Hi to everyone, this is the Clent School of Motoring, we have three qualified driving instructors, myself Malcolm Hoare, Andy Morgan and Richard Miller. We all drive Vauxhall Corsa cars with air conditioning. We cover the Stourbridge and Kidderminster and surrounding areas, we offer one to one tuition and a full hour instruction, block bookings and discounts available.

Visit us at: www.clentschoolofmotoring.co.uk

Hi, my name is Chris Martin, I run my own driving school in Bideford. I use the UK’s favourite learning car, a Vauxhall Corsa. Please get in contact if you wish to ask about lessons. Learning to drive is a big stepping stone in life, but it need not be a stressful experience. My manner is a very relaxed one, lets try and make the process as easy and fun as possible!

www.chrismartinschoolofmotoring.co.uk

Hi all

We are a driving school serving Leighton Buzzard,Dunstable,Milton Keynes,Aylesbury & all surrounding villages, we offer patient,professional Manual & Automatic tuition in modern Air Conditioned cars, we specialise in nervous pupils & intensive courses, visit us at www.dabdrivingschool.co.uk

Hi and welcome, better introduce myself too, my name is wayne and i have run my own driving school in Shrewsbury, Shropshire since 2000.

Wayne Foxall

www.nicedriving.co.uk

Hi

I would like to say hello to all the Driving Instructors out there. I’m in Fife, Scotland reply to say hello and your location and maybe we can get a meaningful post going !!!!

All the best

Phil Smith
Fife Driver Training

A quick update.

The Squidoo Lens - Driving Lessons - was built yesterday and already it is ranked #571!

5 other instructors / driving schools have built a squidoo Lens and have joined the Squidoo Group that I set up. I think there are over 75,000 lenses over at Squidoo and we have the following pecking order:

Driving Lessons 571

Surviving Driving 5472

121 Driving School 8899

Learn to drive 5467

Driving Lessons 6594

Learning to drive in Blackpool with Colin Storey 4835

I think that is a fantastic result in a little over 24 hours. As the lenses and group get more popular more traffic will be attracted to them and therfore more traffic to your web sites. New business? Think of the traffic as a funnel. The more traffic that is poured in at the top, the more that drips out of the bottom as new pupils.

We have over 500 driving schools registered on the driving schools directory and with only 6 of them getting involved on the Squidoo thing, look at the rankings seen already. Imagine what would happen if everybody got involved!!

I personally believe it is very easy to set up a lens - what do you people who have set up the lenses above think? Why not post a comment on this post to let others know how easy (or not) it was for you? If you prefer, post a comment in the forum. Actually, why not also write a Post about your new Lens, with a link back to your web site of course!

I have learnt today whilst updating and adding modules to the lenses that a factor in their ranking is modification and updating of your lens. A simple way to do that is to add an RSS module. You can use the RSS from this blog or from the bookmarks site. All you need to to is click the RSS link, copy the URL (web address) from your browser and use that in the RSS module on Squidoo. Everytime the RSS feed is updated i.e. everytime a post is added here or an entry on the bookmarks site, your Lens will be updated - Simple!

Keep checking in here for updates and don’t forget to check your colleagues Lenses above!

Once we have cracked Squidoo, we are going to attack MySpace and use the 2 to bounce off of each other to produce sparkling results!

Mark.

Have you ever checked out www.squidoo.com? It’s another social bookmarking site that receives a ton of traffic.

Anyone can register and build their own “lens”. This is effectively your own web page hosted on Squidoo but it is all point and click so no web authoring skills are required at all.

Whats the point? Well, more backlinks for your web site plus additional traffic. If a youngster is searching for driving lessons (and this place is full of youngsters, just like MySpace.com), given that there is minimal/no competition there for our little niche market, there is a very good likelyhood of them visiting your web site.

What you need to do. If you just want another backlink, visit http://www.squidoo.com/driving-lessons and near the bottom of the page you will see a section for adding links (Good Driving School Links). Go ahead and put the link to your driving school.

For the more adventurous(!), if you decide to build your own lens for your driving school, or whatever, which will only take a few minutes, then visit http://www.squidoo.com/groups/driving-lessons . This is a group I have set up for “Driving Lessons” and will hold a collection of “lenses” relative to the group subject. You can place your lens within that group.

