d who started what she's been singing professionally but starting off our own at the ripe age of forty one a young age of forty one let me just read the first paragraph of her bio people continue to ask me what is my story who is kim d i'm not your typical dance music artist especially being a proud mother of three kids and forty one years old which makes me a black horse in the industry interesting metaphor i decided long ago the opportunity arose for me to sing professionally i take it holding my hands ti go to because i didn't have the greatest home like growing up so that was my positive reinforcement by performing and singing and the academics and the sports but it always came back to performing so you know you worked as a wedding or i was a wedding singer for about sixteen years ago you know and i had gastric bypass surgery and in this industry people look at you as to her what they see is what they get but sometimes having weight issues can hold you back and they would always say we love your voice  lost a hundred fifty five pounds and you know you've kind of all said that perception you know it probably hurts guys as well as girls to be not considered great looking in the entertainment business but but a female you know that's going to be a very hard thing to get past you know they're like you know this affront if maybe in a from person you have to have a certain look and i might have had it sometimes with the voice but i didn't have unfortunately with the outward appearance unfortunately that's the way the industry is to an extent you don't want to believe that but it is you know so i mostly did it because i was unhealthy and then once i did i realized well you know go further i really want to start singing and doing more with my voice and then a friend of mine introduced me to someone out of philly and i started working for their label and did a what it got it in fervor so i just took it around with it and i've just been enjoying it ever since you know and i have three children and a husband in the family behind me now so it's just nice to know that i can move forward  my stepfather he sexually abused me growing up so unfortunately my waves for singing that's what i went to to get through that and it was like another world and when i sing i sing from my heart because it saved me it literally saved me growing up and like now when i go out i want these kids to see that you have this example of somebody who's gone through something so horrific and i've overcome it but because of poverty positive reinforcement if i didn't have that i don't think i would be here where i'm at now how was the music that  everyone's got a good input and if you just listen to what people want to say and what they want to say what they take away from your song or what your words are you can come up with something so creative so how are you trying to market this one now i have all my music video is coming out on december third and we have had some great people in the industry especially new york get involved and we created something about my childhood the song is called singing my song and it's about growing up and going through so many things and overcoming and coming out on the other side and the video patrice that it's just amazing now to be able to market it and show people what i've done and say hey i did it how do you go about that  my flaws i'm proud of where i'm from because that's what makes me strong it's where i belong i don't hate all my haters they're stuck in the same but i keep my haters because i'm thinking my songs are saying i really don't care what's going on i'm doing my own  they can hey yeah i used to worry about my weight i used to worry about people thought of me not living up to expectations and now the crazy thing is once you lose a party yourself that you thought was negative and you come back with this different person like i'm on the  same person i am mentally but physically i've changed but people don't see that weakness anymore that i saw as being overweight other thing is i really don't care if you'll think i have my kids i have my husband i am moving forward if you don't like what you see here then  what i like the gravelle way i worried for so long what everybody thought and like you know what's the difference like i lost my mother died you know for my stepdad was gone my grandmother i lost all the people that mattered in my life and it's like you have to move forward from now on to did not leave me wrong i think you have talent i know there's a lot of cop out there and you need tough luck talent and timing but i think you might make it someplace i'm hoping right people right time good timing you know get the right play i'm giving you the v sign victory t got yeah ok so you do music you do both keyboard and guitar and you write songs and they were mostly for instrumental some of them are instrumental some of them are have lyrics but do you like classic blues like robert johnson people like that and a lot of classic rock too like led zeppelin and the rolling stones and as miss people are the beatles so  when you're getting started how do you get yourself out there well i'm going to start recording stuff soon with my friends we'll play in a band together and we're going to get a like ok they're not in english well language is not a human language the kind of punk rock lyrics are maybe you could take anything you want from and i'd love to know yeah you need you know sometimes you need to lose people yeah you're fired that's a hard thing about a band you have to have people with you because it's everyone's going different directions level commitment maturity level yeah they behave you go through it you meet other people things kind of home but my brother told my brother was in the music you like and he said every band as soon as they become a band the timer is on and they're going to break up eventually something goes wrong of and you know but hey you got two years and then something happens yeah you  stic song that i wrote that i really enjoyed playing it was i wrote it on piano could you put something that you hate to put i could if you really wanted me to yeah all right anyway you were saying yeah shapiro for their one year old son come through a risk over heart surgery successfully filled with gratitude mike scratch his career as a litigation attorney in manhattan and he and his wife decided instead to pursue a future build around social good hopefully make some money to the ship erode put twenty and fifty thousand dollars of their own money and just starting a digital newspaper in new providence new jersey where they live and still live and two neighboring neighborhood communities that would be high quality objective and nonpartisan that's nice to hear these days for you to hear that they have that much