The Dean's Advantage - Local Customer Service

When it comes to selecting a DIRECTV provider as a new customer, you DO have a choice. Think about what matters to you when choosing how to sign up for DIRECTV service. If you love the tech but want more service options, Dean's offers you alternatives to a national 800 number.

Ready to talk? Go to sales representative Facebook page. Get a quote today. Be ready and you can have it done in minutes! If you prefer (or if you are too far away to meet), sales rep will do a phone consultation.

After HD What's Next? 4K TV

If you crave having the latest and best imaging technology for your home television, then here's something to get you started: 4K. Here I give you the basics of what 4K is, why you might want it and then how to get it. If you don't necessarily want it for your home, it's something to take note of when selecting a hotel, selecting a restaurant or when presented to you at your home entertainment store.

What Is 4K?

4K refers to resolution size of a TV screen. When you shop for a TV you select size of screen and resolution. When HD was launched to the general public, we were provided with 720p and 1080p options. Economy-minded buyers or those with small TV needs chose 720p. For larger screen needs, buyers chose 1080p. Take a look at prices of even larger TVs and you will see how much HDTV is established. My computer has an HD wide ASUS monitor. It's suitable for watching videos and streaming TV.

4K is TV at the next level at even greater resolution. 4K is 3840 x 2160 in size or 2160p. More pixels means better picture. 4K also makes viewing more comfortable at closer distances. Sure, with ordinary programming content or old content, it may not make much difference. But with the types of content you are accustomed to seeing on the big screen like movies, sporting events or concerts, the potential for increased enjoyment is there. And so comes the desire to upgrade to something more current.

Why Get 4K?

Aside from getting a picture resolution upgrade that get's closer to movie experience, you have more comfortable viewing options at home. 4K technology has resolved the problem of being too close for your eyes to view the screen without the image breaking down. That means you can have a larger screen in a smaller space. Your sofa can be closer. With a large group gathering, your front row guests can enjoy the show, too. Think of all the cool parties you can host! If your space is large and have no interest in rearranging your furniture, it may not make that much difference so it may not be worth an upgrade. But if you just love cool tech and you can find a good price, it's a good investment.

How To Get It

First get to know different industry labels. Some are choosing to use "Ultra High Definition". It's between your local theater resolution and HD so you get an idea of its value when you are out shopping.

As with any new purchase, do your research. Do measurements at home so you can see how TV options will fit. You might consider a wall mount to free up home entertainment furniture space. Sale of your home entertainment furniture will help to pay for new TV. Or move it to less used part of home.

If you are lucky, an appropriate ad button is in the side bar now. Otherwise choose your favorite shopping method.

Then you will need to select a service that supports 4K. Cable is limited to 720p. If you want 4K, get satellite service. The first advantage is reduction of cabling for each TV in home. (Is that annoying?) Or having to place your TV near cable jacks. Only one cable is needed to connect to satellite receiver. That can be placed in basement or other room. Other TVs then only need HDMI connections and power.

This blogger, now a Dean's sales representative, is available to help you complete your 4K home entertainment system with a best fit programming package. Starting at $50 (with tax and 2 year agreement with bundling), you can have multi-room and multi-device service.

Check out this Facebook page to view additional content and excellent video demonstrations of Genie DVR and learn the advantages of selecting a local based DIRECTV provider. Upgrade to something totally awesome today with fewer wires and the latest tech. Your neighbors will love you!

How To Build A Shop At Cafepress

Building A Free Store Is Easy And Fun With Cafepress

Cafepress is an an online marketplace built by people who have learned how to make products by placing their images on things. If you have never heard of Cafepress and have been wondering if there is a perfectly valid way to earn online, then stop right now and pay attention because you are looking at it. By the end of this article, you will have your own Cafepress store.

You are probably already aware of fundraisers where you sign up with a company to sell products like t-shirts or jackets. You might do this for school, church or your non-profit organization. What you may not know that there is an easy and lower cost way to do this without having to spend a lot of money or risk an investment in products that may or may not sell. There might be a limited range of products like only t-shirts or you must buy a minimum lot. Cafepress solves that problem and more.

Yes, at Cafepress there is a way to buy custom printed products in bulk if you choose to sell physical items where you are. But you don't need to. Once you have a Cafepress account, you can make products and sell them one at at time through a page set up to sell the product at a price you set. Cafepress takes care of everything, including secure payment, shipping and customer service.

My Store

Your job as a Cafepress store owner is to find or create images suitable for placement on blank products. It might be art that you create or photos you capture while indoors or outdoors. It must be your own original work. You can't take photos of Disney or most commercial toys or trademarked items and use without permission. Safe bets are animals, nature, flowers, objects you arrange in a display or crafts that you make.

