Category: Uncategorized

How to Start a Distillery

Posted on by Tonya Wilkerson

A distillery is a dream business for many people. However, it’s not the easiest venture to start. It can be very difficult if you aren’t fully prepared for it. There are plenty of different questions that have to be asked and answered to feel confident in your venture. This is especially true before you go ahead and take out a loan to start the business. While this article isn’t going to go over everything you need to know about starting one, it will give you a solid overview of what you need to know to get started.

The Basics

If you are going to get serious about starting a distillery, you need to get all of the basic equipment. Don’t worry though, when we say basic, we truly mean it. The equipment listed in this article is the bare minimum. Therefore, you want to take a good look at what you are looking to do and figure out whether or not the equipment in this list gets you where you need to go. Some adjustments may be needed if you are looking to do more.

– A Water Source

For one, you need to get a water source. You won’t be in a position to make any kind of alcohol without water. The process of distilling boils down to adding and subtracting water throughout the production. As a result, you need to have a solid water source available. When in Kentucky, we utilize limestone-rich water directly from aquifers or streams.

– A Cooker

A cooker is essentially something that you add to the grain along with water. This helps to drive up the temperature of the solution for a needed period. It’s always helpful to have some type of plumbing in the cooker that ejects the heated mixture to a fermenter. However, a pump can do the job just as well.

– A Fermenter

You will need a fermenter too. This is a large vessel that is used to ferment the grains, yeast, and slurry. Throughout the fermenter, the yeasts feed on the sugars. It then turns into alcohol. Once a couple of days have passed depending on your process, you will end up running whatever’s left through your still.

– Still

You will need to have a still. This is a must and it should go without saying. Nonetheless, you need a still to produce alcohol that can be consumed.

It’s always a good idea to have drains throughout your floor. This can help to minimize waste. The more you have, the better it will be. After all, it can produce a lot of waste.

Frequently Asked Questions:

There are several questions that you will need to get answered before you get started with anything.

1. What Are You Planning on Making?

2. How Much Are You Looking to Produce?

You cannot get started with building out your distillery without knowing the answers to these two pertinent questions. Everything about your distillery is going to depend on your answers to these questions. You need to be fairly precise with your answers too. You cannot be too general because it’s not going to help you establish what you need in terms of equipment. Try to do as much research as possible so you know what you will need to support your market. Having a comprehensive business plan is a necessity.

We continue to get asked the same questions about starting a distillery. We also get the same follow-ups. Because of this, we’ve gone ahead and answered them below.

– How Much Does a Distillery Cost to Start?

You will find that a distiller comes in a lot of different sizes. You can have a small one and a large one. Your needs are going to vary based on your desired size. The difference in cost will vary considerably. The total cost is going to depend on several factors. A good rule of thumb is to mark up your budget beyond what you expect to pay. It is worth it to get quality equipment like the commercial grade distilling equipment from ABS Commercial.  The distillery tends to always cost more than you originally thought. However, by figuring out the small details before getting started, you can get as accurate of an estimate as possible. However, it’s always a good idea to plan to spend a minimum of $300,000 to get started. Don’t be surprised if you end up having to spend upwards of $500,000 though.

– You’ll Need Branding

There are plenty of different things that you may not add to your cost estimations when you are getting started. One of the main things that can be easy to forget is branding. Branding is an element that is often not calculated in the process. Many assume that your product just needs to be good. The truth is, no matter how good your product is, you still need to have a quality brand in place. A good product doesn’t just sell itself. You will need to get quality branding done. You also need to have quality packaging. All of this will help you differentiate yourself from the competition. You also want to be thinking about who is going to be selling your brand. While you may have a quality and experienced distiller, you still need someone out there pounding the cement and selling your product. Think about who your customers will be. Who are you going to sell to? This is always going to be an added cost on top of opening your distillery.

– What’s It Take to Become a Master Distiller?

You will need to earn it. while there’s no set certification or test to become one, you do need to get some experience under your belt. If you aren’t knowledgeable and you don’t know what you are doing, it’s going to be easy to tell with your end product. There’s nothing shameful about calling yourself the Head Distiller instead of calling yourself a Master Distiller. Once you gain some experience, you can swap the name. Spend some time crafting your product and mastering the technique before you change your title.

– Is The Market Too Saturated?

This is one of the common questions we get. The fact is, the market isn’t too saturated. There is a major demand for distillers. While there are a lot of distillery operations opening up every year, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more. You can take a close look at the craft beer industry. Numerous craft beer operations are opening up and the demand is sufficient to support them. The same is expected to happen for craft spirits.