from a cycle fox news here surety from the site the shapiro of the alternative press grew into something called top end to most of the sites were converted int jackie lieberman who converted the existing westfield new jersey site to a franchise operation twenty twelve a former magazine editor lieberman said her tap into westfield produces one hundred thousand hits monthly and a community of thirty thousand and makes more than one hundred sixty six figures six years where it's one of your thousand dollars a year happy to have you on today mike shapiro tap into will thanks for having me question one of the people asking me and locally owned and operated which is really important second is we cover local original local news content in all of our towns at a time when that traditional media companies are cutting back other news coverage and laying off journalists we're putting them to work basically and we're able to cover everything from town council to high school sports and everything in between you know when i started to happen to it and i would go to for example a new providence council meeting there'd be three other newspapers there plus me covering the council meeting and today there's just me and so if we didn't exist in these towns people wouldn't know what's going on in their town so there's a real option you know there's a real need for this in communities throughout new jersey and yes it's my business but it's also my passion because to me you need an informed electorate and bias providing objective nonpartisan news and information people can make up their own minds they don't need us telling them how to vote or what to think but thankfully because of our news coverage people don't have to vote based on a glossy palm card or post part of they receive in the franchise what supports you can't them what kind of turn can we make it is turnkey as possible so we provide the site hosting email accounts we do all their billing all their credit card processing their advertisers we train them on the sales side on the content side how to use the site we set up their social media and train them in social media and then once they launch we have four fold up for full time two part time employees to service the franchisees including two full time two part time editors to provide feedback to the franchisees about their writing the copy check that post publication and we also provide them with all of the marketing materials that they need contracts and edible media kit so that you know basically they can focus on the news for their town and the a sales to the local businesses in town i t to our model is that the sites can share content with a click of a button so for example if princeton's playing say you know hillsboro in basketball only one of the states needs to cover it both of the states can use that story but more  importantly it's also scalable on the advertising side so for example if there were a franchise in princeton they could reach out to any princeton business and have them advertise not just on the princeton site but on other sites in the tap into networks that that business may wan target for to to to get customers and most a lot of the franchises you think are looking at the numbers are going are going to be successful and start making profits oh yeah absolutely you know and actually as of now we now have fifty three in new jersey five in new york and we've had over five million readers this past year making us one of the largest local publications in the whole state of new jersey at this point now the same time they have to pay to get in but you don't accept anyone just to get a franchise even if they have the money you play that yeah no i mean basically you know what we're looking for people who are connected in their town ideally who have a business background we have a wide variety of different models we have where it's one person who does both the content and the ad sales where we have where two people do it together part time when does the content one does the ad sales we have five hardcopy newspapers that are franchise from us to be their online site while we have two nonprofits that are franchise from us to run the newspaper in their town so when it becomes a way for them to market their nonprofit sector that creates a new revenue stream for them as a nonprofit and they're able to help the community at the same time one of the non profits is the playing field y which is doing are playing field site we also have  we also have st bonaventure university as franchise for not only as a journalism practicum for their students in terms of screening we actually have a perspective franchisee committee which is composed of some of our most successful franchisees and they're the ones that approve a new franchise i don't which is kind of on heard of in franchising i've empowered them because i want to make sure that the people that that we have it's franchisees really represent our brand well uphold our reputation and are going to be a credit to us and to all of our readers who are going to come to know that tap into sight do your franchises go outside of new jersey now we have five in new york and we can we can franchise in pretty much any state you know i'm pretty much limited in terms of my time time plus me and so really we're there we even you know we put the ads up on the site for them we can track all that ad statistics and provide that for the franchisee for their advertisers and where they're for any kind of questions that they have it's basically twenty four seven or these are just individual websites for these newspapers or of a link to facebook well they're the to the web sites are all part of one over all sites they can share content with a click of a button so like for example if a franchisee sees a story on another tap into site and they would like to have it on their site they just we have a cloning feature where they can click a button and then it can go on their site which is pretty neat similarly like if a friend has he has a columnist and another site would like to have that column they can just add that column to their site and i mean back to your question you know there's we also provide we also create a facebook and twitter page for every single tap into site and train them in social media with two full time social media directors who are there for any kind of social media questions to teach them how to post give them tips on how to buy really market their site and things like that and it's funny how newspapers going out of business you're sort of looking at a new niche it's like when a tree falls in the forest or the tree fell but it opens up sunlight and so you're seeing some sunlight you're to grow your own tree and also there's such a need i mean there's over one hundred minus apologies