In this first episode of the Calvert County Lifestyle podcast Clif (that’s me) discusses how to get the most out of Calvert County through the use of Your Calvert.
Shownotes
All shownotes for this episode can be accessed at YourCalvert.com/1 (YourCalvert.com/EpisodeNumber – that’s this page)
What’s A Podcast
A podcast is a themed series of recorded digital audio or video files (audio only in our case). People that subscribes will be automatically notified of future episodes and can have them download to a device of their choosing.
In plain English, think of a podcast as a recorded radio broadcast that is automatically downloaded to a listeners’ device(s) and allows the listener to begin playback at a time of their choosing.
What’s Your Calvert Cover
Events, Recreation, Food + Drink reviews, Business & Real Estate updates, & more!
Events
Calvert Hospice Festival of Trees
End Hunger Dragon Boat Races
Calvert Marine Museum Sharkfest
Solomons Lighted Boat Parade
Calvert County Jousting Tournament
Recreation
Dunkirk & Prince Frederick Dog Parks
JC Lore & Sons Oyster House at the Calvert Marine Museum
Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum
Food + Drink Reviews
Yogurt City
Winery’s (Cove Point Winery, Friday’s Creek, Perigueux Winery, Running Hare Vineyard, Solomons Island Winery)
Sweet Dream Candy Shoppe
Nagoya Asian Bistro
Blondie’s Baking Company
Featured
Calvert County Farm Stands, Produce Stands, & Farmers Markets
Calvert County’s Haunted History
Letterboxing In Calvert County
ArtLab At Annmarie Gardens
Real Estate
Where You Can Find Your Calvert
YourCalvert.com Website (home base)
In your email (subscribe for free here)
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Pinterest
Flickrr (hundreds of photos from events)
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Full Audio Transcript:
Welcome to the YourCalvert.com, Calvert County Lifestyle podcast. Episode number one.
Welcome to the Calvert County Lifestyle podcast. At YourCalvert.com. The original podcast exclusively for Calvert County and dedicated to helping you get the most from the place you love to play or call home. Listen for the latest events, food and drinks reviews, business and real estate updates, interesting interviews and more. Now. Here’s your host, Clif Bridegum.
I’m your host Clif Bridegum. And in this episode, I’m going to tell you how to take full advantage of YourCalvert.com, thus helping you get the most out of Calvert County Maryland, the place you live or like to call home. Going forward, there’s no need to take notes of any kind. I will direct you to the show notes. You can access the show notes for this episode at YourCalvert.com/1. So the number one. You don’t have to spell it out, just do a number one. So all other episodes going forward will also be YourCalvert.com/the episode number. But this episode specifically, again, is YourCalvert.com/1. On the show notes we’ll include links to anything that we’ve talked about or discussed or mentioned.
When I mentioned to people that I was starting a podcast, the majority of people didn’t actually know what that meant. But now I’d like to go ahead and take just a few minutes explaining to you what a podcast is. A podcast can be in audio or video format. And in our case that’s going to be audio format only. The next piece of a podcast, though, is that people have to be able to subscribe to it. And that subscription process is handled by being in a catalog, something like iTunes or Zune or some of those other big catalogs. So in our case, will be in the iTunes catalog, Zune catalog and a few other catalogs that make sense for everybody to get to. You may have found this episode through one of those catalogs or you might have found it on our website and are listening to it directly from our website. But in the future, know that, if you’d like, you could subscribe to it via iTunes or via the Zune catalog and then you’d actually be able to have the future episodes pushed to you automatically or to a device of your choice automatically. Podcast can also be any length. In our case, we’re going to shoot for about a 30 minute episode. The average commute for people that work out of the county is about 40 minutes, so we’re going to try to keep ours at a little bit under that. A one way commute time of about 30 minutes is our goal.
This first episode is going to be me talking only. In future episodes, I’ll be bringing on interviewees, guests, even have a panel of people available to talk to. So now that I’ve explained what a podcast is and how you can get to it or subscribe to it, now going to tell you a little bit about Your Calvert and what exactly is Your Calvert.
So Your Calvert is a Calvert County Lifestyle brand, as I like to call it. And what Your Calvert does is we cover the events, so that’s things to do, recreation, we provide food and drink reviews, so that’s reviews of places to eat or wineries and that kind of thing. We give business updates, profiles of those business owners. We cover real estate updates, including neighborhood guides and quite a few other things, and a lot more. At the core of Your Calvert is our website, YourCalvert.com. So that is our home base for pretty much everything that we do. I just mentioned that Your Calvert covers the events, recreation, food and drink, business updates, real estate and more in Calvert County. So now what I’d like to do is go ahead and dive into each of those a little bit more deeply.
And before I go any further, I should let you know that on our websites we actually post articles to the site five days a week on average. Up to this point in time, we now have over 100 articles live on our website now in all of those different categories. To make sure you never miss an article, I’ll explain later in the show how to subscribe for all of our email updates. In addition to that, we are kicking off this new January with monthly giveaways for gift cards to local businesses.
