Welcome to Day 5 of the Internet Marketing Makeover!

Just about 18 months ago, we moved from the middle-of-nowhere in the California foothills (Georgetown, to be exact) back to the San Francisco Bay Area. Up there, we’d regularly get storms that knocked down trees and power lines and because we lived in a town of only 900 people, we were usually the last place PG&E came to fix.

It wasn’t unusual after a typical winter storm to have us lose electricity (and therefore water too, as water came from a well driven by an electric pump) for 48 hours at a time, and one (horrible!) storm left us without power  and water for 6 1/2 days.

We wouldn’t be in bad shape though – we had a small generator that would power a room or two in the house so I could get online or the kids could watch TV for a little while.  We had a woodstove to heat the house so we were toasty warm despite the temperature being well below freezing outside.  My truck had 4 wheel drive and we were easily able to plow out of the 2-3 feet of snow in our driveway to head into town (which usually didn’t have power either!).

But it took us about 2 years to get to that point.

During the first big storm when we we lost power for the first time, we realized we didn’t have water only after letting a sink run and run until the spigot coughed dust. That’s when we (city slickers) realized that without electricity, we had no well pump. Without a well pump, we had no water. And without water, you can’t flush the toilets…

We made lots of mistakes as we learned to live in that remote environment. But evenutally, we learned how to prepare for the storms ahead of time.

And I got to thinking about how much this storm and power outage dovetails with today’s Internet Marketing Makeover post – it’s all about being prepared.

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