Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

Launching a new blog is a peculiar thing to do in many ways.

This blog for instance has been running for a little over four years now. From before that time I’ve had a domain sitting around which I basically just used for e-mail so I thought that I’d use it as something of a soapbox for a change.

It’s odd in some ways as it seems like forever since I started a blog totally from scratch.

What’s involved?

Well, registering the domain is the first step normally but I’d done that 10 years back for the new blog. Next is to get some hosting but then I’ve that already done. Then, it’s loading the software which takes about 20 minutes and another 20 or so to get the various plugins sorted out.

At that point, it’s ready to go but it looks pretty plain so you end up spending ages searching for a decent template for it before making that historic first post.

After that, you need to register it all over the place eg at FeedBurner to handle the subscribers, Technorati to get some blog type stats. Then you’ve to start adding it to blog aggregation services to pick up a little traffic although you can short-circuit that process by using one of the manual submission services to do it for you ($23 well spent).

Then it’s down to the slog of writing posts with no feedback from an audience for the first few months (which is why most blogs stagger to a halt after 2 or 3 months).

Oh, at some point you need to pick a topic for your blog too. In this case, not so easy as “soapbox” usually doesn’t appear as a blog category!

You might not think it, but it makes a substantial difference because google and other search engines use geotargetting.

This is fine if your website is country-specific (eg .co.uk) but not so good if you’re using a non-geographic domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) as many people do these days because then they will assume that your target market is the country in which your site is hosted. For example, if you own a holiday property in England and rent it mainly to the English then your target market is the UK. However, if you have a .com hosted in America you may not even appear in searches done by people in the UK using google.com or google.co.uk.

It’s not always obvious where your hosting service actually is as many are rebranded. The easiest way to find out is to go to www.whois.sc/yourdomain.com and scroll down to “IP Location”.

What if it’s in the wrong place? Surely it won’t matter that much?

Well, when we moved our sites from American hosting to UK hosting the traffic went up THIRTY fold so, yes, it does matter quite a lot.

I thought that we were home and dry with the various blogs on the new hosting service and had just one last blog to move.

Apparently not though as the feed for this blog ain’t working which is probably why the number of subscribers has dropped off somewhat. Feeds are, of course, something that you don’t normally look at yourself so everything seems fine even if they aren’t and it was only when I tried to sign up for a new blog aggregator that the problem surfaced.

Anyway, I’m having another go at installing this blog, this time starting from scratch so it should be a clean upload but as the problem is related to some odd characters that WordPress saw fit to insert itself it might be a little while before everything is back the way that it should have been.

That’ll “just” leave the forum and the two directories to move over. I’m not really that bothered about the forum as such and it wouldn’t be a great loss if I just dropped it. The directories are rather larger though and need moving over.

Many people see a site with high pagerank (PR) and assume that the site also has high traffic.

They’re wrong to make that assumption: there is little correlation between PR and traffic.

Take a simple example: I registered a domain just over a month ago. It acquired PR2 a couple of days ago yet the only traffic that it has had has been from the google spider! There have been no real people visiting the site at all.

That applies all the way up too. Many blogs taking sponsored posts are finding that their high PR doesn’t equate to a high RealRank (RR) as calculated by PPP. The reason is really obvious when you look at some of the blogs: they may well have thousands of links to their site (hence the high PR) but have no content that would interest anyone so the traffic that they get is minimal and so too is their RR.

Ironically, advertisers are only starting to realise this and change how they allocate sponsored opportunities to use RR (ie actual traffic) instead of PR. They may not get as much PR passed to them from a low PR site but many such sites have very significant traffic indeed. A lot of those low-ish PR sites are written by people who want to be read; they’ve not promoted their site in the conventional way through massive link building programmes but rather just kept writing interesting stuff that slowly but surely builds a readership.

If nothing else, google’s crackdown on sponsored posts has highlighted just how useless PR was as a measure of the “importance” of a blog.

Sometimes I wonder whether or not it’s worthwhile even attempting to learn another language if you’re a native English speaker.

After all, around Europe it’s commonplace to find that companies choose their working language as English. That doesn’t mean that they suddenly revert to some other language when chatting over lunch: it’s English all of the time in many of these companies.

In the European administration there is little option but to choose English as it’s the one language that can be counted on to be known by everyone as, outside the UK and Ireland, it’s almost always the first second language that people learn.

So in many cases you can get away with only English.

The other problem though is that as a native speaker of English it’s often difficult to get the chance to try out any other languages that you speak as throughout the world people tend to go to English straight away unless you speak their language at a very proficient level. That, of course, means that many English speakers just give up.