Fathers Day - Spending Time Not Money

Most of us want to buy or do something nice for our dad on fathers day, after all it’s our dad, we want to celebrate him.  Doing this without buying into the hallmark holiday attitude of spending a fortune and getting very little for your money can be quite hard to avoid though.

Here are 5 ideas of things for your dad, or do with him that won’t cost a fortune, will show you care, and (hopefully) make him feel good and loved!

1) Cook him a fathers day meal
A really lovely meal that you can share with your dad to show him how much he means to you.  This one is really one for all ages, you can make it a bit special by decorating the table, and if it’s mum helping the kids to do this for dad, then get them to join in with the cooking, and maybe make his seat into a thrown with a bit of red cloth and some glitter and sequins you can do a lot and in so many different ways that you can really personalise it.

2) Make him a special moments album
Again another one for any age to do, kids and adults alike can put together a scrap book of events that you as a child and he as dad have shared together using photos and writing little reminders like ‘remember when you took me to play football and we got so muddy mum made us shower in the garden! Didn’t we have fun together!’

3) A personalised photo gift
Lots of the online photo companies now offer lots of things other than straight snap shots, from mugs to mouse mats, posters to placemats.  Gather together some pictures of the two of you together and get them turned into a really special personalised gift that he will be able to use over and over again.

4) Take a trip together
why not plan a day out for you and your dad.  Maybe he’s a fan of motor cars and you could take him to watch the banger racing, or perhaps he loves the beach, June is a good month for trips to the seaside.  There are lots of museums and places of interest to visit up and down the country that don’t cost a fortune to do, and actually putting our regular lives aside and stopping to take time to be with someone we care about is something we don’t do enough of as a nation.  (Remember the song by Cat Stevens - Cats in the Cradle!)

5) Have a special photo taken
Not the cheapest option, but a very special one indeed, how about booking a session with a photographer and getting a really good picture of you and your dad taken. 

Most of these ideas don’t involve spending lots of money, they do however involve giving your time.  The most precious gift we can ever give someone is ourselves.  Sounds corney I know, but you think back to your own childhood and think about the memories that really stick in your mind, and 99% of the time you’ll find they involve people and the time you spent doing something with them rather than the gift they bought you!

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Getting more traffic to your site for free

My friend asked me the other day if I had any  ideas how he could get more traffic to his football blog. I had a look and made a few suggestions, but my main suggestion was that he should register the RSS feed of his blog on feedburner. http://www.feedburner.com/

Feedburner is a free product that pushes your RSS feed out to various ‘news websites’ I have tried it on this site before and not really seen any dramatic increases in traffic. However my friend registered with feedburner last week and has seen traffic increase dramatically! For most of May traffic to the site was sitting at around 2000 visitors per day, after using feedburner traffic has increase to over 10′000 visitors per day which is a five fold increase in traffic - On the 16th of May the number of visitors to the blog was 24′652. Not a bad increase in free traffic to the site.

If you do run a blog it is def worth setting up - as I say I think that the amounts of traffic you will receive vary depending on the subject matter of your blog, a football blog is going to be popular where a blog on stamp collecting may not be as popular.

http://www.feedburner.com/

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May charity donation has now been made

Thanks to everyone who helped rasie money last month for the charity fundraising. Wemanaged to raise th $25 loan for kiva loans. We are doing the same fundraising again this month so you can help out here http://www.peazyshop.co.uk/peazyshop-fundraising/

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May competition is out now

The May competition is now out. http://www.peazyshop.co.uk/may-2008-competition.php

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Article submission sites

In my last post I discussed submitting articles to certain article creation sites with links pointing back to your own website or blog in order to increase your website importance in the search engines. In my quest to find more - article submission sites I have been scoring the internet for more and have found a selection of sites that you can post your work on - and best of all they don’t use the ‘nofollow’ tag.

http://hubpages.com/
http://www.gather.com/
http://www.tumblr.com/
http://www.squidoo.com
http://www.spongefish.com/
http://www.xomba.com/
http://blogdrive.com/
http://wordpress.com/
http://www.zimbio.com/
http://www.vox.com/
http://freeblogit.com/
https://www.livejournal.com/
http://terapad.com/

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How to build valuable links to your website and get paid for it too

About a year ago I discovered Squidoo.com and never gave it much of a look over. For anyone that doesn’t know what the site is about Squidoo allows anyone to write content and post it on their own section of the site in much the same way that a blog works. If you want to make money from your content then you can sign up for Google Ad Sense and place ads on your pages and any revenue that you make from a page on Squidoo you have content on you split with Squidoo and yourself.

