Meet the Family!

This is my daughter Magdalene and my partner Sah’Rah who I co-created home space with here on Gabriola Island.

Magdalene is a grade 1 student and she loves doing yoga, drawing, dancing and being incredibly cute. Sah’Rah runs Blue Apples Metaphysical & Wellness here on Gabriola, which is a metaphysically oriented retail store and healing space as well as home base for a variety of community workshops. We’ve lived on this lovely island for around 6 years now and we’ll be here for a long time yet if we have anything to say about it.

If you’d like to know more about our work over at Blue Apples, please visit BlueApples.ca

Print on Demand CD’s and DVD’s with Kunaki

If you’re thinking of releasing a CD, or a DVD, you need to know about Kunaki. Kunaki offers print on demand cd’s for a fraction of the cost of other print on demand companies. This means you can order CD’s and DVD’s in small runs(as low as 1 at a time) at the same unit price as you would usually pay for a run of 1000! No startup fees or anything! Shocking isn’t it?!

Okay…What’s the catch?

Kunaki is able to provide such great prices for their service because they are very limited in the area of customer support. The system they have created works great, but if you are not at least somewhat technically skilled on a computer, you may find it difficult to get your product uploaded to their facilities. If this is the case for you, fear not. I’ve done plenty of work through Kunaki, and I’m always happy to offer my skills so everything runs smoothly for you.

Another important thing to note is that your cover art is limited to only one insert which can be kind of a bummer, but for the amount you save, it’s certainly worth considering as an option.

That being said, Kunaki has been a great tool for myself and for my clients on many occasions.

If you’re interested in using the Kunaki system to produce your CD’s and DVD’s, contact me – I’d be happy to help you with the system and if you like, I’d love to design your cover art too.

Taking advantage of facebook, twitter and other social networking sites

Social networking sites such as facebook and twitter have taken hold in a big way on the internet the last few years. If you want to get your message out on the internet, social networking sites can be a great way to attract new visitors and keep people updated on what you’re up to.

What is Facebook and how can I use it to promote my business?

Facebook is used by all types of people and they offer a few options that allow you to share the work that you’re doing through your networks. You can create a “fan page” which gives you a space with a photo gallery and a posting wall where users can have discussions. Creating facebook “share” and “like” links on your site can be very helpful so that users can pass along the good word about your website.

What about Twitter? How do you even use this thing?

Twitter is a different sort of creature, users have profiles like in facebook, but it’s much more simplified – users make “tweets”, which are basically short text posts, these are viewed by all of your “followers”. You can also “follow” others and your feed(like your homepage) will just be a list of recent “tweets” from the tweeters that you “follow”. Twitter is great for keeping your followers informed of what you’re up to. Some use it to post links to their website, some use quotes to get across the feeling of what it is they are trying to do. Posting on Twitter can earn you all kinds of extra traffic if you can find your niche as users will often follow friends of friends.

Key Words & Description Meta Tags

What are keywords & meta tags?

What we usually are referring to in the web world when we speak of “keywords” and “meta tags” are a couple little lines of code that you place on your website so it is easily read by “spiders” or search engine robots.

They look like this:
Keywords:
<meta type=”keywords” content=”enter,your,keywords,here” />
Description:
<meta type=”description” content=”enter your description here” />

It used to be that in order to use these bits of code, you had to know the exact syntax above and add the code into your web page in an html editor, then you would have to use an ftp program to upload your html file onto your server. Thankfully now with the help of WordPress and it’s helpful, easy to use plug-in, “All in One SEO Pack”, you can easily add meta tags without any html or ftp knowledge, empowering you,the average user with the ability to be recognized by the search engines, bringing more traffic to your website.

Though you will not need any html or ftp knowledge in order to add your meta tags, there are however a few things that you should know about meta tags…

If you over-stuff your descriptions or your meta tags, they can be overlooked, so be sure that descriptions or keywords are no longer than 150 characters long. So that means keep your descriptions simple and to the point and only choose keywords that you really want to target – using more than you need will just dilute the potency of the keywords you are using.