3 Tricks to Keep Your Home Warm During Winter Without Cranking the Heat

It’s a constant struggle for homeowners to stay warm during the winter. They want to be comfortable around their homes, but they don’t want to pay the exorbitant costs of running the heater 24/7. Fortunately, there are a few steps everyone can take — whether they own or rent — to reduce their heating bills while staying warm this winter. Follow these three tips start winter on the right foot.

Choose Winter-Weather Curtains

Image via Flickr by Jorbasa

Your curtains need to serve two purposes during the winter. During the day, they need to be opened to let the sun in and naturally heat your home (as any cat lying in a sunbeam knows), and during the night, they need to keep heat in so that it doesn’t escape out of the windows. This means they need to be light enough to move but heavy enough to provide insulation.

Check your local home store for curtains if you think you need to replace them for the season. This is also a great opportunity to clean your curtains to remove dirt and dust that have collected on them during the past few months.

Put Down Area Rugs and Wear Socks

Feet are the trick to keep the body warm. Like our hands, they’re at the end of our limbs and have specialized blood vessels to offload heat and keep the body cool. This is why your whole body feels cold when your hands and feet are cold. By protecting your feet in the winter (with socks, blankets, and area rugs) you’re able to warm the rest of your body. This perception of warmth can reduce your need to turn on the heater, thus saving energy and money.

Of course, there are other benefits to placing thick area rugs around the house other than foot warmth. These pieces serve as insulation trapping the heat and keeping it inside. Plus, who wants to step out of bed in the morning onto freezing wood floors, anyway?

Call an HVAC Tech Before It Gets Cold

Most people wait until their HVAC system breaks to call a technician, which means they could spend thousands on repairs because of unit neglect. Calling your local HVAC maintenance team before it gets cold can prevent damage and ensure that your system is functioning properly.

HVAC systems can easily get clogged if they’re ignored for several months. You could be paying more to push more air through the filters if they’re not replaced, or end up running the heater if hot air is escaping through cracks in your air ducts. This means your heating bills will continue to rise, despite your best efforts to seal the house. By scheduling regular maintenance, you’re able to reduce your heating costs while still running your system.

Once you start taking advantage of these ways to stay warm, you will soon come up with more. For example, leaving the oven open after you cook will warm up the kitchen, while you get to enjoy a hot, home-cooked meal. Before you know it, the snow will be melting, and you will be reaching for fan once again.

 

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/sambradford/3-tricks-to-keep-your-home-warm-during-winter-without-cranking-the-heat/

3 Ways a Leaky Pipe Can Cost You Thousands

A leaky faucet doesn’t seem like much. After all, what more damage could a few drips of water do than cause a puddle and some damp areas? But a leaky faucet is just the beginning: What starts as a few drips of water can actually cause you thousands of dollars in home repairs and even lead to medical bills and long-term health conditions. If you have a leaky faucet, make sure you get it fixed today to prevent these three problems.

Damp and Wet Spaces Cause Mold Growth

Image via Flickr by matsuyuki

If the spaces under your kitchen sink and bathroom are regularly wet and irregularly cleaned, you can quickly develop a mold problem. Most homeowners spend between $1,000 and $3,000 to free their homes of mold, which can spread quickly and get out of hand. In some of the worst cases, people have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars clearing their living areas of mold.

Mold causes breathing problems in people who are prone to asthma and allergies, but it can also be toxic for anyone to breathe in. Black mold in particular can affect healthy people who have strong immune systems, leading to headaches and chronic fatigue. With each drip of your leaky faucet, you’re making the problem worse.

Pests Are Attracted to Water and Damp Environments

There are more than 55 species of cockroaches in the United States, many of which can survive for weeks without food. When they do eat, they can live on anything from dead skin cells to hair — both of which most people have in their bathrooms. Furthermore, cockroaches need water only every few days to survive and are drawn to shallow pools such as the ones forming under your leaky faucet.

Although cockroaches and other pests might seem like minor annoyances, they can also affect your health. They spread disease and trigger allergies. Furthermore, they’re not as easy to get rid of as you think. You could spend up to $500 to remove them in extreme cases.

Water Damages and Warps Hardwood Floors

Water is the biggest threat to wood flooring. The wood becomes warped and discolored, making it hard to walk on and possibly even a danger in the home. Furthermore, all it takes is a few warped planks to push on other pieces of flooring and cause them to become deformed as well. Although you might be used to squeaky floors, you could pay the price when you try to sell your home.

