Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

Although we’re now well into the marketing season for B&B and self-catering listings sites, the usual wave of marketing e-mails from such places is quite noticeable in its absence this year.

Last year was a little unusual to be fair as maisoneurope.com had a new owner and he was firing out e-mails like there was no tomorrow several times a month at least and sometimes several times per week. This year, that particular factor is absent for the moment though presumably he’ll be getting going again in the not too distant future provided he’s not gone bust on the adwords campaigns that he was running. Whether he was successful at it or not remains to be seen but the site has never yet come up on ordinary searches that I’ve done myself so I’m a bit doubtful. Still, perhaps the adwords to sell the properties combined with the subscription income from them is enough to keep things ticking along nicely.

This year, all that’s appeared sporadically has been an e-mail from frenchentree.com who are expanding their site with rental listings. The pricing doesn’t really work for B&B so I’ve not bothered with them as yet but if their six months free offer is still around in February I’ll probably take them up on it.

Our own sites don’t have offers as such in that they’re free all the time which has caused us problems in roping in new entries for the crazy reason that people figure that if it’s free it doesn’t have any worth. Consequently, we added the option of paying us £29 per year which by placing a value on the listings meant that we started to pull in more people than before.

Of course, that begs the question: if I raised the notional price to, say, £129 would that bring even more people in?

Indeed, if I listed it as a six months free offer would I pull in really big numbers of new entries?

I’m toying with the idea of doing something along these lines on one of our new-generation sites – either Inns4u or perhaps, when I get around to updating it, Our French Chateau (which gets a surprising number of hits even now).

Marketing a B&B is usually a Winter-time activity as you’re just too busy to do much about it during the Summer season when you’re full with guests.

So, as we edge out of the shoulder-season (which can be quite busy), we’re edging into the marketing season and therefore the arrival of e-mails offering to advertise your B&B and bring you thousands of bookings if only you’ll pay a few hundred pounds to list your place.

Last year, I thought I’d have a go at e-mail marketing for the listings sites that I run and was very surprised at the initial reactions that I got. Although the sites are free to list, or rather because they are free to list, several people were very suspicious about them in their replies to my e-mails. So, I had a think about this and added a charging option which interestingly helped me pull in a lot more entries than when it was totally free!

Funnily enough, only one person has ever paid for a subscription to the site yet it seems necessary to have a charge sitting there so that people give their free listing a value ie they are saving £29 per year. The value is even better this year though as I now offer to pay those listed for any recommendations that come via them.

Anyway, I’ve fired off my first batch of e-mails to B&Bs in Scotland last night and it’s already pulled in a dozen or so new entries which is pretty good going for the first day and, all being well, they’ll be trickling in over the rest of the week.

One thing that I found quite surprising when I started doing the paid posts on a more widespread basis than I had before was that a considerable number of them are picked up by various blog aggregation services. So much so that I’ve almost trebled the number of “readers” subscribing to the feed of this blog and there are early signs that An Age of Magic will be going the same way in due course.

Does this matter to me? Well, in theory these guys are ripping off my hard work but on the other hand I’m sure that the advertisers quite like their stuff getting a wider readership than it would do if it were only listed on this blog and, since it gives me more inbound links for no effort, it will gradually increase the amount of money that I get paid to write the articles in the first place. So, for example, my piece “Considering starting an online business” of earlier today has been picked up by YourPropertyNews already.

Funnily enough, the vast majority of the articles picked up by these aggregation sites are those in the Sponsored category so my “real content” seems immune to piracy at the moment. Why this should be, I don’t know, as a lot of the Sponsored content is broadly similar in nature to the “real content”.

One of the chief characteristics of French tax and social security administration is that when you start out in business they send you bills based on an estimate of what an established business would be earning, not what a start-up would be bringing in.

Although typically a new business will earn very little after start-up expenses in its first year, it will typically receive bills for thousands of euros no matter how small it might be. Clearly that’s something of a drag on start-ups in France and the effect is that considerable chunks of business activity are done on the black ie without registration. This, of course, helps nobody in that the businesses which do register have to shoulder the tax burden for those that don’t which forces many down the unregistered route or alternatively into bankrupcy, neither of which is beneficial for the country.

Take for instance Marcus who’s done some calculations as to what tax a start-up could expect to be paying in the first couple of years. His example was of a business making EUR 5000 per year right from the start and includes just the social security contributions (ie there would be addition taxes). Year one bill: EUR 4914, year two 2780, year three 2183 ie over 98% tax on the first years income.

Even if you change the parameters of the calculations to reflect zero income in the first two years followed by EUR 5000, the bill for the second year is EUR 4080! Still, at least in the third year you get a refund of EUR 281 in that case, which you could put towards the wind-up costs of your business.

Is it any wonder why the black economy in France is so large?

We’ve just received yet another ludicrous bill from one of the French tax offices.

Apparently since we didn’t return the 2005 figures for the business until a few weeks ago and haven’t yet returned the 2006 figures (both thanks to our duff accountants), we must obviously have earned EUR 155,000 in 2006 and therefore they are taxing us on the basis of that. Since 2005 was our first full year with the business we were still investing substantial sums and therefore didn’t make any money at all in 2005 and it’s only in 2006 that things started heading towards a more normal level. Sadly, still a long way short of EUR 155,000 though.

As in all areas, they are incredibly optimistic about the performance of the French post office too and seem to believe that a letter which they printed on October 31st would be delivered within two days even though they didn’t even post it until the 6th of November!

Anyway, we’ll have yet another go at rattling the cage of our accountants to see if they can head off the attempt to collect on one of the largest direct debits I’ve seen (which’ll bounce anyway as the sum involved is actually more than our total income for the year!). Still, at least that should give me the opportunity to change back to paying them by cheque: it’s never a good move to pay any French tax place by direct debit as we’ve found.