– Is Opening a Distillery More Difficult Than a Brewery?

You can expect this to be the case. Not only are the upfront costs more, but you also have to worry about adhering to more codes and passing more inspections. Because you will be selling higher-proof alcohol, you will also have elevated safety standards that you have to adhere to. This ends up increasing the operational costs associated with running your distillery. Along with this, you will be paying a lot more in taxes on your spirits than a brewer does.

– Can I Buy Used Equipment?

If it’s available. However, it’s not often that used equipment becomes available and doesn’t get snatched up quickly. However, as more and more distilleries start to scale up their businesses, you can anticipate there being more used equipment for sale. You can find some used equipment at American Distilling Institute (ADI).

– Can I Start at Home?

No. It’s illegal to start distilling at home. It doesn’t matter what your state’s laws are or what someone told you. You cannot distill at home. This is not expected to change anytime soon either. There are several reasons for this. The primary reason is safety. There are standards in place to ensure that you are doing it right. You may make poisonous concoctions if you don’t know what you are doing. Also, you could end up blowing your place up if you aren’t experienced. The entire process is simply not safe if you don’t know what you are doing. Also, there is the case of taxes. It’s nearly impossible for the IRS to calculate taxes owed if you are distilling at home and selling without a license. If you are looking to get into distilling, you will need to enroll in a class or learn from someone experienced before getting started.…

Posted in Uncategorized

Prepare For Effective Design

Posted on by Tonya Wilkerson

Lately, there are a lot of questions about Photoshop being the best tool for web design. It is true that other applications have appeared in recent years, such as Sketch or Edge Reflow, that are better prepared for the new standards of the web, and that the giant Adobe has failed to adapt.

However, although its future is ain’t looking great at the moment, Photoshop is still one of the most used tools for photo editing on the market, and it is also true that it still provides a lot of value. So we are going to give some tips to optimize your Photoshop to the maximum and show you some of the ways that your web design can be as efficient, fast, and spectacular as possible.

Image Sizing for Desktop or Mobile?

The first thing we have to take into account is the size of the canvas to create. Years ago, this question was simple; there were standards such as 800 × 600 or 1024 × 768. However, things have changed, and now there are many screens are different sizes. According to the latest statistics, the most used size during 2013 was 1366 × 768 and 1280 × 800.

In our case, we usually work with responsive frameworks like Bootstrap, whose container in version 3.0 is: 1170px for large desktops, 970px for small desktops, and 750px for tablets, with a gutter, or space between columns, of 30px, 15px on each side.

Therefore, to create a document in which we can work with these measures, a larger workspace is necessary, so let’s put 1300px wide, for example. The height will depend on how long the web that we are designed is, but with 2000px or 3000px, we will have to start. With these configurations, we will have our workspace ready to start:

Adjust Pixel Settings

Photoshop https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html, is quite frustrating when it comes to accurately placing elements in the exact location that you need them. That’s because many automatic adjustment options are disabled by default. The ideal is to activate them :

     .  View → Snap → (enable it)
     .  View → Snap To → All
     .  Photoshop → Preferences → General → Snap Vector Tools and          Transforms to Pixel Grid → (enable it)
     .  And finally, when you use any vector tool (Line tool, Rectangle tool…) remember to activate the option “Align Edges” in the options bar

To Export the CSV File

You have already had your developer company, someone like Still Web Design create a beautiful website, but now you need to create a backup file and export the different elements to send them to the developer.

This can be a tedious task if we don’t optimize it.

Another simpler option is to create an action within Photoshop to export elements separately with a simple key combination. In our case, we have an action in which pressing “F5” Photoshop exports the selected element, cutting it to the size it has, very useful. If you want to use it, download it for free and install it in your Photoshop.

And that’s it, with these tricks you can start designing your website in Photoshop without a problem.

Image Sizing

You need to consider the size of your images, not just how they look on the page.  And I’m not talking about the size of the image relative to the other elements on the screen.  I’m talking about the size of the data of the image.

Many designers go overboard with beautiful images.  I’m looking at you photography website owners! This is the internet and you don’t need to have a photo with the image quality and pixel quantity of an image that belongs on the cover of a National Geographic magazine.

Yes, great looking images are a good thing to have, but you don’t need that dense pixel data.  The reason is that it’s too much and it bogs down how quickly you website can load.  What you want to do, is to lower the image quality to the point that it still looks good, on desktop and on mobile devices, but it’s as small of a file size as possible.

Also, it’s a lot easier to fix this problem in the beginning than it is after the website is already up and running.

Where to Find High Quality Images

Every site you build needs content and every site you build needs images, so where do you get these images from?  Well, you can pay for images from sites like Adobe (https://stock.adobe.com/), they have great high definition images.

