Foreign Perspectives

Sadly we don’t have quite so much time to spare as the gite people but even so we’ve managed to clock up quite a few website sidelines for ourselves since we’ve been here. The first major one was our thriving B&B and gite listing sites which between them attract getting on for 1500 visitors per day, a number exceeding the number of visitors of many commercial listing sites.

Since then, we’ve separated off our regional guide into the ever expanding Pyrenees Themes and our transport pages into PerpignanFlightsAndCarHire. Of course readers of this column will know that Foreign Perspectives is also growing and branching out with our directory launched in January. Now that we’ve one directory on the go, we are making a start on another and hence the birth of the Whole Earth Directory recently.

Why bother though? Well, it turns out that some people are making a fair amount of money on some of these ventures and it looks quite likely that a friend of ours will be matching his real-world income with his Internet income within the next year or two.

So, if you do move to France, don’t expect your initial job to necessarily provide most of your total income once you’ve been here for a few years.

Net effect? Well, our take-up on the mailings this time is getting on for 5% (vs 1% on the trial). Funnily enough we haven’t had anyone actually pay the £29 which is OK because we’d prefer that they didn’t but it seems that putting a value on it is enough to persuade people to put their time into adding their information to our listings.

We’re going to stick with the current e-mail and £29 for the remainder of this batch of mailings but are thinking that perhaps we should put the notional charge up to £59 as persumably that would mean the site was twice as valuable and therefore might attract more people. That might sound slightly illogical but it appears to be the way people value a listing. Our notional competitors is a site which we had the chance to buy early last year but didn’t as we couldn’t really put a value on it. Interestingly at the moment, the new owner is firing out e-mails several times per month trumpeting that he has the fastest growing listings site around. That’s probably true, but unfortunately for him almost all of that growth is through his offer of 6 months free. We’ve just recently taken him up on it ourselves but only because it’s free and don’t expect to renew when the offer runs out which is probably the thinking of 99% of people that he’s picked up lately.

We had the benefit of seeing some of the figures behind the site in the course of our negotiations with the former owner and feel fairly confident that the new guy will go bankrupt if he gets a renewal rate from the free offer of anything below 30% or so yet the typical rate is more like 5% which equates to the people who actually get bookings from the site over the free period.

Compared to charging sites, ours naturally have a 100% renewal rate in that once people go on, their membership doesn’t expire. A typical small commercial site has a renewal rate of more like 70% so they have to replace the 30% that they lose each year with new entries. We’re actually growing faster than that and will probably finish this mailshot with around 300+ entries vs 100 or so this time last year.

The only exception to this seems to be the excellent Auberge du Cellier where Pierre will regale you with a trully excellent French meal. Ironically, his restaurant receives dreadful reviews although that is to your advantage as it means that it’s relatively easy to get a reservation. How come the bad reviews then? Simple really: Pierre concentrates on the food and largely ignores everything else which is just how it should be whereas the restaurants that receive the good reviews concentrate on everything else and don’t bother too much about the food.

So if you want to eat an excellent French meal, try any French restaurant outside France or the Auberge du Cellier down here.

I think a lot of people fall at the first hurdle in that they run out of new things to say. We started writing this way back at the start of 2004 as we were moving to France and had loads to say each week but once we’d been here six months or so the amount of new things dropped dramatically and so too did the blog entries. Will that happen again? Hard to say as the style of the blog is quite different to what it was then so there’s a lot more scope but perhaps that’ll run out in a year or so too.

The time taken can be considerable too. You might think that it would only take 30 minutes to write one of these entries but it can be a lot more than that. Don’t forget that I need to think about a topic first, plan what I’m going to write and then write it. Can’t say that I never just sit down and fire away but hopefully it reads better than that most of the time. Again, in a lot of cases people just find more things to do with their time.

I think that the last point is key though. In the early days there is next to no feedback. Blog sites are unusual in that they rarely give accurate figures as to how many people are actually reading your blog. For instance, our stats on Feedburner are bouncing along at fairly low level but if you compare the stats on the website hits for the blog there are obviously a lot more people reading it than Feedburner is counting.

So, it’s anyones guess as to how many people are reading this.

So if you need dependable 24/7 service, ’tis best to look somewhere else than France. I do hope that the expected flood of brits still to come here think that it’s still cute when their electricity conks out at 5pm on Friday and there’s no service ’til Monday morning, even from “24/7” places.