Examine your blog as if you were the Hotel Inspector

I love the Hotel Inspector. She goes into failing, horrible hotels and businesses which are mostly run by, (how to put this tactfully?) fruitcases. And with her searing insight and years of undaunted experience, she is able to spot exactly what needs to be changed to completely turn the whole thing around and give it all a completely new lease of life.

This typically involves getting rid of the horrible colours that the owners think are cute. Destroying unnecessary decorations, in one case, a ‘museum’ of other people’s unwanted junk! And covering everything in sight with such an air of freshness and newness that people can not resist staying there and being happy to do so.

She resolves family issues, and staffing problems and then at the end they have a brilliant re-launch party.

Tomorrow, take a step back from your blog. Sign out and visit it as if you were a casual visitor, just surfing on by on the look out for something useful or interesting to read.

1. What are your first impressions?
2. Is it clean and crisp?
3. Are your ‘best bits’ on display in prominent places, where they can be easily found?
4. Do the colours or the images clash on the page or in the brain?
5. Do you have a ‘museum’ of unwanted junk which needs to be removed?

So you know what needs to be fixed. Done that?

Good. As Alex Polizzi would say: “That’s brilliant dahling”.

 

6 Reasons Why People Do Not Write

Fear:
The main reason that people do not write is fear of one sort or another.

They have various thoughts running through their brains such as : will my writing be good enough? Will people want to read it? Will people laugh at me?

It is the fear of exposing the workings of their private mind to the world at large, to friends and family and to all comers old and new.

Work:Reward Ratio.
When people want to write, one of the first things they do is to start to google various questions. just like when you want to change careers, you ask your faithful computer/Internet some basic and fundamental questions:

How do people write?
How do writers earn their living?
How much money do writers make?

Etc. etc.

And the results of these searches are often page after page of writers explaining just how little they actually earn. Warning others off trying to do the same and saying that not everyone can be like J.K. Rowling. This is an immediate dis-incentive. Why would anyone want to put themselves through that anyway?

Not Having Any Ideas:
The thing is, that most people do not have any ideas if put on the spot, and the thing also is that, most people would be able to come up with some amazing ideas if they were given half an hour and asked to come up with the most outrageous thing they can think of. Admitedly, there are some people who, after half an hour of thinking would imagine that it is outrageous to put paper in the normal bin and not the recycling bin (oh the terror!) but they would be few and far between.

Having an important career and other life.
Is it always a shock to find out that a respected High Court judge writes fluffy romances, or the Police Metropolitan Commisionner writes children’s stories? I don’t know. But it is possibly enough of a put off for these people to think to embark on a second career as a writer.

Having a silly name:
There are many people in all walks of life whose names now trip off the tongue because of the different things they now stand for. Donald Trump, something which obviously means a greatly different thing in the UK than in the States, is a prime example. How about Audrey Niffeneger, or Arnold Schwarzenegger? And a writer is at an advantage from the start because they can take a nom de plume.

Just Realising How Much Sheer Hard Work is Involved.
Many writers or would-be writers baulk at the idea of producing a certain numbers of coherently flowing words. Then, having written them, the idea of sitting down to edit them is also a huge put off!

But it is like playing the lottery. Why do people play for that one in fourteen million chance of winning? Someone has to win. Someone has to be the Rowling, the Tolkein, the Fleming, the Cartland, The Clarke… This list is endless!

The question should not be ‘why Do people not write’, but what on earth is stopping them?

 

Invictus by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
                                       Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

                                      It matters not how strait the gate,
                                      How charged with punishments the scroll.
                                      I am the master of my fate:
                                      I am the captain of my soul.

                                                           William Ernest Henley (1844-1903)

 

A Quick Way to Get More Visitors Without Doing Anything!

From having this blog, I have noticed one thing about the way that visitors arrive here.

Now I will let you into the little secret that I have discovered:

Having interesting photos brings visitors to your blog too. A lot of people come to my blog after having looked for an alien picture. And that alien post is my most popular post and has had thousands of page views by itself.

• Relevant

Obviously, it would greatly help if the photo or image was completely relevant to the subject of the post. There is no use having a highly popular picture of a singer or something in a post about different styles of period lamp post. The visitor would come, find nothing to interest them and leave.

• Positioning

It helps to place it in a good place where it is high enough up in your post

• Size

Not too big and not too small

And that is the whole tip. To get more visitors, choose an interesting, relevant, popular picture and that will lead people to your website as well, after that it is up to you to grab their attention and keep them there.

Cute kittens always help too!

 

What To Do If Someone Has A Heart Attack

New guidelines from the British Heart Foundation have simplified the instructions for what to do if someone’s heart stops beating during a heart attack

Hands Only CPR
The main thing to do is to get their heart beating again. If you are a qualified first aider and are confident, then obviously do what you have been taught and what has worked for hundreds of years. But for all the rest of us, they advise, that we hum along to ‘Staying Alive’ by the Bee Gees and press down on the person’s heart to that rhythm.