You can paint or draw and capture a high quality image and use that. Or draw using an online paint program. Paint.net and GIMP are both free. While there is a learning curve to learn to draw and edit images, if you start with simple projects you can learn the steps to edit photographs to right size and appearance. Take photos that you have (make backup copies that you use to keep your originals safe) and practice cropping, cutting, resizing and changing image appearance with the tool set you are given. Learn about standard image sizes. Learn what colors and font sizes work best. Too small and it ends up fuzzy or hard to read. Sometimes you might want a dark or light frame around subject. Sometimes you will want to remove the background and make it "transparent" so you don't have a square image on your t-shirt with white in the background. Learn how to transform your photos into a work of art crafted by your mouse and patience with your computer paint program.

Let's Begin

To start your Cafepress store, you will need to visit site and locate the green Sign Up Now text. In my view I see a Facebook, Google and Amazon buttons. For quickest signup choose one account that you use most often. Or sign up the usual way with your email address and information as instructed. Be sure to use accurate and your real information. You will need this to get paid to PayPal or when you are sent a check in the mail. Your email address must be real to so that you verify your account. Most online accounts with security require double optin to be sure you are genuinely interested in membership and not a form bot.

JOIN CAFEPRESS LINK

Once you are in, you will need to read everything for yourself. The site changed a lot since I joined in June 2014 using my website FindItCat.com email address to register. Some policies and procedures may have changed. If you are a company, you can use Cafepress to establish your brand with a number of printable products. Put your logo on a mug, laptop cover, phone cover, bag, clock, calendar or t-shirt. If you have a logo, then you have your first project. Else, if you are an individual seeking a first project, find your best photo that you think would look good on a mug. It might be a part of the photo with best colors and subject.

Photo Mousepad

This was one of a set of first projects completed in June 2014. I found a set of photos from a couple of years back and selected subjects with interesting themes or views to use. I used GIMP to edit the photo to the correct "canvas" size to fit a standard mousepad size. Here, I sized and cropped a large pond photo to show only two pink flowers sitting in a pond of green. I left room for text below the photo. It was hard work making sure nothing important was cut off and the text was large enough to read. I had to look up how to type a copyright symbol while typing text into the box. (Not in a mode that used regular keystrokes.) Putting your brand and name on your piece is important for you protection and to bring them back to your page for more if they like it. For the theme I imagined a computer user who wants to glide over a pond and contemplate life while surfing.

Puzzle

If a photo mousepad is not for you, here's the easiest puzzle in the world as a cool gift for a puzzle loving friend. Put your photo on it and send it as a gift. If you are tired of cards or sending flowers, send a puzzle made by you and your mouse. This one was harder to work the caption in as you can see. You want it large enough to read but not disturb the image too much. I captured a flower arrangement and cropped to show best view.

Visit My Shop

I have several shops and products in the back and not up in stores. You get best results if your shop has a name, you add descriptive tags and pay a lot of attention to details in your store and your designs. Cafepress helps you by being a professional site with high Google rank. You do the work of making cool products and filling in descriptions for each one. Use the Cafepress recommended pricing to start out and adjust as needed. You can have customers come and buy or order a bulk amount to sell at home. Write a blog to help share your products. Create a fanbase. Invite your friends on Facebook. You can use the social buttons provided with each product.

Swagbucks

As a bonus, Cafepress is a Swagbucks partner. That means that customers who are Swagbucks members get cash back when they shop. That means that you should join Swagbucks to let your customers know how to save and get cash back. Get more customers that way. Everyone likes a bargain. Right?

JOIN SWAGBUCKS

Let Me See Your Designs

You have some homework to do. I want to see your best. Go get your shop. Get your best image. Make it very simple for your first project like your own logo, computer artwork, cartoon or simple subject photo. Put it on a mug or bag. (Those seem to be easiest to get right.)

You have to work at something if you want a chance to build something online. Here's your chance to do it in your time with no burden of buying a storefront. It might take some practice and you might have to do some research. Download Paint.net and GIMP. Decide which apps work best for you.

Make products to buy in bulk to sell at home or have visitors come to buy online at Cafepress. Your choice. Run your store your way.

Post Your Best Good Work At Home Job

Real Work At Home Jobs

Many people earn good money with work at home jobs. It's important to check with a company before signing up or paying any fees. It's best if there is a free way to earn.

Here is an example of a job you can do at home. You can create your own Cafepress shop and make your own products. If you are good with images and placing them on products, then give this a try. Here is a puzzle coaster I made with my snow leopard photo.

If you are new with editing images, get Paint.net and learn how to use it. It's free and easy, including a way to make background transparent, which you need to do if you want to put a white background image on black or dark object.

Find your best photos and decide which ones you think would be cool on tees, mugs, calendars, mousepads, glassware, laptop covers and many other products.