Okay. So let’s go ahead and dive into some of the events that we’ve covered. So over the past year, we’ve been fortunate to have covered events like the Festival of Trees that the Calvert Hospice puts on. That was rather recent there during the holiday time season. Back in the summer, we covered the North Beach Dragon Boat Races that was put on by End Hunger. That was just a fantastic event. We’re really looking forward to that event coming up again. We have a ton of photos from that event, almost 400, and I’ll talk about that later when we mention Flickr. We also covered the Sharks Fest at the Calvert County Marine Museum. The Solomon’s Lighted Boat Parade happened a couple weeks ago. We also covered the Calvert County Jousting Tournament. So you can find these events and the 29 other events that we’ve covered in the past eight months on our website at YourCalvert.com/events.
Next will go ahead and talk about some of the recreational items that we’ve covered. In the recreation category, we’ve covered things such as the Dunkirk and Prince Frederick Dog Parks. So that’s the Grays Road Dog Park down in Prince Frederick, Dunkirk Dog Park, which is located actually in the Dunkrik Park. We’ve covered things like the J.C. Lore & Sons Oyster House, which is actually located by the Calvert Marine Museum, the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum and even a total of 23 actual things that we have in the recreation category.
So next we’ll go ahead and talk about some of the places that we’ve covered in food and drink reviews. In our food and drinks category, we’ve covered places like Yogurt City, which is a new frozen yogurt shop down in Prince Frederick. We’ve covered every single winery in Calvert County. That includes Friday’s Creek Winery, Running Hare Vineyard, Perigeaux Winery, Cove Point Winery and the Solomons Island Winery. We’ve covered the Sweet Dreams Candy Shop, which is down in St. Leonard. We’ve covered the Nagoya Asian Bistro, which is a new Asian restaurant in Prince Frederick. We’ve covered Blondie’s Baking Company and lots more. In our featured section on the site, we’ve actually featured 15 different places. These include things like Scrivener’s Choose and Cut Christmas tree farm, Calvert’s County Haunted History, which was actually one of the most visited articles on her website. We’ve covered letterboxing in Calvert County. We’ve covered the Calvert County farm stands, produce farms and farmers markets. That was a very popular article. And even things like the Art Labs at Annemarie Garden and Arts Center.
So next up is our real estate category here. And in the real estate section, we’ve actually got nine articles. The majority of them so far have been our neighborhood guides. Our neighborhood guides have been extremely popular. What we do in our neighborhood guides is we’ve been writing about a specific neighborhood. We write about all of the things that exist in the neighborhood, anything that sets that neighborhood apart, its location in proximity to other things and anything else that’s located near it or around it. So for these neighborhood guides, we’ve actually completed neighborhood guides on Federal Oaks, College Station, Scientist Cliffs, Chesapeake Ranch Estates, Farms at Hunting Creek. We’ve got a lot more in the works for you guys. In addition, in the real estate category we’ve covered things like short sales, and even given some market updates. So we look forward to providing you a lot more real estate.
Now onto business. So our business section is actually our newest section. We don’t even actually have it live on the site yet but we’ve got quite a few profiles of business owners and neat little businesses that you might not have heard of but that you might need in the future.
So just to sum that up one more time for you here, just to make sure you’re not, you know, your heads not blowing off your shoulders, you know. Your Calvert guide on the events, recreation, food and drinks, big business updates, real estate and more going on exclusively in Calvert County. Not southern Maryland, but Calvert County only. So to take that even further, our core business is our website YourCalvert.com but in addition to that, we’re active on a bunch of social channels.
First off the email, and people actually can subscribe on our website to receive our daily email updates. So when you go to our main page, YourCalvert.com, any page that you’re on in the right sidebar you’ll see a spot to enter your name and email. If you go ahead and enter your name and email, you’ll than actually receive another email that you have to confirm. As of the recording of this episode, there’s actually 415 other people that are actually already getting and receiving our daily email updates.
In addition to email, we are active on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest and Flickr. So on Facebook, we actually have 5,052 followers. On Facebook, we actually posted daily, or multiple times daily, giving you posts about Calvert County. We post the daily updates that go on our website. We let you know that those are up and give you links to those. We even will communicate weather updates or school closings or other information that you guys find viable and tell us that you want to receive.
On Twitter we also provide you with links to the daily postings that we have on our website. In addition, we also do provide some breaking news and updates. Facebook is definitely getting a lot of the more general kinds of posts. But if there’s something very specific that we need to get out real quick to people, we definitely use Twitter for that. In addition to that, we also will do live event coverage directly from Twitter.
So we’re active on Pinterest as well. Our handle is Your Calvert there. And on Pinterest we actually have organized all of our daily articles into boards that you can subscribe to and share as you well. Pinterest is actually the newest channel that we’re on but it’s gaining followers quite nicely. So we’re happy with where we’re at with that. And we look forward to seeing you and connecting with you on Pinterest as well.