Or you can use a royalty free image site like Unsplash https://unsplash.com/ or Pexels https://www.pexels.com/.  There is a problem with using the free sites though.  The problems is that the content is not unique.  If you drop one of their images into Google Image search, you’ll see that their images are used on tons and tons of websites.

In general, you don’t want to use free stock images, you want to use unique images that aren’t found anywhere online except on your website.  Just be aware that you won’t get as much traffic to your website if you use royalty free stock images.

Image Embeds

You do not always need an image on your site, sometimes you can get away with an embed.  An embed is an image to a human.  When they look at your page, they will see a picture.  But an embed isn’t really on your webpage.  It’s is a line of code, an embed code, to where the home of the image is, which is on another website like for instance Flickr.

You can take an image from Flickr and place it on your webpage using the embed code, and the user can’t tell the difference.  The benefit of this is that you don’t have the image hosted on your web page, which means that is one less thing to load, which means you site can operate faster.  And as you know fast web pages offer a better User Experience.

These are some of the best practices the you’ll want to keep in mind when using Photoshop on your web design projects.  Photoshop is a great help to most developers but it is a tool like any other.  The effectiveness of the tool depends on the skill of the person using it.

How Design Impacts Page Speed

What most developers, and even most SEO’s for that matter, don’t know, is the how images impact a website’s load time.  Images are the major thing that slows down a website.

Why?

Because almost everyone uses images that are too big for a website or a mobile device.  What you want to do, is minimize or squish the image size down to as small of a size as possible, without impacting the resolutions.

You’d be surprised.  You can actually compact an image a lot before it starts to look blurry.

If you simply pay attention and make sure to make your images as small as possible, you will be taking care of the vast majority of work that needs to be done to speed up, or to at least not slow down dramatically, your website.…

Posted in Uncategorized

What Is Thin Content

Posted on by Tonya Wilkerson

As we have been writing in articles and content on our social networks, Google seeks to give the user a good answer to their question.

This good response is what is called in the sector as valuable content, broad, with quality, and added value for the user. As well. Thin content is it’s opposite; that is, content that does not add any value to the user.

And how does Google know if the content is good or bad? Google spiders know everything. They just have to track how much time the user spends on the page and what is the interaction it generates in that time.

If it’s good content, not only will it stay longer, but it will browse more service or content pages, increasing the page depth index. And this, Google, takes it as a symptom that this page contributes value to the user and does not pull SEO positioning strategies that no longer work like click-baiting.

Thin Content Types

On the internet, you will find many articles on this obstacle to your organic positioning; However, they are wrong in defining the types of “poor” content that can ruin your web project, be it an online store or a corporate page are.

Auto-Generated Content Automatically

In this world, they are known as spined texts and are characterized by mixing phrases, without much sense, or logic, and they seem to have minimal modifications to other texts with simple changes as synonyms for the main keywords and long tail.

Have they ever proposed it to you? Maybe you didn’t even know what the Seoindecent proposition was. And this is one of the strategies used in Black Hat SEO: pyramid-type links (the famous Tier).
The relative error in thin content affects you when this strategy is proposed for the important project and with this type of non-original content.

Google knows almost all the tricks SEOs use to win the game of chess. And in this case, it penalizes you.

How to avoid it? We must clarify that the pyramid links strategy if properly executed, prioritizing content, user experience, and quality links, is suitable for many e-commerce projects and service delivery websites.

Duplicate Content

For this type of Thin Content, Google developed an entire algorithm; Your name will sound familiar to you: Google Panda.

In effect, this friendly animal has become the nightmare of all SEOs who were guilty of bad habits and bet their clients’ web positioning strategies on duplicate or stolen content.

This is not only a violation of international copyright regulations, but for Google, this law of least effort is punishable (big hit).

Therefore, if your SEO is professional, it will invest in original content; Yes, the one in which if you use anti-plagiarism tools, you get 100% originality.

What Happens To Short Content?

This is one of the most common questions: do I have to publish content of more than 2000 words to position the page? It depends. Not all extensive content is good content; sometimes, it is better to write a little poorly, to contribute, be fresh, and, above all, original, with an adequate optimization -and not the repetition as parrots of the keyword to position-, and not wills that someone with insomnia.…

Posted in Uncategorized

How To Protect Yourself

Posted on by Tonya Wilkerson

Negative SEO consists of using Black Hat SEO on third-party websites in order to be penalized by Google, and may also include reducing the effectiveness of a website’s SEO properties by disabling or altering them. Unlike other hacking practices that directly attempt to destroy a website or spoil its appearance, a negative SEO attack does not affect its appearance or user experience, but its effects are only apparent in Google’s search ranking. For this not to happen to our website, it is necessary to know how to protect yourself from negative SEO and be able to identify attacks.