Now, the more links that are added to the Driving Lessons lens and the more lenses that are added to the Driving Lessons Group, the more popular they will become thereby attracting more visitors. It is very viral by its nature. Why have I done this? Well, the more popular the lens or group becomes, the more people will end up backlinking to the Driving Schools Directory and its importance will therefore increase in the eyes of the search engines. That increased popularity equates to higher search engine rankings, more visitors and therefore more referrals for yourselves.

Oh, did I mention that Google ads and Amazon adds are displayed on the lenses and if these are clicked by visitors, you will share in a slice of the income! A no brainer really; more good backlinks and an income.

Get on over there folks!
Mark.

Just received this email (extract) from the DIA (Driving Instructors Association) - in case you are not members, I thought you may like to see it. What are your views on the questions? Feel free to enter the discussion and see what other views driving instructors have at:

http://forum.driving-schools-directory.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=639

BBC Survey of British Driving Instructors:
BBC and the Driving Instructors Association Survey Jan 2007

The BBC 1 current affairs series Real Story with Fiona Bruce are producing a programme looking at the issue of young drivers in Britain today and whether more could be done to make them fit to drive on our roads. Furthermore we will be investigating ideas as to ways of improving the current driving test to achieve these aims.

This short survey is designed to obtain the views of those professionals charged with teaching learner drivers regarding the current test and what could be done to improve young driver competency and safety.

Yours Sincerely,

Kirk Barber

Note: For the purposes of our survey, the definition of young drivers will be those aged between 17 and 24.

1. Do you believe the UK driving test is producing safe and competent young drivers?
2. Would you like to see the introduction, in some form, of a ‘Graduated Licensing’ scheme?
3. Do you believe learner drivers should complete a minimum number of compulsory tuition hours with an instructor prior to taking their driving test?
4. Have you ever been verbally or physically abused by a young learner driver?
5. Do you think the legal driving age should be raised to 18?
6. Do you think young drivers should be subject to a night-time driving curfew?
7. Do you think the hazard perception section of the current driving test is an accurate measure of a driver’s ability to perceive hazards under real conditions?
8. Did you pass or fail the hazard perception test on your first attempt?

The new social bookmarking site is now up at http://bookmarks.driving-schools-directory.co.uk. this is a web site that will collect all good links to driving related web sites. Again the benefit here is additional backlinks for your web sites. The front page looks sparse at the moment as this will only display the most popular links / bookmarks and as there are not many currently, they will not show up. You can see current links by vlicking the “tags” or “recent” links.

The more instructors and pupils that put up their favourite links, the better the web site will work for us.

Registration up is a very quick and painless process.

To explain what a social bookmarking web site is e.g. like Del.icio.us, Furl, Digg etc. I have copied a posting from a private forum at www.trafficdomination.com - I have been given permission!

You know, I was just thinking about how many people I know understand THAT social bookmarking and tagging is a major thing right now, but don’t understand WHY people actually use social bookmarking.

Many people use thee sites for social, fun, purely entertainment and ways of interacting with their friends.

So when blogs came out and got popular, rarely did any internet marketers yearn to start a career as a “Professional Blogger” but we did look at how to USE the blogging technology to improve our overall web presence.

The same thing is with social bookmarking. A lot of people jumped headfirst into the tag and ping thing, without really knowing - or needing to know - why social bookmarks ARE such the rage.

But now that we’re building Tag Sites with the hopes of real people coming and using it, I think it’s important to make sure we understand this, because we need to customize our tag sites with the end user in mind.

I’m going to write this to you as a potential USER of social bookmarks, not as a marketer who just uses it. If I can convince you of the personal need - or at least, the personal benefit - of using social bookmarking, then you will be in a much better place as a marketer.

***What Is Social Bookmarking?
Everyone knows the ‘favorites’ or ‘bookmarks’ in the IE or Firefox browser. You find a site you want to save the URL, so you click “Add To Favorites” or “Bookmark This Site” and you’re able to come back to it whenever you want.

This is known as “Bookmarking”

So, add the word “Social” ahead of it, and you have the same functionality, with two differences:
a) The bookmark is no longer IN your browser, it’s ON a website
b) The bookmark is no longer PRIVATE, it’s PUBLIC.

The most common question I hear at this point is, “ok, but WHY do people use it? I just don’t get WHY.”

The first easy answer is, people like sharing.