Next up is Flickr. And Flickr is actually a really unique way in which we’ve used this. We actually take a bunch of photos from events. We have professional photographers that we hired to photograph some of those events. We’ve done this for things like the Dragon Boat Race, the Jousting Tournament, and a few other events as well. And we pay professional photographers to photograph those events and we take all the photos that we get and we upload them. So we actually upload the entire catalog of good images to Flickr in high quality, full resolution format. And then we make these available to everyone. In addition to those event photos, we actually take (inaudible) photographers and/or writers that write up our articles on a daily basis, take a lot of photos that don’t actually make it into article. In a normal article, we can normally only fit about three photos or so, but in a lot of cases I’m getting 5 to 10 photos from my writers. And what we’re doing, or in the process of doing, is we’re in the process of taking all of those photos, so the ones that are in the articles and the ones that didn’t make it into the articles, and uploading all of those to Flickr in full, high quality format.
So that brings me to my next point. All the photos on Flickr and most of the photos on our site we are licensing under the creative comments license. And the specific license is the attribution noncommercial 3.0 (inaudible). The quick, simple overview of that is you’re free to share, distribute the image for noncommercial purposes. You do have to give credit to us for that. Publishing the photo on a website, you must give a valid link to any page on our website. And if you do use the photo in print, then you do need to give us credit. If you’d like more details about that license, you’re more than welcome to go to the show notes and we’ll point you specifically to where you can read more about that. But in general, you’re free to use any of the images for noncommercial purposes and giving credit wherever credit is required. And so the other new thing, too, is that if you were at a specific event, we may have gotten you on camera and you’re more than welcome to use that photo for, you know, your own personal reasons. No big deal. You can download it, send it to your friends, make it your desktop background if you’d like. They’re available, just so you know, to get to them if you’d like or if you have some other purpose in mind. Just let us know and we’d be happy to work with you.
Before we go any further, I’d like to take a moment to thank each and everyone of you that has read an article on our website, shared a link on Facebook, subscribe to our email newsletter or taken any kind of effort at all that’s resulted in you being part of our community. We truly appreciate it and we’re out your creating this podcast and creating the website and doing all this work for you, our fellow Calvert County residents.
So leading right into that, we actually have a voicemail line. To get to that voicemail line is YourCalvert.com/VM. YourCalvert.com/VM. And if you can’t remember that link, you can go to the show notes, YourCalvert.com/1. Just the number one. YourCalvert.com/1. And then find that link there on the page. And what this voicemail link is, is it will take you to our special page where you can leave us a message. This is not a normal phone number. It’s not answered by a human. It’s going to go directly to voicemail. And you can actually leave this message directly from your computer using the microphone built into your laptop or into your tablet or into your phone. But here’s what I want you to do with that voicemail line. If you’ve got a comment about the show or about an article that we’ve written or you’d like to say thank you, that would be a fantastic way to do it. You can also go ahead and leave a shout out to a person in the community. If someone’s got a birthday coming up and you just want to say, hey or happy birthday. It would be a fantastic thing to do. Or happy anniversary. Or hi mom and dad. Whatever you want to say. Go ahead and go to that voicemail hotline and leave your message. If you’ve got a question about an upcoming event. Anything that you think that we may be able to help you with, feel free to go ahead and leave that message there. If you are calling in to leave a message, go ahead and state your name and say what city you’re from. So in my case that would be, Hi. Your Calvert Clif Bridegum from St. Leonard. You know, something like that. That way we can go ahead and put that into the show. So please note, though, that not everything that’s left on the voicemail will make it into the show. And if you don’t want something, or don’t want your voice on the show, just go ahead and note that in the message too. Then again, that place to leave a voicemail was YourCalvert.com/VM. That’s Victor Mary. VM.
Okay. Now that we’ve made it this far in the show, I’ll go ahead and spend the last few minutes talking about me or giving you a little bit of into my background. So as I’ve said multiple times in the show, my name is Clif Bridegum. I am the founder of YourCalvert.com. So I got my start quite a long time ago in 1996. I actually used to build computers for my parents’ computer business. They actually closed that a few years after I started, about four years later. And then at that point in time, I actually went and worked for an IT department for a company in DC. I worked there for about 11 years. It was a 200 person company. I started as a help desk technician and then I worked my way up and became a network engineer, where I actually managed the back end servers and networking infrastructure. In addition to that, at about the same time a few years later but during that same kind of period, I started selling online and managing my own web businesses. So now we’ll fast forward to about today. So about three years ago, I quit working for that company and actually decided to venture out and do everything on my own. And as of now, and for the past three years, I’ve owned a marketing company, Your Digital Salesman. That’s online at yourdigitalsalesman.com. And what we do is we specialize in website design, social media, search engine optimization and mobile marketing for small businesses. I have a passion for helping small businesses succeed with their online and off-line efforts. Now I can devote all of my time to doing that right here in Calvert County.
So a few other things you may not know about me. I’m a United Way of Calvert County board member. I’m actually the chairperson of the leadshare group of the Calvert County Chamber of Commerce. In addition, I’m an active member of the Bay Business Group. I am happily married. And if you’re listening, miss, I love you. In addition, we have three dogs. We have a Labrador Retriever, a lab shepherd mix and a Siberian Husky. And now at this point, we’ve reached the end of the show. Thanks for listening to the YourCalvert.com podcast. Subscribe to our updates at YourCalvert.com or via iTunes, Zune, Stitcher or other podcasting client. Out.