Monday 27 September 2010

Localventure on Twitter

I finally got tired of getting nothing positive from Twitter - my problem had been that in the rush to get a decent following for my localventure1 Twitter feed and therefore to try and drive traffic to the blog I had been automatically following anyone who followed me and had managed to get over 550 followers but at the expense of racking up 723 people that I was 'following'.

Long story short I never bothered to check my Twitter feed as there was just loads of marketing rubbish that I didn't want to actually read. With a little judicious pruning I'm now following just 11 people whose tweets I am actually interested in and will be able to keep up with.

Interestingly my own follower count has already started to drop - from 554 this morning to 543 as I type - which just goes to show that the majority of transaction on Twitter are just follower gaining exercises in spamming.

Friday 24 September 2010

Leeds Premier Karate Club in Yeadon, Leeds

If you're interested in learning karate (Shukokai, a style which emphasizes fast powerful strikes with a mixture of traditional basics, sparring and self defence) feel free to come along to Yeadon Westfield Junior School in Leeds at 6.00pm on Mondays and Wednesday to chat with Sensei Michael Tattersall (5th Dan) - a new beginners class started on Monday the 20th of September 2010 and the first four classes are free for new beginners.

Feel free to get in touch with me for more details and I can also pass along Michaels details if you'd like to contact him direct.

I'm an orange belt at the club have trained there for about six months and am enjoying it immensely (I have a second dan from another style and am enjoying the challenge of 'starting again').

Ages 7 to 70 basically !

Focused Hypnosis - update


The telephone number for Focused Hypnosis has changed. It is no longer 0800 2425686... it is now 0114 3520012.  

Friday 10 September 2010

Changes to Localventure


The business/sales element of LV has kind of disappeared in the last few months - the business model I'd developed wasn't quite there and rather than ditch the blog and do something different I'm taking some time to lounge on my executive laurels and have some quality failure time.

However, I put a lot of time into the blog and twitter accounts and like having them around so I'll keep both open as my personal window on the world for now - please feel free to add comments  on anything I say and we'll see how it goes.

Phil.

Twitter Accounts

I currently have two Twitter accounts, one using the name 'whisky1' which is a holdover from the Prestige Whisky business that I closed down in June of this year and the one attached to this blog : 'localventure1'.

With immediate effect I'm stopping using the whisky1 tag - it's a shame because at one stage I had almost two thousand followers on that account (compared to the around 500 on the LV feed) but given the narrow subject matter and the fact that this blog has remained reasonably active I think it makes sense. Hopefully a few of the whisky1 followers may move across but either way I'm going to take the localventure brand on as my main personal blog and twitter focus although I am planning a couple of specific martial arts blogs as well in time.

E-mail marketing snafu or the stupid, it burns !!!

Last week I received an interesting marketing e-mail from a business I agreed (inadvertantly) to receive marketing and information e-mails from.

I've had about one a month, all above board, most of the content is of little or no interest but so far no problem. Then this company accidently forgot to bcc a portion of their e-mail data base - including mine - so I and around four hundred other people began to receive some very desperate looking sales and marketing messages from companies on this list who had decided that it would be clever to take the suddenly available information and use it for their own ends.

Now I wasn't surprised because to be honest, had I anything currently to sell I might well have considered doing the same thing, however, sitting and thinking about it for 2 nano seconds I realised that it was probably a bad idea, would look pretty sad and is probably illegal in someway.

Suffice to say others moral crap filters didn't work on that day and after about 25 of these unrequired sales solicitations I was getting pretty sick of deleting the e-mails from my Mac, Ipad and Iphone over and over again to the point where I almost deleted the venturelocal@gmail.com address from my e-mail clients. Eventually, one of the sick and tired receipients pointed out the exact legal position and surprise, surprise the deluge stopped.

New beginners karate class in Yeadon, Leeds

I'm currently learning a new style of karate and my club trains twice a week in Leeds at Yeadon Westfield Junior School.

The style is called Shukokai, the club is Leeds Premier Karate Club and the instructor is a fifth dan called Michael Tattersall. He's starting a new beginners class from Monday 20th of September 2010. New beginners can come along without obligation and have four free classes until the end of September to decide if they like it before paying anything.

If you're interested in coming along, the beginners class will run from 6.00pm to 6.45pm and it's in the main hall at the school whose address is :

Yeaon Westfield Junior School
New Road
Yeadon, West Yokshire LS19 7HW

If you want more information or to chat, feel free to drop me an e-mail at venturelocal@gmail.com - the training is hard but fun and suits both kids and adults alike - probably age seven or eight onwards.