Diary

It’s great to be back! As there is only WTA Palermo on this week it was a fairly gentle way of getting back into the swing of things. Also the fact that the first match started at 3pm gave me plenty of time to remember things like how I lay out the trading tips email and where I save the files to.

The Telegram room was nice and busy all day. Plenty of people signing up and the trades went mostly to plan.

Towards the end of the day came my only real irritation of the whole day. I pay for a dedicated IP to send the trading emails out. It isn’t cheap and they keep upping the price a little. I had found an alternative company who claimed they could provide the same service without a dedicated IP. Obviously that meant a huge reduction in price. I had gone through the sign up process. Changed DNS records and submitted my domain for approval. They rejected me! It seems they had looked at my domain and decided that I would be using the emails for marketing and therefore risked spam complaints.

The email said that if I thought they had assessed the domain incorrectly I could contact them and work with them to solve the issue. Fair enough. I emailed them on Sunday night explaining that there was zero risk of spam as the recipients had paid to receive the emails. I wasn’t trying to sell them anything as they had already paid me! I don’t use marketing emails. All my marketing is done on social media or on the blog. Twenty four hours later I had received nothing from them. I went on their chat support and told them the problem. The guy claimed that they HAD replied to me but they got a “soft bounce” response. I asked what was in the email. He said that they had rejected my domain. I sad that I had received that email but when they read my reply it would be clear that they had assessed it incorrectly.

He insisted that they had replied saying that they understood my business and it was rejected. I asked for a copy of their reply. He pasted some pidgin English text that I reckon he had just made up. I suggested that if they were unable to send an email to a gmail account when sending emails was sort of what they DO then it wasn’t a good first impression of their company.

I asked if they had a customer complaints department. Oh no we don’t have anything like that!. I have emailed support again but think I am wasting my time.

i took the dogs out a little early last night. I might avoid that time of night. We were walking down out street. there was a car parked half on the pavement and I saw someone walking up the street towards us. I held up the dogs to let the other person pass the car first. I didn’t see who it was until he was just before the car. It was the brother of one of our ex neighbours. His brother blames me for ruining his life. To be honest if I did ruin his life then he deserved it. I don’t know if I have posted about it on the blog in the past. Basically this 18 year old was a wannabe gangster. Thick as pigshit. He tried to give me some grief over the course of a few months because he thought I had reported him to the police for something. I hadn’t. Anyway I was waiting until I got him on his own but he always had some cronies with him. One day Sue was walking to Tesco and this prick and a mate decided to threaten her. Thankfully she had Charlie with her and they backed off very quickly.

Sue told me when she got home. Obviously my first reaction was that I wanted to break his legs. There was no proof of what he had done or the hassle he had been giving me. He wasn’t worth getting locked up for. I wrote a note to his mum. I explained what her son had been doing and that if he or she expected me to do nothing about or to him then they were wrong. To her credit, 2 days later she kicked him out and he was staying at the YMCA. I didn’t even know they still HAD YMCA’s!

Anyway his younger brother was crapping himself as he got nearer. He ended up tripping over his own feet and almost smashing his head on the car door. Judging by the state of his face he does that a lot. I walked on, laughing. Round the corner I saw the red lit up collar of Jacko the Corgi. I started shortening my dog leads as the little twat was bound to bounce over and wind them up. Not this time though. There was a car parked in the middle of the road. He had full beam on and was blocking the junction plus blocking anyone coming in either direction. Jacko’s owner was keeping him on the opposite pavement. We walked past the car as we were going up the side street that he was blocking. The driver looked pissed. As we went up the side street I hear a loud noise and a fully grown fat bloke came down the street on a skateboard. Fuck me we’d only been out 2 minutes! Is every mong in Worcester out tonight?

They’re all crazy out there. Stay safe.

 

Two more sleeps 😉

It has been a busy and frustrating few days. Most of the Battle of the Brits matches gave us opportunities to make some money. That was the easy portion of the work.

Even though a lot of new members signed up during Covid the number was understandably well below the number I would expect in normal times. I thought that with a week to go before the main tours kicked off again that the rate of sign up would also increase. If anything it DEcreased. It would be easy to think that there is something wrong with the site but according to Google Search Console the number of people searching for tennis trading products took a nosedive.

It is always tricky to work out how potential customers are thinking. No one searches for tennis trading on Google if there are no proper matches on to trade. I am always tweaking the site to find the “sweetspot” of the various parts of the site. Site title. H1 header tags. What the customer sees above the “fold” when they click on the site. (what is on screen before they start to scroll). The meta description that people see in search results. You don’t have a lot of space to describe your site to entice someone to click on it.

All of those items help but the difference is tiny if no one is looking for your type of site.

I had to conclude that people were waiting until the last minute to sign up for the guide. The trading tips emails were completely different. I advised people not to sign up until Monday as that’s when the first email goes out. People started signing up on Friday.

The flood of new TradeShark Tennis members started early this morning. It would appear that the site works fine!

Sue’s working all weekend. I can’t say I’m not relieved. Some days by the time I finish work she has had a “couple” of drinks. It is worse when she is coming up to a work day. She gets very snippy. There was a news programme on the radio while we were sitting outside which was another doom and gloom piece about a second wave. She made a comment that “this is never going to end”. Here we go.

Her bad mood went from 0 to 60 in 3 insults. She said you can’t just look on google or twitter to find out the truth. I mustn’t ask her about details but next year when Covid mixes with the Flu it will possibly wipe out all civilisation. Scary stuff huh? Until she then added that she and I would probably be OK. Oh god am I going to have to father the new human race? She was pretty sheepish the next morning.

I can’t remember the last time we had the windows cleaned. The downstairs ones get done from time to time but I don’t have a ladder to reach the upstairs ones. Sue found someone on Facebook who came recommended. A tenner to do all the windows. Bargain. They came this afternoon. I opened the back gate so they didn’t have to come through the house. One guy started cleaning the living room windows. I had the dogs in that room to keep them out of the way. Charlie thought the guy was trying to break in. He was going nuts at the window. His bark is really loud. Even before social distancing when we got a takeaway delivered and Charlie barked when they knocked on the door they would move back to the entrance to the garden. “Shit he sounds big!” was a common comment. Anyway when the head window cleaner came round the back of the house he nervously knocked on the back door to ask if he could get some water. Charlie was watching him through the dog gate. He wasn’t happy. When the guy knocked on the door again when they had finished I opened the dog gate. Charlie and Molly followed me through. Molly went up to him for a bit of fuss and Charlie moved in to sniff the guy. Charlie backed away growling. He REALLY didn’t like this guy. He’s usually a very good judge of character. I’ll have to watch this one if we use them again.

Now that the outside of the windows were clean I had to clean the insides. I got them all done before the FA Cup final started apart from the living room and my office. They looked fine until the sun shone on them. Streaks all over a couple of them! I recleaned our bedroom windows and the bathroom one. The window by the back door was a nightmare. I nearly lost my mind over that small window. Everything I did made no difference to the streaks. In the end the sun went in and they looked ok. It will keep until Sunday.

I’m expecting a busy day with new signups on Sunday. Then it’s finally back to business as usual on Monday.

Stay safe.