Even water isn’t coming into contact with hardwood floors, wood could still suffer damage from a leaky faucet. Water could wear away cabinets and cause damage that exposes the interior of your house — letting other pests in. The cost of water damage can range from $1,000 to $3,000 and even extend to $6,000 for major fixes.

Between warped wood, pests, and mold, you could spend almost $10,000 on home repairs because of a leaky faucet. Meanwhile, the cost of a wrench or replacement pipe at your local supply store won’t exceed $20. It’s worth the time and expense to invest in this quick fix.

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/sambradford/leaky-pipes/

4 Technologies That Can Improve Team’s Workflow

Companies are always looking for ways to improve the workflow within a company and make its team of people much more effective and efficient. Luckily, employing various technologies can help companies easily achieve this goal.

These are some of the currently available solutions that can significantly improve team productivity and help establish an impeccable workflow.

Cloud technology

Cloud technology is certainly one of the best ways to improve a team’s productivity and workflow. There are plenty of popular cloud solutions out there, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box. What makes them exceptional are their features, the two most important being:

• Data accessibility – This one takes the top of the list, as accessing all the data on the cloud is only a few taps or clicks away, wherever you are. Furthermore, accessing data is possible from a variety of devices such as computers, smartphones, and tablets. This enables employees to work from any location while any changes made are immediately saved.
• Collaboration features – Having two or more people working on a document or several different documents simultaneously was practically impossible in the past. Nowadays, employees are in a position to work on tasks and get them done faster.
• Secure data backups – Keeping data secure was a problem for many companies, as it required equipment as well as a team of IT professionals. But now, this feature is practically included when you are using a cloud service. Not only is the data accessible only by you and your team, but all of it is additionally backed up in case of emergency.

This technology has revolutionized how teams of people work together on projects. It is a solution that should be implemented for all businesses and it is simply the best option for improving workflow.

Knowledge base

Knowledge base software tools are specifically created for growing businesses which contain a lot of data. There are paid and free variants, and many businesses go for Moodle, as it offers a lot of customization. A knowledge base is perfect for collecting and storing all the important information about the company, its regulations, project notes, and any other types of information which is vital for the business.

The platform is specifically useful for sharing a variety of data with new employees, as they can easily go over all the important information on their own. This puts less pressure on all other employees, as new ones can acquire the necessary knowledge on their own.

Team monitoring software

Managing and monitoring the behavior of smaller groups of people, for example those counting 4 or 5 members, is fairly easy. However, when these numbers reach two or more digits, having everything under control is quite a challenge.

Luckily, there is a software tool for this as well. For example, time card software is a perfect way of monitoring the work hours of all the employees in the company. Tracking this sort of statistic is very hard when teams count a lot of members, especially if there are those who work remotely. But, with an easy-to-use software solution like this, tracking team members’ activities is very easy to achieve, which gives managers the opportunity to invest their time on other pressing matters.

Task management software

Teams of people face a variety of different tasks every single day and each task has a deadline that should be met. When there are only a couple of task and a few people, organizing is easy. But, when things add up and more people join the team, it is up to the team manager to find the best way to organize how tasks are going to be performed.

For example, a great platform for task management is Basecamp, which provides an abundance of features for team management. It is a completely easy and straightforward way of adding tasks, adding details about them, and setting the deadline as well as assigning it to all team members. Software solutions like this help teams of people achieve their goals without any bumps.

These were the 4 different technologies that greatly help improve the workflow within a company. Make sure to implement all of these technologies, as they can significantly upgrade the whole process and make it much easier.

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/ivandseo/4-technologies-that-can-improve-teams-workflow/

Reverse Engineering: What Can You Gain From Your Competitors

 

Reverse engineering is the process of dissecting or dismantling an object for analysis to understand how it works, with the intent of duplicating the original object, or improving it for the better. This practice has been implemented in a wide variety of industries, old and new. It has been applied countless times over to computer software, where machine code is reverted to source code, and programmers use it to fix bugs, identify viruses, or simply optimize a program’s performance at a very technical level.
Reverse engineering has its place in online marketing as well, since there are many areas where these same principles can be implemented to help marketers improve sales. Marketing to an online audience can be very competitive and intimidating for those new to the game, but there are fundamental areas they can focus on to help improve their success.

