Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
Technorati favourites exchange @ Foreign Perspectives
One of the blog marketing sites, DoshDosh recently suggested that it may be possible to get into the top 100 favourites on Technorati relatively easily.
Whilst we’ve all been beavering away in building up links back to our blogs, it will take a “while” to get to the top 100 linked to blogs as number 100 is currently sitting at over 3000 links. On the other hand, it would only require just over 100 200 people to favorite us to get into the top 100 favorited blogs which certainly seems in the realms of possibility.
Why bother though? Well, being in a top 100 list of anything is almost certain to increase the traffic on the blog and indeed quite likely to increase the number of blogs linking to us for that matter.
Anyway, if you’re interested in exchanging favourites in this way you can start the ball rolling by clicking 
and letting me know that you’ve done it in a comment to this post (quote your Technorati username so I can confirm the link).
A link back in a post would also be appreciated and reciprocated.
Those also offering link exchange are listed below:
List of blogs offering Technorati Favorites’ Exchange programmes:
- NiaTrading Signals – Alex 3071
- Domestic Divapalooza – Angela Llewellyn Stevens
- Anitokid by Anitokid –

- AskaX World – Andika Kusuma
- Tech Lock Rahul – Rahul
- Bigfoot Sightings – Linda Martin
- Azazil.net – Gary V. Vaughan
- Nukilan Jejari Azhad by Shaz Azhad –

- Fyais by fyais –

- BlogOp – Chris Lodge
- Design Adaptations – Charity Ondriezek
- Spyware, Adware and Security News
- Digital Information Technology – Atul Dogra
- How to Earn Money Blogging – Daryl Lau
- Make Money Online: Quick n’ Easy Way – EJ Cooksey
- Genius Type – Brian Lee
- Keeping Fit is a Daily Battle
- India PR Blog by India PR Blogspot –

- The Rojak Blog – Ap0gEE
- Lifecruiser – Lifecruiser
- Me and My Net – Anoop Kumar Singh
- Manila Mom – Maia Jose
- MLM Gossip
- Panda Cube – Aki Jinn
- Quasi Fictional – Diogenes
- Shankar’s Tech Blog 2.0 – Shankar
- ShanKri-La – Karthik Ramadoss
- Share Everything in Life
- Dox – Rahul
- My Online Collections by star500k –

- Table4Five – Elizabeth
- TechChee.com
- Ordinary Folk – Mike
- (weeding done to here)
- T Jantunen.com by T Jantunen –

- Vinod Live! by Vinod Ponmanadiyil –

- Online Business News – Tammy Ames
- Wampago – Chris
- Webtools@Desinet1
- Show Me The Money by Gerri –

- Armen’s Blog – Fave it
- Article Discovery Politics by David Greene –

- Philippine Home Design and Improvement Blog
- Home Based Business by Brian Pratt –

- Shakeroo’s Gold – Shakeroo
- Blue Sky Brothers – Greg Meares
- Brown Thoughts by Brown Baron –

- Business Sanity – Susan Martin
- CalvinWarr.com by Calvin Warr –

- Can’t Coach That by Coach McGee –

- Career Ramblings – Fave the Site
- The Pond – Karen
- ContentPays.info by Yogesh –

- Creative Design – David Airey
- Random Expressions – Deepak Jeswal
- Digital Phocus – Brendan Monaghan
- Dosh Dosh – Fave it
- Eat Drink & Be Merry – Fave it
- Ed Lau – Fave it
- eJabs.com by Matthew Jabs –

- Everyday Weekender – Fave it
- (exceptional) work.com – Jon
- Life in the Fast Lane by Deborah –

- Foreign Perspectives by Arnold –

- Gauravonomics by Gaurav –

- Hannes Johnson – Fave it
- Ramblings from the Marginalized – Fave the Site
- Homemaker Diary – MQ
- Internet Serious Business by The Troll –

- iReview – iReview
- JesterTunes – Jester
- Jimi Morrisons Head – Fave it
- Jon Lee – Fave it
- Julies Journal – Fave it
- Kabatology – Kabatology
- Klamath Design by Linda –

- Sleeping Princess
- MLM Forums online marketing blog by Jens P. Berge –

- MrGaryLee.com by Gary Lee –

- Msdanielle.com by Danielle –

- My Dandelion Patch – Fave it
- Nate Whitehill – Fave it
- Nathan Drach – Fave it
- Net Business Blog – Fave the Site
- Life Rocks! 2.0 by Nirmal T V –

- Real Amber – Real Amber
- Reality Wired – James
- Revvi::blog – Revvi Sudirnoputra
- Riskiraj by Rishiraj –

- Romance Tracker by Phil Van Treuren –

- Samanathon – Fave it
- Scribble on the Wall – Fave it
- Serendipity by Sharique–

- Shadow Scope by Richard –

- SiteLogic – Fave it
- Sizlopedia – Sizlopedia
- SMO Blog – Mark Blair
- SMS Today by Foxtucker–

- Square Cookies – Square Cookies
- SquareCookies
- Stephen Fung – Fave it
- Syaf the Geek by Syafrizal Abu Mansor –

- TechLivez.com – Tech Livez
- Technacular by Vikas Sah –

- TechnoDiary – Sahil Gupta
- Technospot.net by Ashish Mohta –

- TeknoBites by Ram –

- The Blog Columnist – The Blog Columnist
- Filipino Entrepreneur by Filipino Entrepreneur –