Dealing with negative SEO techniques can be quite complicated since most of them are beyond our control (such as bad links pointing to our website). And, in addition, it is also usually a bit difficult to detect, so in this article, we are going to try to explain step by step how to do it.

But, Before We Start… Why Would Someone Commit A Negative SEO Attack

Like hackers, people who carry out negative SEO attacks can do so for various reasons. It can be intentional, such as – sabotaging a competitor’s website, extortion, or just for fun – but it can also happen that involuntary negative SEO attacks occur. There are cases where family members, employees, or even SEO agencies contracted by the website owner carry out outdated Black Hat practices thinking that this will help your website ranking and unknowingly engage in techniques negative SEO.

So What Are The Chances That Your Website Will Get A Negative SEO Attack?

With this information, you may be concerned that this practice will become massive and may affect your website. Luckily, reality indicates that, although these practices exist, it is not so easy for your website to fall. Therefore, although it is interesting to know how to protect yourself from negative SEO just in case, the truth is that it is high risk and low reward activity . And while it’s pretty common unless there’s a very compelling reason (revenge maybe?), someone is unlikely to try to attack your page.

The websites that are most susceptible to a negative SEO attack are those that are in highly competitive niches, and that move a lot of money (for example, gambling or erotic video websites). In contrast, less competitive themed websites are much less likely to receive negative SEO.

Despite this, you cannot create a negative SEO-proof website, and we can all be potential victims (although unlikely, as we have already explained), so constant vigilance is the best way to safeguard our website and its reputation So let’s get down to business and learn how to protect yourself from negative SEO.

How To Protect Yourself From Negative SEO

The first step to protect your website from negative SEO is to detect any signs of attack, such as a sudden drop in organic traffic. This is easy to see if you monitor your traffic through Google Analytics regularly. You can also set up an email alert in Google’s webmaster tools, which will allow Google to notify you by email if your website is not indexed or if it receives a manual penalty. If this happens and you know that you have not carried out any strange practice, it could mean that your website is being attacked. And the sooner you know, the sooner you can react and minimize the damage.…

Posted in Uncategorized

The Five Commandments To Design

Posted on by Tonya Wilkerson

Starting an online project through a web page is difficult; it can also be a breeding ground for doubts and unknowns that many times can lead you to put it aside. In this post, we are going to give you five basic steps to start your online project.

The following steps are the ones that you will most likely have to go through when starting an online project at your own risk. In the steps to follow, it will be assumed that you are the one who wants to carry out the project and create it from 0. That is, this post is aimed at entrepreneurs and web designers.

1st Decide The Project That Is What You Want To Do

This step is evident, and also one of the most complicated if you are not clear about what you are going to want to do, or if you start from a blank page without anything previously decided.

In this step, you have to be clear about what your skills are and what you are capable of doing. It will do no good to set yourself unattainable goals.

If your objective is to monetize the future website, you should also find out what the possibilities of doing it are and what are the benefits.

2nd Think About How To Do It

The time has come to begin to visualize in your mind where everything will be placed, the menus, how many sections the web will have, forms, corporate colors … that is, the design.

And not only that of the previous paragraph referring to the design, but you will have to plan how to join that design to the purpose of the web. In other words, if you want a website in which users have their own account and can access their own space within the website, you should think about items from which they can access sections for technical support and various other things.

3rd Begin To Do It And Find The Many Obstacles That Were Not Available

Once you have decided what you can and what you want to do, it is time to get down to business.

It is time to start with the design of your website, for this you must use the technology you think appropriate or with which we are used to working, etc …

As you build your website, unforeseen events will arise, that is, things that you had not foreseen in your initial sketch and that you will have to correct or improvise to carry out this project.
4th Make The Checks That Everything Works As It Should

Once it is taking shape and you realize what is going well and bad, it is time to check that everything works as it should, that is, check-correct-check.

5th Correct What Has Not Worked In The Previous Point And Recheck

At this point, we continue with more of the same, since we know from experience the problems that can arise with projects, especially if they are complex and, above all, quality and good operation must prevail. With which to correct what has not worked in the previous point and recheck more of that and the other functions of the web,…

Posted in Uncategorized

5 Things

Posted on by Tonya Wilkerson

SEO (Search Engine Optimization in English) is a crucial factor that determines the quality of a website and plays a very important role in positioning web pages on Google or other search engines.