But to make this more clear, here are a bunch of scenarios to show some benefits that social bookmarking offers, which can’t really be achieved in any other simple, generic way (and this ’simple’ and ‘generic’ point is important).

Ok, lets say you’re a dog lover, and you’re always finding cool, funny, interesting, helpful sites about dogs. You want to share them with all your dog loving friends. Instead of forwarding the URLs by email all the time, clogging people’s email boxes, you just stick it up on your Delicious account, and anyone who knows that you always find cool dog sites, can go to your page on delicious and see all your posts.

ALSO you can see which other people on delicious have also bookmarked the same URLs as you, so you can click on their name, and see what else they’ve bookmarked. You can find new URLs this way, that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

ALSO, imagine one day you’re at a friend’s house, you bring your dog over to play with your friend’s dog. And your friend mentions that his dog has some medical issue, and you say “OH, I just bookmarked an important article on that medical issue!” So you immediately fire up your delicious account, and give your friend that URL.

so this is one group of scenarios where you, as a dog lover, can benefit from having a delicious account.

****Having A Delicious Account For Your Business
This has started to become really big as well. One example I’ve been tracking for a while is Adobe. The company started its own delicious account and posts to it very frequently. Users of Adobe products can well benefit from going often to this URL:
http://del.icio.us/Adobe

Another Idea: Imagine you’re a speaker and consultant on a certain topic. As part of being the “guru” on that topic, it helps to stay on top of current developments. One way of doing that, and adding to your “audience” to have a delicious account where you tag all the URLs that you feel are timely and relevant to the topic you’re discussing.

So, when you give a presentation at an event, you can use certain URLs as examples to back up your points. And at the end of the talk, you can say “please go to my delicious account at this address [ ] because I update these URLs every day/week”

And it’s a way of building an audience with people just by them appreciating your ferreting. And every 10 links, or so, you could post a link “HIRE ME” or something like that which links to a page with your phone number

We have started to upload software, videos and books to the members area. These free downloads will be of a general nature and use with the initial upload concentrating on tools and help for your web building and designing efforts.

They include:

Software

Meta Whiz

Retail Value: $14.95

Brand New Software For Effective Search Engine Optimization!

Do your web pages display the correct Meta Tag Codes? If not, you could be losing out on higher search engine rankings.

META WHIZ V.1 WILL GENERATE CODES FOR THE FOLLOWING TAGS:

•Title

•Keywords

•Description

•Author

•Copyright

•Rating

•No Spam

•No Framing

•Robots

•Resource Type

•Revisit After

•Distribution

Operating system requirements:

Windows Computer - Preferably Windows 95 and beyond. Windows XP, 95,98, NT, 2000 and ME. * Distribution file comes in the .exe format. If your computer does not allow you to execute an .exe file, then this package is not for you.

Family Finance Planner

Retail Value: $17.00

Family Finance Planner is a brand new, quick and easy software tool which can help you to manage your finances.

It will help you to track where your money is going, help you to make important financial decisions and work out how to save up for things you really want.

Here’s just some of the features of this amazing brand new software…

Comprehensive monthly home budget tracker allowing you to keep track of all your expenditure each month with a built-in feature to track how much over and under budget each item is, as well as automatically calculating all the totals for you.

Income/expenditure tracker to keep detailed records of your income and expenditure.

Yearly budget tracker allowing comprehensive data to be tracked over the period of a year, with automatic calculation of all totals.

Investment projection calculator to calculate how long you will need to save up before you can buy something you want, like a car, a holiday or a deposit for a house.

Car loan calculator to help you calculate whether you can really afford that new car you’ve always wanted.

Car Leasing/Purchase calculator to automatically calculate whether you would be better off buying or leasing a new car.

With all these powerful financial facilities at your disposal, you’ll soon be able to keep your bank account balanced, your bank manager off your back and work out how to afford things you really want!

Requirements Family Finance Planner is for use on PCs running Microsoft Windows. It also requires a spreadsheet program to be installed on your PC. Suitable software is included with the package. Alternatively if you already have Microsoft Office or another office package installed on your PC, you can use the office package spreadsheet program instead.

AtomicFTP

Retail Value: $19.95

AtomicFTP Client provides the perfect combination of performance, security, and ease-of-use for the active internet user and webmaster. Whether you are publishing a new Web site, downloading the latest digital images, music and software, or simply transferring large files between your home and office, AtomicFTP gets the job done quickly and easily every time.