If you have a fliar for writing then sites like Squidoo.com, Gather.com and Hubpages.com, all allow you to make money from your content and network with other writers.

Now I’m not the best at writing so I would probably never make much money from my articles but what these sites do offer is something far more useful. You may or may not be aware  that building links is the key to driving traffic to your websites AND to increasing your positions in search engine results for a keyword. The Google algorithm is complicated; it uses onpage and offpage factors to decide where your website will appear in the search engines. For example if you have a website about money making, and you want your website to appear for the term money making you want to have as many links pointing to your website with the phrase ‘money making’ in the link text. This is an over simplified example but is essentially what happens.

In the world of search engines a link acts as a vote, links from high quality websites are more valuable than links from low quality websites. Because many sites allow you to add your own links to them like social bookmarking sites; most of these sites add a tag to the HTML called the ’nofollow’ tag this means that any links pointing to your site from a link with a ‘nofollow’ tag will not be counted by Google in its algorithm.

So you need to find sites that you can add links to that don’t use the ‘nofollow’ tag. Which is exactly where the article websites - Squidoo, Hubpages and Gather come in.  I am in the middle of building a small website about Puerto Pollensa, so I need to source links that point to the site with the keyword ‘puerto pollensa’ in them. The easiest way I found to do this is to write an article about Puerto Pollensa then post it on Gather - Puerto Pollensa  and Hubpages - Puerto Pollensa and make sure that there are links pointing back to my site from each article.

This is a simple and effective way of building valuable links to your website or blog.

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Check your loose change for 2p’s (1983)

I was listening today to a radio programme today on BBC radio 4 in the car. They were talking about rare coins that people have found in their loose change that have ended up being valuable.

The first coin they talked about were the 1933 UK pennies. No penny coins were pressed in 1933 because the banks had such high volumes of them there was no need to press any that year. Acoording to the Royal Mint website http://www.royalmint.com/Corporate/Museum/georgeVpenny.aspx 6 (possibly) 7 specimen 1933 penny coins were pressed. The last one that was sold at auction went for over £20′000, so you don’t need to rush to your attic for a rumage because your not going to find one.

They did however give me some hope at the end of the programme - In 1971 when the UK changed from metric to decimal all 2p coins were printed with the word ’new’ on the front.

From 1971 to 1981 all 2p coins were printed with the word ‘new’ on the front, then in 1982 the royal mint decided that they were not really new any more so started pressing them with the word ‘two’ instead. However in 1983 some coins were pressed with the word ‘new’ by mistake and these coins went into collector ‘coin sets’  and not general curculation. According to the programme these coins are rare and you can expect to get around £300 at auction for one and there were a possible 450 pressed.

Now you maybe one of the lucky people to have one and you didn’t know it was valuable so have a look in your attic!

Have you ever found anything rare in your attic? Let us know by leaving a comment.

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New Eco Articles Section On Peazyshop

The environment is something that we are passionate about here at Peazyshop so we have created a new eco section which will feature all the interesting eco and environmental stories we find. to visit it you can find a link at the top of every page, or click the link below.

The environment is something that we are passionate about here at Peazyshop so we have created a new eco section which will feature all the interesting eco and environmental stories we find. to visit it you can find a link at the top of every page, or click the link below.

http://eco.peazyshop.co.uk/

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April charity fundraising out now

The April charity fundraising page is now up. http://www.peazyshop.co.uk/peazyshop-fundraising/

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April Competition now out

The April competition is now live and ready to go http://www.peazyshop.co.uk/april-2008-competition.php

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