As stated above, reverse engineering involves dissection for the purpose of analysis, and one of the first things to find out about your competitors is their target audience. When you arrive at their website, try to identify who their target demographic is. This can be done through fully understanding their products and services, and knowing what needs they address. For example, if your competitor is a tutorial website on how to create a website, consider all aspects of the target audience, including age, education, income, occupation, and other relevant details. Your goal should be to attract an audience that is similar to that of your competitors, and be able to communicate with and appeal to them.

Once you’ve identified your competitor’s audience, content is another factor that needs to be addressed. The content is the sole reason for their audience in the first place, and it is important for you as an online entrepreneur to understand everything about the content. For example, let’s say your competitor focuses on entertainment news and current events. Pay close attention to the website’s articles, titles, graphics, and links, and ask why they are present in the first place. Also take into consideration your competitor’s priorities by analyzing the content strategy the website owner had in mind. This can be derived by keeping track of the order that the articles appear chronologically, the phrasing or tone of the articles, keyword strategies, and any links that appear in the bodies of the articles. If there are any patterns or recurring themes to the content, you will be able to understand the content at a level that allows you to plan your own content and expect a similar degree of success.

The most crucial strategy in sizing up the competition is identifying those needs within your competitor’s market that are not being addressed. Take another look at their website and see whether there is anything missing, and take note of areas where you can outshine them. Aside from looking on-site, take your research to other venues. Perhaps there are online forums or other websites that contain criticism or negative reviews about your competitors. Surely these are things you as an online entrepreneur do not wish to emulate. These areas of inadequacy are opportunities for you to learn from their mistakes and save time by avoiding trial and error. By filling in the gaps of their model, you can improve upon their strategy for the benefit of your own business.

Reverse Engineering Your Competitor’s SEO
The appearance of your competitor’s website, including layout, organization, link structure, and page depth all contribute to the user experience. A good strategy to understand your competitor’s website structure is to conduct a crawl of their site via the “Tree” view on an SEO tool such as ScreamingFrog. This will enable you to visualize how the information architecture is designed. Other key factors of your competitor’s website is the page depth and take note of the proportion of pages that are at each level within the website.

Internal link structure is also important to analyze, because the link structure used by your competitor may have room for improvement. Again, there are several SEO tools that can perform this function. Get to know their strategy and find out how to make it work for you.

Aside from the user experience, content and site structure, link building represents another important facet of your competitor’s strategy that you can reverse engineer for your own website. Content that performs particularly well may enjoy exposure on social media and natural links. However, link-building strategies from external websites may contribute to your competitor’s SEO success. Look for spikes in the velocity of new links versus links that have been lost. This activity may suggest volatility in your competitor’s SEO activity, especially if your competitor’s website has suddenly ranked well for novel keywords.

Moreover, your competitor’s organic keyword rankings can also be analyzed using SEMrush. This tool lets you know what specific keywords your competitor actually ranks for. Of course, this level of analysis is far more detailed than overall performance, and carries much power for your web development strategy.

To analyze your competitor’s organic performance, you can conduct studies on organic search visibility using a tool such as SearchMetrics. Search visibility is measured by the keywords for which a website ranks, keyword volume, and click-through rate, and you can take this strategy further. Contrasting the organic search visibility between desktop and mobile devices can expose whether your competitor’s website is mobile-friendly, and you can make the necessary adjustments to your own site.

We’ve mentioned several tools for your reverse-engineering strategy, such as ScreamingFrog, SEMrush, and SearchMetrics. Aside from these tools, there are plenty of services at your disposal:

• Google Trends
• MOZ
• Alexa
• Majestic SEO
• Ahrefs Site Explorer
• Quantcast

These services provide vital information for you to understand your competition and run a successful website. Let us know if these reverse-engineering strategies helped you build your website by leaving a comment below.

Also if you don’t have a website you could always create one for your business. All you need is a good domain name, reliable hosting provider and an excellent website builder like Joomla or WordPress. There are lots of helpful sites with comprehensive guides and tutorial on how to create your own website that you could use to build a website.

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/twitter-easyvince/reverse-engineering-what-can-you-gain-from-your-competitors/

Weatherization Tasks to Help You Save Money on Your Energy Costs

Have you ever considered how much money you waste each year on your utility bill? You should. Leaking air is one of the costliest utility expenses. Reducing the number of drafts in your home could save you as much as 20 percent. Here are four weatherization tasks to help you save money on energy costs.

