Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

It took ages but I’ve finally got the images for the listings sites uploaded to the new host and the domains that I’ve transferred seem to be operational too.

That leaves me with about half a dozen domains to do today to complete the move of the listings sites. They’re the simple ones so there shouldn’t be any problem in moving them over.

Next up are the blogs and the directory which are a little more complex in that they both use databases. There’s a surprising number of photos in the blog too but nothing like the amount that the listings sites use.

Once they’re over, I’ll be able to delete the databases from 1and1 and downgrade my hosting plan which’ll save something like £10/month as the only pre-database plan I needed was all of £25/year. That’s actually the biggest problem with the charging structure on 1and1 – if you need a database then you’re immediately looking at a jump from a reasonable £25/year up to £10/month.

Learning a new language and running a business might seem to be very different tasks but they have one thing in common: a need to be stubborn.

To learn a language you need to be stubborn enough to just keep going when you hit difficulties from time to time. In fact, often it seems to be the case that it isn’t so much an aptitude at languages that is required but rather an ability to be so stubborn that you’ll go on regardless of how bad you think you are at a given time.

It’s little different in most businesses of course. There are difficulties that arise from time to time and you need to develop that stubborness to just going because you know that you’ll be able to sort out whatever problems have arisen or are likely to arise in the future.

One thing that I’d not allowed for in changing my hosting service was the sheer size of the photographs that have been uploaded by those on my B&B and self-catering listings sites.

They don’t seem terribly large individually but when you’ve got over 1800 of them that amounts to a hefty chunk of discpace which in turn means that it takes AGES to transfer across the Internet. The sheer length of time means that you get heaps of time-outs on the FTP transfer so I’ve been plugging away at the transfer off and on all afternoon.

Oh well, perhaps another day will get it done.

Google seems to have its sights on the blogging community and specifically on those that get paid for some of their posts. How come?

Well, basically Google doesn’t like the concept of people being able to pay for links. Unless, it’s Google, of course, as they make quite a bit of money from adwords which is a system of payment for links.

However, the paid links aren’t really the problem for them. What appears to be more of a problem is that the links that the bloggers have been creating are in context. So, if you’re looking for information about, say, credit cards then the theory is that it’s much more likely that a blog talking about them will pop up to the top of the Google search results because the links that they’ve got are in context whereas a normal directory entry for credit cards wouldn’t come up so high because that’s just a link out of context.

However, not all bloggers have been hit by this which has muddied the picture somewhat. Nobody outside Google really knows for sure why some are hit (sometimes from PR7 down to PR0) whereas others are, so far, unscathed.

I’ve looked at some combinations of them and one possible common thread so far is that those who’ve been hit seem to write site reviews when they’re paid whereas those that haven’t been hit tend to write an article around the topic requested and just add the links to that. Whether this is true in all cases I don’t know but it would seem a logical thing for Google to hit: those doing the general article have a “real” in-context link whereas those doing a review have simply written a paid advertisement.

If my reading of it is correct then ironically those who have been doing exactly what the advertiser wanted them to do will have been hit whereas those who did what the advertiser needed (ie a link truly in context) have, so far, come through OK. Think of it like an enhanced version of the advice that some of the paid sites offer: rather than asking would anyone read your blog if the paid posts weren’t there, ask yourself if the article you’ve written would be valid without the link to the advertiser. If both apply to your blog, then you’ll have a much better blog than you would otherwise and chances are that Google will be happy about it too.

When we started off the original plan was to get going on the Internet marketing first as that would be a quick success (hopefully!) then we’d move onto advertising in the books & magazines. Notably absent was the idea of advertising by way of brochures and it was quite a deliberate omission too. Why?

Simple really: by and large you get roughly a 1% return on any marketing that you do. So if you want to get ONE sale you need to distribute ONE HUNDRED brochures. Unless your brochures are very cheap or your service is very expensive it’s easy to see that brochures are not the way to go. For example, say your brochure costs about £1/$1/‚€1 including any postage or distribution costs then that 1% rule means that you will be spending around £100/$100/‚€100 to get one sale which isn’t really a runner unless your product costs at least 10 times that.

This is, of course, why the Internet is so appealing. You can get thousands of people reading your “brochure” and at virtually no cost to yourself. Sadly, that 1% rule doesn’t apply to all the hits that your website will receive but it should apply to those that are relevant (which can be determined by looking through your site visitor stats). However, if you can manage to, say, double your site traffic then, by and large, the number of relevant readers will also double so, in principle, you should double your sales, or at least those that you get directly from your own website.