Foreign Perspectives

Archive for March, 2008

Yeah, I know, boring.

However, interestingly our strategy of simply buying the cheapest available machine nearly four years back and replacing it when it was at the end of its life does appear to have been the correct one. The original one cost us around EUR 200, worked perfectly for over three years and has been replaced with another one at around the same price.

Sounds expensive? Not really. The next one up from both costs nearly 50% more and given the heavy workload we’ve been putting the machine to over the last four years I don’t believe for a minute that it would have lasted any longer.

Now, in theory, we could have gone for the extended warranty but, frankly, I don’t think they’d have honoured the agreement on the basis that we were using it for industrial scale washing (which we were).

Incidently, that extra 50% gets you quite a lot of washing programmes but doesn’t mean that the machine can actually do any more work. If you look along the washing machines on sale near you, you’ll find that all but the very expensive ones can only cope with 5kg loads.

It’s obviously impossible to name a single bank which you can choose simply because no single bank operates in every country of the world.

There are some general pointers as to how to go about choosing your bank though.

One school of thought is that you should choose the local bank with the most branches in the area which you’re moving to. That’s a reasonable approach in that for most countries there’s a charge to use ATMs that aren’t owned by your own bank so it may save you on ATM withdrawal fees. However, be wary of local banks that don’t operate internationally on a widespread basis or that don’t attract many foreign customers as you can come unstuck very easily through not having local banking practices explained to you. This even applies in many cases where banks operate English speaking branches: they might well speak English but often banking terms don’t translate well.

The other school of thought is that you should choose a bank based in your own country but with branches in your new country. This can work well in that the banking staff should be more familiar with the banking practices that you’re used to and sometimes offer good deals on money transfers to/from your home country. So, for example, if you’re American then the best choice is usually Citibank as that operates as a local bank in many countries yet retains an American feel in every location in which it operates and offers good deals on transfers between Citibank accounts in other countries. However, if you’re British, you might think that HSBC would be the way to go yet because it bills itself as “the world’s local bank” it tends to follow local banking practices more than British ones although it does offer transfers to your HSBC accounts in other countries.

Don’t forget that you don’t need to choose a single bank. One combination that works very well is a local bank with low charges and lots of branches combined with an international bank to handle your global transfers.

Although there are loads of categories that you can list a blog under, “soapbox” isn’t one of them.

That’s a shame really as many blogs would sit very neatly under that particular category. After all, there are a great many bloggers who would have been standing on their soap box in earlier times. It’s not just the preachers these days of course as everyone and their dog has something to say nowadays. In fact, once you’ve kicked off one blog, you get to the point eventually when you’d like to say a bunch of stuff which doesn’t fit under the heading of the original blog.

Which is a long way of saying that I now have my very own “soapbox blog” over at The View from Arnold.

It seems like google hand you pagerank when you’re not looking for it so I’m going to run a little trial on another blog domain to see if I can pick it up delibrately.

What I’ve been doing in the past has been to use a test domain when trying out new versions of my listings sites and after a while those domains have tended to pick up page rank which I don’t really understand as I obviously don’t run any promotion on them. In fact, I don’t even link to them so I’m confused as to how some of them are even picked up by google to begin with.

Anyway, for the trial what I’m doing is moving my beta testing of the new version of the listings sites to part of ‘tother blog domain (which I’ll not mention as I don’t want to pick up links to it from here and thereby muddy the waters).

Page rank usually takes a few months to acquire so it’ll be a while before I know if it’s working or not.

Online everyone tends to assume that there are infinite resources behind every website and, of course, that’s just not the case in reality.

For example, we like to be as helpful as we can to those properties listed on our holiday accommodation listings sites and to that end we offer a range of free services notably including a free website review. In practice though few people actually take us up on them normally but when we mentioned a few of them in our recent newsletter we had rather more response than we were expecting.

Now, in itself the response wasn’t overwhelming but the reviews that we did highlighted a number of common problems and so we did a followup mini newsletter telling people how to perform one of the key checks that most sites were falling down on which in turn generated rather more response than expected although again at a level we could deal with.

What we’ve subsequently done is to enable a feature we call “marketing assistant” which basically generates a short e-mail advising people as to changes that they could make to their own website to improve how it performs in searches. In fact, that’s phase one of that particular feature as we’re hoping to develop it further.

The problem is that as we move into the peak booking season, the number of e-mails generated is starting to rise and so too are the number of enquiries that we’re getting from them. So much so that we’ve had to switch the facility off for a few days to catch up.

It’s something to be mindful of: once you move out of the field of total automation online, you can easily find that you’re swamped with the responses.