Reverse Your Fans

Image via Flickr by Vox Efx

We all once learned that heat rises while cold air sinks. You’re using these fundamental laws of thermodynamics in your home every day, even if you’re not thinking about it. The ceiling fans in your home spin counter-clockwise by default. Their purpose is to circulate cold air in the room, and they do so by pushing cold air down.

Have you ever noticed the switch on your ceiling fan? Its purpose is to reverse the fan blades to spin clockwise. You should flip this switch during the winter. That way, your fan will take the hot air near the ceiling and redistribute it to the rest of the room. One simple flick of the switch will keep you much more comfortable during the winter and summer.

Identifying Air Leaks

Since air leaks are so expensive, preventing them is the first goal. The most likely culprits for air leaks are places directly connected to the outside. Run your fingers by the baseboards of your home, and check to see if you feel air on your hands. If so, you have a leak. Repeat this process with windows, doors, and vents.

A nice trick for finding air leaks involves a candle. Light one and carry it around your home. Wherever you suspect an air leak, hold the candle to the site. If its flame flickers or burns out, you have an air leak.

Check Your Filters

Many apartment complexes and maintenance-free living facilities across the country do quarterly filter checks. They do so because they understand how much damage occurs to an HVAC unit that uses an old air filter. Changing to a fresh one in a timely manner slows the depreciation of one of the most expensive pieces of hardware in your home.

For this reason, you should treat your HVAC unit the same way that you treat your car. Acting negligently will cause your utility bills to spike. Plus, you’ll have to replace your hardware earlier in its life cycle. To protect your HVAC unit and thereby extend its lifespan, hire a reliable professional to service your unit twice a year. By performing maintenance once early in the summer and again early in the winter, you’ll save yourself a lot of money overall.

Clean Your Water Heater

Did you know that sediment deposits build in your water heater over time? When this occurs, the heating element in your unit is more likely to fail. You’ll have to hire a technician to replace it, which will cost $500 on average. To avoid that, you need to clean your water heater. Flushing your water heater is an easy process that even a novice homeowner can do. Simply follow the steps listed here to remove the sediment from your unit.

Preventing your home from wasting energy saves you a lot of money over time. Follow the four tips above to maximize the efficiency of your home, thereby reducing your utility bills.

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/sambradford/weatherization-tasks-to-help-you-save-money-on-your-energy-costs/

5 Essential SEO Practices for Your E-commerce Website

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of any e-commerce venture. Your online store may be well-stocked, with plenty of wares to choose from, and you may have a great support team ready to answer any questions that your customers may have, but without SEO, how can your site be seen?

For the uninitiated, SEO is the practice by which you tweak every aspect of your site to allow search engines to quickly see and access your website. With great SEO application, you’ll be more likely to show up in search results. SEO applies primarily to king-of-the-hill Google, but many of the same adjustments also work for search services such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.

What are the first steps to helping your site be seen by more people? Let’s take a look.

1. Have a compelling URL

The World Wide Web has been a core part of our lives for the past twenty-odd years, and granted, securing an exceptional URL is getting more and more difficult. Not all of us can be Shopping.com. However, there are plenty of them left. You just have to be creative.

Make up a quirky, memorable word that represents you and your brand, and let that identity permeate throughout your store. Integrate this branding throughout your site, so that people know who you are.

Having great domain hosting is also highly recommended. Your shop is presumably here for the long haul, so make sure that you get a provider that is reliable and will support you throughout the years.

2. Reduce duplicate content

Barraging Google with an avalanche of content once worked for black hat SEO, but that era is long gone. These days, having a proliferation of marginally different content is actually penalized by search engines.

For an online store, duplicate content is a reality that can’t be avoided. Let’s say that you sell shirts—of course you’re going to have that baby tee in pink, and orange, and yellow, right? A great way to address this issue is to place canonical tags on the “flagship” version of that shirt. The red one, perhaps?

A barrage of similar items when using your in-store search will also be frowned upon, and will be seen as stuffing. Paginate your search results so that both search engines and your end user—nobody likes being assaulted by data and options all at once—will be happy.

3. Use search-friendly categories

When adding categories to your store, make sure that they are easily readable by humans and search engines alike. Take that as no strange numbers or symbols cluttering up the site. So, in your sweater store, if people want to look for a certain type of sweater, make sure that the URL is simple and to the point. That means sweetsweaters.com/vnecks, or sweetsweaters.com/hoodies. Google (and your customers) will thank and reward you.