- The Thinking Blog by ilker yoldas –

- Untwisted Vortex – RT Cunningham
- UrgentClick by Andy –

- Vacilamos! – Ari
- Online Diary – Venu
- VersaCreations by Vivienne Quek –

- My Affiliate Journey
- Inklings: The Copywriter’s Blog by Walter Burek –

- My Life My Story –My Passion – Yong Kai Loon
- Zath by Simon Barker –

- Digital Art World Blog –

- Blogtology –

- The Outsider’s View – Javier Altman

- Making Money through Internet – MarriedMelody

- Earn Money on the Web – Kent

- Blogs et IE – T@Blogoshere

- Spark Minute – David Spark

- Uncleboob – Uncleboob
* - IT Experts Central – IT Experts Central
* - Tech Freak – Kanak
* - sophistishe – Sheena
*
SUGGESTION: once you’ve gone through and faved everyone on this list, add a comment saying you’ve done that and subscribe to the comments. That’ll pick up anyone new appearing here. ‘Tis also worthwhile to run up a favourites exchange page of your own; if you do, mention that here and I’ll add you on which get’s both of us a link.
IMPORTANT: I’m running various separate blog promotions at the moment so you need to put a comment here to say that you’ve favourited me as I can’t tell from the Technorati info whether or not new favourites are arriving because of this post.
TRAVEL/EXPAT/IMMIGRATION/EMMIGRATION RELATED SITES: let me know if your blog covers topics in the areas of travel, expat or immigration/emmigration matters as I will consider blogroll exchanges with sites in those areas.
WEEDING: a number of those listed here are no longer participating in the exchange; I’m in the process of weeding out those that aren’t so this list will be shrinking drastically over the next few days weeks months.
LINK BACK: As I have dofollow for comments, you should automatically get a linkback to your blog when I approve any comments written here. I’d appreciate it if you’d return the favour 🙂
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.buying a house in France: part 15: banking & finance: introduction
International banking raises issues that rarely arise when you confine your transactions to one country and we’ll be covering these over the next couple of weeks.If you are moving to France to live, you might think that you may as well either close or at least tidy up your finances in the UK before you leave. Resist this temptation! It can be much more difficult to open UK accounts when you are living in France and if you have closed everything you may find it virtually impossible to open any account in the UK.
The banking scene in France is completely different from that in the UK. Whereas there are the “big four” in the UK, France doesn’t really have any truly big banks and the majority of French “banks” are what would be considered relatively small regional building societies in the UK. As with small building societies, the range of products is quite limited.
Next week we’ll begin with what you might think is the simplest part of this topic: UK banking & finance.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
How safe is it to quote your bank account details to strangers?
Many of the B&B and particularly gite owners accept payments by bank transfer to their account. What amazes me is that they never consider that it’s something of a risk to give your bank account details to a complete stranger and even more so when it’s a series of complete strangers.
If you think about this for a while you’ll realise that your bank account details are printed on your cheques but that’s not quite the same as you give cheques to people or organisations that you know. There is a safe way to do this though. Just quote a savings account number and, if you’re really paranoid about it, open a savings account in a bank that you don’t normally deal with.
Every time that I raise this issue, someone quotes their bank manager as having said that it’s perfectly safe to hand out your details in this way and that it’s impossible to take money out using only those details. Haven’t these people even heard of direct debits? After all, a direct debit uses exactly the same information as you quote to receive money. Now, I’m not suggesting that a fraudster is going to set up a direct debit and then withdraw money from your account using it but there are a number of very similar ways to do that. For example, if you care to give me YOUR bank details, I could set up a one-off transfer by simply looking up the address of your bank and faxing them the instructions to do that. You might think that wouldn’t work as they check the signatures, but actually they only check a small percentage of the signatures so it almost certainly would work. Then people say that it must be safe because the electicity company quotes their details for payments so how come someone hasn’t cleaned them out by now? They haven’t because they quote the number of their collection account and collection accounts reject electronic withdrawals.
Since a small business doesn’t have the option of a collection account the safest thing to do is to quote a savings account number as you can’t withdraw money electronically from a savings account.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Marketing our blog
Initially we just included our blog on the marketing lists for our other sites but quite quickly found out that a lot of places list blogs in a peculiar way or don’t list them at all so we’ve been looking around for other ways to get our blog known.The business of blogging is relatively new and so a lot of places aren’t quite sure what to do with them. Many site directories are set up on the basis that the sites on them are fairly static but that’s one thing that’s definitely not the case with active blogs. They also have the characteristic of being local news in many cases and whilst I’m sure it’ll be quite a while before we get mentioned on a news bulletin we are actually listed on one service which in turn feeds into Reuters, USA Today and FoxNews.
Each time a new entry is added various services such as Feedburner, Technorati and more specialised services like PingOMatic inform all the other news-type services that you’ve done that. The net effect of this is that you get the equivalent of a new listing every time you add an entry which can both produce an immediate flurry of hits on the blog and also helps the more gradual building up of hits from the normal search engines.
What’s also quite different from a normal website is that you get feedback and comments on what you said. For instance, a few weeks back I was speculating as to how many people were reading this blog, I was very surprised to have a reply from the Feedburner people themselves. There’s also much more interaction between the various bloggers than there is between people running up normal websites.
One “problem” with a blog is that you really have no idea how many people are actually reading it. The likes of feedburner return a count as to how many people are potentially subscribed to the blog but that doesn’t count those subscribed directly via the e-mail subscriptions and, on the whole, there doesn’t seem to be any 100% reliable way of counting those who reach entry.
What has really surprised me though is that somehow or other this blog has managed to get into the top 1/2 million blogs already which is pretty good going I think considering that I’ve only been doing it properly for six months or so.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.