Circle, it just sits and spins also..
.
There is no way to contact Sean Donahoe to tell him about these issues. I could not find a Help Center link to put a ticket in to tell him his links don't work. I can only hope he stumbles onto this post while he is searching for his latest contest winners. I know I won't be a winner with such a negative post, but I had hoped to write a more positive one when I first joined his Inner Circle.

All in all, Sean Donahoe's Internet Marketing Success Center (IMSC) is a great idea, but for $47-$97 per month, it's poorly implemented for the target user. There are too many clicks when one click should do, the site's pages are way too slow to change, and then too slow to load, and it goes offline frequently, several times a day, for an hour or more, so you barely have time to download more than 5-10 items before it crashes out on you, or after about 2 or 3 main page changes, the browser is sitting and spinning again, and down for the count. One thing I noticed, whenever it comes back online, there is a new item to download, so when he is adding things to the site, apparently several times a day, it's offline to everyone but Sean Donahoe.

By comparison, Mark Austin's Resell Rights Weekly is only $19 per month (with a FREE option that still gets you a lot of useful content) and a whole lot easier to navigate, with most of the same PLR and MRR downloads that Internet Marketing Success Center (IMSC) charges twice as much for, with no free subscription option at all.

It's only a $1 for a trial subscription to either one of the two sites, so check them both out for yourself. I've already made my decision about which is the best value for the money and the least waste of my time.

FREE Downloadable Stock Footage and Royalty Free Music for Video Editing!

It's finally here! What everyone has been asking about, wanting to get their hands on, and looking all over the internet for!

Check out the first subscription-based resource for downloadable royalty-free stock footage, music, sound effects, special effects and looping motion backgrounds.

Free Stock Footage

And, to promote their site and make people more aware of it, they are giving away 7 full days of FREE downloads at the link below, so you can see just what sort of footage is available behind that home page.

Free Stock Footage --> FREE TRIAL

Then after your 7-day trial is over, just select a subscription length, and within minutes you will have UNLIMITED ACCESS to thousands of multimedia files for use in all types of projects, either personal or commercial - and all royalty-free!

There are currently over 30,000 clips on the site, with more being added each month!

Seriously, if you don't check this free trial out, you will be kicking yourself for missing out on the best video stock footage resource for that perfect clip or sound effect or music that you need right now on your current, or on your future, projects.

And if you aren't into downloading, which does take a lot of time when you are after a LOT of files in the same category, or if you just happen to prefer your clips on an "official" DVD, like I do because I use them for commerical purposes, then you can take advantage of their FREE DVD collections on their companion site below.

Free Stock Footage --> ON DVD

Among the 143 free DVD collections that are currently available, you can also get Adobe After Effects templates for green screen, or the AE templates for titling, as well as their new Animated Lower Thirds collections, all of which come with alpha channels.

Don't miss out...check it out!


About Crystal Eikanger

Crystal Eikanger is a freelance writer, web designer, video editor and voice talent working as Ei-Kan Productions on vWorker.com as well as other freelance job sites. The Footage Firm is a popular stock footage website that periodically gives away HD and SD video collections as well as royalty free music, After Effects templates, Red One slow motion footage, and now animated lower thirds with alpha channel.

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