Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

I’ve been thinking about the traffic that’s been arriving on this site over the last month or so and it would appear that the people most active in the “blog aggregators” are concentrated in the broad area of financial services for want of a better name for it.

To be fair, that sample of stats suffers from a bias in that I’m obviously only seeing the aggregation services that are picking up various articles on my blogs. However, the majority of my posts most definitely haven’t been in that financial services area yet the incoming links from the aggregators are disproportionately hitting topics in those particular areas.

For sure, there are aggregators out there looking at the travel end of things and whenever I write something about Hawaii and cruises in particular, then I can expect those articles to be picked up.

Anyway, that has me wondering if it would be worthwhile to kick off a blog aimed very specifically at that financial services area? For that matter, I’m also wondering if there’s money to be made with a blog aggregator: if nothing else, having other people doing all the work and having me banking the advertising income has a certain appeal.

It seems like forever since we had a whole day off so we’re thankful that there’s nobody in tomorrow and neither is it a school day so we get to lay in.

For me it’s a sort-of work day though as I’m down to only four days to go before the Spanish exam (the final one for the course). Still, at least that’s starting to come together and I can talk with the best of them about the society in Spain in the early part of the 20th century. At least, I can in Spanish…. as usual I can do some stuff in Spanish that I can’t in English.

Have to see about getting my case packed too as I’ve to fly out on Friday morning.

The pattern of bookings this year has been rather peculiar right from the start and seems to be continuing in the same vein.

Last night for instance, we had only one couple in although we really should have two but ‘tother one was one of our “visa application bookings” so we weren’t really expecting him to arrive.

Tonight, not only are we full, but everyone is taking meals too.

What October will be like, we’ve really no idea at the moment as the majority of people are booking just a few days to a couple of weeks ahead these days which means we generally have no idea how a given month will turn out ’til we’re well into it.

One thing that constantly surprises me is just how bad the stock control system is in Metro/Makro.

Despite billing themselves as the supplier to hotels, without fail they run out of hotel soaps in June every year and don’t get them back in stock until September. Hard as it may be to believe they’re even worse with the little shampoos which go out of stock in May or June and usually don’t come back until well into October. They do have loads of the little body lotion bottles though which have been sitting on the shelves unsold since June (I marked one of the boxes way back so, yes, they are exactly the same boxes!).

I’m not just singling out one slippage either. Fanta? Not from June to August. Water? Very limited availability right throughout the Summer.

Don’t these people have automated reordering systems in place?

I find that after a while the focus of our blogs tends to drift off from the original idea and so, sometimes, it’s useful to change the domain name to reflect the new focus of the topics in it.

So far, that’s resulted in this particular blog living in three different guises over the course of almost four years. Mark one wasn’t a blog per se in that it was basically a mailing list that I used to keep everyone back home up to date on what we were getting up to. A couple of years later, when the mailing list became a bit unmanageable it moved into its original blog format although the content remained pretty much the same. Then last year we thought that it was time to revitalise the whole thing and put it on the Foreign Perspectives domain.

Now, its Wendy’s turn. To begin with she kicked off her blog on her own domain but didn’t really get into it for the first few months. She has now though and usually has three or four posts a day before you even count sponsored ones. Anyway, it was time to get it onto a proper domain which is Cultured Views. Of course, the snag now is that we have loads of places that we need to tell about that change of domain and there’s the issue of seeing about getting the pagerank moved over too.

Since she has a proper domain now, ’tis time to think about promoting it and we’re hoping to get going on that over the next couple of days.

Interestingly, one of our most successful website launches is our very new Whole Earth Guide. For reasons which totally escape me, our article on opening a bank account in America has proved to be an immediate success for the site and consequently we’ll be extending the expat banking section of the site over the coming months.