Administering CPR to someone who has had a heart attack more than doubles their chances of survival. Better still attend one of the training courses which are being run all over the country. You might help save someone’s life!

 

How To Get More Traffic for Your Blog Through Linkreferral

Linkreferral is a great website for generating traffic to your blog, e-commerce website, or any other website that you may have.

 It is basically a links directory where you can add the link for your own website into one of the many categories that they have after registering for their service.

After that they require you to do your share of visiting people’s websites which in turn makes people visit yours.

If you go to 30 websites from their directory, from any category, and review 5 sites, choosing one of them to be your favourite, and make one comment on the forum, then you have done your maximum daily amount.

Bad Points

• It takes ages to visit 30 websites. It is not possible to just click through quickly, linkreferral only registers your visit once the whole website home page has loaded.

• It also takes ages to leave 5 reviews on other people’s sites which are helpful and meaningful.

• Because the forum comments are perfunctory, the forum is full of thousands of comments, but does not have the feeling of a proper community. A bit like a dance for shop dummies. They are dancing, but they don’t know why they are there or whether they are having fun or not.

• From time to time, someone visits your site who just ‘doesn’t get’ what you do and what you are all about. This person just leaves a low score or a poor review and this can knock your ego a bit.

• Another bad point is that sometimes you come across a website which is so interesting that you find yourself so absorbed with reading it and forget to visit the other 29 and one link leads to another and…

Good Points

Linkreferral leads you to discover hundreds of other websites. These are often other blogs, or money-making websites, or anything you can imagine. You can leave comments on their sites and so build up your backlinks and they in turn visit yours.

• You do not have to do every part of the requirements, just surfing a few of the sites lets you work your way up the list of sites in your category. The secret is little and often. Since people have to visit 30 sites, if you are on the first page, then the chance are higher that you will get a visit.

• You start getting visitors almost immediately you join. 

• People come to your site and leave a review. This means that they can spot something obvious that you may have missed, and it also gets tested out by lots of different browsers and computers who can comment on how fast your images load etc.

Link Building
A directory website like this is very useful for making contacts and link building because you are able to send direct emails to the website owners.

Referral Programme
Unfortunately, the actual referral programme is not that great. They ask $50 to join and pay $0.15 cents per referral, so you need to refer at least 334 people before you even get your $50 back.

But on the whole, it is a great way to generate a steady stream of traffic to your site, who are interested to see what your site is like and can review it for you.

 

No Shopping Left at the End of the Week

When things start to run out towards the end of the week, especially when the kids are on holiday, it is very tempting to go and do a big mid-week shop.

But in these hard times, if you have a budget for a week, then the last thing to do is to go out and do a whole weekly shop. One thing leads to another and you end up spending next week’s budget too!

If it is something vital, like milk etc, then pop down to the local shop and just buy some milk nothing else!

But if it not a basic, but a luxury, then resist the urge the go shopping! Just do without it for a couple of days. This is a good time to raid the back of the cupboard and the back of the freezer to see what is lurking there and eat that. Sometimes it is surprising what we buy and forget about which then gets pushed further and further back as new stuff gets piled on top. Now don’t you fancy a chick pea and sardine sandwich with custard 🙂

 

10 Ways That I Saved Money Today

Times are tough right now, and money is tight for a lot of families. Incomes are not only reducing in real terms because many people are being asked to take pay cuts or to reduce their hours, but also because everything is becoming so expensive. In the UK, unemployment is at a 17 year high, with 8.4% of the eligible population out of work.

There has never been a better time to take a good look at your income and spending and save as much as possible. Here are 10 ways to immediately start saving money:

1. Cut down on takeaways. If your average spend on a takeaway meal is £25 a week, then getting one every other week immediately saves you £50. Cut down altogether and you are £100 a month better off.

2. Lower your mobile phone tariff. Just how much do you pay for your mobile phone texts and calls? Some of the tariffs are so confusing that the people selling them don’t even understand which ones are better value for money (this means you Carphone Warehouse!). Work out how much you spend a month and see if there is a better deal out there.

3. See if you can switch to a better rate for your gas and electricity. Many websites let you search online for better value. Save up to £100 a month in some cases. If you have not already discovered these websites, then moneysavingexpert.com and uswitch.com are good places to start. I will put a list of some more at the end of the post.

4. Shop around for cheaper car insurance. If you have been using the same company since you started driving, then the chances are that there will be other companies which provide far better deals to you. Do you have all the benefits? You pay less if you park in a garage, have an alarm fitted etc etc, discuss it with your prospective insurance company and see what they will offer you.

5. Pay off as much expensive credit card debt as you can. This will significantly reduce the amount of interest you pay for the rest of the debt. Letting it stay just builds up the debt for you. Save money by paying it off more quickly.