Super Charged Linking

Retail Value: $19.95

With SuperChargedLinking, you can offer a place for others to post their link with the distinct advantage of knowing yours is in place FIRST, before they post theirs!

This amazing new technology takes the hours to verify you are getting a true reciprocal link, and automates this chore seamlessly and accurately. SuperChargedLinking is a simple, easy to use application you can install on your site that will ensure your link is indeed on your reciprocal link partner websites.

Videos and Books

Free Google Traffic
Retail Value: $24.95

Here’s a taster of how just one site is using these ‘hidden’ Google tactics to easily get tens of thousands of visitors for free:

This site has discovered an area of Google that gets a ton of traffic - but - where there’s not much competition… yet. This makes it pretty darn easy for them to get stacks of free traffic from Google.

This is just one out of many businesses quietly using the ‘hidden’ areas of Google to get mounds of free traffic.

Would you like to start benefiting with these Google traffic secrets too? Well…

These incredibly powerful yet very easy-to-follow Google traffic secrets come in the form of eight brand new videos you view directly at your computer. I’ve bundled these powerful videos into a product called How To Get A Lot More Google Traffic For Free:

How To Create Your Own Blog
Retail Value: $9.97

With How To Create Your Own Blog For Free you will get access to the following videos.

- Introduction and registration of your own blogger.com account

- Editing your profile

- Editing and customizing the “menu links”

- Posting messages on your blog

- How to ftp your blog files to your own server so that you can run the blog from your own domain name.

- Quick rundown on the basic settings of the blog system

Create your Own Web Site in 5 Days
Retail Value: $9.95

Discover How You Can Create Your Own Web Site in 5 Days

with video enhanced tutorials Use affordable tools and save a fortune!

Do you want your own business web site without having to spend thousands of dollars hiring someone to create one for you? Are you an online entrepreneur who’s just starting out without a thousand dollar budget?

How do you get hold of a professional business web site without having to burn a big hole in your wallet hiring a web developer to create one for you?

The magic answer : Do It Yourself! Learn how with this ebook.

Plus you will also get access to online movie clips that will show you exactly how it’s done. No more guessing. Just watch and follow. Simple.

Templates and Graphics

1600 Graphic images to use on your web sites.
306 Professional Web site Templates

Keep an eye open in your members area for more items!

Mark.

A new Members Area has now been completed. Driving schools / instructors that have enhanced their listings will now be able to log into the members area to view and amend their listings. Also, they will be able to see the driving lesson and intensive driving course requests made by potential students that have requested this service from ourselves.

Please note that if you do pick up a pupils contact details and arange driving lessons, it has been agreed with them that the first lesson of normal driving lessons i.e. not an intensive driving course, will be at a 50% reduction.

For existing driving schools that have enhanced listings, please navigate to the members area and request your username and password from the Lost Password form.

There will be more added to the members area in due course. Watch this space!

Mark.

A new forum has now been set up at http://forum.driving-schools-directory.co.uk - Forum.

The forum is a place where learner drivers can get advice and their questions answered from experienced ADI’s and without the hourly charge!

ADI’s (Approved Driving Instructors) can have a chin wag about their latest trials and tribulations or just communicate with like minded people.

PDI’s (Potential Driving Instructors) can see what it is really like on the “other side” and obtain help and guidance for their ADI parts 1, 2 & 3.

Drivers are not left out! If you want to discuss normal or advanced driving; feel free. Once you have passed your driving test there is no need to leave! There will still be a lot to talk about, trust me!

Join in the fun. Now!

Mark

I have been meaning to set this up for some time - I have finally got there!

The idea of the blog is to announce the latest news and changes within the driving schools directory web site. We will start with this blog!

Also, driving schools and instructors will be able to announce their own news stories such as a special offer for driving lessons or perhaps their latest first time pass success or even a driving test pass with no minor faults!

Why would you wish to do that? Well, within your post or announcement you should include the URL or web address of your web site. These blogs get pinged all over the web and to all sorts of sites thereby providing you with another back link(s) to your web site. Is that important? You bet it is! The more back links you can get to your web site, the more important the search engines believe your web site is and thereby improving your search engine results and rankings.

Watch this space!

Mark.