Interesting times become harder and harder

Hi all its late october so its been a while since my last post! As such here it is im going to tell it like it is!

In mid September I decided to mix work with one of the biggest sins a business owner a do "involve the wife" Yes you read that right "the wife" She had started to nag about getting involved in writing for the pre-pay-as-you-go.blog, so after weeks of ear ache I gave her a few tasks to do.

1) Reasearch a couple of article ideas id had

2) Write an article of at least 450 words

3) The article had to be 100% her own wording no copy and pasting allowed ( for obvious reasons)

4) I asked her to be expression full and if needed to be opnionated and funny.

That was just over 5 weeks ago and so far I have to say things havent quite worked out how we had both hoped. Yes she has upto this point produced at least 6 articles of 450 words all of which I have had to rewrite upto 35% of each of them.

So if that wasnt enough the articles have been wooden in a descriptive sense! Eventhough ive tried to get the message across that some form of personnality is needed to gain any interaction from my readers.

Ideas have also been a proble for the wife, as you can imagine mobile phone technology consists of thousands of parts with multiple technologies combined to create just one working handset. So you would imagine looking at it from that perspective coming up with an article idea is a relativly easy one.

So its the end of October and Id be better off writing for myself, so the problem is how am I going to tell the wife and get her to realise its nothing personnal!

3 quarters the way through 2010 part 1

Hi to everyone and thanks for being patient with us, this blog has become lost in the mist this year, what with the recession biting and general work load increasing to compensate.

It's August already and this is the 1st update of the year, so here we go with a pre-pay-as-you-go.co.uk update!

The main website www.pre-pay-as-you-go.co.uk was given what we considered to be a major overhaul in the early 2nd quarter with the home page and network pages having the addition of rotating banners placed above the available handsets.

The banners where designed in house using PhotoShop Cs4 using 2 adds per network pages and 1 for each network on the home page. This was acheived using animated gifs, and before you think why! Here's the reason,

On starting the banner creation we had 2 clear options 1 create them with flash, 2 create them as animated gifs now neither are ideal but as we predominantly receive new visitors via Google serps we decided to stick with the gifts so good file names and descriptive Alt tags could be used to aid in seo matters.

Obviously there are down sides to using gifs, which are, they are resource heavy and are less interactive than modern flash, but as we pointed out the pros outweighed the cons. So your wondering all the above was a while ago, so did the banner addition have any effect on sales or bounce rates?

Well that's not an easy question to answer as other less obvious tinkering went on with the site to improve load times, and as such I'm not prepared to tell you right now until I've finished telling you about the other updates, which will he in part 2

Using Twitter to help drive traffic

WOW! Its nearly christmas already and everyone here at pre-pay-as-you-go has only just got over the maddness that was September. This was what we are calling our all work and no sleep period, with Twitter becoming the main focus of our social media activity over the last few weeks. prepayasyougo

THE OBJECTIVE

Raise pre-pay-as-you-go's profile in twitter by removing followers who dont tweet and people we follow who dont. And in addition increase our tweet per day count (without looking like spam) oh and increase our usage of twitgoo the twitter related service that allows you to post images alongside your tweets. prepayasyougo on Twitgoo

As far as we can tell the hard work so far has started to pay off with our visitor count finnally creeping over the 210 mark, and new and interesting tweets being written everyday. I think Twitter is going to be a very longterm project for us, I cant see us ever reaching the 1000+ followers count.

But as long as we continue to produce usefull and informative Tweets for our followers and use the service to promote the comercial BLOG Pre-pay-as-you-go blog and website Payg mobiles Twitter should prove to be a usefull tool.

Behind the scenes at pre-pay-as-you-go.co.uk

Thanks for visiting the Pre-pay-as-you-go EXTRA BLOG.

This Blog isnt specifically about mobiles or tariffs its about everything that goes in to bringing our visitors the latest information. From research into the latest handsets, chasing updates on prices changes, keeping the website and main Blog up to date, absolutly Everything!

When i say everything i mean everything, you can even read all our Twitter updates right here they will be automatically added here as well as everything from blog.pre-pay-as-you-go

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