6. Use your car less, drive to a park and ride instead, or just simply walk for shorter distances. Drive more economically and plan your journeys so that you can get several things done during just one trip.

7. Cut down those subscription services. You know if you cancel your Sky subscription, they only phone you a month later and offer you a much better deal. Haggle with them! Of all the services that you buy they are probably the ones that you can bargain with the most. Save at least £30 a month.

8. If you have a landline phone, see if your phone company offers a cheaper tariff. A lot of companies have unlimited calls during evenings and weekends. Or if you regularly phone overseas, see if they have an Anytime service which lets you call anywhere for a certain number of minutes a month. Halve your phone bills.

9. Shop at a cheaper supermarket. Switching from Sainsburys to Aldi can reduce your bill from £100 a week to £40 a week.

10. Go through your bank account with a fine-toothed comb And pick out the niggling little unnecessary payments. Are you paying for things you no longer use? Are you paying subscriptions for the kids that they don’t even read? Cut out all the useless payments. Do you have more than 3 insurance policies? Make sure that you are not paying to cover the same things in different policies!

Don’t throw away your hard earned cash. Sit down and make those savings today!

 

How to Survive Being Limited by Paypal 1: The First Rejection

In the fairytale of our lives, eBay and Paypal are the spiteful ugly stepsisters!
At anytime they choose, they can take their toys away and make you go and sweep out the cinders, poor and alone and dejected.

They do not need to give you a reason, it is all there in their terms and conditions so that the moment you sign up, you are at their mercy.

Paypal is not a bank. It is an intermediary which transfers payments between a buyer and a seller so that the buyer does not have to give out their credit card details online.

When you sign up to their service, you give them permission to access your credit history and to check up on you in any way that they see fit. In the second paragraph of their terms and conditions, they state that any money you keep in their system will be pooled along with other users and put all together into a bank account to earn interest. This interest is paypal’s interest and you have nothing to do with it. Herein lies the major problem, set out in black and white right at the beginning of their T & C. They use your money to earn interest.

So, obviously, it is in their interest to keep your money for as long as possible.

There are two types of limitation by paypal and both of them allow paypal to lock you out of your account for 6 months.

A temporary limitation is subject to your providing any details that they ask for. There may be a certain transaction that they are unsure about, or they may ask you to prove where you got the goods that you are selling by sending them invoices for the items you are listing.

By logging in to your paypal account, it will be possible to see what sorts of documents they want to see to help you to unlimit your account. With over 15 million users in the UK, it is impossible to see how they can investigate each case properly and much of it must be automated. Nevertheless, if you do as they ask, then your account can be usually unlimited.

 The other type of limitation is the permanent kind. In this case, Paypal will send you a cryptic email saying that your account is limited because you have breached their violations policy and this means that you will be permanently suspended with no way of getting your account back. They will hold you funds for 6 months so that they can pay any fees or disgruntled buyers, and then finally, they will let you have your money and send you a ‘Parting of ways’ email.

The eyes of eBay and Paypal are full of shards from the devil’s mirror and they can only see foulness and corruption around them, everywhere they look (The Snow Queen, Hans Christian Anderson (1805-1875), and because of this they clamp down hard on anyone who goes against their rules and instead of giving people the benefit of the doubt or taking each case on an individual basis, they just use the same strict criteria to judge everyone.

The problem is that Paypal has become such a universal and easy way to pay that, for many people, it seems that there is no way that life will survive without it. Freelancers, online retailers and other service providers depend on paypal for their livelihood. And often the only payment that buyers will prefer is paypal because, as one buyer said to me, they only trust paypal as a way of sending money online because it is thought to be very safe.

A permanent paypal limitation is a double blow because firstly it hits your income hard. Many thousands of people have taken to online retailing as a way to make ends meet between jobs, or even given up the day job to sell things online.Without this income stream, they can feel hopeless and helpless.

Secondly, it is a complete rejection. When they reject you, they use words which make you feel like a criminal. In many cases they give you no reason why you have been thrown out, only that you have ‘violated’ something. They have thrown you out of their exclusive and popular club and shut the door in your face, and no amount of begging and pleading on your part will make them open it again. This makes it even harder to turn around and walk away. You do not get to have the last word and there are no ways to make them listen. You really do feel like a gnat trying to make the elephant notice it. And a criminal gnat at that.

In part two of this series, I will highlight how people try to get around this problem…

 

Short Survival Tips #4 Lose Weight, Save Money, Clean Up!

Instead of vacuuming your whole room, buy a stiff brush with a long handle and brush all the dust into a big pile in the middle.

Then vacuum around the edges and the big pile.

• Burn off some serious calories while you are brushing.

• Save money by not vacuuming for so long.

• Save energy by not using so much electricity