Visit my shop:

http://www.cafepress.com/finditcat

Puzzle Coaster - Photo By Julie K. Frey

If you click the photo, you can purchase the snow leopard puzzle coaster. Once at Cafepress, browse through the site to view excellent and creative designs by members. You could be one of them in just a few minutes. It pays to PayPal. In addition, you can use Cafepress to make your own products that you sell as fundraisers or give away as promotional products. Put your brand on something.

Do you have any work at home ideas? You are welcome to post in the comments below/ To make a comment you will need to have Google Accounts.

Here's A New Social Media Platform You Might Like!

Currently No Longer Active Member. Site appears to no longer exist. It was a good concept but major changes midway and a complicated system made it hard to work with. Key concepts to take away are to establish trusted branding and focus on sharing content first. Let the message speak for itself. Sales happens when people see value in something.


No Luck Promoting Your Media Content?

Do you have YouTube video that you want to promote, but prefer something other than the YouTube interface? There's a newly remodeled social media platform that's suited for the purpose of social media content sharing. Members are encouraged to share in ways not available in other social platforms. Can your social platform easily share to other platforms? How easy is it too add comments and relevant links to other content you want to share? In some cases, especially if you are new, you'll have to buy advertising to get views.

Introducing "Rebranding"

One important key business strategy is called "rebranding". That is effectively taking content and putting into the context of something you are trying to promote. Effectively, "rebranding" is putting a frame around your creative work or someone else's creative work that they have already shared via social media. (How many of you used a Grumpy Cat photo to get likes and shares on your fan page?)

Introducing "Smartrebrander"

There is a social media platform that you should consider joining if you seriously want a chance to grow your YouTube account and have not found any success with other methods. This social media platform is called "Smartrebrander". It's a community that supports sharing of social media content with links for the purpose of building fan pages, blogs, media content pages and business front-ends. As you may already know, the first step of marketing is to share something, NOT sell something. You want to build a relationship with your potential customers and subscribers first. With social media you use shares of videos, photos and publications to establish who you are as a business owner and what types of customers you want to attract. You want your members to like you first. Build a "niche" of followers, then you can present them with your recommended products and services.

Why Join Smartrebrander?

One of the hardest things to get are shares, especially if you produce a video with common keywords, like my train video. Don't you agree? There are lots of train videos on YouTube (do a search). Smartrebrander lets you take something you've created and puts it in front of members who would LOVE to share your video. All you have to do is fill out a form that includes a blog form to add your video links to the Smartrebrander share library that members have access to. (You can't put links in a YouTube "About" caption, but you can with Smartrebrander. The best I could do was put the name of this blog under the headline of this article inside the YouTube About box.)

How Is This Same And Different From Other Social Media Platforms?

Other social media platforms do the same thing. You probably just shared someone else's creative content today. However, you don't have immediate access to other media content until someone in your "circle" or a friend shares it. When you add content to the Smartrebrander library, you are giving members access to your content for sharing. At the same time you have access to content added by other members. Perhaps you are in need of an animal, food or nature photo that you need to increase social media page engagement. Perhaps you are tired of passing off the same, stale photos or videos and would like to tap into a library to get something new and fresh. And you want to be able to share to ANY social platform without having to copy and paste links. Would you like that?

Smartrebrander Membership Options

Smartrebrander has a membership structure that enables both free and paid members levels of benefits depending upon use. You can join as a free member and have up to five "rebrands", earning from affiliate commissions and access to online business training. That may be enough to just try out the service or if you have a low or no budget business, but are patient enough to build your business the slow and methodical way.

To make the most of Smartrebrander, eventually you will need to upgrade to "Premium" member. Premium Members can have unlimited "rebrands" access to all library contents and can add new content to the library. There is a trial $5 one month fee to try out the Premium membership. If you find that it works for you, the monthly subscription is $37 per month. When you compare that to social media advertising costs along with other membership benefits (see inside!), you may consider that a deal! (My Facebook ad costs are in the thousands over the past three years!)

Want To Join? Have More Questions?

This link goes to the main home page

This goes to the view of the library

Here are the most popular library items

Here is the range of categories in the library

About My Train Video

Before I joined Smartrebrander (FKA "Loyaltepays"), my train video (July 2012 upload date) had about 300 views (early April 2013) without me doing anything special to promote it. Then I added my train video to the library. As you can see it's now up over 500 views (October 28th, 2013). Not only do I have a way to promote the video to the Smartrebrander community, I can "rebrand" it and place it in my blog, website or other place that accepts either a URL or Iframe code. The green "ShareThis" button at the bottom of the frame lets anyone who visits share the video to any social media platform listed at ShareThis!

Would you like that? Does that solve any problems for you? I have shared both video and photo content easily on Google+ and Facebook using the same coded link. If you put in the still photo right, the image comes up, an important part getting likes to your photo or video share. It's amazing! I think the concept is brilliant, but needed more work to get the costs and services reasonable for level of use. But that's done as of October.

Won't you give Smartrebrander a try today and see if it works for you and your media content?

Join today!