in new jersey that don't have any kind of local newspaper at all not print not online then you have a lot of these kind of what i would call media conglomerates buying up newspapers i mean going next just north jersey dot com they're laying off almost fifty percent of their reporters they're closing twelve of their weekly local by because of the changing face of newspapers no one can pay for local you know yet by doing it this way where it's franchise and it's locally owned and operated that enables us to scale on the advertising side on the content side while keeping our costs low keeping the yes well i still do the sales training for the franchisees and we've learned a lot since we began one of the things that we learned was that in the beginning what we provided to advertisers was advertising coupled with content marketing and content marketing is like the hottest thing in terms of advertising these days and so that's good really the test of time with the content marketing yes so basically when a business advertises with us they have an ad on the site that clicks through their website but the content marketing side is they can post events including sales on the calendar they can post press releases some advertisers have their own featured column where they can write as often as they want linking back to their websites that content marketing  since january we introduce several new revenue streams which are also advertising vehicles for businesses for example we have the news that readers can get for free in the morning and in the evening news there's now three advertising spots in the sponsorship of the news we have sponsorship of each of the sections of the site and so berkshire hathaway home services and atlantic health and j c p and l are sponsoring those sections in many of our towns now which one creates a revenue stream new revenue stream for the franchisees but also is a great way for these companies to market themselves and show how we are committed to the community it's one thing to say you are it's another thing to show that you are walking everything and then in addition to that we also can do targeted e mail blasts for advertisers to the subscribers of a given town and in december our asses going to come out which is going to help a whole new kind of range of businesses for example a lot of local retailers ice cream stores hair salons those kinds of businesses who are looking for instant gratification from there advertising and the act is going to allow us to do push notifications offers and things like that to all the people that download the app which will be free how do you get the local residents to go to your website if they haven't heard of it yeah there's a there's a number of ways one thing that we do is we provide a thirty sixty ninety day plan to the franchisees about how they can buy early market the site in their town things like for under our franchise agreement is we allow the franchisee to barter ad space with non profits and other organizations in town we're doing important community events so those organizations are able to receive  advertising that would normally be prohibitively expensive for them to do and in exchange that site gets publicity of being one of the sponsors of that particular event there's a lot of things like that the content the people who spread the information that i don't really minutes to the community and and we can cover so many different stories that a lot of these hardcopy newspaper reserve no longer able to cover because they don't have enough journalists to go out and cover them so that's important too but you know people can reach me my my cell phone i'll give it and check it out and they can they can even sign up and get the news e mail them to them in the morning of the know a lot of people in prison and relatives in our area and so more the merrier you know you might want to sell some coffee ads anyway i'm glad your son's first item is the eighty s o s oversize cards so now that we're fully into autumn it's time to prepare for any weather so my answer for this the oversized scarf so it's a great success story it adds texture to any outfit you can double as a blanket and you're always prepared for an emergency picnic this card is my go to for these false they will because they have a variety of color and patterns the best part is a bunch of them are own sales right now so happy shopping so it's some to become more spontaneous pack up and go is a travel website that plans your three day tonight the cation for you before your where you're going so you take a no obligation survey where you list your discard dates your recent trips because you don't want to go back to your recent trips whether you like to relax or be active on your trips what bad budget are you etc then pack up and go plans your trip for you tells you what to pack in word to go at what time so once you're at the departure location you open up your envelope and you will learn where you are going safe travels so watches are among my favorite accessories they add a classy finishing touch to any outfit and i'm loving all the south from rumba time so they have classic s flowers are beautiful gifts but they obviously don't last very long so how about a bouquet of precious stones instead so this brand lets you choose from a selection of healing crystals that come in a little such show to celebrate different make a gorgeous gift and get ten percent off your order with your code trending at your checkout and then bring us back to princeton i want to pitch feature this month the princeton holiday troll the tour so this is a one hour through where you bring your you and your family you will get see the homes in hangouts of prominent celebrities or prominent figures in our history like albert einstein robert  lived in princeton so this too it's a number one rated princeton attraction by trip advisor and aaa magazine so it's really awesome you will see a lot of stuff it's only for fifteen dollars per person you also get a chance a visit on snap chat and i'll get you all those codes that you need for twenty percent discount and ten percent discount on all the sales so that's the go what's trending with riaa this month i'll see you next month for our holiday december episode and that's it comments muses so what kind of pills did used to none so i don't really care but i think it's funny that people care ok from a from a psychological standpoint what about the kids how can they handle this relationship better so not to have a play on the thrilled with their role in my kids can get you being what medication would you prescribe to me i'd like to call the old fashioned or just whip out i know it sounds cliche has to start at the top when one doesn't have enough hair that's been the round table and we'll be right