Employ effective internal linking as well. Make sure that all of the v-necks are under the v-neck category, and all of the hoodies are under the hoodie category. This streamlines the entire operations of the site and will let Google index it more optimally.

4. Ensure that your site loads fast

Even though you’re rocking that 50mbps connection, many people around the world are not. Google, in its widespread inclusivity, factors your site loading speed into account when deciding to award you higher search rankings. There’s a lot of websites that provides free content about how to create your own website and also provide advanced tutorials on how to optimize your own website.

Streamline your site elements accordingly. Minimize the instances of images on your site—let them be clickable if your users wish, but do not impose. Animated flash images are a big no-no, as they load really slow and cannot be accessed by mobile devices. Again, let them be optional. Run extensive tests to see how fast your site loads on a variety of different connections.

A faster site loading speed will enrich your customers’ user experience, letting them browse more and hopefully, be so pleased that they will buy your wares or avail your services.

5. Provide a mobile service

Since the original iPhone and iPad were launched, the increasing ubiquity of smartphones and tablets meant that the amount of people using the Internet on their mobile devices has similarly increased. A whopping 31 percent of mobile users primarily use those devices to go online, forsaking the desktop entirely. Plus, 58 percent of mobile users also expect that browsing the Internet on their phones is as fast or even faster than using their PCs.

To facilitate this belief, you must make sure that you have a mobile version of your store as well. Thankfully, modern website design practically guarantees this. However, you may need to add security, so that your customers can shop using their phones with peace of mind.

Getting yourself out there is one of the hardest parts of any online endeavor. It’s easy to get lost in the waves of content that appear on the Web on a daily basis. These are just some of the first steps to making yourself known, so make sure that you apply them well.

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/twitter-easyvince/5-essential-seo-practices-for-your-e-commerce-website/

Good Governance Starts with Transparency in the Boardroom

Unless your organization has the right tools for the job, transparency can be a harder goal to achieve than you might think. If directors have complained in the past about a lack of transparency or fairness, begin by identifying where your practices have been falling short. Access to information is one of the most frequent sources of frustration among board members, but how does inequitable distribution of information happen in the first place? It really depends on how you disseminate materials to directors or archive old reports and whether or not they can be retrieved without turning to the administrator. For example, here’s a typical scenario: while preparing for the year’s CEO evaluation, Director A requests last year’s evaluation to see if the CEO has achieved his or her performance goals. The administrator emails or couriers the document, but when Director A brings it up at the meeting, Director B wants to know why all members weren’t sent this relevant information. Meanwhile, the administrator thought twice about sending copies to the other members to avoid overloading them with extra information.

This is a great case for arguing the merits of board portal software over both paper-based meetings and using email or free file sharing services. They make it easier for administrators to implement transparent practices and provide equitable access to information for all members without overburdening them with documents they’re not interested in reading. They also tend to be considerably more secure than paper or email by requiring password authentication to access every document. Papers are frequently misplaced, as are mobile devices, while email accounts are too easily compromised to store sensitive materials.

In order to see how a board portal can specifically address access to information pain points, take a look at how a platform like Aprio Boardroom works. The administrator first divides the board into groups and subgroups depending on the organization’s structure. They then create an event (such as a general meeting) for the appropriate group, and subsequently attach documents to the event. All group members are then given email notifications that new material is available, with a link that will take them back into the portal (with password authentication required) to view the document. Historical documents, like past resolutions or meeting minutes can also be easily accessed in the library. A deeper look into the features and processes of a board portal is available at Aprio.net.

When you’re looking for board portal software, be sure to ask how much control your administrator has over creating groups and events and uploading materials. For example, whereas with Aprio the administrator has complete control over the back end, other systems require the administrator to send all information to the software company, which inevitably leads to miscommunications and mistakes. There should be in place a way to create sub-admins, an important feature when it comes In Camera meetings. Since the admin should not be privy to In Camera materials, they can make the Chairperson a sub-admin for this particular sub-group, safeguarding the company’s privacy and integrity. These are all important features to ask about during a vendor demo to make sure that your company gets the product that can meet its security needs.

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/michaelsanduso/good-governance-starts-with-transparency-in-the-boardroom/