Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

I find myself in the unusual (for me) position of thinking about setting up a company in America.

How did that come about? Well, some back of the envelope calculations indicate that there could be a lot of money to be made were some of my websites hosted in America and in some circumstances it looks like doing that might produce a tax liability for me over there so to ringfence that, it looks like the simplest long term solution would be to run the sites via a US based company. If that situation comes to pass (I’ll not know if it’s likely to for several months) it seems likely that I’d end up running all the income through said US company purely to simplify matters tax-wise for myself.

Anyway, because of all that, I’ve started looking into how one might go about setting up the company and it looks like it’s a whole lot simpler than it is setting up a UK company. The place to form it seems to be Delaware in that if you don’t make any income in that state then you’ve only $60/year tax to pay them which is dead handy for me as the websites are likely to be hosted in Texas. Setting up the company costs around $200 all-in and after that it’s under $100/year running costs although I imagine that I’d be needing an American accountant at some point if things really took off (can’t see it somehow).

One side-effect of doing that would be that I could even move to America if the income were high enough in that I could obviously employ myself.

Still, all that’s dependent on the website working really well in America and, of course, it might not.

Some years ago I moved all my websites from a US hosting service over to a UK one to take advantage of the search engine boost that you get when your sites are hosted in the country where your target audience are searching from.

Ironically, now I find myself moving some of those same websites back to America in order to pick up traffic from the US itself. That’s happened because the sites are now much larger and much more global in scope so there should be a certain advantage in hosting in the US to reach the US audience.

Now, the question is: will the jump in traffic be anything like the 30 fold jump that I picked up on moving the sites over to the UK in the past? Well, I should know in a few weeks for sure but, so far, the traffic appears to be higher than it was when the site that I’ve just moved over was living in the UK.

Several years ago I made the move from US based hosting to UK based hosting because of the extra traffic that you tend to get when your site is hosted in the same location as your main customer base.

That particular move worked really well in that I ended up with around 30x (yes, thirty times) the traffic that I’d had on the original American hosting service. That’s with no changes in the website apart from where it was hosted.

Ironically, now I’m looking to move some sites in the opposite direction as they now have more of a global audience than the collection of sites from a few years ago did.

Now, the big question I’m wondering about is whether I’ll get a 30x jump in traffic in going the other direction?

Although the main customer base for my listings sites is essentially the English speaking population of Europe, there’s an even larger English speaking population just across the Atlantic that don’t see the sites as often as they should since they’re hosted in the UK.

I have tried the sites on an American host in the past and it was a complete disaster because the main interest at the time was from people in the UK and Ireland.

However, roll on three years and I’d quite like to create a foothold in America. Not with all of the sites, of course, but rather a small selection of the sites so that I could pull in some guests from America and, for that matter, add properties from Americans too.

As a taster for this, I’ve set the geographic target for a couple of the sites in google to America and they seem to have pulled in a different audience than they had when they were fully based in the UK. However, that’s just with google and I do pretty well on both yahoo and msn.

So, I’ve been looking for a cheap hosting service that would let me move over one or two sites and I think I’ve found it in the form of 3ix who charge $12 per year. Now, “all” I have to do is to work out how to have the site over in America but with the database that supports it still in the UK.

After you’ve been blogging for a while you tend to find that some of the articles you write could be collected in a series.

So, for example, this blog has a series on living in France, another about banking, and so on.

However, I’ve been thinking of doing a blog for the listings sites which is quite different. For one thing, it’s a blog with quite a narrow remit ie to write about the listings sites themselves. More significantly perhaps is that I’m planning to do it as a blog consisting of a collections of series right from the start. Today starts off the series on marketing your property which will be an ongoing thread but there’ll be several other threads intertwined through the blog as time goes on.

It’ll be a while before that becomes apparent though as it’s not going to be a daily blog by any means (there just aren’t enough hours in the day for that).