Web hosting is a predominant factor that can affect SEO significantly. It must provide good performance and security, and more importantly, it must withstand huge volumes of traffic that your website is receiving. If it can’t, Google won’t give you a chance to rank high on the search engine results page.

Website Speed

One factor that determines the positioning of your website is speed. Google tends to prioritize high-speed websites, giving them the opportunity to rank well in search engines in a natural (organic) way.

Speed ​​depends a lot on your web hosting provider and the quality of servers it offers. If you see that your website loads very slowly, especially if it is full of audiovisual content, you should contact the company whose services you are using and demand that they move your website to the other server. Errors and poor performance often come as a result of shared hosting, used by a large number of websites, which share the same resources as you. If you want to enjoy high speed and good positioning, consider moving your website to a less busy server or even dedicated hosting.

Uptime / Downtime

Uptime refers to the stability of a server that ensures the availability of a website. It is evident that the servers offered by a web hosting cannot give you 100% uptime, but most of them can provide at least 99.999%.

Nothing happens if your website is not available to search engines and visitors at all times. Some problems are unavoidable, and you can’t control them even if you wanted to – but if you see your site lacking availability very often, that may mean your servers are not working well, which can be a serious problem if you want to improve your SEO.

Location

An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a set of numbers that identify a device or a network or the Internet. In addition to that, an IP address describes a primary factor that can affect SEO – location.

SSL Certificate

Internet security is essential, both for users and for search engines. That said, we must mention the SSL certificate (secure connection layer in Spanish). SSL improves the security of your website by encrypting the information that the user sends to the page, protecting it from possible malicious attempts. Sites that have SSL installed contain S in their URL (https: //).

Backup 

No one wants to risk losing all the files on the website – but we must be prepared if something like this happens. Life can be very cruel.

To avoid such a scenario, you need to make backup copies of your website from time to time. Many web hosting providers offer their own backup services – they will be done regularly and automatically, which is a perfect solution for all website owners who don’t have to use the services of another company. In this way, you can recover all the data and files that you have lost due to malicious attacks or natural disasters that have destroyed the physical server.

1) Creating Brand campaigns increases the branding of your business: Whether you create campaigns on google ads or Facebook ads, for example, for the sale of coffee machines and in that ad you use the brand of your business, then there are many possibilities that the user who has entered your website through the said campaign and has obtained a good user experience, it is very likely that in the future they will perform a search for «home appliance + your brand.»

2) All the visits you receive on your website provide data on user experience: Both search intention and user experience are two factors that Google takes more into account every day. Here you can see a study that Google has carried out on how the ideal page of a real estate company is based on user experience.

If this trick is used by large companies in the sector, why not you?

Conclusion

As you have seen, there are multiple SEO tips or tricks for your website, using them in a correct and above all constant way will make your website start to rise positions at a dizzying pace.…

Posted in Uncategorized

5 Tricks To Position

Posted on by Tonya Wilkerson

These tricks or SEO tips help (and a lot) to make your website rank faster but to be effective, and your project must first have a series of basic requirements.

Position using photos, videos, and rich snippets

At this point you will already know that optimizing the images of your website is very important for positioning, both the alt tags and their size must be optimal, for this, we must optimize the images, it is also recommended that the image format be JPG or JPEG2000 as they are lighter than others like PNG.

A good way to google images using photographs is by editing them with your own filters and modifications.

How does doing this help? Well, very easy, if you create an entry for your website or blog, it is most likely that the images you use are either taken from Google images or a repository such as pixabay. Therefore those images are already indexed in Google, and it will be a lot more difficult for your photos to appear in search results.

Attack The Simplest Keywords First (Longtails)

Although it is very tempting to go first for those keywords with the highest number of monthly searches, these are the most difficult to attack, for the simple fact that there are other websites with a lot of authority that are surely already going for them.

Get Quality Links (With Head)

One of the main disadvantages that you will find with those new websites is that both the website and the domain will have practically no backlink pointing towards it.

Backlinks are links from other websites that serve to increase the authority of our page.

Here it is very important to do things with your head and very well studied since, according to Google, we should not carry out any link building practice, although the theory says that in practice links help to position a lot.

Search Console + IndexKings

And a very simple and effective trick is to use this tool to make our URLs index faster since we have the possibility of sending to a priority crawl queue those new URLs that we add to our website.

Combine Your SEO Strategy With Google ADS And Facebook ADS Campaigns

Although it is true that SEM does not help directly improve the SEO positioning of a page, indirectly it can be useful, and much.

How does SEM help the positioning of your website? It helps in many ways, but mainly two:

…

Posted in Uncategorized